Holiday traditions in keeping with the times
SHIRLEY » When I was growing up, I did not count my blessings as I do now. Mired in teen angst, I didn’t cherish my family as I do the family I have now. Instead, I longed for things I didn’t have. Things I believed destiny intended but my parents denied. Like my own room, a lavish wardrobe, a stylish haircut.
Most of all, I wanted to be pretty and popular. Things that money, admittedly, couldn’t buy, but which I thought my family situation might have
helped rather than hindered. My mother, for example, could have embraced modern beauty basics, at least for me. She might have realized that the mere fact that everybody else had — or did — something was reason enough to allow it.
She didn’t, though and I was driven to take desperate steps in secret.
Such as hiding out in a closet to dry-shave my hairy little legs with a dull-bladed razor snagged from a bathroom cabinet, as cuts sprouted like red seedlings amid the stubble. Or severing my chestnut-brown braid with my grandmother’s sewing scissors and dying the remnants with hydrogen peroxide.
My unevenly-shorn head resembled a bale of hay, with like texture.
When my mother’s shocked screams subsided, she said: “Don’t worry, it’ll grow out!” Meantime, said my father, “She can’t go to school like that!” Finally, my dreamed-of trip to the hairdresser! Given the circumstances, though, it was more like an ER visit. Chopped near-bald, a bleached blonde no more, I went home with a supply of tinted “rinse” to use with every wash. I wore a hat for weeks.
But that’s another story. This one is about another desire denied, or so I thought at the time: family traditions everybody else had but we didn’t. Holiday traditions in particular .
My friends in the Greek neighborhood I grew up in had extended families that always gathered for the holidays and when they hosted parties, I was sometimes invited. It was like a festival … enough food for an Army, as someone would invariably remark as they plied me with treats. Here, have some more … stuffed grape leaves, baklava, whatever … my siblings and I were too skinny!
One cringe-worthy comment (intended to be hilarious) went something like: “Standing sideways, you look like a zipper.” Not even close. But I did stand out out. My family was nothing like theirs.
My non-ethnic friends had enviable holiday traditions, too. Like going to Grandma and Grandpa’s for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I pictured “Little House on the Prairie.” Or “The Donna Reed Show.”
Our family didn’t have anyplace to go. My only grandparent lived with us. We had a limited network.
We didn’t have Christmas dinner, per se, but we did have Thanksgiving. Nana cooked. She started early, preparing “the bird” in the morning. (Pies were in the fridge, delivered by the Cushman baker.)
Stuffing first. Out came the meat grinder, a hefty old gadget with a detachable crank that clamped to the kitchen counter like a vice. Into its metal maw, Nana fed fixings for stuffing. These included — but were not limited to — turkey innards, onions and hamburg, pre-fried in a black iron skillet called “the spider.”
Then back into the pan went the concoction to simmer. It smelled heavenly and tasted even better. Her hungry grandchildren had to be shooed away or there’d have been none left for the bird, as she said while doling out samples. I tried her recipe once. It looked sketchy and smelled like boiled socks. Nobody tasted it. Now, my stuffing of choice is a mix. No fuss, no fiascoes.
My earliest Thanksgiving memories feature the dining room in Nana’s roomy apartment, where my uncle also lived. My dad owned the house, four story brick, big back yard, no central heating. We lived on the second floor. This was before two younger siblings came along and we moved.
Uncle loved mashed potatoes, heaping helpings he over-peppered and smothered with gravy, drawing criticism from my father, who also poked fun when my uncle fiddled with the “rabbit ears” antenna on his TV set in the living room, where we all gathered after dinner.
Since this scenario more or less reran over the years, I guess you could call it a Thanksgiving tradition.
Christmas, too, came with repeat performances. The tree, for example, which my father went out to get on Christmas eve, when trees were cheap. Besides, he had the night off.
Segue to our new abode, one street removed from the old one.
A Victorian single-family, bursting at the seams, our full house had an abundance of greenery and bloomery: lilac trees and a rock garden in the tiny back yard. Inside, eight rooms sheltered seven people. Four kids and three adults, including Nana, who had a small “in-law” apartment upstairs.
On Christmas eve, I would read stories to my siblings by the artificial tree in her parlor. “The Elves and the Shoemaker” was a favorite.
Downstairs, out tree trimming routine was a kids’ production, heavy on the tinsel. We chucked the stuff onto the tree in glorious, glistening gobs, plugging gaps, outshining the ornaments.
Other kids festooned their trees’ branches with cranberry or popcorn chains they’d threaded themselves. Or so I imagined. Maybe it was the legendary Ingalls family I envisioned, but it seemed real to me. I wanted that family to be us.
Years later, though, creating family traditions of my own, I didn’t go in for cranberry chains but we did do tinsel. My son was a month old on his first Christmas, and I remember like a snapshot what that looked like. (Actually, I have several.) We lived in a rustic, lake shore house then, a “winterized” former camp with more windows than walls. It was so drafty the tinsel shivered on the tree.
It’s a remembered tradition now, no more tinsel. Too messy, and definitely not bio-degradable.
Nostalgia can rosy up rusty memories, patch worn spots, polish dulled edges. But it also sweetens bitter fruit and reflects images no longer clouded by youthful yearning. Now, I can see the past in a kinder, gentler light. No, mom was no Donna Reed, nor did my bookish dad resemble the rugged but loving parent Michael Landon portrayed in the “Little House…” TV series. But they were my family and families are what they are, flaws and all. I wish I had cherished mine more.
At least, looking back, I see one thing, clear as Christmas Day: We did have our own holiday traditions.