This Modern Love column Carolyn S. Briggs really held my attention and brought back some old feelings about family, holidays and expectations.

Consider the opening:

MY three vegetarian, activist, urban, multi-degreed, agnostic, adult children have rejected Christmas as a consumerist sham of a holiday, one in which they will not be participating. Oh, they’ll take the day off and drink organic wine, but they won’t be buying presents, putting up a tree, baking cookies, lighting candles or decking any halls. There will be no taking of a family picture for their card and no sending of that card or any other.

My parents didn’t have a Christmas tree this year. When I visited for Thanksgiving, my mother gingerly broached the subject.

“How would you feel…if we didn’t have a tree?”

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