29. Families and Holidays are a Tricky Business--Let There Be Beer

Thoughts about distractions and third places during a time of year that's hard for many of us; plus a beer to celebrate the you you want to be in the new year.

You Bring the Presents, They’ll Bring the Emotional Baggage, and I’ll Bring the Beer

If you feel like your holiday traditions need a little razzle-dazzle, may I suggest calling your grandmother a bitch to her face, in front of the rest of your family? That’ll put some spice in your nog, guaranteed.

This was obviously not my finest moment, because in the decade-plus since it happened, I’ve grown into the kind of person who very much does not throw that word around. But if you’re also thinking I’m a terrible person because my immature outburst was directed at a relative—a grandparent, no less—then, I think you might be one of the few and fortunate among us who don’t have a whole lot of experience with true family dysfunction or toxic people/relationships in the inner family unit. I don’t talk about my grandmother to most people, which is partly due to a tradition of believing that family matters, in addition to being a beloved ‘90s sitcom, are Nobody’s Damned Business. But is even more due to the fact that I’ve heard so many times something along the lines of, “No, come on, she’s your grandma! Aw! Grandmas! They are old!” I don’t know what to tell these people. That their naivete is charming? Shitty people exist, those shitty people often have families, and those shitty people also often get old (see: most of our government). And so the world turns.

I regret spewing a gross word used to deride women, but my anger was justified. Families can be hard and holidays can be hard and oh yeah global pandemics can be pretty hard, too. So, staring down the barrel of Christmas, I wanted to write a little bit about how I lean on craft beer this time of year. It’s not in the problematic, spiral way you probably instantly thought it was—that’s what anyone concludes when you use the phrase “lean on” followed by any kind of alcohol, I suppose. It’s in the way that, maybe more than any other time of the year, I need what a third place provides, I need a shared interest with the people I’m seeing, I need a—healthy and in moderation—distraction.

I have some aunts and uncles and cousins, sure. But as it turns out, a collection of relatives does not an extended family make. It’s a long story consisting of many little stories within; suffice it to say, I barely know anyone beyond my grandparents despite everyone having lived no more than 90 minutes away from each other for most of my life. (And now, a large portion of that family is proudly Team Anti-Vax. So.)

This stood out when I was growing up because I went to a small Catholic school where the student body consisted almost entirely of first or second-generation Irish kids and they all seemed to have an endless reserve of cousins, cousins they actually liked. But I didn’t mind. I’ve always been close to my brother and aside from my teenage years during which I can only guess I was possessed by a Swedish death metal-loving demon, my parents, too.

Sometimes, my mom was too sick to drive an hour and a half upstate through twisting, winding mountain roads to sit among people we barely knew, play-acting at what we all knew a big family holiday was supposed to be. These were my favorite Christmases. The four of us never changed out of our pajamas, simply drifting back and forth between the kitchen and the living room with various treats, culminating in a feast of Chinese takeout at night.

But the most frequent occurrence by the time I reached adulthood and we’d kind of stopped pretending the big family thing was ever going to happen became having just my grandparents—my dad’s mother and father, and my mom’s mother (my aforementioned sparring partner), with her second husband for several years—over for dinner. Even with grandparents you love, and I do have those, there is just something about Christmas that twinkles its stupid little lights on every crack in every relationship. Someone is going to say something insensitive, whether they intend it to hurt or not, and someone is going to either bite back, cry into the noodle pudding, or go plunge their head into a pile of towels in the linen closet to curse to themselves for a little while (I’m just guessing).

As much as it is the smell of pine; the crunch of burnt sugar on my mom’s spritz cookies; the warm but pleasant lull after a big home-cooked meal; Christmas to me is also a nauseating dread-warped flurry of butterflies in my stomach as I’d pad around the kitchen in tights assembling a cheese plate, preparing myself for the tennis match of passive aggressive barbs about to go down. It is zeroing in on a little coffee drop spreading into the fibers of my mom’s festively embroidered white table cloth, trying to avoid eye contact with whichever family member just said the thing that is going to shatter the nice atmosphere. And now that I’m heading into my fourth Christmas without my strongest ally and most beloved confidante, my mom, it is a whole bunch of new things, all foreign and hollow and weird, and in the shape of earnest attempts at creating new traditions that, frankly, none of us in the immediate family care to have. We are lucky to see each other lots throughout the whole year; Christmas is something we’ve just got to get through for the grandparents and also because, will the world let you simply skip it?

And so, I do not look forward to nor cherish this time of year. But I find my physical person shuttling back and forth, to the suburbs to see my family, to Western Massachusetts to see my husband’s family. Add to my deep-seated discomfort with Christmas and newer, shinier grief that I have always needed to be on the go, out and about (cannot relate to the people who are like, “meh, I don’t really like going outside anyway” in regard to the past two years, in other words). But for over a week this time every year, I feel confined to old houses, old houses that should feel like home but where I tiptoe around like an unwelcome guest. Where one room is always too cold and another uncomfortably warm. Where the pressure to smile and laugh and catch up bears down until I feel tears involuntarily welling up and I don’t even know why.

I get through these days by planning brewery visits. By turning introducing people to this beer or that into an Activity. By steering the conversation away from mask mandates back to beer.

I never feel the urgent need for a third place more than I do at this time of year. For better or worse, and many would argue worse, third places in America equal alcohol places. On The Fingers Podcast, Dave Infante interviewed Brandon Hinke, of the Twitter and Instagram project @PicturesOfDives. I deeply related to so much of what Brandon says here about so much of his life happening in bars. It’s our third place, because capitalism bulldozed most of our other third place options just like it bulldozed everything else.

The majority of bars and breweries aren’t open on Christmas Day, of course. (Here are some open in NYC this year, unless that changes due to The Surge.) But by the time I get through it, I’ve got to get out into the world the next day. I need to see other faces, faces that don’t expect anything from me. And where else is there to go? Restaurants? You can only eat so much and sit so long. Really a coffee shop is the only competition, but a brewery is much more conducive to hunkering down with the family members I actually want to spend more time with.

And when I’ve got to be in the too-cold-but-also-too-warm houses, suffering from claustrophobia I normally don’t have, I wield craft beer as the social lubricant it’s known for, except not in the way it’s known. It’s not me walking around chugging barley wines to make myself forget that everyone around me expects me to just not care that my mom’s not here. It’s me walking around, beer in hand like an essential prop, steering the conversation toward it. Gather ‘round, cousins, and let yer old beer hag tell you why this nutty brown ale pairs so well with that aged gouda. I enjoy the Chekhov’s gun approach to beer at the holidays: I lay out my bounty upon arrival, knowing that at some point, it will be consumed, and will be the focus of the conversation. Mercifully.

Beer, nor alcohol of any kind, was never a part of our holiday celebrations growing up. Somehow, sometimes, I still find myself feeling surprise when I’m with other families who comfortably have wine with dinner, a digestif while settling into post-dinner conversation. My maternal grandmother believes alcohol is a crutch for the weak, and so my mom thought the same until my brother and I started bringing craft beer around and she saw that alcohol can be enjoyed in a safe, social, communal, fun, and not unhealthy or toxic manner. That revelation in and of itself was a nice turn of events for holiday festivities, and now, the act of paying attention to what beer gets served with dinner or what brewery we’re going to visit on the day after Christmas or support by getting to-go beers from before they close on Christmas Eve—those are some new traditions I do care to have. I guess you need some traditions, and those can be mine. And in light of Holidays: Omicron Edition, I’ll end this by saying that making a tradition out of grabbing to-go beers from your local brewery, who might not even be doing on-site consumption right now, is a great idea.

Beer Tarot!

This week I pulled Judgment.

Via Wikipedia

Just in time for Dry January, Judgment is here to raise an eyebrow at you no matter what you do!

Lol, just kidding. This card is of course more in the “judgment day” vein—equally fun? It’s about rebirth, your inner calling, and absolution. You could say it’s the perfect card to pull before the start of a new year.

For real, this card shows up to make you reflect: are you the best version of yourself that you can be? Maybe it’s time to level the f up. I don’t think that means pushing yourself where you don’t want to go or forcing productivity that just isn’t there—we’re still very much in a pandemic (2.0?), the world is still very much on fire, and most things are still very bad. You do not need tarot or a newsletter or a frenemy asking pointedly if you’re really living up to your potential.

But you can ask you if you’re living the best life you could be under these hellish circumstances. Plenty is out of your control, but is there anything you can change this year to bring yourself peace, satisfaction, fulfillment, excitement, wonder, or all of the above? Do you want to move, do you want to pursue a different career path, learn a new skill, get a pet, start meditating, finally end a toxic relationship/friendship, start volunteering, start therapy? This card says do it. Whether you make resolutions or not, you could enter 2022 a new you, even if it’s the same old shit show of a planet. Judgment means you’re coming to a crossroads, and big decisions are coming up. So, good luck, or namaste, or something.

Because this card is so perfectly timed for the new year and because any of these changes are something to celebrate, I think you should reach for a champagne-inspired or champagne-incorporating beer. I just received Gilded & Aged from Springdale Beer and it’s one beautiful, celebratory beer. It’s a mixed ferm golden ale aged in wine barrels and fermented with champagne yeast and grape must. It’s only available in the taproom, if you’re in the general Framingdale, Massachusetts vicinity. Either way, drink your favorite and here’s to you, baybee.

This Week’s Boozy Reading Rec

Helena Fitzgerald’s writing has a knack for reaching into your guts and pulling out memory fragments and emotions tied together like one of those endless rainbow handkerchief chains magicians use (except not obnoxious!). I loved the most recent issue of her newsletter, Griefbacon: kendall roy's terrible horrible no good very bad birthday party. Helena is satisfyingly spot-on about sad boi Kendall, but you don’t have to watch “Succession” to need this essay (I mean, you should of course watch it, dingus). It’s about parties and their disconnect from the actual world where actual things are happening, the expectations, the disappointments, the farce of it all. It’s a perfectly timed read for this time of year, especially for another year seeing most party hopes deflate faster than a dollar store balloon.

Until next week, here is three times the Darby. Just because it’s Christmas. (And at Christmas you share more pug photos.)