In a column in Oregon’s mid-Willamette Valley newspaper, the Statesman-Journal, Jeanine Stice rails against consumerism at the expense of sharing family stories at Christmastime. She notes that she’s met people who …
… don’t measure their soul with statistics but instead with real-life stories.
So instead of reading statistics and scurrying around shopping with money you don’t have for things you don’t need, find time at home this week to listen and tell your family stories.
Anyone who’s been around people who’ve been through war, or experienced poverty, knows there’s immeasurable wealth gained through storytelling.
While I would have supported Stice’s view under any circumstances, her words particularly resonated with me because my husband and I had just been discussing a recent horoscope of his that said he should be sharing family stories that had been passed down through generations. Randall lamented that he didn’t really know any of this kind of family story, which is especially regrettable because both his parents were the children of first-generation immigrants to the US. He would have liked stories of the “old countries.”
I don’t have all that many family stories that span generations, but I can think of a couple — both winter/Christmas-related.
The winter story is my grandfather’s claim to have seen the cloven hoofprints of the Jersey Devil in the snow on the roof of his house.
In the Christmas story, two brothers (I’ve lost their exact relationship to me,
but I believe they are from my grandfather’s generation, and the story takes place around the turn of the last century) exchange gifts, one of which is a brass cannon. Turns out the one brother got the cannon for his sibling because it was something he wanted for himself. From then on, any gift that has ever been given in our family that seems to be something the giver wanted for himself or herself has been known as a “brass cannon.” We use it as a figure of speech, as though everyone knows what a brass cannon is.
Why not take a moment (Freudian slip — I just typed “money” instead of “moment”) to see if you can recall any legacy family stories you can pass down this Christmas?