SurvivingHolidayHellpt2

Because young children thrive on familiarity, cohesiveness and continuity, families generally develop a new respect for rituals when children arrive in their lives. But as those same children enter adolescence, and begin questioning everything familial, it may well be time to add some novel events, perhaps seek the children's input, or otherwise demonstrate flexibility in the execution of ritual celebrations.

Christmas and the dreams come-true fantasies it launches have become so essential to the American economy that exhortations to get into the yuletide "spirit" now saturate the entire cultural environment from Thanksgiving on. This is not solely the creation of toy manufacturers splicing their hard-sell between Saturday morning cartoons; the most elite institutions collaborate in the blitz. America's leading dance company, the New York City Ballet, for example, suspends its diverse repertoire to present only one Christmas-oriented confection, over and over, from Thanksgiving through New Year's Day: The Nutcracker,. In the United States, at least, there is no way to escape Christmas, as secular as it may have become.

In families in which one spouse is Christian and the other is not, society's headlong rush to celebrate Christmas winds up being a continual source of friction. Spouses can get caught up in a tug of war over whose holiday takes precedence, Christmas or Hanukkah, for example. Often a couple will settle for some unsatisfying mishmash of both.

Usually, though, says Doherty, families settle into one of two patterns. In one, the non-Christian spouse, almost always the husband/father, yields to the Christian mate on Christmas—but serves as an in-house critic of the excesses of the season. Aloof from the demands of the holiday; even irritated by them, this person is, in Doherty's words, "a Christmas Abstainer."

Another common pattern is for the non-Christian spouse to initially either ban Christmas or set very strict limits on its observance, then spend years negotiating and reluctantly compromising with the spouse and children. One father, for example, finally yielded on presents for the children but said he would never allow a tree. Some symbols are just too loaded; gifts, on the other hand, are more tied to the commercial secular reach of the holiday.

"I suspect that a key issue is which religion the mother belongs to," Doherty speculates, "because the woman is likely to be the ritualist in the family. I don't think many fathers would pull off Christmas with all its trappings if their non-Christian wives were not into it."

Ultimately, the holiday season doesn't just highlight and intensify religious and cultural differences that may lie dormant or find some easy accommodation the rest of the year. It comes to represent whose tradition and family of origin are valued and validated in the new family that two people have set up.

The arrival of children often brings the smoothed-over issue to the surface. Each spouse has an awakened sense of their own heritage and a desire to pass it on. And the feelings can fester until the issue is resolved.

By definition, family holidays are intergenerational events, often uniting at least three (and sometimes four or more) tiers of relatives. "Married couples who have no children will drive a thousand miles through sleet and rain to be with relatives they don't really like—just to be in a two-generational family," Doherty reports. Even when adults are at each other's throats, everyone competes to make holidays, especially Christmas, happy for them.

Yet ponder the irony. Christmas is an extended celebration built around children, and that we spend weeks preparing for. "But for children, Christmas is over in an hour," Pittman points out. Whatever the loot they get, children pay a high price for the holiday's core frustration. With everyone anxious to do everything right, tension soars through the season. And as is always the case, children with their built-in radar pick up on the adult turmoil and do what healthy children everywhere do—they act up.

Such goings-on make their parents look incompetent. It's points against them in the great holiday sibling sweepstakes: Whose kids are best-behaved? Whose are looking best? Achieving more? And parents are furious with the children for showing them up. Of course, this makes the children get more tense and so they act up even more.

If the holiday imperative to act merry and to feel connected to one and all is daunting for original intact families, it is a superhuman task for divorced and remarried families. With their evocations of the past, the holidays always awaken visions of family wholeness—and this is always a reminder that someone in someone's family is missing in action.

Typically, each family fraction struggles—and often competes against the other—to meet the multigenerational requirements of ritual observance. The result, Pittman contends, is that divorced parents always wind up "chopping up the children for the holidays with the Christmas chain saw."

Children are often members of two households, and while they deeply wish to make the adults in their lives happy, they know they must disappoint someone, because they can't be two places at once; Santa Claus notwithstanding, the laws of physics operate straight through Christmas. The resulting distress can lead to sullenness, acting out or turns at both.

No surprise, then, that children of divorce often come to dread the holidays. They hate the hassling and competition for them that the approach of the holidays sets off in their parents. They hate the feelings of loss. And they hate knowing that, no matter how they are sliced for the holidays, they are always hurting a loved one. So resist the temptation to hiss at Lisa or Johnny, "Can't you just show some holiday spirit?"

Remarriage can make adults euphoric. But their children don't necessarily experience it that way; it's just another means of feeling left out, certainly for the several years that it takes stepfamily relationships to build. Then along come Thanksgiving and the rest of the holidays, intensifying everyone's desire to belong, and the need cannot possibly be adequately met.

If intact couples run up against a culture clash at Christmas, stepfamilies face a prolonged siege. "A stepfamily has not a family tree but a family forest," says psychologist Emily Visher, Ph.D., who with her husband, psychiatrist John Visher, Ph.D., has pioneered the study of stepfamilies and discovered the unique developmental course they follow. For children in new stepfamilies, everyday life is a war of cultures—Mom's, Mom's new husband's, children's, and Dad's new girlfriend's. Every little thing, from the kinds of cookies in the house to the way French toast is made to where the toilet paper is stored, is different from in their previous family.

No matter whose house the holidays take place in, the sense of dislocation and insecurity can be severe. Then double it, because one of the functions of holiday rituals is to communicate belongingness—and new stepfamilies have not yet developed their own rituals. Then, just when a kid is scoping out the new cousins, it's time to pack the bags for the changeover to Dad's new in-laws and a whole new set of not-quite relatives to be met.

The first couple of years of stepfamily celebrations are particularly hard, say the Vishers. "It gets better as the high emotions calm down." They should know. They've mastered 30 years of stepfamily life themselves. "Flexibility is the key. Everyone in the house should get together and put forth their ideas on how to celebrate the holidays. Everyone's input counts equally, including that of the kids. The adults can then select the rituals which are feasible."

Stepfamilies may be the first to know it but actually, says Frank Pittman, "everyone has to face the fact that there is no Santa Claus. No one is going to come and give you what you're missing." And that is the ultimate disillusionment of family holidays. You've reached the end of the year and things still haven't been made right. You still don't have the perfect family. (Psst—I'm going to let you in on a little secret: no one does!)

Somewhere along the way, Pittman explains, "we got the idea that if we chopped enough fish or stuffed enough turkeys or put up enough colored lights or dragged a tree into our living room, then our problems would go away and everything would be wonderful." How did we ever work our way into this deception in the first place?

You could call this belief the stocking-stuffer version of the myth of "quality time." We've bought into the belief that we can do a year's worth of work on our entire set of relationships just in a few days—holiday time. But believing we can repair all relationships and repay all debts on these days is what ruins the rest of the year. Christmas and the rest of the special days are sad, says Pittman, because we face the reality of what we haven't done for ourselves, our lives and our loved ones over the whole year.

Better, he says, if we treat the rest of the year as if it were Christmas. And treat Christmas as if it were an ordeal. Cancel the big show. Don't bother smearing pate on the beef. Simply feed and nurture each other. Then no one will be disappointed.

Holiday Tales

Begin's Beauties

My girlfriend and I were dating two brothers one winter and were invited to their family home in Thompson, Connecticut, for Christmas. My friend and I are both Jewish. Apparently, most of Thompson is not—a point not overlooked by our boyfriend's father. When he met us, he joked that his sons had won the prize for bringing the most Jews ever into Thompson—that he had never seen so many in Thompson. For the rest of the weekend, he referred to us as "Begin's Beauties," after Menachem Begin, Israeli Prime Minister at the time. Though the comments made us extremely uncomfortable, my girlfriend and I tried to be as polite as possible. The weekend didn't wreck my girlfriend's romance with the brother she'd been dating. She ultimately married him. —B.L.

Next Time, Send Them to a Hotel

It was the first year my mother, a proud new homeowner in New York, got to entertain the family for Christmas. Her sister, brother-in-law and niece flew in from Utah to stay with her for a week. It was a fiasco from the start. My aunt's husband, accustomed to the warmth (and low heating bills) of the Southwest, kept upping the thermostat to 80 Fahrenheit. He also broke one of the brand-new dining table's wooden sections while trying to move furniture around. To top it all off, after my mother "corrected" her 12-year-old niece who had tossed a rude comment to her grandmother, he delivered a 20-minutes lecture insisting that my mother had no right to criticize his child and that if she knew so much about parenting, she should write a book and get her own talk show. —R.T.

How to Really Ruin Christmas

It was a few days before Christmas and the family had gathered at my brother's home as we usually do for the week. He appeared his usual self but his wife seemed tense. Then, while she and I were standing talking on the sidewalk before the house, she suddenly blurted out that she was planning to ask my brother for a divorce—right after the holidays. I was horrified. Should I alert my brother, since he was oblivious? Should I tell the family? If I did, Christmas would be ruined for everyone, including the kids. But if I didn't, we'd be living in a fool's fantasy. In the end, I kept my mouth shut. We all gaily exchanged packages Christmas morning, including my brother and his wife. She asked him for a divorce a week later. That was the worst Christmas of my life. —M.P.

It's Summer, Let's Fight About Christmas

It was July, and the entire family—grandparents, siblings, spouses and children—were on vacation together in Italy. We were all sitting at an outdoor cafe in Rome, joking and laughing, when my sister said: "I want to talk about where we're going to have Christmas this year. We've been going up to (our brother) Harry's for years and this year I want to have it in my home. "She said that it was expensive for her, her husband and son to fly from South Carolina to Oregon each year and that her son wanted to open his gifts at home for a change. "It's my turn," she argued.

To which Harry replied that he would see what he could do, but that his logistics and expenses would be horrendous since there were five in his family, including two sons from an earlier marriage who had to spend either Christmas Eve or Day with their mother. No sooner would they arrive than they would have to depart—as had happened two years earlier when we'd all descended on my sister's place. That launched the annual argument. And when I piped up that we'd never had Christmas in my place and maybe we should all gather in my one-bedroom apartment in New York City, everyone turned on me. No one spoke to each other for hours.