The house is abandoned now — the Sundays there never left me

My wife and her brother got into a conversation this week about who's hosting Christmas this year. Turns out it's our turn, and we're genuinely excited about it. We remodeled our house back in 2013 with exactly this in mind, a long dining room table built for filling up with friends and family. We don't do it nearly enough. Nothing beats it when we do.

There was a stretch of my life when getting the extended family together wasn't a once-or-twice-a-year thing, not just an Easter, a Christmas, a wedding, a funeral. Growing up in Mays Landing, we did it every single week. Every Sunday night, at my mom's parents' house, a block away from ours.

The house had three rooms, and each one had its own ritual

My grandparents' house ran like clockwork every Sunday. In the kitchen, my dad, my grandfather, and my uncles played penny poker, keeping their winnings in old plastic peanut butter jars. In the living room, my mom, my grandmother, and my aunts talked while 60 Minutes played on the TV, always on, every week, whether anyone was actually watching it or not. And in a separate downstairs room, it was me and my brothers, usually parked in front of a Disney show.

As the night wore on, everyone drifted back into the kitchen, the men, the women, the kids, all of it converging in one room. The men's conversation would shift to which supermarket had the best deals that week, a genuinely hot topic in our family since one of my uncles worked in the industry. They'd crack open Black Label beer while my grandfather cut up pepperoni and cheddar cheese. And the talk covered everything, small stuff, sure, but also religion and politics, sometimes with real heat behind it. It never once turned into a grudge. Nobody took it personally. We always walked away united, every single time. I feel confident in saying this scene once played out at hundreds of thousands of homes across New Jersey over the generations.

I didn't realize how rare that actually was. Not then.

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My grandparents Mike & Anna at their Mays Landing home across from Wheaton Plastics | EJ photo collection

The factory behind that house has its own story of quiet abandonment

The building visible right behind my grandparents' house was just as central to our family's life as the house itself. It started as a cotton mill in the 1800s, and my grandparents worked there when it was still running as one. The mill closed in 1949, and the site reopened the following year as Wheaton Plastics, a name generations of Mays Landing families, mine included, came to know well. My parents worked there from the 1960s into the 1990s. Now that building sits abandoned too, just like the house it stands behind, both of them quiet in a way neither one was ever supposed to be.

Then it just quietly stopped being a given

I moved out of my parents' house around 1981, and the visits started thinning out after that, the way these things always seem to. The gatherings among my grandparents, my parents, my aunts, and my uncles slowed down over the years. Every one of those family members has since passed away. The house that held all of it, all that food, all that noise, all that love, sits empty now, right across the street from the same building where two generations of my family clocked in for work.

I'd genuinely love to hear from anyone still doing this, a real weekly family gathering, no occasion required. It feels like something we've mostly lost as life got busier and families spread further apart. Maybe hosting Christmas this year is our own small attempt at bringing a piece of it back.

I still miss Sundays.