By Angela Williams Glenn 
When you’re a child, the holidays come with a sense of magic, but that magic is wrapped up in Santa Claus and reindeer on the roof. When you’re an adult child, hurriedly packing up your own children, rushing them out the door to get on the road to grandma’s house, it’s an entirely different magic that awaits you.
The childlike wonder of racing out to see what presents Santa left for me under the tree no longer holds a candle to the magic that awaits me when I burst through the front door on Christmas Eve. There, it’s not the presents I anticipate waiting for me, but the presence of my mom and all the magic she and my aunts bring to our traditional holiday family gatherings.
Decades ago, they snuck around the house in the role of a jolly, white-bearded man in a red suit, stuffing stockings and leaving gifts under the tree, but as adult children, my sisters, cousins, and I now know they are truly the ones who have been behind the family holiday magic for a long time.
During the holidays, my mom’s homemade Italian feast can be smelled before you walk in the door. As the family grows each year, she adds a stocking to the mantel where now 17 stockings await our arrival on Christmas Day. She insists that Santa still fills the little ones’ stockings rather than her and Papa.
Despite all the noise that rings out throughout the house from Thanksgiving to Christmas Eve to Christmas Day, these three women—my mother and two aunts, now grandmothers with grown children and grandchildren quickly outgrowing the magic of Santa—are quietly at the center of all the holiday magic. No matter whose house the celebration is occurring at, you’ll often find the three sisters-in-law elbow to elbow in the kitchen, working together over the last of the meal prep or cleaning up the dinner at the kitchen sink.
We four daughters are also sure to be helping because though they might be the leaders behind the magic, they didn’t raise daughters to sit on their behinds and not jump in to help.
Year after year, they prepare our favorite foods and plan desserts with a little extra set aside for us to take home. As the years pass by and people age and things change, I see the magical value that is motherhood in the way they plan and prepare and serve the holiday meals for the children who, even as adults, they so painstakingly want to take care of.
With their kids older now and their grandchildren also getting older every year, I see how much joy (and on the flip side sadness when one of their children can’t be there) they get in having and feeding their children and grandchildren in their homes that now quietly wait for the noise of children and family to burst through the door.
Though they will happily fill the bottom of the Christmas tree with gifts, it’ll be the meals they so lovingly prepared and prepped for the holidays year after year that I’ll always treasure and remember about these wonderful women in my life. Year after year, they brought the magic we all came to know as our beloved holiday traditions.
by Sue Volikas 
by Brittany Reiling 
