December 18: I’m not crying, I’m eating spicy mustard

Tomorrow we are heading to the Christkindlemarket downtown for sweet and warming gluhwein, greasy sausages mit senf, and scandalously over-priced bags of sugary nuts. It’s a traditional event in Chicago that draws millions annually. Vendors hawk ye olde European food and wares in their open-air shoppes and hundreds of bored German college students on their Christmas breaks take a trip over to sell Chinese-made ornaments for der Tannenbaum while singing Chicago’s praises in dramatically accented English.

It’s almost as authentic as a forkless dinner at Medieval Times. We go every year.

But not last year, of course, because no one went.

In previous years, we’d gone as a family of 4, but this year we are going as a family of 7 because we used to be a family of 8.

This is the first Christmas without Grandma Joanna—my husband’s mother. She died unexpectedly this past February (I wrote about the day here). We are approaching the hardest part of the hardest year.

We had quite a few difficult firsts this year without Grandma—birthdays, family summer vacation, Thanksgiving, and now Christmas. For the first few months, it was easy to momentarily forget that Joanna would not be coming along. The habit of making reservations for 8, of asking about convenient parking, choosing locales with few stairs was difficult to break. By Thanksgiving, we had learned to distribute the cooking duties and had only two and not four breakfast options and three and not six, holiday pies (sorry, Joanna).

As the family matriarch, Joanna also set the tone for what we could do and where we could go. While she made all events joyful, fun, and highly caloric, she also had physical limitations that kept us close to home. Joanna would not have been able to walk around the Christkindlemarket tomorrow, so we never thought to go until this year.

The seven of us—my husband and our two kids and my sister-in-law, her partner, and their daughter—will start a new family tradition of an outing to the Christkindlemarket every holiday season. I got us a family meal package that includes a few snacks and a table in the warm Timberhaus, but they had only one seating size, for a family of 8.

It’s not like Grandma wasn’t going to be there anyway.