The Season’s Upon Us - Dropkick Murphys
This song reaches its first crescendo with the lines: Some families are messed up, while others are fine, if you think yours is crazy, well, you should see mine.
I write to you from a train cruising into Toronto, on my way from the airport to my mother’s house. If I looked through her bookshelves, I might be able to track down the neon-magenta cover of a Douglas Coupland novel that she used to reference: all families are psychotic. The quote that gives the book its title, in full, is: All families are psychotic. Everybody has basically the same family - it’s just reconfigured slightly different from one to the next.
I don’t think that’s true, but I was talking with a friend about how my boyfriend and I have some very similar assumptions about family, in a way that surely arises from the extreme cultural similarity of our upbringings (white anglo-Canadians with parents who went to graduate school and worked overseas, and with at least one grandparent in possession of a British accent). He said, well, this is also what happens when you like your family.
I regularly contend with envy that one of my boyfriend’s sisters lives within biking distance of our apartment. I live very far away from all my family members, and my daily life is not very enmeshed with theirs. But I do like my family. The Dropkick Murphys say I’m so glad this day only comes once a year, but I sometimes wish that the contents of this next week, where I’ll walk around the park with my brother, and drink my mum’s latest kombucha, and play board games with my dad, came a little more often. Still, how lucky am I that, whatever our psychoses, I look forward to spending Christmas time with my family?
Wishing you family that you like and that are near to you, and, if you can’t have that, wishing you some of this song’s rollicking mayhem as you deal with obligations and resentments and miscommunications and other psychoses of the holiday season.
Sending you plenty of cheer,
- Tessa