RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Lowell Politics: December 21, 2025

Last Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting was the final one for outgoing councilors Corey Belanger, Wayne Jenness, and Paul Ratha Yem, all of whom gave farewell remarks. I’ll write about what they said in next Sunday’s newsletter.

Otherwise, the most significant thing that arose at Tuesday’s meeting was a report by Councilor Erik Gitschier as chair of the Nonprofit Subcommittee which had met the previous evening. Gitschier’s report was thorough, but some of the things he shared were disturbing, so I reviewed the LTC recording of the subcommittee meeting and will report on it here.

The subcommittee meeting was requested by Assistant City Manager/DPD Director Yovani Baez-Rose to acquaint councilors, local nonprofits and the public with new requirements governing the use of federal funds coming to the city. Specifically, the new rules apply to entitlement funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Lowell is eligible for these funds because so many residents have such low income.

Lowell receives three categories of these funds (with the amount received in the most recent year shown in parenthesis):

• Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) are funds that go to quality-of-life improvements such as small business assistance programs, open space projects, and subgrants to nonprofits. I believe eight staffers at DPD are paid by these funds ($2 million).
• Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG) involve services for the homeless ($200,000).
• HOME Program provides down payment and closing cost assistance for first-time home buyers ($750,000).

For the most part, the city administers these funds through a Request For Proposals (RFP) process whereby non-governmental organizations submit applications for grants and, when they are awarded a grant, provide the promised services.

This year, the federal government has imposed new requirements on the city in the administration of these funds that will have a profound impact on the community. Any entity applying for any funds must be in compliance with these requirements, and the federal government has imposed a positive duty on the city to monitor such compliance.

Regarding the specific federal requirements, I think it best to share a transcript of this portion of Ms. Baez-Rose’s remarks which I’ve lightly edited for clarity. It’s a bit lengthy, but please read it entirely:

One [of things applicants must certify] is that they are not doing any diversity, equity and inclusion work. They are not providing any access or information related to abortion care. They are not using more than two genders in any of their language. That also means using “he/him/she/her” kind of pronouns or referencing LGBTQ+ in their documents, hiring practices, job descriptions, handbooks, all of these things. Again, they’re defining that as DEI and so it is unacceptable.

Also, organizations can’t reference or promote climate change, environmental justice, and climate resiliency.  And they cannot provide any kind of benefit to undocumented immigrants.

What that means is that organizations in grant agreements will have to sign off that they are in compliance with all of these things. We’ve had to add language into our RFP that says if you are accepting these funds, you know that you cannot be doing any of the following things.

There is also an expectation that our Community Development staff will do compliance monitoring of these organizations including organizational websites to ensure they are in compliance.

But asking organizations that serve vulnerable populations in a very diverse community like Lowell to abolish any diversity, equity, and inclusion language in their documentation and in their programming that is being funded is going to be difficult. It’s one of the reasons why we asked for this subcommittee meeting, because I think it’s really important that everybody is very clear that these are not arbitrary changes coming down from DPD. It is coming down from HUD, and we need to maintain compliance with this otherwise all of the entitlement funds that the city gets essentially would be at jeopardy.

We also want organizations to understand that this is a voluntary grant opportunity. They don’t have to apply for it. They don’t have to accept it. But we fully understand that losing a $50,000 grant for a small organization could be a pretty big deal to their operating budget.

Verification of immigration status is something that we have never had to do before. So now if you are a first-time home buyer and you’re looking to buy a house, in addition to the income verification documentation, you’re going to need to provide us with proof of your legal status. And there is a federal program online program called SAVE which the city would essentially need to put individual information into to confirm that person’s legal status. That’s documentation and information that we haven’t collected previously and that we would be required to do and that’s information that we would not only collect but we would collect and input into this federal SAVE system. That would also be true for any small business expansion loan.  And then any homeless prevention under ESG or any nonprofit organizations that are taking the grant funds and then paying for things on behalf of people. That would include rent, stipends if they were getting paid through the grant, or a childcare voucher. Anything that could be direct payments.

[Ed. Note: SAVE is an online service administered by US Citizenship and Immigrations Services (USCIS) that allows governmental entities to confirm the immigration status and US citizenship for applicants seeking federal benefits.]

We would have to collect that information and then staff would have to put that into the SAVE system that would do whatever it does in the background to confirm that and then we’d be able to move forward. I think that could make people nervous. It makes us nervous. It’s not something that we’ve had to do before and it’s important for people to understand that we’re asking for it because they’re accepting  these federal funds and that it’s not a requirement of the city of Lowell, but if you’re trying to access these funds from the city, this is something that you’re going to have to provide us – the DEI, abortion, two genders, climate change, all of these  things. It doesn’t matter the project. You have to commit to it. It has to be something that you commit to. We have to monitor compliance for any program that’s funded.

These new requirements have many implications for the city. Some are practical. The reality is that many in our community are undocumented. If you imagine a Venn Diagram with one circle being the undocumented and another being those in need of these federally funded services, there would be at least some overlap. Will the children of the undocumented now be ineligible for childcare vouchers? For rental assistance? Won’t that drive up the number of homeless people in our community?  Although not mentioned at this meeting, will the Lowell Public Schools which depend on significant amounts of federal funds, face similar requirements? Even for those here legally, will there be a chilling effect on their willingness to apply for assistance? For anyone not native-born and white, it’s not unreasonable to worry that having one’s name entered in a federal immigration database might lead to being snatched off the street by masked agents.

Then there are the moral implications. Many sincerely believe that DEI, LGBTQ+ rights, confronting climate change, and other banned concepts are positive goods. But is the sincerity of those beliefs so tenuous that any mention of them can be purged from an organization’s documented identity overnight? On the other hand, if the federal funds are irreplaceable and doing without would cause more suffering, is it acceptable to redact statements of an organization’s values to keep receiving that money?

As I said, the moral and ethical dilemma posed here is profound and is deserving of a broader community conversation. DPD did its part by prompting the subcommittee meeting to alert people to this situation, and the subcommittee did its part by holding a meeting and conveying the information to the entire council. But it was disappointing that the council as a body simply accepted the subcommittee report without comment and moved on to the next item on the agenda. Residents should know where councilors stand on this, and why the city is making the choices that it is. I’m not saying the city’s response is wrong, necessarily. But I am saying that the repercussions of these policies, their anticipated impact, and the rational for the city’s response should be fully discussed in public.

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As mentioned above, the city’s HOME program, which provides down payment and closing cost assistance for first-time home buyers is covered by these requirements. The city in turn uses the Merrimack Valley Housing Partnership (MVHP) to manage the program. Coincidentally, on Tuesday, Cathy Mercado, the Executive Director of MVHP, appeared before the council to speak in support of a motion by Councilor Corey Belanger.

The motion requested the city manager to “facilitate a workforce housing development program to assist residents onto a path to home ownership focused on first time home ownership opportunities as well as down payment assistance and rent-to-own initiatives.” Belanger explained that he saw home ownership as a path to wealth creation for many in Lowell which has made him a strong advocate of first-time home ownership programs. Although this will be his final motion as a city councilor (for now), he hoped that by filing this motion at this time it might create some momentum going forward.

I concur with Belanger’s sentiments on first-time home buyer programs and can add a real-world example of the importance of the work done by MVHP. As most of you know, I spent 30 years as the Middlesex North Register of Deeds. In that position, I had a front row seat to the collapse of the housing market in Lowell (and globally) in 2008.

In the years preceding the collapse, loose regulations and the quest for obscene profits led unscrupulous lenders and brokers to extend onerous mortgages to aspiring homeowners. For many of the thousands of mortgages recorded during the expansion of the housing bubble, it was obvious on the day the mortgage was recorded that it would end in foreclosure. But everyone involved was getting paid up front and quickly passed along the right to repayment to unwitting pension administrators or mutual funds managers who suffered the loss on behalf of their clients. By the time the mortgage crisis ended, more than a thousand Lowell residents had lost their homes to foreclosure.

The financial crisis had a devastating effect on Lowell’s neighborhoods that transcended just the foreclosed properties. I spent considerable time digging into the records to understand what had happened and why. One thing stood out: almost none of the many people who had obtained their homes through the first-time home buyer program administered by the Merrimack Valley Housing Partnership faced foreclosure. It was compelling evidence of the value and effectiveness of the MVHP program.

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On one of the coldest days of the season this year, our mail carrier delivered political flyers from Rodney Elliott and Vanna Howard, both candidates for the state senate seat vacated upon the death of incumbent Ed Kennedy earlier this year.

It seemed strange to get a political mailing the week before Christmas, but it was a reminder that the special primary election in that race is just a few weeks away on Tuesday, February 3, 2026. The special state election will be a month later, on Tuesday, March 3, 2026.

The deadline to submit nomination papers to local election officials is not until December 23, 2025, so the field of candidates is not yet set. However, whoever wins will have to run again for the same office in the state primary on September 1, 2026, and in the state election on November 3, 2026.

If either Howard or Elliott win the senate seat, the state representative seat the winner now holds will be left vacant until the fall election since there won’t be time for another special election.

In person early voting will not be available for the special election primary or the special election, however, voting by mail will be offered. To apply for a vote-by-mail ballot for all 2026 state elections, visit the Secretary of State’s website.

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Back in 2012, I recruited 56 people from Lowell to each recite on camera a line from the classic story, “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (a/k/a The Night before Christmas). Some who appear in the video have passed away, or moved away, but many are still around. Please enjoy the video which resides on my YouTube channel.

The Christmas Fruitcake: An Ageless Tradition

This essay by Henri Marchand was first heard as a radio essay on the “Sunrise” program of WUML, 92.5 FM, at UMass Lowell. Today we continue our tradition of reposting the essay each year at Christmas.

The Christmas Fruitcake: An Ageless Tradition

By Henri Marchand

I think there is no yuletide tradition so endlessly lampooned and so deliciously mocked as the once esteemed fruitcake. Everyone loves chestnuts roasting on an open fire and even plum pudding gets an annual endorsement by the beloved Cratchits, but mention fruitcake and people will tend to giggle. Johnny Carson suggested that there exists but one fruitcake in the world, it just passes from one unappreciative family to another. Calvin Trillin is reported to have commented that “There is nothing dangerous about fruitcakes as long as people send them along without eating them.” And in Manitou Spring, Colorado, the Chamber of Commerce sponsors an annual Great Fruitcake Toss. The record is 420 feet, the waste immeasurable.

Unpopular as they may appear to be, a web search turns up over two million fruitcake hits. Mail-order bakeries began selling them in 1913 and now sell thousands every year. There were times when the fruitcake was revered. Early recipes date to ancient Rome but evolved over the years. The modern fruitcake originated in the Middle Ages with honey, rare spices and hard-to-get preserved fruit from the Far East. In the 18th century nuts were incorporated, the cakes eaten for good luck with the following year’s harvest. Due to the expense of the ingredients and a difficult baking process, fruitcakes were once restricted by law in Europe to special events like weddings and Christmas. Today the fruitcake is pretty much a Christmas tradition. (Has anyone ever heard the refrain, “The bride cuts the fruitcake!”?) There are many types of fruitcake, but basically they’re all a pile of fruits and nuts glommed together with a minimum of batter and often dusted with powdered sugar and soaked in liquor for added flavor and shelf life.

When it comes to fruitcake, everyone takes sides. As in politics, there are two camps, each sharply opinionated—those who have bitten the hallowed fruitcake and those who would rather die. Of those with a taste for this yuletide dessert a number partake openly while others do so surreptitiously, stealing a morsel when they think no one is looking. Among those few bold enough to discuss their addiction, there are particular preferences. Some fancy the lighter, citron based variety, while others crave cakes with a higher nut content. Some drool over the dry, crumbly variants, others lap up the glazed and gooey sorts. In my early years I never cared for the bland flavor of citrus bits or their texture, which I found not unlike that of pencil erasers.

I developed an affinity later in life and I have baked a pair of cobblestone-sized loaves annually for over a decade. I do so with great holiday cheer despite loud family protestations. The recipe I follow is out of a dog-eared cookbook, a dark molasses rich block chock full of candied cherries and pineapples, dates and golden raisins. But I’ve modified the mix over the years and use shelled walnuts instead of Brazil nuts. Mainly it’s because I prefer the taste of walnuts. It’s also because shelling Brazil nuts is like disarming grenades. You need a deft touch, applying just enough pressure, otherwise the crescent shaped, steel like shells explode, scattering shrapnel all over the place and turning the nutmeat to mush. A pound of nuts produces a measly two-to-three usable, undamaged pieces. Cutting up the fruit is no less challenging as thickly sugared pineapples and naturally tacky dates stick to knives, cutting boards and fingers. Many end up in my mouth. This year I’m going to add dried apricots to the mix and drown one of the finished cakes in brandy or bourbon, an added inducement for those who have yet to indulge themselves.

I’ll do this because I’ve noticed that there are not many takers when I wheel out the fruitcake on Christmas Eve. I don’t push it on anyone or suggest that they try “just one little piece.” I just slice it and let it speak for itself at the front of the buffet table under a small spotlight. Oh, several guests are polite and compliment its jeweled appearance and my stubborn adherence to tradition, but there aren’t many slices missing by midnight. Others shake their heads, and say, “no thanks, I don’t do fruitcake” as if refusing a casual offer of an illegal substance. Some groan dramatically and cry, “Oh, no, no, I’d love to but I just couldn’t eat another bite” even as they shovel down handfuls of peanuts and mouth another meatball. Still others simply sniff in mock derision, roll their eyes and say things like, “Yeah, right, dad!” Apparently Santa’s no fan either as the thick slices left for him by the tree are still there Christmas morning while the chocolate milk is gone.

I know the merry barbs are coming from the anti-fruitcake faction and the remains of my effort will linger long after the holidays but I don’t care. I like fruitcake! I’ll enjoy slivers of these ageless bricks for the next six months. Or until the spirit of the season abandons me in April and I toss the lot of what’s left to the squirrels and birds.

Living Madly: The Holidays Simplified

Photo by Erik Mclean

Living Madly: The Holidays Simplified

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

I didn’t put up my Christmas tree this year. It’s the first time in my life that I haven’t had a decorated tree in my house during the holiday season. Although I have always enjoyed our Christmas tree, I just couldn’t bring myself to drag it and all of its ornaments and accessories down from the attic. I didn’t feel like moving the living room furniture around to make space for the tree, or vacuuming up the needles that always fall off while moving the tree around.

I have mixed feelings about it. I miss the tree’s lights, the way they brighten up the house on the year’s darkest nights, but I also feel relieved. A sense of dread came over me every time I thought about setting up the tree. It felt like work, an obligation. Nothing about it felt like fun.

Part of this, I suppose, is that I’ve reached a point in my life where I no longer care about other people’s expectations or opinions. I’m pretty much done doing anything I don’t want to do because I’m “supposed to,” most especially in my own house.

In the absence of the Christmas tree, I’ve been motived to make some of my own holiday decorations. I created a wreath from branches and greenery I gathered in the woods. I hung a simple garland of dried orange slices over the fireplace. More dried oranges—reminders of the returning sun—hang in my kitchen windows to catch and make the most of the morning light.

I’ve been making handmade gifts: crocheted hats, bags, and scarves, homemade treats, one-of-a-kind ornaments. It’s been fun to create personalized things for people that they couldn’t go out and buy for themselves.

Since deciding to do all this, I’ve seen several posts on social media offering up tips and ideas for celebrating the holidays in a simpler way: making handmade decorations and gifts; focusing less on spending money and more on spending time with family and friends. At first, I found it ironic that I had arrived at a similar state of mind on my own. But I think it’s a sign of the times, driven by our current economic, environmental, and political climate.

Whatever the reason for it, I believe the trend toward celebrating the holidays in a less commercial, simpler, greener, more personalized way is an idea whose time has come. I think most of us need more quality and less quantity in our lives in general.

Refusing to give in to pressure to decorate or shop has not only saved money, it’s helped me better appreciate the season. I’ve followed the tracks of deer, rabbits, coyotes, and foxes while hiking in the snowy woods, and have discovered winter berries and wild holly growing along trails. I made mulled wine from scratch for the first time in years. I’ve also made time to connect with old friends, and have reminisced about past Christmases spent with loved ones who are no longer here.

Maybe I’ll put up our Christmas tree next year. Or I might decide to get a smaller one, something just big enough to string a few lights on to brighten up the night. But if I don’t, I’ll come up with some other festive ways to celebrate the season.

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Emilie-Noelle Provost (she/her) – Author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award, American Fiction Award, and American Legacy Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Visit her at emilienoelleprovost.com.

Home for the Holidays: Cowboy Christmas

Home for the Holidays:
Cowboy Christmas

By Henri Marchand

“The memories of childhood have no order, and no end,” wrote Dylan Thomas in Reminiscences of Childhood.  A popular holiday song claims that, “there’s no place like home for the holidays.”  These lines come to mind as my family prepares to celebrate Christmas, 2020.

We cannot see nor can we celebrate Christmases yet to come but even as we create new Yuletide traditions and experiences, we easily recall and readily share stories with family members and invite the comforting spirits of Christmases past to adorn another Christmas season.  In so doing we gift pieces of family history to our children and grandchildren and family members yet to come.

House exterior – 2018

Since 1975, my wife and I have celebrated Christmas in several homes, for the first five years by ourselves, later with our children and grandchildren.  We spent the latter part of each Christmas day at what we considered the extended family home where I grew up.  We returned regularly to celebrate not only Christmas but other holidays, birthday, graduation and special theme parties, and weddings.

Three generations of my family lived under one roof, creating moments and memories tied to the space and structure, giving our home something like a soul if that can be said for a house.  Over the years, the house, a large, roomy Colonial Victorian, sheltered our nuclear family that included Memère Brouillard and Aunt Rose.  Tech students rented two rooms from September to May and relatives visiting from Quebec, usually when an elderly aunt or uncle passed away, stayed with us.

Prior to my parents purchasing the house at 118 Riverside Street in 1953, five other families called it home.  The house was built in 1896 by George C. Osgood, a doctor and apothecary who bought the lot in 1891 from the estate of Ezra B. Welch.  Welch acquired the land and earlier buildings from a family named Pierce when the area was still farmland.  The gnarly remnants of an apple orchard held out in our neighbors’ back yards in the 1960s.  Osgood and his wife Louisa had three children—John, Harry and Mary.  They called the house home until June of 1903 when they sold it to Louis Olney, a Textile School professor of dyeing technology.  Olney and his wife Bertha also had three children—Edna, Margaret and Richard.  They reportedly kept a pet monkey and a goat.

I picture the Osgoods and the Olneys celebrating the holidays in their own times, in more formal attire and the home’s more formal furnishings, navigating heavy snowfalls and the still thinly developed area in sleds and sleighs.  Recently posted photos on Facebook capture Riverside Street across from the Osgood’s home on February 1, 1898.   The view is towards Moody Street (now University Avenue), the sky is cloudy, the ground covered in deep snow and there are only three homes all along that side.  Young trees, presumably elms line the street and the street light is a gas lit Victorian.  A woman poses on the front porch of the gambrel house overlooking the Merrimack River.  A child, half obscured by snow, plays in the yard.  Some fifty to sixty years later that would be my siblings and our neighborhood friends.

There were three other, short-term owners after Louis and Bertha Olney died in an automobile accident in 1949 and before my parents moved in when I was two weeks old.  It was a large home and over the years my parents filled it with eight children—Monique, Gerard, Henri, Andre, Louise, Rene, Paul and Anne Marie.  It became the place where our extended family gathered for informal visits and for holiday celebrations.  And where childhood memories were created and where they reside still.

An early memory is of watching Mom and Memère prepare special meals, bake pies and cakes, and fry doughnuts.  An incentive to behave as we observed was the promise of raw pie dough and cake batter treats.  We each took turns visiting Memère and Aunt Rose who lived upstairs in an in-law suite created by a previous owner in 1952.  They were my parents’ live-in child support and we happily joined them for lunches and seemingly endless games of cards, checkers and Parcheesi.

Halloween was a memorable season as the home lent itself to our imaginations and to the telling of ghost stories with its long hallways, nook stairwells, connecting rooms and passageways and the not-so-secret, secret room in the library Olney added in 1922.  My Dad had a flair for embellishing stories whether fact or fiction.  He claimed that the Olney’s pet monkey was buried somewhere in the yard or beneath the basement floor; that ghosts wandered the halls and resided in the secret room; that a squirrel who camped out under the hood of his car dashed out clean-shaven one morning after he turned the ignition.  He spun tall tales of treasure hidden within the walls and in as-yet-undiscovered secret spaces.  The storytelling tendency was inherited by at least one family member.  My sister Monique, not one given to lying, to this day swears that she saw Dad chatting and shaking hands with Santa Claus one Christmas Eve.  She recalls her memory in fine detail, insisting that she heard the sound of bells as Santa flew up the chimney.

It is Christmastime that evokes the most vivid of home connected memories, with tinseled, Charlie Brown trees strung with colored lights, yuletide aromas of baking pastries, roasting turkeys and C7 bulb warmed balsam scents.  There were white Christmases and bare lawn Christmases, rainy Christmases and warm ones, but in my selective, disordered memory they all appear white.  There remains, stored in boxes, unsorted collections of black and white snapshots of our earliest holidays and color prints of later ones, some dated, some not, so that attaching an exact year to each memory is difficult and perhaps wholly beside the point.  Nor is the memory of a particular holiday tied to the gifts received—Popeye Colorforms one year, a Boxer dog model another, and a visible man model later when I had expressed interest in becoming a doctor.  But try as I might I could not figure out what organ went where and the patient was never made whole.  Whatever the gifts, it is the memories that endure and give added richness and meaning to our family’s ongoing celebrations and the requisite disputations of dates and names and whose memories testify to the official record.

Colorforms

One Christmas in particular stands out, Cowboy Christmas, as my older brother Gerry and I came to call it.  We were six and seven years old, our younger brother Andy five.  The parlor that year was in what we later determined to have been Olney’s waiting room outside his library.  The tree was another beautifully scrawny and heavily tinseled, glass adorned specimen.  Gerry, Andy and I received cowboy hats, holsters with guns, faux leather gloves, a banjo and a ukulele.  In memory, we also received matching homemade flannel shirts that year to complete the singing cowpoke look but the memory is disordered, like the photos stored in shoe boxes.  In recently unearthed black and white glossies, we pose proudly, ready to gallop off on our imaginary steeds not in flannel but in long-sleeved jerseys.  No matter, it was the high noon of TV westerns and we spent that Christmas vacation chasing each other and yippee ki-yaying around the house.  I imagine now that my parents may have regretted their gift choices.  It remains one of my fondest childhood Christmas memories, and even now, with an aversion to guns as gifts, I happily recall and replay Cowboy Christmas.

Cowboy Christmas – 1957

It wasn’t until several years ago that I learned that my cherished Christmas memory was created at a difficult time for my parents.  I was visiting my Mom, reminiscing as we often did in her later years.  As we spoke of the holidays I expressed how I remembered that Christmas as a wonderful time.  She seemed pleasantly surprised and shared that for her and Dad it was a season of struggle.  Dad, a self-employed painter and paperhanger, had been hospitalized and out of work.  But they were determined to provide gifts for each of their children which by then included four sons and two daughters.  They were equally determined not to let their worries diminish our joy.  So they purchased inexpensive felt hats, six-shooters, and plastic cowboy instruments for my brothers and me along with other simple toys for our siblings.

As we got older Christmas memories shifted from toys to traditions.  At some point, around ages eleven or twelve, we began attending Midnight Mass and enjoying a Réveillon, traditions carried down through New England from mostly farming communities to factory towns by our Quebecois forebears.  The Réveillon followed Mass with an early morning buffet of Franco favorites—tourtière, salmon pie, apple and squash pies, homemade caramels, and fudge.  Once done, it was off to the parlor for the sharing of gifts.

Over the years Christmas celebrations evolved as we each left the family house.  We continued to return with another generation after time spent with our in-laws and at one point fifty-plus showed up at what was now a more reasonable time (4 p.m. rather than 1 a.m.) to feast, exchange gifts, and delight in an ever growing, ever lively Yankee Swap.

In the late 1990s my parents began a new, adults only tradition as a way to spend, relatively quiet, time with us.  Two weeks before Christmas my brothers and sisters and significant others gathered for dinner with Mom and Dad, joined by our cousin Rick, who was by then living in Atlanta.  Each of us was responsible for one course of a dinner that often broke with Franco-American cuisine traditions.  Between the main meal and dessert we formed a production line to cut and wrap several batches of homemade caramel (with regular testing for quality control) and decorate the family tree.  Mom and Dad delighted in these annual gatherings.  Dubbed the Christmas Progressive Dinner, it was initially conceived as a traveling feast with a different course served at each of our homes but a blizzard the first year convinced us to abandon the travel part.

We have known for a few years that our long run of celebrations in the family home was nearing its end.  As the years passed and we all had our own homes, the family house remained the common ground, our parents the center that held and their being and nurturing drew us all back at Christmas.  My Dad died in 2001, my Mom in the spring of 2019.  We agreed that we would not sell the home before one more Christmas season, one more round of gatherings to celebrate the memories and to say goodbye to the spirit of the place.

Living Room – 2018

Living Room – 2020

Our family house passed on to another owner this past spring and after sixty-seven years will no longer host our family’s holiday communal gathering.  But it remains with us in muddled memories that “have no end” and in stories of Christmases past and of the people who have called it home.  There is no longer a home spacious enough to accommodate fifty of us for a single holiday celebration so we will atomize and gather in cautiously smaller groups.

Covid Christmas 2020 will be celebrated with new traditions and family members, likely via new technologies.  Photo moments will be saved with screen shots.  Still, we will remember those that came before and will look forward to passing on, as one passes on family heirloom ornaments, those endless memories of Christmases past.  Even as we look back, we will look forward to 2021 and to “Cowboy Christmases” yet to draw near.

Grandkids