Boxing Day

[vaneramos]

December 26 is a holiday in Canada, one on which many people traditionally go looking for good sales. For my family it was always a continuation of Christmas.

On Boxing Day my mother's family always gathered at Nana and Bumpa's house for its most important reunion of the year. My mother was the eldest of six children: Donna, Gayle, Carol, Tom, Janet and Nancy. While I was growing up, all of us lived within 45 minutes of Windsor, except for Nancy, who married an Army man and ended up in Nova Scotia. I had 18 cousins on that side. I was in exactly the middle position: number 10 of 19. Not only that, all but six of the cousins were within two years of my age. It must have been bedlam. Mostly we were confined to the basement. One year when most of us were about three feet high, older cousins Cathy and Brenda squeezed us all into the alcove under the stairs and told us scary stories they had learned at camp that summer. In later years, groups of teenagers would disappear to one of the upstairs bedrooms.

My great-grandparents, Dommy and Poppy, would be there, and sometimes several of my mother's aunts, uncles and cousins who I don't remember. Many of my mother's relatives smoked, so the basement would dissolve into a smelly haze of noise and junk food. The relatives held their liquor well, so although many relatives would drink, few were ever drunk. The main sign of inebriation was the rising level of noise and changing tone of humour. Several of the husbands would have a game of one-upmanship to see who could make the best fun of his wife. My father would never do that. My parents drank little and didn't smoke. Dad once admitted to me he had trouble relating to male humour. He must have spent so much time in the company of my mother's family that he thought all men were male chauvanists like Bumpa, Tom and the men my aunts married. It was a closely-knit family, still very Irish in its temperament, despite the blood having thinned in Ontario for 200 years.

Every Christmas the aunts would draw names for gifts. I was more serious and creative than most of my cousins, and my name was a favourite with Gayle and Carol, who would sometimes trade for it. I could count on receiving some great art and craft supplies. Best of all was the year Aunt Carol gave me a lizard.

Nana was a dithering, ineffectual person. Bumpa was domineering and argumentive. His three oldest daughters often quarreled with him.

My brothers were the eldest cousins by several years. As they left for university, married and started to have lives and inlaws of their own, Mom used the excuse to stop attending Boxing Day parties on a regular basis, preferring to spend what time she could with her own children. Every year Bumpa used the same guilt trip on Mom: "This might be my last Boxing Day."

Bumpa died of cancer in 1989, when most of the cousins were in their 20s and had moved away from Windsor. Aunt Gayle also died of cancer in about 1991. The Boxing Day gatherings ended. Nana is 91 and lives in her own townhouse in a seniors' community. She is fairly healthy, but I have only seen her twice in the past seven years. When I came out, Mom didn't want me to tell her relatives I was gay, so I stopped attending family gatherings. I have told Aunt Carol and her sons, Jim and John, but the rest do not know except by suspicion, and I don't care. I have little in common with them.

Today I have to write an article for Ecology at Suite101, so we're having a quiet day. The lamb bone is on the stove slowly filling the place with Scotch broth fragrance. Maybe when I finish writing, we'll find something to do.

We could even finish our game of Risk: The Lord of the Rings. This was the girls' Christmas gift to me, which they must have purchased with their own money. They know how I love board games.

For now they seem content to lounge around, Marian reading and Brenna playing quietly with Lego or making pipe cleaner figures. It is a pleasant, lazy day with sunshine at the window.

Comments

[twillhead.livejournal.com]

My Dad was "Bumpa" to his two grandchildren. I'm so much vicariously enjoying your Christmas holidays, past and present!

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Bumpa was the name of my grandparents' care when my brother, their first grandchild, was learning to talk. Nana used to hold him up to the window to wait for his grampa to come home, and when the car pulled into the driveway she would say, "Here comes that big, bad Bumpa." Bob took her to mean his grampa, and that was the name all of us used for him.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

I take it that Risk: The Lord of the Rings is Risk (which I last played before you were born) played on a map of Middle-Earth rather than the world we (believe we) live in.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Yes, it is similar to the original with a few interesting little complexities thrown in, adding elements of both randomness and strategy.