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+--- Thread: Time Marches On (/showthread.php?tid=3501)
Time Marches On - GeauxHomeLittleD - 04-06-2026
When I was a kid the only places open on Sunday were churches, sit down restaurants (but only after church), one grocery store and of course 7/11. If a major holiday happened to fall on a Sunday even those few places were closed. Easter was always on of those days. Everything closed but the churches and amazingly that one 7/11 store.
Of course if you were a kid during those days you absolutely hated this and wished with all your might that everything was open because you were sick and tired of entertaining "out-of-town" cousins for the entire weekend and were it not but for accident of birth you would never intentionally spend time with those people for any amount of riches or fame.
The "out-of-town" cousins always came along with aunts and uncles. Grandparents too. What else are people going to do when everything is closed? Go sponge a free room and dinner off of some kinfolk and call it "family bonding". Even if the big holiday family feast was at another relative's house somehow visiting relatives were "farmed out" to other kin within the proximity. No cable, no internet, everything is closed- and the kids have to do all of the cleaning plus entertain all of the visiting kids. If you were one of the older kids your life was Hell for very long weekend!
Fast forward to the present day. Easter was yesterday. I did my regular shopping at a few stores then was temporarily shocked that Lowe's was closed before remembering it actually was Easter. Everything else was open. Even trash valet picked up the trash. Two of the four kids and one of the grandkids texted. We each called our mothers. Basically just like any other day. We're spread out all over the country so big family holidays aren't much of a thing anymore. Just like I wished for when I was a kid. The old timers always used to say to be careful what you wish for!
Nowadays I'd give just about anything to go back to those older times. The big holidays were the time of family reunions, the kind where people actually have to talk to and interact with each other. It's where you learned stories from your family history and funny anecdotes you will be sharing with your grandchildren. It's where kids learn that cousins don't have to know each other well to have each other's backs because that's what family is. You accidentally learn dark family secrets when the great aunts don't realize that your French has gotten much better and they talk openly and loudly in their native tongue. That one uncle gives you a pint of schnapps to keep an eye on the younger kids outside during his shift to watch them as he slinks off to one of the outbuildings while
scanning for witnesses (what he was doing in that building I do not want to know). You learn that it is NEVER coffee in Uncle Maurice's coffee cup, you also learn that one of your cousins is a professional mud wrestler and most importantly: your youngest uncle is dating a stripper with one glass eye!
Now most kids don't know their cousins, great aunts and uncles, etc. There are no big family holidays where everybody gets together for a feast- not in the old sense. How did we get here? I feel it started when we went from everything being closed on Sundays and major holidays to everything being open. As "Blue Laws" fell more and more businesses were able to stay open during times previously barred to them- but over time those same businesses gained the right to demand that employees work those days as well. No more three day weekend for the majority of society, no more driving a few hours for a big family weekend. What started as convenience became practice. People tried for a while, schedules were juggled, 3 days crammed into 2 plus driving both ways and helping prepare the feast. More work than it's worth. It just became easier to do individual family holidays catered to each household schedule.
So now only the old timers try to keep some kind of big family shindig at holiday time where relatives that live fairly local have a one day cookout together. No relatives from half a days drive away. No 30-40 relatives all convoying to church together. No cousins learning to hulahoop whilst simultaneously learning dark family secrets. No circle of elders handing out smartassed wisdom while trading family gossip. No learning the social intricacies of when knowledge should be giggled at and when it is to be filed away and kept to oneself. No learning to protect the younger cousins from their own stupidity. No playing chase in the garden and running smack dab into a giant banana spider. No more roasting hot dogs and marshmallows over a fire the night before Easter with goofy cousins.
Time marches on. It will never go back to the way it was. But those things I hated in childhood are the things I look back on fondly now. The old traditions are dying because the old timers that keep them are dying and less and less of us are taking up the torch- or have and got tired of it after years and years. The younger generations will make their own traditions. They wont look like mine. That's okay.
That's the end of my wake and bake holiday rant!
RE: Time Marches On - Ninurta - 04-06-2026
We still have the family dinners, but they're not the same. All the nieces and nephews are now grown and have kids of their own, and most of them don't come around for it. Ours was yesterday at 2 pm, and even I didn't go. I'm not fit to be present around decent, civilized folk, so I stayed home and ate chili.
.
RE: Time Marches On - Freija - 04-06-2026
That was lovely and it stirred my feelers in good and not so good ways I’m still trying to unpack. I’ll be out of town from Wednesday through Sunday with a super busy today and tomorrow getting ready but here I sit writing a response instead of addressing my tasks for this afternoon thanks to my head now being filled with thoughts that have no place to go.
Reading some of your nostalgic feelings from childhood and times past, a lot of it sounds to me like some idyllic Norman Rockwell painting or Brady Bunch scenario because it differs so wildly from my childhood memories and experiences. Not saying I don’t have fond remembrances of favorite cousins and whatnot but gatherings of more than maybe two family groups at a time out of six on my mother’s side are not part of my recollections and I can think of only one instance I was a part of where multiple families gathered on my dad’s side. My birth parents separated when I was in kindergarten and my dad tried but I was never very familiar with his side of the family and in the times I was involved, I was the weirdo outsider that never really belonged.
My mom had five sisters and was the baby of her family. They all married and scattered in different directions except one who stayed local providing nearly all of my extended family connections. When we first moved from Ohio to Arizona in 1961 it was this one sister, who was closest to my mom’s age moved out west to join us several years later along with my grandparents so when we did get together it was with one aunt and uncle, four cousins and grandma and grandpa. That was a big family gathering to me.
I did occasionally visit my dad who lived in California at this time and he had a sister living close, my aunt Dotha but her kids, my cousins were young adults and there wasn’t any connection there and I never saw any of my dad’s other family ever again.
My grandparents, born in the 1880s and 1890s passed away when I was 12 and 13 and it was also about this time, I completely ended my already strained relationship with my father because he just couldn’t come to terms with who I was so needless to say, big family gatherings were not part of my picture beyond my aunt and uncle and their kids whom I had mostly grown up with that just accepted my differences.
In spite of what may sound like a tragedy to some with big connected extended families, siblings and multiple generations, I don’t really feel like I missed much but sometimes I think a few of my adult behaviors are influenced by these experiences. I was a deeply troubled kid that threw up hardened protective walls anyway and think a broadened familial experience would have only driven me further into isolation. I was loved and cared for by the people that mattered to me which was enough even if it was only a small circle.
Between 15 and 18 while I was still living with my mom and stepdad through high school, even connections with my aunt, uncle and cousins began to wane not because of what I was going through but because they moved too far away to see regularly and after that, I did not see any of them again until I was 25 at my mom’s funeral in 1980. I have neither seen nor heard from any of them since.
However, thanks to my mom’s efforts during her last year, she did track down my dad and patched things up between him and I even though we hadn’t spoken for over ten years. We stayed in contact and visited several times which ended up with my dad seeking therapy because parents want to blame themselves when their kids don’t turn out they way they expected but things were cool and he even got to meet my husband a couple times, which is something my mom never got to do, and they got along well. However, when I got divorced in 1997, it really pissed him off or something and we fell out of contact. I learned a few years later he passed away.
I’m sure to some it may sound like I’m emotionally deficient, broken or disconnected and in some ways I probably am but that is not how I see things from my perspective. While I may not be as warm and cuddly as some because of the walls put up for my own survival while young may still exist to some degree, it doesn’t mean I do not love or am loved but it does mean by very few. I’m good with that and while my experiences may be limited those that I have leave me fulfilled and rewarded.
So after blathering on about my life and family and such, I’ll finish addressing one of the notions pondered in the OP. I don’t really think stores being open is part of the decline in big family get togethers but rather just a symptom of fast-paced modern times where a text has replaced conversation, families have become more geographically diverse and the world that many of us older folks grew up in has become unrecognizable or not what were raised to expect.
Now I’d better get busy or tomorrow is going to be a mad rush.
RE: Time Marches On - SomeJackleg - 04-07-2026
we did that with both parents side of the family, and alternated holidays which ones we went to as a kid. then when we moved just 30 miles away and we kept it up for a couple of years, then my folks slowly got to where we didn't go. it got to the point that me and the brothers had to beg them to go and that fell on death ears.
now i and my better half, my youngest brother and his family go across the road to our mom's, the middle brother who moved just 40 miles away doesn't hardly ever come down or call. but they go across the road to her mom house, who always has a big ol shindig. people who ain't even related come to those.
he married a girl whose parents like ours lived on farms, and bought land net to theirs and like ours all the farmers around have given the land to their kids who have no interest in being farmers and selling out to land developers and now we have hundred house plus subdivisions popping up everywhere. 1/4 acre lots or less with only maybe 8 foot between some of the homes.
lucky for me and my youngest brother, nobody can get closer 1/4 mile on one side, and 1/2 mile on the other three.
needless to say, time is not on our side, no it ain't
RE: Time Marches On - 727Sky - 04-07-2026
Growing up on a 40 acres farm (20 acres cleared farmland and the other 20 forest) with always a horse and a great hunting dog the blue laws never really bothered me all that much as we had to travel 8 miles to the closest small town to do any shopping...so we went when stuff was open.
Dad's mother who lived in West Texas (about a 4 hour drive) always had the big gathering where Dad's brothers (all 4 of them) brought their families and kids. It was always a great time to eat, play, and occasionally do some fishing or night hunting for Coyotes or day light Rattle Snake killing as the gathering lasted usually 2 nights and 3 days.
Fond memories and looking back on everything a great childhood I wouldn't trade anyone for. Grandmother passed and there were a few attempts at keeping the gathering alive but jobs and distances pretty much killed the gatherings.
RE: Time Marches On - Chiefsmom - 04-07-2026
I miss those days as well. For me, they pretty much stopped when we became adults and scattered to the wind. Although, growing up, I wasn't really close to my sister as she was younger. But in the last 10 years we have become much closer, so that is nice.
I do still talk to a few cousins as well.
Unfortunately I will be seeing more of them soon, as all of our parents are getting up there and my mom is in really bad shape with Parkinson's and dementia.
RE: Time Marches On - F2d5thCav - 04-07-2026
@"Chiefsmom"#67
You have my sympathy. My Dad had Parkinson's. It was especially frustrating for him as he had always been a very fit person in his life.
--Cav
RE: Time Marches On - ChiefD - 04-07-2026
Thanks everyone for sharing your stories. I think experiences are as varied as we Americans are. Where I grew up, we didn't have any kind of blue laws. Everything was open Sunday, especially the bars. It is Wisconsin after all. If all the bars would have closed, people would have rioted. Where do you think they headed right after church? When I was a kid, we all went to church and I and my two younger sisters also went to Sunday School. We all were confirmed in the church when we were 14 (Lutheran-Wisconsin Synod). We usually went somewhere to eat lunch, or went shopping.
There were very few family reunions I went to as a kid. The few we went to seemed to degenerate into drunken insults and fights. There were a lot of people who I didn't even know at these reunions. We kids would warily watch the adults continue to get drunker as time went on. Then it was time to leave. The last one I went to, there was a family tree put together on a large board. I found out looking at that family tree that my Dad was not my biological father. Surprise! We never went to another one. I was 14 at the time. My parents sat me down and told me everything. I was finally legally adopted by my Dad when I was 15. He was there from the beginning, when I was just a baby. There are dads, and there are sperm donors. I tried to put it all behind me, but it was more difficult for my sisters (half sisters). Have I ever mentioned that I hate surprises?
My last Navy duty station was in Norfolk VA, which had a blue law. This was 1987. It was ridiculous. I stopped going to church after my confirmation, and I thought that a city of 350,000 people having a blue law was bullshit. They finally got rid of it in 1990 or so.
My family is more scattered now. My husband is gone. I actually spent my first Thanksgiving in the weeks after he died at my neighbors house across the street with their family. I felt accepted and happy. We were very close. I could go over to their house any time, grab a key from their back porch, and use their hot tub. It's great to have neighbors like that. They moved back to Virginia a few months ago, and I really miss them.
I try to get to my niece's and nephew's happenings. Two of my nieces live out of state, one lives about 150 miles south of me. My nephew is a 10 minute drive away, so I have been to multiple baby showers and birthdays. He has a two year old son and his wife is pregnant with twin boys, due in a few weeks. Family can mean many things. Now on Thanksgiving and Christmas, I go up to my youngest sister's house. Sometimes my parents are there, sometimes not. Otherwise most holidays are just texts. That's okay. I'm at the age where I just go with the flow.