Holidays!

I think we got it right this year. We drove for two days toward Ohio, where my family is from, with a carload of gifts and our dog. We got a hotel (generously paid for my aunt C, who raised me, as an early birthday gift), so we had our own space to just be together and with our dog. This made every moment we were with family poignant instead of exhausting, I think. The slow drive back home was a slow reentry into our own time and space.

We spent a lot of time holding my new nephew, and playing with my other nephew, now 6. We made a snowman and ate way too much and went to a couple museums on days when we needed to be alone together and laughed a lot with the extended family.

And, of course, we sang. This is always the highlight of the holiday season for me, when we all gather together on new year’s and sing the traditional Greek carols. In the song, we invite St. Basil, and each other, to sit and eat, sit and drink, sit and tell each other our troubles. We sing about endings and beginnings. And in those moments (this year, on both New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day), I feel everyone there, pressing in around us—my grandmother and mother and aunts and uncles who are gone now, and of course, this year, my father, also. And all of us who are still living were there, ages three months to nearly 90. This year, we went on to other songs I’d learned from them, and I wept and held onto one of the babies, and it was beautiful.