Senior Living: New Christmas traditions

Joining a friend to watch a holiday movie is a worthwhile activity

Published Dec 23, 2024  •  Last updated 11 hours ago  •  4 minute read

Sharing a mug of holiday cheer while enjoying festive snacks and taking in a holiday classic on the small screen is just one way to spend a pre-Christmas afternoon.  Photo by Getty Images/iStockphoto

I have a new Christmas ritual, happening this year for the second time. While doing things twice may not qualify, strictly speaking, as a ritual, I am hoping this particular December activity sticks. The nascent holiday rite started last year when my friend Deb invited me to come to her home to watch a Christmas movie during the day (which always feels like the most delicious sort of hooky).

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You’d have to know Deb — an accomplished and fashionable hostess with a cosy home and gloriously gut-busting laugh — to appreciate how exciting this was. I knew there would be tea (Cream of Earl Grey, as it turned out, kept warm in a stout pot set on a stand with a tiny tea candle) plus homemade snacks and also, a blanket to tuck around our feet as we watched one of her holiday touchstones — Christmas in Connecticut.

The 1945 movie stars Barbara Stanwyck as Elizabeth Lane, a single New York food writer who can’t cook. Despite this impediment, she crafts a fulsome if fictitious persona for her magazine readers as a farm wife who lives on a sprawling property in Connecticut with her husband and baby. When forced by the magazine’s publisher to host Christmas dinner for a returning war hero, Lane must scramble to assemble a family and farm to avoid a scandal and certain job loss.

Deb thought I would like this movie because I was once a food writer for the Edmonton Journal (I chose to ignore the potential slight on my kitchen skills tied to the movie’s premise). Indeed, I was charmed by the black-and-white romantic comedy, which features fetching holiday outfits plus a selection of borrowed babies who prove puzzling to dinner guests expecting just the one. Deb loves the movie because it was made during her mother’s era. Her mother died when Deb was 10; watching the movie feels like spending time together.

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It was a delightful afternoon and I am now a fan of the stylish and clever film. But I loved the idea of the indulgent, pre-Christmas get together even more. The creation of a new ritual suggests something about creative aging that feels inspiring to me.

There is a tendency among older people to look backward and to comment, with sometimes blinkered nostalgia, on the things we once did in our storied past, and to be fiercely attached to those things. There is perhaps no better example of this than Christmas. The re-creation of the same event, complete with traditional food and decor, can feel compelling. But as children leave home, and parents and grandparents pass on, rituals may become hard to preserve.

It’s also true that hearkening to a Christmas past can be stressful for those who don’t have a comfortable connection with the season. I recall my childhood Christmases with joy because my household was stable, with loving aunts, uncles and cousins in the mix and enough food and gifts to go around. Once I became an adult with kids of my own, the holidays were somewhat less comfortable. My boys’ father and I divorced when they were two and four, and while we did a commendable job of sharing the day, my stomach still tightens at the memory of Christmas math. Whose turn. For how long.

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Today, my children are in their 30s with families of their own and they live in different cities. Seeing them at Christmas is a treat, not a guarantee. Happily, my husband has two adult children in Edmonton, and a lively collection of grandchildren, so we have a place at the Christmas table. But family life is ever-changing, and we are always aware that our kids have their own lives and their own rituals to establish.

That’s why, in my 60s, I try to be open to change, while finding ways to establish my own rhythm, to drop my own anchor. Watching a Christmas movie with a dear friend feels like an excellent opportunity to mark the season in a new way and a chance to look forward rather than backward.

As I write this story, I am planning this year’s movie afternoon because it’s my turn to host. We’ll be watching A Child’s Christmas in Wales, the 1987 television movie starring Denholm Elliott. It’s based on a touching and humorous 1952 recording by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, that was taped the year before his death at the age of 39. The story invokes the author’s memories of his own childhood Christmases in the early 1900s in Swansea. It aches with love and is rooted in a tender, but knowing, backward glance.

I will make gingerbread for the occasion, and buy some really good chocolate bars to break into pieces. My favourite tea is Buckingham Palace and I’m thinking about the best way to keep it warm through the hour-long story. There will be blankets. We’re already talking about next year, when Deb will trot out Irving Berlin’s 1942 film, Holiday Inn, with Bing Crosby soaring through his classic rendition of White Christmas. I hope it happens; it might not. But just thinking about it makes me happy.

— Liane Faulder writes the Life in the 60s column. [email protected]

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