29. On my favorite holiday

As I excitedly set Pandora to jazz Christmas music a few weeks ago, Stephanie asked if Christmas was my favorite holiday. I thought briefly and told her that No, no Christmas was not my favorite holiday. Chinese New Year is my favorite holiday. I've since spent the past few weeks thinking over holidays. I've started to develop an appreciation for Advent and the hope, waiting, expectation of Christ's birth, but to me, it still sits separate from the holiday spirit and Christmas traditions that most attribute Christmas to. 

This is in part because Christmas doesn't mean a whole lot to our family. I came home on Sunday night, a little more than a week before Christmas. The Christmas tree was still sitting in three parts in the garage; the ornaments in a corner of the family room. We do Christmas presents, but some years my parents just hand us cash to buy our present because they don't know what to get us. I've spent over a third of my Christmases at our church's bi-annual conference, which always took priority over any family celebration. Those years, opening presents were oddly squeezed into a few hours on Christmas Eve or early Christmas morning, sandwiched both before and after by packing for four days in the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. It feels like we don't have traditions, but we have stories. Like the year mom let us all open our presents early just because we asked. Or when Alan broke almost all our ornaments when he was two years old. Or the year my parents decided we wouldn't get a Christmas tree, so instead we came back from a church Christmas social and discovered mom had decorated Alan's student desk with lights, taped stockings to the wall above, and put presents beneath. 

Christmas at our household feels like a hodgepodge, and we don't always know what to do about it. We didn't eat ham growing up, but isn't turkey for Thanksgiving? One year we did hot pot for Christmas. We can't figure out how to make it a big deal, so sometimes sis goes to her gathering with young adults (mostly immigrants who don't have local family), or a friend will visit, or we'll leave the house for another gathering. My mom oddly ties ribbons and we gave our nativity scene away because we didn't know where to put it. 

But Chinese New Year...Everyone has to be together on Chinese New Year. My mom is excited instead of obligated to decorate, and she reminds us what the couplets hanging by the door frame (duilian) mean. We know we'll have pineapple, oranges, fish, noodles. We know we'll have hot pot. The whole house is sprinkled in red, from the new year's cards to the lanterns to the lion dances on the celebration shows. The CDs with songs singing about good fortune, family togetherness, and spring beginnings with the percussion of drums, cymbals, and firecrackers play for weeks. 

We know how to celebrate Chinese New Year, but we're trying to figure out Christmas. I think that's part of the immigrant/first-generation experience: making up traditions as we go. I don't know what my kids' traditions will look like, but I like thinking of what I'll pick and choose, keep and let go as we sort through significance and meaning.