Irony of Fate*,
My cousin G. isn’t feeling well. “Are you able to convalesce this weekend?” I plead with her: she’s been having a rough time of it healthwise, and I’m trying to get her to prioritize rest.
“Yeah…. no,” she responds, “New Years is THE holiday of our people. I need to clean out my closets and reorganize the pantry. Plus Herring Under a Fur Coat is not going to make itself.”
G. isn’t wrong: New Year’s Eve was always the biggest holiday on the Soviet calendar (and remains that way in the post-Soviet space). When Soviet commissars set about displacing that “opium of the masses,” the Russian Orthodox Church, they knew they had to figure out what to do with Christmas, or their new post-religion utopia would never stick. So Christmas traditions scooted over a couple of days and became New Year’s Eve traditions: the decorated pine, the exchange of gifts with Father Frost bringing them for the little ones, the opulent family meal.
That’s how G. and I grew up, and our parents and grandparents before us. And we loved New Year’s Eve. Sure, we loved the tree, and the presents, and time spent with our countless second and third cousins. But more than that, it was the only time we felt the magic carelessness of being a child, growing up in a family that invented tiger parenting before there was a name for it. New Year’s Eve meant a few days free of obsession about grades, violin *and* piano lessons, ice skating and gymnastics and ballet, cleaning our rooms, and all the other things that made our childhoods a relentless march towards accomplishment, where nothing short of perfection would do.
My Dad loved New Year’s Eve, too. He grew up during the hungry and cold post-war years when a twinkly tree shone that much brighter, and chocolates only came in New Year’s gift packages. Every year, he’d drag home a lopsided pine as tall as him, wrap it in lights and shiny baubles he inherited from his parents. The table would be decorated with enough real candles for every guest, and he would force us to run out into the frigid night, sparklers lit, to celebrate with glee when the clock finally struck 12.
Meanwhile, my Mom hated New Year’s Eve. I remember her incessant complaining about the pine needles that needed to be swept up constantly. When she and my father divorced, a New Year’s tree never graced her home again.
Of course, I realize now how long her to do list was: both to make my Dad’s whimsical New Year’s Eve possible, and because of the expectations heaped on her by cultural custom.
Gather impossible-to-get ingredients for that once-a-year meal, cook it all, figure out what we’re all wearing… And then, there was that horrible superstitious mandate: you have to go into the New Year clean, or else all the bad clutter of the year past will follow you. This meant, just like for cousin G., that everything needed to be cleaned and decluttered. In the middle of the brutal Belarusian winter (normal temperatures: 15 below zero Celsius), my Mom would throw open each of the 9 enormous casement windows in our house to wash them with hot soapy water… on both sides. This was a woman who washed the floors in her home twice a day, so you can only imagine what her version of a “deep clean” looks like. By the time that we all sat down for New Year’s Eve dinner, she didn’t want to celebrate. She just wanted to go to bed.
It’s funny, really, if you think about it. She struggled, frustrated but unquestioning, under the weight of these expectations from invisible, non-existent Others, while I enjoyed the holiday precisely because it gave me a few days’ reprieve from her parallel expectations of me.
If that sounds at all familiar, of course it is. It’s the experience of virtually every middle aged married American woman with children: they are the real elves creating the magic of the Christmas season for their families. And this feeling of obligation isn’t easy to shake. Especially when someone else’s magical holiday memories ride on you giving in.
I hope you don’t think I’m judging these women. I’ve worked relentlessly to avoid this exact trap (mostly by choosing not to have children). But I have one of my own. Around this time of year, when many of us are making resolutions while the rest are pretending to not to be making resolutions, it’s hard not to notice my own struggle for balance and self-determination.
On the one hand, I want to spend my time intentionally: less scrawling, more reading. But unless I’m very careful, I create to-do lists and rob myself of the joy of spontaneity and rest. Because sometimes, I need to be pulled out of the doom spiral of my phone and into activities that will leave me feeling better and more fulfilled in the long run. And sometimes I need to lie on the couch, watching true crime documentaries.
Regardless of which option I choose, I feel badly about it. Trying to not feel badly about it is useless. So I guess the only thing I want to see myself doing differently is creating enough of a routine and easy-to-enforce boundaries that create opportunities for both. And ugh, if that doesn’t feel like a big resolution hiding many small ones.
*If you’re wondering about the title of this post…
