RELATIONSHIPS IN THE 90s by Don Edgar ............" Funny thing about Christmas time. It's simultaneously an occasion for the extended family to exchange pleasantries and the period of the most concentrated conflict many families ever experience. More children are kidnapped by their non-custodial parents, there are more murders and more family violence than at any other time of the year. More kids are disappointed by the presents they never received, more parents frustrated that their good intentions have gone unappreciated, more mothers determined they'll never try to cook a turkey with all the trimmings again, and more fathers wishing that Christmas would just go away and leave them alone. My own memories of Christmas are, on the whole, pleasant. As a kid I felt lucky to be given anything and a roast chicken was a treat to look forward to because most of the year they had to lay eggs. Then I met the woman of my dreams and trouble darkened the halls of holly. She expected to go home to her parents for Christmas, I was expected by my mother to be at her place and I wanted to be in both places at once. The compromise of taking turns each year didn't work. My mother couldn't cook, never had a turkey, had tinned Christmas pudding and custard made out of packet powder. She also made comments on how the gift I gave my wife would have looked better on her and she was never happy with the short stay we endured for the sake of keeping the peace. So, after a time, we stopped going for Christmas, claiming it was too far to travel with small children and then on to my wife's even more remote country town home. It was more fun fishing on the Murray River. Some years, we had them down for Christmas with us. Then, as the in-laws got older, it became the custom for the whole extended family to travel up there, but have Christmas dinner with my sister-in-law and her family. They had a bigger house, a pool, a big backyard and they couldn't travel down to us because of work commitments. These gatherings were noisy, fun and quite exhausting. We would all meet at the old house for breakfast and open our gifts. Then we'd all adjourn to the other rellies' place for lunch. And even though we would have brought the turkey and a huge ham, our daughter would have cooked the Christmas pudding and my wife would have made the brandy sauce, we always felt it was an imposition on them, something we could not reciprocate because they could never come to Melbourne for Christmas with us. Family spirit was high, the best of intentions prevailed, but there was an edge to it. The reasons were no different from what happens with most families at Christmas, though the results were much less damaging. Today's extended family at a distance is unused to living together in close proximity. They talk often on the phone, but having meals together is infrequent and contact time limited and manageable within the bounds of tolerance. Each separate nuclear family unit develops its own habits, comfort zones, its own culture and its own form of co-operative conflict. But when you're a visitor, you feel obliged to do it their way, to fit in, so the tension rises and sometimes bubbles over into open conflict The strain of being nice is at its peak at Christmas, that celebration of the first Christian family, which few of us now believe in anyway. Mums and dads want Christmas to be a happy occasion, proof that their children have been raised to love and care for one another, proof that It is still a family. Yet everyone carries all sorts of baggage from childhood that blocks good communication between them and their parents; other baggage arises from sibling rivalry; and those interlopers, the sons-and-daughters-in-law, don't really belong anyway. Once you add grandchildren, each brought up in line with their parents' uniquely developed family culture, you have a volatile mix likely to explode at any moment. That's why more and more families are eschewing the home-cooked family Christmas dinner in favour of a picnic at the beach or dinner in a restaurant. At least there the kids can get away and play, or there's a formal procedure that keeps the lid on emotional earthquakes. It's a pity in a way, but better the family that enjoys Christmas as a reminder of good things past than one forced into an exhausting battle to survive the day when they'd rather be somewhere else.

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