A Christmas Day dinner for all those who are lonely
You’re invited to Marilynn Vanderstaay’s Extended Family Christmas Day Celebration, to take place on Dec. 25. All of you. Your friends are also welcome — or anyone you’d like to bring along, for that matter.
“I believe anyone who wants to be part of a family Christmas dinner should have that opportunity,” said the Westmount-based writer and journalist. That’s even if, like her, they have no family around them with whom to share the day.
A traditional Christmas turkey dinner will be served, with all the trimmings — at a kosher restaurant in Decarie Square, of all places: Ernie & Ellie’s. And in the spirit of Christmas the Forestall family, owners of Westmount Stationery on Sherbrooke St. W. in Westmount, will provide a gift for each guest at Vanderstaay’s holiday soiree.
The meal will be served familystyle, on platters and in bowls; that way guests choose what they’d like to eat and at the same time get to know the others at the table: Vanderstaay’s theory is that you don’t stay strangers long once you’ve asked someone to pass the turkey or the potatoes.
“You’re passing the bowls and platters and people talk and it is like being in a family,” said the Westmount-based writer, journalist and inspirational speaker. She writes Around Westmount, an online magazine about local events published every two weeks.
The Christmas dinner is open to people of any religion or no religion at all. although Vanderstaay, who calls herself a person of faith, begins the meal with a welcome and “a prayer to Almighty God in Jesus’s name.”
The event is an outgrowth of a Thanksgiving Day dinner she has hosted for nearly a dozen years. “Eleven years ago, as Thanksgiving was drawing near, I looked at my 70-something mother and said I was tired of spending what is to me an important holiday — being thankful — in her living room, watching television and pushing frozen peas around on the foil plate of our frozen turkey TV dinners.”
Her mother, who was from Holland, had never made a big deal out of Thanksgiving — but it is a big deal for her daughter. So they invited a few friends who had no plans to attend family dinners to meet them at a west-end restaurant. “We had a great meal, great fellowship and the tradition began,” Vanderstaay recalled. “Every year since, I invite friends and friends of friends who do not have family or friends to share the day with to be part of my extended family.”
Vanderstaay has had her trials: Her mother has been gone for several years and her husband died in early 2016, so she has no family in Montreal. She has overcome cancer several times and suffered brain trauma; as a result of damage to her optic nerve, her vision is limited enough that she is considered legally blind.
The size of the group gathering for her holiday celebration varies — they were 40 one year; another year they were five — and so does the venue. In the run-up to the Thanksgiving dinner this year, one of the participants suggested that they meet at Ernie and Ellie’s in Decarie Square. And they so appreciated the hospitality of the restaurateurs that some participants asked Vanderstaay for an encore at Christmas. And so a new tradition is in the making.