Letter from America
New England’s festive rituals – from Peking duck to jazz carols
One of the first things that happens when you leave London for Cambridge, Massachusetts, is that you meet people you would’ve met if you’d stayed at home.
We moved thousands of miles from London and settled round the corner from Sara, an old friend of The Oldie’s publisher, James Pembroke, and her American husband, Tim. She acquired him in Chester but they settled here, possibly because the parking is easier.
Sara and Tim’s Christmas Eve carol-singing party is the highlight of the social season. There’s a wheel of Stilton, a monster ham, homemade chilli con carne and, best of all, mince pies with stuffing smuggled from England and therefore worth a little more than its weight in gold.
The guests stagger into the light and warmth from the snowy dark: old New Englanders, displaced Harvard professors, faces from the school run and arty types. The happy mixing of these factions at the carol party is our city’s equivalent of a Christmas truce.
Sara dispenses the pre-printed song sheets while Tim dispenses the champagne. I play the piano and Sara’s friend Maureen plays the violin. I’m a recovering jazz musician, and not really a pianist. Maureen is a filmmaker and occasional Irish fiddler. Our annual rehearsal begins with a quick glass of fizz before we get to work. Our bangings and scrapings impart more syncopation than usual to the Dickensian atmosphere. It’s as though Mr Pumblechook has strayed into a jazz pub.
We warm up on pop classics such as Frosty the Snowman and Santa Claus Is Coming to Town, and then move on to trickier stuff like Baby, It’s Cold Outside, in which the singers divide by gender, the men doing their best Dean Martin.
Over several years of desperate improvisation, Maureen and I have worked out some nifty arrangements. We do We Three Kings in the style of John Coltrane’s My Favourite Things, with a 6/8 jazz feel and some jazztastic fiddle interludes.
We give Silent Night a country-andwestern lilt, as though Felix Mendelssohn is riding a broken-down mule, with James Wood the literary critic guesting on the trumpet, then pealing out the descants on Handel’s Joy to the World. We come a cropper, as every year, on
Good King Wenceslas – easy to sing but in the treacherous key of Ab and with too many chords – but we land safely and sentimentally on White Christmas.
This year, there is no carol party. It wouldn’t feel like Christmas at all, were it not for our other Christmas tradition, eating Chinese food in the American Jewish manner. This ancient ritual originated in New York in the early-20th century, which in American terms is as the Middle Kingdom is to modern Egypt. The Jews are great eaters – in New York, to ‘appetise’ is to graze on deli food – and they had a day to fill. The Chinese, who never close, had a whole restaurant to fill.
The two ancient peoples soon discovered deeper compatibilities. The passions for family and work. The elders’ right to tyrannise each other’s children with demands for grandchildren. The recitation from memory of their progeny’s certifications in the professions. The willingness to discuss medical problems in a crowded room. And, most of all, the obsession with food. No other peoples greet guests by asking, ‘Did you eat?’ To which the only polite answer is ‘I could eat.’
The result is a wave of Jewish-chinese marriages – mine among them – and a vast folklore of cures for indigestion.
Just as every Jew lives near two synagogues, in order that he or she can refuse to set foot in one of them, so we maintain two options for the Chrestmach lunch: Bernard’s in the ’burbs and the House of Chang down the street.
You have to book early for Bernard’s. The best time is while you’re finishing the Thanksgiving turkey and working out what to do next. It’s a 1950s-style suburban Chinese in a mall by Route 16, with a big bar, sports on TV, booths, and those necessities of upmarket Chinese restaurants lazy Susans, multiple layers of tablecloth and piped-in piano muzak with strings.
Bernard is from Hong Kong – so he conducts his business in customary Cantonese fashion, discussing his guests’ appearances with his staff at ear-splitting volume. But he and his restaurant are pronounced Bernard, in the American style. Also American in style is the menu, with Us-only items like chop suey. Otherwise the food is pretty authentic.
Our daughters rate Bernard’s Peking duck as highly as the duck at Royal China in Queensway, where their Chinese grandmother takes them in their summer holidays. They eat duck while she discusses their educational and marital prospects with the other diners, most of whom seem to be her neighbours in Hong Kong.
But the House of Chang feels like home. Like us, it’s a family operation: wife out front, husband in the kitchen and children helping out.
‘Happy holidays!’ the Buddhists say to the Jews. ‘Have you eaten?’