Several years ago, my mother announced that she was spending Christmas in Egypt with friends. I flew home anyway, alone, and spent two days making homemade pierogies and sauerkraut and bread for the traditional Carpatho-Rusyn meal we always have on Christmas Eve. At 10 p.m., my sister had an hour off from her rounds at the hospital. She came home and we ate. Then she left, and I did the dishes.
You might say I have a strong sense of tradition, if you didn't recognize the heavy press of bereavement on these proceedings, the fear that the past is lost forever. "The possible ranks higher than the actual," Martin Heidegger wrote. Our visions of an ideal holiday erase our memories of the opposite. Like elephants, we return to the place where something disappeared long ago, hoping to get that old feeling back.
This compulsive pursuit of the past also explains why, when my mom called to tell me she didn't want me to stay with her over Christmas this year, I felt it must be some misunderstanding. "I'm 70 years old," she explained. "I don't have many Christmases left in me. I can't handle the chaos and the noise anymore." She offered to pay for me and my family to stay in a hotel instead.
"It's your house," I said finally of the place I (myopically) consider mine more than any other. I imagined myself under a starched white sheet, listening to strangers come and go in a hotel hallway on Christmas Eve. "You should do whatever you want," I said. Then I put down the phone and cried.
I could have protested her decision, but I knew that I would merely be seen as playing to type, following the same pushy emotional script my family has heard so many times before. Or, as my sister put it years ago when I moved in with yet another boyfriend, "Same old story, different year." We want our comforting traditions to stay suspended in sap while our families constantly revise their understanding of us like software that updates automatically. Instead, traditions crumble and nostalgia yields to melancholy, but our identities, to our families, are as fixed and stagnant as fossils behind glass.
Anxious to demonstrate how mature and flexible we've become, we return to our birthplaces and we're cut down to size, encountered as predictable once again. Disappointment and longing well up on a last-minute trip to the shopping mall, haunted by the mournful strains of Perry Como's "White Christmas."
Maybe I just wish I were little again. As a parent, I'm expected to smile serenely as I pour the wine and rush the baked rolls to the table, as I sign "Santa" on every package, then join my children in marveling at his generosity. I'd rather be one of the kids, tearing into presents, then gloating over my loot like a drunken pirate. Perhaps nostalgia is a natural result of being abruptly ushered from the realm of gleeful greed to the less-thrilling arena of sweating the small stuff, then receding into the background until it's time to crawl across the floor retrieving stray scraps of wrapping paper.
My mom's insistence on spending Christmas in an empty house might be her way of finally rejecting this farce. For decades now, my brother and I have returned home specifically to regress, to slouch around in dirty socks, eating Christmas cookies, ignoring my mom's soliloquies on how little time she has left. Lately we have dragged our spouses and unruly children along with us. What I perceived as abandonment could be my mom's attempt to offer an "It's a Wonderful Life"-style tour of what life would look like without her.
Maybe my mother's growing acceptance of her mortality has emancipated her from old obligations. Or maybe she's just eager to shock us out of our childish selfishness. Either way, it worked. We can see now that, without her, we are greedy babies surrounded by other greedy babies, waiting expectantly for the dinner bell to ring. We want to deny that there's an end to this story, so we remain trapped. My mother, though, is free to forge a new path, unburdened by the decay of history.
But we'll all come together again on Christmas Eve, the trapped and the free, to endure the noise and the chaos. The possible ranks higher than the actual. I'm really looking forward to it.
Heather Havrilesky is the author of a memoir, "Disaster Preparedness."
E-mail submissions for Lives to lives@nytimes.com. Because of the volume of e-mail, the magazine cannot respond to every submission.
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