Tag Archives: family

Have yourself a memory little Christmas

13 Dec

Saying “I love Christmas” is, I know, one of those silly, obvious things that people say. It’s like saying “I love not being stabbed by newly-sharpened pencils”. And despite Christmas being a hard thing not to love (save for specifically prohibitive religious beliefs or an overwhelming Grinch-ness), people say it every year. I do too.

Because sometimes loving something creates in its own ferocity the necessity to proclaim it.

I often forget just how much I love it, only to be reminded by a twinkling tree shining through someone’s front window, a Salvation Army band playing a carol on a street corner, or a sniff of that intoxicating combination of cinnamon, pin needles and wrapping paper.

I love everything about it, but it’s been particularly fascinating to see the focus of this adoration shift slightly and continuously over the years.

In fact, it dawned on me today that if you wanted to somehow chart my life- maybe for some kind of personal report card that I know you’re all secretly keeping on me- you’d just have to look at my Christmas year after year to see where I’m at as a person.

There I am as a kid, playing with his magic set. There I am later, oh ghost of Christmas past, a surly teenager doing everything he can to pretend he’s ‘over it’. Oh look, that’s the year I must have bought my Xbox. And there’s Christie now, sitting beside me…

As with most people, Christmas for me has always been about family. But in childhood, this is easily taken for granted. Family is always there, so instead of relishing the opportunity to spend time together, as a kid you focus on the stuff that isn’t as common. Most significantly, presents.

I still remember so many of the presents I was given for Christmas as a kid, though many of the givers have probably forgotten them. Lego train sets, magic kits, a beginner’s science lab; all are stored permanently in my memory, if no longer in my cupboard.

As self-sufficiency kicks in, the gifts become less important (though no less appreciated), and the focus shifts onto the people. We all get busier, so Christmas becomes the only time you get to see some of the people you share DNA with. Bonding with the potential future blood donors.

The size of the tables shrink and grow, as though breathing slowly. When a family suffers a loss during the year, you feel it all over again at Christmas. When a new partner, spouse, baby or close friend come along, they are gleefully folded into the mix.

And that’s how it’s been for me. Our family still celebrates Christmas on Christmas Eve, embracing the German traditions we’ve lived with all our lives, and those we’ve created for ourselves. My wife has joined the table and relishes each of the new annual events she’s become an inseparable part of; making biscuits with my mum and sister, going to the German-language Christmas Eve church service, eating our customary roast duck stuffed with green apples.

I in turn have joined hers on Christmas Day, waking up at dawn to wear pyjamas while opening presents, driving across Melbourne and embarking on a long, decadent, continuous meal.

And we’ve made our own traditions too. We decorate our tree, dust off the iTunes Christmas playlist, dedicate a night to enjoying the lights in the city, cook together, have a Christmas party with friends and, every year, watch ‘A Muppet Christmas Carol’ together. There are few things in the year I look forward to more.

On Saturday, we went to a local Carols By Candlelight near our home here in Sydney, and we both had the same thought at the same time; maybe this would become a new tradition.

But the changes from Christmas to Christmas are even more intrinsically linked to who I am and where I’m at as a person in any given year than the simple and joyful observation of traditions.

In my mid-teens I performed heavily improvised ‘Christmas spectaculars’ for my family every year, now I spend weeks planning recipes and menus for the things I’m going to cook. It’s the same show-off impulse, manifesting differently as I get older.

When I proposed to my wife on the Empire State Building, it was Christmas Eve. If any given year was a tree, Christmas would consistently (and appropriately) be the star on top of it.

Christmas is different every year, but consistently wonderful. Like the fake outtakes at the end of the Toy Story movies.

It’s easy to love Christmas. But it’s not often enough I take the time to think about why I love it.

Now that we’re in Sydney, and family and friends are a little further away, we’re creating new traditions and excitedly looking forward to the existing ones more than ever.

So, in the words of my favourite Christmas song, ‘have yourself a merry little Christmas’.

-Tristan

Origins…

27 May

imageMy dad turns 80 next year.

My dad is an energetic, lively guy who, in my subjective eyes, looks no more than 70 (okay, maybe 74…). But it can’t be denied, my dad is a guy who’s getting old.

Luckily, he’s happy too, and surrounded by a wife, kids, grandkids, great-grandkids and (reluctantly) a dog who all love him. His house on the beach, his daily trips to the gym, his Monday night German choir rehearsals, I have no doubt these things all keep him feeling younger than he is, and help keep away most of the slowly-increasing effects of eight decades on the planet.

But to the boy, fleeing Nazi Germany with his father- who was a key figure in the resistance- moving from city to city and country to country, this contented elderly figure pottering around in his backyard somewhere in the south of the opposite hemisphere must not have even entered his mind as one of his potential destinies.

It is that very past though, however filled with war, fear, death and uncertainty, that led him to that backyard in Altona.

His experiences, as our own do for us, formed who he is and how he sees the world, even now, and while it’s something he’s always been happy to talk about, I’m ashamed by how little I know of it.

The truth is, his past is my origin story too. Dodge it as I may (and have), I have German blood, and the things I learned from my dad, as much as the things in him I swore I would never repeat, were all filtered through and flavoured by that. I can’t relate his upbringing to my own, and hope to understand it that way, because it was about as different a time and as different a place as you could try to find. War-torn Germany in the 1940s is to Melbourne in the 1980s what weisswurst is to pavlova.

History has never been an active category in my drunken-pub-trivia-night of a brain. As much as I love the tactile nature of the past and the way even the softest whisper can echo itself into a yell in the future, I don’t have the brain for dates and places and names. So sadly, as happened with my grandmother (on my mother’s side, another remarkable story fortunately captured on audio cassette), I have never properly absorbed the story of my dad’s childhood.

Actually, more often than not, the prevailing elements of his heritage- his accent, his epicurean preferences and habits, his insistence that my sister and I speak German at home- were things that made me angry or, worse, ashamed. To say I’d like to take those reactions back now is true but unproductive.

Acknowledging this ignorance is one thing, seeking to colour in the pages is another. As ashamed as I am of my lack of appreciation of his past, I also realise how lucky I am to figure this out now before it’s-dare I say it- too late. It’s not too late.

This is my plan. I won’t let the past slip away unrecorded, because I know with it will go an enormous part of who he was, and the true understanding of who I am.

So next year, as part of his 80th birthday celebrations, I will gather a video camera, a microphone, a camera, a tripod and my father, and we will make our way across Germany, visiting each of the places he lived.

In some, the houses he lived in may have been long removed, but I want him to find the small things- the street corners, the trees, the light in afternoon- or just the memory of those things, and I want him to share them with me.

In each place, I will set the camera on its tripod, attach the microphone to his collar, get him a beer, and let him talk. As long as he wants to.

I’m no documentary filmmaker. I don’t know what will happen or how I will use it later. In its way, it doesn’t actually matter. I want to hear what he has to say. I want others to be able to hear it. I want my children to hear it when they’re old enough to want to know about him.

But, I think most importantly, I want him to have been able to say it; to know absolutely that we value the role he’s played in our lives enough to want to know everything that made him who he is.

Note 1: At this time, my dad doesn’t know about this plan. It probably won’t stay a secret up until his birthday, especially if I keep posting about it online, but let’s see how long we can go without telling him.

Note 2: It should be noted that my mum is rad too, and has her own story worthy of telling. She will have her chance. One parent at a time!

Tristan Lutze, 2010

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