A Wish for Ashley

When I was a kid, I envied my friends for their families’ Full House-esque holiday traditions.  I found their cookie parties, visits to grandparents’ houses, personalized stockings and mini-tree lighting ceremonies fascinating, quaint and freakishly wholesome.  Our family has never been one for formal tradition.  Why have a sit down meal when you can arrange the food in a disorganized buffet, resulting in a beautifully chaotic do-si-do as you help yourself to ham, potatoes and a roll only to have to circle back to the start of the display in order to obtain butter and gravy?  However for our lack of grace and social decorum, we make up for it in laughs and foolish innovation.  Our holiday traditions may never be featured in a wholesome Hallmark movie, but they do prompt me to celebrate my family members in a most genuine way.

Holiday Tradition One: The Nutcracker

Historical Background: Growing up, Kayla and I danced in the Nutcracker every year.  Mice, soldiers, party children, snowflakes, flowers, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Flowers, candy canes… you name it, we danced it.  Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without those familiar bars of music, costumes and dancers pirouetting across the stage. 

A Normal Family Tradition:  Attending a professional performance of the Nutcracker each holiday season.

Our Whacked Out Version of the Tradition:  Attending a professional performance of the Nutcracker…but before doing so, going out to dinner.  We get dolled up in dresses and impossibly high heels, eat at a nice place… and then proceed to walk over ice and snow for 25 minutes+ to the theater.  Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without feeling our toes go numb, nearly wiping out multiple times and laughing at each other’s unfeminine scurries and shuffles as we attempt to move quickly and stay upright. 

Enacting the Tradition in 2009: Last night, Kayla and I relocated to New York City (from Boston) for our annual Nutcracker outing.  Different ballet company, same ridiculousness. I don’t recommend running/shuffling/inappropriately stumbling 10 blocks in a tight satin pencil dress that doesn’t allow for more than a 7 inch stride. 

Invitation: Ashley, if you ever join us for our Nutcracker evening, I’ll give you my arm.  I can’t guarantee you won’t bite it, but I can guarantee that if you do, I’ll go down with you.

With love (from Kayla’s couch in New York),

Audra