Join Suzi as she take a journey on the path of evolving family customs and their impact on our healing from trauma. This episode isn't just about the holidays; it's about the choices we make in preserving or reinventing the customs that shape our lives.
Happy Holidays!
Music credit to Kalvin Love for the podcast’s theme song “Bee Your Best Self”
Tune into our CHW Streaming Radio and the full lineup at cominghomewell.com
Download on Apple Play and Google Play
Online-Therapy.com ~ Life Changing Therapy Click here for a 20% discount on your first month.
Contact Suzi at suzigma@gmail.com or (818) 470-2013 and share your story.
suzilandolphi.com
vetsandplayers.org
wildhorserescue.org
Thank you for listening! Be sure to SHARE, LIKE and leave us a REVIEW!
Join Suzi as she take a journey on the path of evolving family customs and their impact on our healing from trauma. This episode isn't just about the holidays; it's about the choices we make in preserving or reinventing the customs that shape our lives.
Happy Holidays!
Music credit to Kalvin Love for the podcast’s theme song “Bee Your Best Self”
Tune into our CHW Streaming Radio and the full lineup at cominghomewell.com
Download on Apple Play and Google Play
Online-Therapy.com ~ Life Changing Therapy Click here for a 20% discount on your first month.
Contact Suzi at suzigma@gmail.com or (818) 470-2013 and share your story.
suzilandolphi.com
vetsandplayers.org
wildhorserescue.org
Thank you for listening! Be sure to SHARE, LIKE and leave us a REVIEW!
I'm Susie Landolfi, and welcome to Be Crazy Well. Welcome to Be Crazy Well, which is a actually great title for the season. I'm recording this now and we're going to play it on Christmas, offer it on Christmas Day, and one of the things that I've been talking a lot to some of the people I work with and my family and friends is the idea of tradition. Most of you know that I talk about trauma traditions, the traditions of trauma and how it affects us. What I don't talk enough about is the joyous traditions, the traditions that we also carry in our families, like, let's say, the tradition of making up after we've had a fight. I know a lot of families that fight a lot and then I know that they make up a lot. There's traditions of abandoning, of threatening I'm going to leave and then they stay. So there's all kinds of trauma traditions and there's all kinds of what I would like to call healing traditions the traditions of families that actually have arguments and don't talk to each other for a while and then somebody reaches out and they start talking again. Families that argue and then they're there for each other when the shit hits the fan. There's traditions of helping one another, meaning that we criticize and complain about those that aren't doing well in the family, and yet we're right there to help them when they need it and maybe even the traditions of not taking care of ourselves well enough, and then at the last minute, we change. And then we do. I've talked to a lot of people about what happened to them as children in their families and how it's all different now that there were traditions of people getting drunk on Christmas, falling into the Christmas tree you know vites, all of that and yet now they're handling it better. They're actually participating in some joy. So I just wanted to remind all of us that none of us do this perfectly, and we made it through another year and we have another year coming up, and what are we going to do with it? How are we going to create new traditions?
Speaker 1:I was very traditional at one time. I grew up in New England. There isn't anything more traditional than New England where the sort of from in terms of people coming over here and landing on this property, this land. We brought a lot of traditions and we've been here long. For those of us that came from the very first ships that landed here, we didn't always act well, and yet we have a rich history and a traumatic history of landing here and starting new families. So when you grow up in New England, you do everything the same every year. It's passed down, and when I got out here to California, I noticed that there was not really the same emphasis on tradition. I would imagine it was partly because, you know, we didn't have any snow, we were at the beach on Christmas day, but I think it was more than that. I think that where I grew up, people stayed there for generations and generations, and here in California it was people coming out here to start a new life, for new traditions, and I missed it terribly and I remember trying really hard to create the same kind of Christmas out here that we had in New England, and I sometimes did it well and sometimes I didn't, and sometimes I, you know, put up the manger and that my mother had been, you know, handed down to me and some of the other decorations, and then, thank goodness, my daughter came along and she decided, along with her son, because he was born here, that we were gonna make new traditions and it wasn't.
Speaker 1:It's a beautiful life movie that I grew up on. It was Elf and my whole family is Elf obsessed so much so that the open house we're having on Saturday night there is a table with the three food groups and if you've watched Elf you know that he believes the three food groups are candy, candy corn and syrup. So I just got through putting small little candy canes on a tree next to the maple syrup which of course is very New England tradition and watching as my daughter is pouring green and red candy corn into a dish. I'm so grateful that I had these traditions as a child and that I am able, as I get older which is really interesting to be able to give them up and to make new traditions, and that's unbelievably wonderful. For me, it is the ability to enjoy what I had and to appreciate what I had as a child, where everything was the same for years and years and years, and to be able to give all that up and start new traditions with my family. I oftentimes tell people like we have a choice as we get older. We can embrace this change and we can become more settled and wise and joyous and funny and open-hearted, or we can become cranky. It's kind of like we can be El for the Grinch. So my family has decided to be the El, but I want to tell you a couple of traditions because, as you know, when we talk about mental health and what happened to you, holidays are part of our makeup, of how we were trained.
Speaker 1:So here's one of the stories of my youth when my mom separated and divorced when I was five, my father was so angry at her for doing that that he wanted to punish her. So one of the ways he punished her was not giving her truly enough money to manage a household for the three children and her. Yet he would give us every time we saw him on Monday, like $5 each. Now, remember, this is 19,. Well, I was 10 in 1960, so there's that. So $5 was a lot of money in 1960. And he'd say don't give it to your mother. And of course, we'd walk in the house and the first thing we'd do is hand my mother the money that he gave us, knowing that it was important for her to have to keep the electricity on, which was shut off many times, as was the heat. So anyway, she didn't have enough money to buy us Christmas presents and my father wanting to I don't know maybe ease his guilt or do something that he didn't have as a child, would buy us massive amounts of gifts even though we didn't have the heat on, and would send him over in a truck. We thought it was Santa Claus when we were young, but of course as we got older we could see the truck.
Speaker 1:My mother, wanting to give us something, decided she was going to be the stocking filler. She was going to fill our stocking. So again when we were younger we thought it was Santa Claus. I don't know if it was that she actually couldn't afford buying regular stockings. You know some nice felt or cloth ones. But here's my mother dead.
Speaker 1:She decided to make those stockings so wonderful because that's all she could do. She gave us nylon stockings Now, not pantyhose, because that wasn't even there yet Actual stockings, you know the kind that would go on the legs egg container for you that are old enough to remember that. So she would take three stockings and would put an orange at the bottom of them and that would make the stockings stretch a lot. And then she bought us just wonderful little toys when we were little and then, of course, all kinds of jewelry and wonderful stuff when we got older and she wrapped everything in that stocking and she stuffed it in that nylon stocking and as she kept stuffing in the stocking remember it can stretch a lot the stocking would get bigger and bigger and then she'd hang it on the bed post of our bed and we had bunk beds for a while and then we had our own and that stocking would be, I'm going to guess, somewhere between four and five feet long and we would get up in the morning it would be hanging by our bed and it would hit the ground and then go another two or three feet on the floor. It took us at least an hour or more to open up our stockings and we loved it. And what was really interesting was when we got older I'm saying in our teens and we knew that my mother was doing this we absolutely looked forward to that stocking more than anything else for Christmas that we would take our time unwrapping every little thing. If it was a lip balm she would wrap it and it was absolutely one of the greatest traditions which I carried on for a while. And then we stopped. When we came to California it was going to know we're not doing the stockings and I think probably it stopped when you couldn't find stockings that much anymore and it led to pantyhose and certainly we weren't going to do that. So I wanted to tell you that it was interesting, now that I'm a mother and a grandmother, to be able to look at how she made a tradition because she couldn't afford to do much for us, that it didn't have to be a tradition based on a lot of wealth. It was a tradition actually based on poverty and creativity. So for me that was an amazing experience and how much I still think about it and appreciate it as a child.
Speaker 1:Now let's talk about the tradition of divorced children. Divorced children have to go to two households and or they get to go to one, and it's every other year. We had to go to both houses my father's and, of course, my mother's. Now we never stayed at my dad's house. We never lived, because when they got divorced, he lived with his mother for a long time and then he got his own small apartment. Because he was a workaholic. He never created a home and he never created a place where we could stay. Wherever he stayed, the small apartment that he had was just to be able to sleep, shower, keep his clothes and go back to work. So I never really had to go to my dad's house and do any tradition of a Christmas tree.
Speaker 1:I went to my grandmother's house, my Italian grandmother's house, and we always went to both. So here's the tradition of divorced children. You have to navigate what each family wants you to be and do. Now, in my case, before my mom remarried, it was a very traditional Italian household of two grandparents that spoke no English and they didn't want to teach the grandchildren any Italian. So here we are at a Christmas dinner with homemade raviolis and everything that's Italian Meatballs and salad and all of that. I don't ever remember my grandmother Italian grandmother ever baking a turkey or a roast beef, but there was just a massive amount of food that she cooked all day and all the aunts and uncles and cousins came over and we had the kids' table and we ate and we expected to eat a lot and there was lots of arguing at the table. Now, thank God, there wasn't any fistfights. There was a lot of drinking and a lot of arguing because my grandfather made wine down in the cellar in a big oak cask with fruit, some kind of a sangria type wine, and after dinner everybody got tired because they ate so much and they went into a living room, a living room where all the shades were pulled. There was plastic on the couch. So there was a den where you could sit on the couch without plastic, but the actual living room was covered in plastic and all the shades were drawn and so we as children just kind of had to sit there and, again, not a lot of talking. It wasn't a family that was very close in terms of talking and hugging and loving. It was much more of arguing and then going to sleep and then getting up and eating some more.
Speaker 1:Now I go to my mother's side of the family, and it's very New England, so my mother's middle name was Putnam. That means that she was a direct descendant of the witch trials and of the people that immigrated over here on literally on the Mayflower. So here I am in a home that has all oak furniture, we have roast beef, mashed potatoes and green beans and there's no spice, unlike in my Italian household where everything had garlic. I was surprised I didn't even have garlic ice cream, and it was quiet and it was very polite and it was very cold, and it was a time where I knew that we were supposed to not show emotion. And yet at the other house. Everybody showed every emotion, whether it was helpful or not, and I remember these two worlds where I had to adjust To how people behaved. No one adjusted to us as children. It was that old adage that we had to adjust to the situation we were in. I Think both extremes were traumatizing for me and there were wonderful things about each experience Christmas tradition, where there were lots of people with lots of energy at the Italian household and and lots of movement and lots of smells and and Colorful, with roses everywhere on every print you could imagine. And then another house that was very calm, where you played cribbage and we ate and everything tasted great because you could taste it. I was not real fan of garlic, so I actually liked the food better over at my mother's, my grandmother's house on my mother's side, and it was those places, it was that place that I got all of this New England tradition. So I share all this with you to know that that's what I came from and I don't have any of that now.
Speaker 1:Now I'm going to add one more piece. When my mom and my stepdad started to date and started to get together, my stepdad was Native American, black and Italian, and he lived in and with his black family, although there were also white people that were married into the family. So when we joined, it was this amazing family of From the lightest blonde to the most beautiful dark you know, hair and face and wonderful people all through it, and that was a whole another set of traditions. Everybody bought everybody a gift. Now this was a family of at least probably somewhere between 20 and 25 people, with Brothers and sisters and then their wives and their children. So it was a huge Christmas of lots of presents and the presents were so practical a family that was brought up in poverty that now had more money and had a better life because they worked so hard. My father's family bought cleaning products, bought toilet paper and paper towels, but all kinds of bought tools and Did buy some sweaters and scarfs and things like that. I would say it was the most practical gifts you could imagine For Christmas. So no one ever asked for anything, it was just things given to you that you would need throughout the year.
Speaker 1:So with all of that, I can tell you that my Christmas and my holiday traditions are as varied as the people that created them in rich and culture and race and Gay straight. All all of the above and I. I couldn't be more blessed to know that we can create a tradition of joy, a tradition of caring, a tradition of fun, a tradition of appreciation, and that, as much as it's about the decorations, the food in the gifts, for me it's about the ability from my family to constantly readjust, recreate and Know that the tradition that we really care about the most is how we treat one another. How we care for one another is the tradition in this family, and it's not just at Christmas and the holidays and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. It's about a tradition of how we're going to treat each other all through the year. So I just want to wish you a year of new traditions, of how you treat yourself and the people you care about. That's the tradition. So be crazy.
Speaker 1:Well, enjoy this time this next week, see if you can dig deep and find that appreciation, create that joy and share with those. And if you have no family or very little family, trust me, there's someone in your life that deserves to hear. I have a call from you and you deserve to call. And if anybody has invited you somewhere, go, go, do that. Be. Have a tradition of accepting invitations and helping to create more joy for yourself and others. Be crazy well, that's what we do.
Speaker 1:Wow, it's been a great year. You'll hear me again when it's the beginning of the new year and I really, really want to thank you all. I want to thank Cindy Thompson. Of all the people I've met in my life and still meet and I meet them all the time Cindy Thompson, who is the director of Coming Home Well, is by far one of the best gifts I've ever had. She is so creative, works so hard, is so dedicated to these podcasts and now our new radio channel. So be looking for. The crazy well radio channel will be letting you know more about it. Go on our website. Be crazy, not crazy well. Coming Home Well, I should say. Go to Coming Home Well website and check out the announcement about our new radio station, new radio channel that will have you know talk shows and music and all kinds of wonderful great things to support Our troops and our civilians. So welcome to a new year. To be crazy well, bless you.