Christmas with the Packards

I’ve always been of the opinion that the Packards (my wife’s side of the family) are a little crazy. I’m still of that opinion, but over the years there has been a change in my heart where I can now look through the craziness and admire the great qualities they have.

Let me start by saying that there are literally a million Packards and they all know each other and are intimately familiar with everything that’s going on in the other 999,999 Packard’s lives. I’ve been in this family for years now and I haven’t even come close to figuring out who goes with whom and which of the 3,000 kids running around came from which womb.

They have a built in mechanism that they use to sense when a Packard clan gathering is going to take place, and they converge on that location like a flock of locusts devouring a corn field. I don’t mean anything negative by that comparison, it’s just that there are so many of them, there’s always food involved, and it’s a form of organized chaos on a grand scale.

So I think I can be forgiven if it’s taken me a long time to adjust to the overwhelming experience that being a part of this family can be. But I’m older and wiser now and I have come to appreciate that there are things the Packards do that I have never seen another family do and the fact that all 1,000,000 of them do it is amazing.

My current case in point is Christmas. We’re here in So. California and this is the biggest of all the Packard nesting grounds. Every year a few days before Christmas all the various Packard strongholds pick a few families they want to spread some Holiday cheer to and they all go caroling.

There’s easily 50 of them that come out to sing, and they’re all good singers so it’s like a semi-pro choir going caroling. In the middle of a song a group of them will break out in harmonies. Nobody tells them to do it and there doesn’t seem to be any planning to do it before hand, they just know to do it. I just stand in the middle of them all trying my best to carry a tune and suddenly people all around me will go into a harmony. The problem is I don’t know how to sing harmony and I’ll have 3 different harmony parts going on right next to me. I end up trying to mix a Bass part with an Alto. I think I gave myself a hernia during one of these adventurous attempts and I ended sounding like a pair of cats declaring their undying love for each other.

Despite my own personal discomfort and confusion during the singing I’d have to say that it’s a pretty wonderful thing. I mean who goes caroling anymore? It’s unheard of. But the Packards do it and the people they sing to love it. I’ve seen people they sing to cry at the end because they were so touched.

Another Packard tradition is to make the Santa experience very real for their kids. On Christmas Eve all the cousins will gather together to eat, run around the house, scream, eat, hit each other, scream, eat, and drive their parents insane. A lovely evening in anyone’s book. At the end of it all one of the cousins will get a phone call and on the other line is Santa. Santa will talk to the chosen cousin about what’s been going on in their life and will tell them what time he plans on dropping by the house. Considering that there are 325,000 cousins, being the chosen one is a very big deal. Loralee still remembers the year it was her turn.

Before the kids go to bed they all choose a hiding spot, because Santa made the mistake of letting them know when he was coming by so now they get to hide and watch him put out the presents the next morning. So when Christmas morning comes all the kids are hiding behind couches and curtains, under piano benches, or just curled up in a ball because all children know that the human rock is the best camouflage there is. And this is when the real magic happens. Santa (performed by a family friend) comes in the door and starts putting the presents under the tree. Not only that but he will talk to himself about what’s been going on with each child during the past year (this information provided in the form of a script by the parents). It’s no wonder that Loralee got in a fight in Junior High about the existence of Santa. Of course he’s real! She had seen him every Christmas for as long as she could remember!

Christmas with the Packards isn’t just a nice idea and a pleasant morning spent together, it’s a production. It’s a symphony of planning, cooking, organized chaos and a deep sense of tradition. Like I said, there’s no other family I know that goes to this amount of effort to make Christmas a magical experience. If they weren’t a little crazy I don’t think it would work because only a crazy group of people could make this work every year. God bless them for it too.

Here's a small sampling of all the Packards in their caroling glory.