We made a successful spanikopita yesterday (it would take actual effort to ruin one) and brought it over to my friend's house. It was a small celebration. There were eight of us -- my friend and her husband, their son (who is my age), daughter-in-law, granddaughter, and the son's 85-year old neighbor (who's a pistol). There was a fair amount of tension between and among generations, but I kept thinking "Of course your parents push your buttons -- they installed them." And the tension was fairly good-natured. The best part was that we felt warmly welcomed into the fold. It was all pleasantly low-pressured, with lots of good humor and interesting conversation.
I'm amazed at how long it takes to outgrow the trauma of Christmases past -- maybe forever at this rate. It's been a long time since I've had an "awful" Christmas, and even those, as my mother points out, weren't purely horrible. She's right -- they were merely laced with trauma rather than filled with it. Nonetheless, I'm pleased to have sailed through this Christmas, with all the busy (but not overwhelming) preparations, unscathed, ready to go back to the "real life" of the other eleven months of the year.
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