An Elegy

By Frizell Bailey

Christmas used to be my favorite holiday. And how could it not? Any holiday where you get loads of gifts and can gorge yourself on platefuls of fatty food is all right by me. Besides, this festival of gluttony is a great way to cap off the end of the calendar year. But it was more than that. Christmas, for me, was always first and foremost about family.

I grew up in a tiny Mississippi town of the sort that most people think of when they think of the South. There were no fast food restaurants or malls or even a Wal-Mart for 30 miles. We had one stop light on Main Street until it was replaced by a stop sign. Much of my family lived right there in town and had lived there all their lives. Those that didn’t came home several times a year from New York, New Orleans, Chicago and California for family reunions and holidays. By far, Christmas was the granddaddy of them all.

There’s no place like home for the holidays.Most years saw our little section of town inundated by convoys of extended family. For a solid week just about every member of the Thomas and Bailey family was “home.” Hotel rooms were rarely an option. The mere mention that someone was considering getting a room was sure to offend and be dismissed as sheer nonsense. So kids doubled up in twin beds or slept on the floor. My parents’ three-bedroom house, which usually seemed unable to accommodate the six of us, suddenly seemed spacious enough to hold up to seven additional people.

I would gather with groups of my aunts and female cousins in family kitchens to prepare copious amounts of food:  turkey and dressing, glazed ham, potato salad, several cakes and sweet potato pies. We would usually stay up late into the night, and each of the following nights, catching up and generally enjoying one another’s company.

On Christmas day, the children would, of course, spend much of the day playing with their new toys while being ushered between Big Momma’s and M’deah’s (my maternal grandmother) house. My father and uncles could usually be found watching football and savoring brews in between munching on turkey and dressing and playing with the kids and their new footballs or radio-controlled cars.

Holidays with my family, however, were not entirely like the Waltons. Ours, like most, had its share of dysfunction. There were often arguments and disagreements about one thing or another. And because holidays often meant the consumption of large amounts of alcohol, there were sometimes arguments that escalated into fisticuffs or, worse, gun brandishing. It may sound like a horrifying thing, but if you knew my family it would all seem quite humorous and harmless. These arguments usually ended in lots of apologies and tears, brothers hugging and saying how much they loved each other.

But sometimes, you can’t go home again.It has been a number of years since we have had one of these old family gatherings, for many reasons. The kids have all grown up and started families of their own. Many, including myself, have moved far from home in the pursuit of new opportunities. There have been divorces and deaths. My own parents divorced in 1994 and now reside in separate cities. My father has remarried.

Perhaps the biggest reason is the passing of my maternal grandmother, M’deah, in 1994. She had a stroke a few years earlier around Christmas. Although she lost some mobility due to paralysis on the right side of her body, and most of her speech with the exception of those all-important curse words, she remained the unifying force she had always been for the family. It was a couple of years after her death that I realized M’deah had been the nucleus of my mom’s side of the family. Without her presence, we all find ourselves in the same place at the same time much less frequently. A couple of years ago, the house that M’deah called home for most of her life burned to the ground. For me it was symbolic of the closing of a chapter in my family life that could never be revived.

My Big Momma is still with us and there have been gatherings attended mainly by my dad’s side of the family. But while Big Momma has remained in relative good health, she is now in her nineties and we are all keenly aware that Christmas will one day be celebrated in her absence as well.

I miss those Christmas get-togethers. I miss the home cooking and long embraces from familiar faces whose names I could not quite remember. I even miss the whiskey-induced fistfights. But I suppose this is all a part of growing up. It is now up to my generation of the family to carry on these holiday gatherings with our families. Some day I will hopefully have children of my own, and with any luck I hope they too will have fond memories of big, loving, dysfunctional family Christmases.