Mall not Country Club

My half-baked theory about this is that we are lacking imperious patriarchs or matriarchs who demanded attendance and you wouldn’t dare defy them. I had a grandmother (b. 1914) who was the mastermind of our family. She was so powerful and charismatic that she had gotten several family members to move near her (on Nantucket Island in the 60’s and 70’s) and then some grandkids stuck around or moved back when they grew up, so holidays were multifamily affairs. When they were rifts or a crisis or a divorce, my grandmother would call people up and tell them what to do. Keeping the family together was the only thing that mattered. When my unmarried uncle and aunt had a baby in the mid-70’s, when it was still a little shocking, my grandmother arranged for everyone to make a quilt square and she had someone stitch it together to give the baby a clear welcome from the entire family. After my parents’ divorce, my grandmother informed everyone that her ex-DIL, my mother, would still be part of the family. My dad and his eventual new wife and my mom had to work it out. But when my grandmother died in the mid-90’s there was no one to take over for her, and my extended family—and eventually my family—splintered. When I had a massive, bludgeoning rift with my siblings during Covid, I was quite sure my grandmother would have immediately intervened, instructing us to apologize/accept the apologies. But the next generation wasn’t imperious enough to intervene and boss us around. We went a year with no contact, and, left to our own devices, we still haven’t entirely recovered. Our holidays are splintered micro-gatherings now. My grandmother would have called us all up and yelled at us, and we would have gotten past it and all arrived for Thanksgiving.