Back for this holiday season, the Snapshots series, a gift from journalists from Duty, offers fiction texts inspired by archive photos sent by readers to the editorial staff. Today, a text by Éric Desrosiers based on a photo by Roger A. Tremblay.
Like all children, I really loved the holiday season. There were the Christmas presents, of course. But also those long vacations during which we could play endlessly with friends outside and we only came home, wet and cold, to drink hot chocolates and watch films on television.
But since nothing is perfect, there were also family celebrations. Don’t get me wrong, I loved meeting up with my cousins even if we didn’t see each other that often. It was a time when you could still have lots of uncles and aunts, which automatically made for lots of children of all ages among whom you always ended up finding play partners.
But these family gatherings had a way of dragging on, and we had to make conversation with lots of adults who we didn’t really know and to whom we had nothing to say. And then, there was this unease, and even this tension that we felt growing as it got hotter and hotter in the house, as people drank and as their exchanges became more lively.
It usually started with platitudes about the Quebec Nordiques. In the minority in the family, those of us who had the misfortune of being supporters had to put up with the condescension and mockery of Canadian fans each time, even if, let’s be honest, our players played a hockey that was much different. interesting than Montreal hams.
Things got tougher when discussions inevitably turned to politics. It was on the eve of the second referendum and, again, the family was divided into two camps between which the comments and insinuations quickly took a personal and hurtful turn.
And then there were all those old arguments and grudges between the adults whose origins we children often didn’t know. Even though all these people loved each other and were basically not bad, we sometimes saw them give each other heavy looks, pointedly ignore each other or take on an exasperated look when Réal, the youngest of my uncles, started to lose his mouth. soft, talking too loudly and making butt jokes that made my cousins and I laugh.
“We choose our friends, but rarely our family,” sang the poet in reference to a certain brother-in-law. There is actually no reason for us to get along well with all these people to whom the fantasies of our family tree connect us. While it is true that blood ties can be incomparably strong, even in this era of triumphant individualism and the tribalism of social media algorithms, they are also weak points in our armor through which the slightest blow, the slightest misplaced word can seem to strike straight to the heart.
Parental betrayal
So I was far from delighted that year when my father had the idea of inviting everyone to spend part of the holiday season in a large cottage on the edge of a lake where When they were little, they were used to going with their family. A fine psychologist, my mother ended up convincing my little brother and me that these few days spent away from our friends and a television worthy of the name would not be the total waste of precious days off that we feared, especially because we could build an ice rink on the frozen lake and play hockey there as much as we wanted.
But you should always be wary of adults who try to reassure you. Obviously less naive than my brother and me, several of our favorite cousins had asked and obtained permission from their parents to stay with friends rather than accompany them to the chalet. Worse still, a mild spell had made the lake ice too fragile to venture there, my father announced as soon as he arrived. But it was when it started to rain that we understood the scale of the disaster that awaited us. We were going to be prisoners of a chalet without a TV where there would be a surplus of idle adults who sometimes got on each other’s nerves.
After a day, the cousins and I had already exhausted all the card games we knew and had finished — as much as possible — the moldy puzzle of 1000 minus 7 or 8 pieces found in a cupboard. And since this was long before the invention of the Internet…
And that’s the goal!
Understanding the extent of our despondency, my mother took advantage of a break in the rain the next day to suggest that we replace our skates with ankle boots and go play hockey on the snowy path that led to the chalet. Ready to do anything to extract ourselves from the soft and heavy atmosphere in which we were trapped, we put on our coats and snow pants without much conviction and went out with our poles. However, the geniuses of the game were quick to take hold of us to the point where our laughter and our cries of joy ended up attracting adults, first as spectators, then as players.
As night fell, we returned to the chalet with red cheeks and light hearts to drink hot chocolate that Mom had prepared for us and began the first of a long series of three-deck asshole games. . My father, my uncles and my aunts, for their part, stayed outside for a long time playing hockey where we could hear them laughing and shouting with joy.
If I remember correctly, it was the team that gave itself the name Nordiques that won that time. The decisive goal was scored by my uncle Réal after a spectacular breakaway. But maybe I’m embellishing the story. What I am sure of is that, many years later, it remains one of the most beautiful and precious memories I have of our family celebrations.