GENERATION GAP
Last week the gap closed in on me. It was a family Hanukah/Christmas party. Tons of food brought by each nuclear family and gifts for everyone. The group included me and my sister, the extreme elders, but the host was her daughter. The next generative elements were her three sons, one daughter and their spouses. Those four pairs produced six boys and, very recently, the first girl, bound to be the only princess (thus far). All that required 12 presents, totaling 144, all of it bundled in a crowded assortment of shopping bags that filled half the room and virtually overwhelmed the Christmas tree that half drowned under them.
This was intergenerational joy.
Immediately I recalled similar holiday gatherings when I was a boy. That same effusion of food, a home team football game in progress somewhere, and presents flowing. But that was someone’s lifetime ago. Yet—
The need to assimilate and celebrate the generational connections was a startling reminder of a collective human necessity: to mark procreativity and celebrate it under the cover of a festival.
Google reports that festivals allow for sanctioned joy, excess, and reversal of everyday hierarchies, offering emotional release and social cohesion through music, food, dance, and spectacle. Whether sacred or secular, local or imperial, festivals consistently affirm a group’s sense of belonging, continuity, and meaning in an uncertain world.
Burrowing down to one family, a celebration, such as the party I just attended, allow for all of the above, the smoothing of hierarchies that equalize the participants’ access to provisions, gifts, play, and conversation, each in their own turn and their unique proclivity.
But something deeper runs through an event rendered especially potent and preeminent by offered annually, and by the preparatory efforts, and, ultimately, by the significance experienced by all.
Is this the experiential cement that holds families together despite differences and dislocation, that brings family members to celebrate their togetherness through all thick and thins.
And makes each generation join the next in at least one conjoined experience of love
