Picture a dim, candlelit dining room stuffed to the gills with people, and practically exploding with noise, movement, and quasi-organized chaos. People are crammed around the table elbow to elbow, like sardines. The air throbs with a life it’s own. Like a cross between the warm heart of a mammal, and a pulsing wound. Although hard to distinguish in all the chaos, if you listen carefully, you can pick out the noises of clinking glasses, people talking over each other, the crunch of a nutcracker, requests to please pass the salt, please pass the wine. Cackles of laughter. You might hear a faint choir singing in the background.

You look up just in time to see a discarded, jagged lobster claw fly just past the end of your nose as it’s tossed onto a bowl with the rest of the pieces of exoskeleton. Part of you wants to lock yourself in the bathroom to steal a silent moment and shake the noise from your ears, but if you do that, you might miss something, and you desperately don’t want to miss anything. Someone is pressing against the back of your chair, trying to wedge and shimmy through to the kitchen, and under the table, an animal is stepping on your foot. Your left knee is being jammed into the leg of the table. You are trapped. Wedged in like the plastic cubes of the game “Don’t Break the Ice”. You pray that you can hold your bladder until the end of dinner. You make an offhand comment that is met with peals of laughter, and your face warms with pride and unexpected self-consciousness.

Have you been transported in time to some medieval feast? Surrounded by hungry heathens, bumped by people rushing to the vomitorium? No. You are having Christmas Eve dinner with my family, thank you very much.

My Methodist grandmother on my mother’s side married my grandfather, who was (gasp) Catholic. At the time, it was considered quite the scandal. Her own mother refused to attend the wedding. A decision she later regretted deeply. I imagine my grandmother found the traditions and rules of Catholicism to be a little foreign and odd. She was an amazing cook, and had a taste for the finer things in life. When she learned she that it was not acceptable to prepare meat before Christmas day because of lent, she may have been disappointed. She loved a good roast beef. Chicken was apparently considered gauche at the time. My grandmother loved an excuse to put on a fancy dinner. The strange no-beef rule left her no option for dinner on Christmas Eve other than lobster. The tradition stuck, because… well.. who doesn’t like lobster?

So every December 24th, twenty or so people congregate at my parent’s house in the middle of the coldest, most landlocked state in the country. The state of Minnesota, practically smack dab in the middle of the entire continent. On what is close to the darkest day of the year, we order fresh lobster from a thousand miles away, and sacrifice them in the name of Christmas and by default, Catholicism. We squash ourselves around the table and try to talk over one another. The decibel level in the room is directly proportionate with the amount of wine consumed.

At a certain point your mind starts to shut down from over stimulation. It gives me a small amount of insight into what it might be like to be autistic. To sense so much going on all the time, that it becomes too much for the brain to process. Your mind becomes fragmented and your sentences are blurted out randomly. Much like a conversation between children. “My dad’s a Fireman!” to which the other party replies “I like cookies!” and the first person responds “My goldfish is named Freddie!”

This is what Christmas Eve dinners are like in my family.

My husband is one hundred percent Dutch. His family is even larger than ours. When we have dinner at their house, the scene is much different. People take turns speaking. There are silent moments in between conversations. Pauses. People pass things around the table in an orderly fashion. People don’t crack jokes during the blessing. The only thing tossed at the table is the salad. For some reason, things aren’t typically spilled. It’s all quite civilized. And it’s a nice way of doing things.

I am glad that my daughter Madge gets to experience the best of both worlds. When I spend time in one atmosphere, I tend to long for the other. The pendulum swings from unrestrained chaos and joviality to peaceful celebration and reverence and back again. Two lovely variations of the theme of family at Christmas.