Xmas Rituals

We all have our Christmas (or Thanksgiving, or Hannukah, or Halloween…) rituals. Rituals help us know what to do, without having to think too hard, like routines. Rituals also link us to times and people past and create community. As with routines, rituals are on the uncanny boundary between being helpful and being a constraint – do you want to adopt your family’s traditional rituals, or make your own? When do you feel you have sufficient power over your own life to be in control of your rituals, or lack of them?

Our number 1 Christmas ritual is a bike ride. This is actually my number 1 ritual, willingly accepted by Chris. In more recent times, this bike ride has involved wearing reindeer antlers on our helmets. I ascribe the development of my cycling ritual to the unfortunate Christmas when my grandfather pretended to have a heart attack to stop my grandmother coming to our house for Christmas. My grandfather had a tendency to punish other people severely when he considered they had misbehaved and Christmas was a family time my grandmother loved. Upon news of the heart attack, our Christmas rituals fell apart and my parents had to go attend the medical crisis. I took myself off cycling, up Dyers Pass in the Christchurch Port Hills to the Sign of the Kiwi, overlooking Lyttleton Harbour. Memory does not relate what my brother did.

Chris and my biking ritual this Xmas Day included some memory lane. We cycled from the airport (having dropped off a car for a friend, my rituals don’t generally include airports unless I’m flying out of them) back to Sumner over the Port Hills.

“This isn’t the quickest route,” Chris said as we twisted and turned through small streets in Riccarton near the University.

“Agreed,” I said. “But it’s how I used to ride around here. Look, there’s the party flat for the University C Canoe Club.”

We cycled up Dyers Pass and I knew all the climbs by heart, practised from decades ago, including in the years I trained for triathlons by cycling up the road then running trails in the Port Hills. We dropped into our friends’ Nic and Andy’s place en route. That’s not a ritual – dropping unexpectedly in on friends on Christmas morning – though it’s quite fun. The family were wearing stripy felted slippers knitted by one of their daughters – their family has a ritual of home-made gifts.

That’s a generational ritual for me, too, making gifts rather than buying them. Making gifts is about emphasising the value of time and care, as opposed to the purchasing power of money. We often give people jam and chutney made from produce we have grown; raspberry jam is a favourite. And, if people don’t like the preserves, they’re an easy gift to pass along. Allied with the home-made gift principle, I try to provide as much Xmas dinner as I can from our garden. That meant Chris, Mum and I ate broad beans (small, fresh broad beans are completely different from old school tough grey ones!), new potatoes and salad, along with ham because that’s what Chris wanted to make a more Xmas-y dinner.

However, before we could have dinner, we carried out my family’s practice of exchanging gifts over mince pies and coffee. As children, Rew and I waited with baited breath for my grandparents to arrive while the fruity-spicy smell of mince pies emanated from the oven. We’d then be directed to find one present for each person in the room from under the Xmas tree and hand them out. Once the unwrapping round was complete, we would find and distribute the next round of presents.

My grandmother would, exceedingly carefully, detach the sellotape and unwrap her presents while preserving the wrapping paper. Living through a World War leaves unerodable rituals. This Xmas, when Mum said, “That’s such nice paper it should be saved,” I gaily ripped the paper off my gift – I’ve outgrown the practice of stacking slightly creased and torn paper in the linen cupboard to await next Xmas.

You might be wondering why I’m mentioning a whole lot of rituals derived from my family and none from Chris’s. That’s because Chris’s family had few Xmas rituals. My adherence to rituals puzzles him. “So what did you do for Xmas?” I asked.

“We were at the beach, or camping. We didn’t have Xmas trees, or any particular way of doing things other than being given presents. Actually, that’s not quite right. We’d always have an early morning swim.”

So Chris and I did manage to incorporate his one family ritual on Xmas Day. Few people are completely immune to rituals!