In My 80s, I’m Happy to Pass on Holiday Duties

We are a family who loves getting together, so we not only do the big national holidays, we do birthdays and anniversaries and other family celebrations, too, and my house has always been Ground Zero for it all. Even as our kids’ and grandkids’ lives changed, with out-of-town college, long-distance moves, busy schedules, we were always able to roll with the punches and meet the moments by holding our Thanksgiving feast a day or two late, our Chanukah/Christmas in early January, a graduation party a month after graduation. The only unchanging thing was that the party was always held at my house.

My husband and I were a great party team — he mostly did the setting up and cleaning after, while I did most of the cooking and all the baking. The year he died the pandemic took over, so there were no big get-togethers, but even then, the family managed to convene, masked, in my driveway, for someone’s birthday. The year after that, both my kids offered to take over, but I refused. I wanted to hold onto tradition. Doing it — even with the extra work, alone with the memory of our team spirit — seemed important.

But five years have gone by, and when my son asked if he could “take” Thanksgiving (he has grandchildren now and he wants to start a tradition for them), I understood. I figured “why not?” because at the time, I didn’t think of it as “giving away” the holiday; it was more like a loan. So, last year, for the first time, we held the celebration at my son’s house. Of course, we kept a lot of the traditional recipes, and the “assignments” were the same, too: I still did all the baking. And a strange thing happened. I realized how much work all the hosting had been: setting the table, strategizing space in my oven to re-heat casseroles people brought, making sure there were enough platters and serving pieces, finding appropriate containers to send food home. Without all that, I was able to really concentrate and enjoy baking the cakes and cookies everyone loves, and I love making.

The next big family holiday, Chanukah/Christmas was a little different from the others (and not only because we are equal opportunity Jewish/Christian celebrants). On the Chanukah menu, my husband always took over the cooking of the (seemingly) million potato pancakes it took to satisfy our hungry brood. He was the latke king, with a routine and a way around hot oil that I knew I could not carry on. So, although I stopped short of buying store-bought latkes, I did make them in advance, in several shifts, and froze them. And found myself thinking how nice it would be to have someone else stand over the hot stove frying those million latkes in real time.

When two of my grandsons graduated from college weeks apart, and my daughter offered to host a party for the two of them in her big backyard, I didn’t even have to think twice about it. I knew it would be a wonderful event, and as a bonus, confirm and cement the closeness of the two cousins and their families.