“It’s your house,” I said finally of the place I (myopically) consider mine more than any other. I imagined myself under a starched white sheet, listening to strangers come and go in a hotel hallway on Christmas Eve. “You should do whatever you want,” I said. Then I put down the phone and cried.

I could have protested her decision, but I knew that I would merely be seen as playing to type, following the same pushy emotional script my family has heard so many times before. Or, as my sister put it years ago when I moved in with yet another boyfriend, “Same old story, different year.” We want our comforting traditions to stay suspended in sap while our families constantly revise their understanding of us like software that updates automatically. Instead, traditions crumble and nostalgia yields to melancholy, but our identities, to our families, are as fixed and stagnant as fossils behind glass.

Anxious to demonstrate how mature and flexible we’ve become, we return to our birthplaces and we’re cut down to size, encountered as predictable once again. Disappointment and longing well up on a last-minute trip to the shopping mall, haunted by the mournful strains of Perry Como’s “White Christmas.”