Cousin's Christmas

You don't choose your family. They are God's gift to you, as you are to them. ~Desmond Tutu


I come from a close family. Not just a close immediate family but a close extended family...cousins, aunts, uncles, cousins kids, kids of cousins kids. Growing up we frequented each others homes, played together, fished together, fought with each other, worked together, celebrated together and, in the last few years, mourned together over the passing of our mother, our father, our aunt, our uncle, mourned the loss of cherished family members that were and are still near and dear to our hearts. We get together every summer on 4th July as we have been for over 30 years.

Most of us from my dad's side also get together for the Cousin's Christmas, an after Christmas event. We used to meet at Grandma's every Christmas eve, all the cousins on my dad's side except for the one family that lived in California. In those days, all the boys wore white shirts with red ties and the girls red dresses. As we grew older and had our own families to attend to, seeing the cousins at Christmas gradually faded until it stopped all together. We didn't realize at the time how important a tradition this had become, didn't realize until it had been gone for a number of years that we had a gaping hole lingering in our hearts during the holidays, didn't realize until one of the cousins brought back the Cousins Christmas with a slight twist on the original tradition. Because we all had families of our own and could not get together on Christmas Eve, the Cousins Christmas now takes place in January on the Feast of the Epiphany, a Christian feast day that celebrates the revelation of God the Son as a human being in Jesus Christ. This new day is appropriate because most of our family is rooted in a strong Christian faith.

The Cousin's Christmas is one of the highlights of my holiday season, a much needed link to my past that also gives continuity to the future, a connection to the very foundations of the person I have become. The memories are the life blood in the growing tree of our family connecting the generations, a tree in which our deceased grandma, aunt, and uncles are the roots the provide the tree nourishment, the aunts and uncles the trunk linking us to grandma, to our familial past, the cousins are the base branches, our kids the spur branches, our grandkids the newly budded twigs that will one day sprout leaves of their own. God willing, I live long enough to see those twigs grow strong and flourish into branches of their own.

If I was to choose one word that would describe the essence of our tree, one word that would be the aroma of our family, one word which we all, the entire extended family, could agree upon that defines our relationships, one word that makes our tree a shining beacon of hope, that word would be love. We are a family that genuinely loves each other. We love each other not despite our quirks and oddities but because of our quirks and oddities. We are a family that celebrates the uniqueness of each one of us for it is in our uniqueness that we add character (lots of character) to our tree. We celebrate together, laugh together, reminisce together, and mourn together. We are a family that, in a heartbeat, is there to support each other in times of sorrow and in the next heartbeat there to rejoice in times of joy. Love is the binding that allows the spouses to graft into our tree and draw from its incredible strength and, in turn, add strength to us all for love is unique in that the more it is given away the more it is received, the more it is heaped upon others the more it blesses the giver.

Love is the legacy of our family. Love is the intergenerational gift that started with our grandmother and has been handed down through our aunts and uncles, to my generation, to our kids generation and, I expect, will also define our future generations for love is the strongest substance this earth has ever known. Love binds us together, keeps us together, makes us strong.