Family Christmas

Our Family Christmas, Rescinded

By HEATHER HAVRILESKY

Published: December 21, 2012 Comment

Enlarge This ImageSeveral years ago, my mother announced that she was spending Christmas in Egypt with friends. I flew home anyway, alone, and spent two days making homemade pierogies and sauerkraut and bread for the traditional Carpatho-Rusyn meal we always have on Christmas Eve. At 10 p.m., my sister had an hour off from her rounds at the hospital. She came home and we ate. Then she left, and I did the dishes.

Illustration by Holly Wales

Enlarge This Image

Whitney Pastorek

Heather Havrilesky

You might say I have a strong sense of tradition, if you didn’t recognize the heavy press of bereavement on these proceedings, the fear that the past is lost forever. “The possible ranks higher than the actual,” Martin Heidegger wrote. Our visions of an ideal holiday erase our memories of the opposite. Like elephants, we return to the place where something disappeared long ago, hoping to get that old feeling back

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