LET’S SAY GRACE
Our Christmas
dinner menu this year is like nothing we have ever had before. It will
feature giant lobster tails and filet mignon and cheesy potatoes and mushrooms
and whatever else Trixie and Sugar can think of. I am sure they will add
macaroni and cheese and mozzarella sticks. If they don’t make something with
bacon, I will.
Christmas
dinners were not always this way. For forty years of my life, they were
celebrated with great tradition and fanfare. My grandmother, Mema, would
do the planning. The men in the family had one responsibility, to stay
the hell out of the way. The men never let her down. The women handled
everything else.
On Christmas
Day, for over fifty years, each family would begin to arrive at Mema and
Dada's around noon. The men would head straight to the garage. Uncle Tripp made sure that there was more than
enough beer to keep them there. The
women would go into the house with whatever they were assigned to bring.
My mother, Peggy, was responsible for maintaining the eggnog and whipping up
the drama when the drama started to wind down. My aunt, The Nun, would be sitting at the
kitchen table facing the door, doing her job of passing judgment on whoever might
enter, and eating rum cake with her fingers. Everyone who came in would place whatever they
had brought on the big table in the kitchen and ask what they could do to
help. Mema would tell them that she had everything under control and that
no one needed to do anything. Peggy and The Nun would then assign each
woman the last thing that Mema had asked them to do.
I brought
Trixie to Christmas Dinner for the first time, six months after we had eloped. I had warned her all about it. I told
her if it was too much for her to let me know and we would just leave. I
had hoped she would do just that. I
pre-apologized for all of the relatives that would offend her and I told her,
in advance, of every grenade that would be tossed her way. She walked through the door, as prepared as
anyone could be. She was a nervous wreck. Two minutes in she whispered to me, “I have
never seen anything like this in my life. I thought this only happened in
the movies. I never knew real families did this. I love this!”
I was
shocked. She must have seen something I couldn’t see at the
time. As it turns out, she did.
In the dining
room, the table was set, waiting, and ready for the food. The table was
huge and completely filled the room. It was covered with a white table
cloth. A Christmas runner ran down the center of the table. The
seating was determined by Peggy. She was a master of all things involving
drama, and her seating arrangements always played a key role to insure that the
drama was maximized. Each place setting was set with three antique china
plates, six pieces of silverware and three crystal glasses. There were a
dozen silver gravy boats, crystal salt shakers and candelabras spread out over
the length of the table. When the turkey came out of the oven, the side
dishes would be placed on the table. Dada, my grandfather, would
start carving the turkey. The first call would be placed to the garage
for the men to come to dinner. The men who were new to the family would
finish their beer. The men who had been around for while would open
another beer. When Dada was done carving
the turkey, the second call would go out. The men would come in and stand
around the table. Peggy would tell them where to sit and they would sit
down. The kids would come in to sit down next. After that everyone
else sat down. Dada would sit at the
head of the table and Mema would be seated next to him. Uncle Tripp would
be seated at the foot of the table. Without fail, every year, Peggy would jump
up to tend to some last minute imaginary catastrophe in the kitchen. When
she returned and sat down, it would signal that Christmas dinner was officially
to begin.
“Let’s say
grace,” is how it always started. With those words, everyone who had
already started eating would stop. Everyone would look at each
other. Mema would always ask The Nun to say grace. She was a nun
after all. She usually did a good job too, seldom invoking God to show
his wrath upon us heathens. She knew to keep it as short as possible.
After grace,
the passing of the ambrosia would begin. Every family has its quirks as
far as food goes. Ours was ambrosia. Peggy was a master of placing the
people that loved ambrosia as far away from the ambrosia as possible. Sometimes it could take up to ten minutes for
everything to make it all the way around the table. You never passed
things across the table. Never. The
only conversation that ever took place up until this point, were things like,
“Can you please pass the potatoes?” “Can
I get some more eggnog please?” and “Is there any bacon?” The new family
members always sat in silence, not wanting to offend anyone. Trixie just
watched it all. She did not say a word. And then, Uncle Tripp
lobbed the first grenade of the Yuletide season. He looked at Trixie and said, “Who are you?”
“I am Trixie,
Uncle Tripp,” she replied.
“You are with
Tony right?”
“Yes.”
“You are the
prettiest of all of the girlfriends he has brought by yet.”
“Uncle Tripp,
I am Tony’s wife, not his girlfriend.”
“Oh. Well I
won’t tell his girlfriends that he is married then.”
“That is ok,
Uncle Tripp, I never tell my boyfriends that I am married either. Can you
please pass the string beans?” Trixie said.
Uncle Tripp
raised a single eyebrow and passed her the string beans. Trixie smiled
and winked at him before he could wink at her. She had passed his test
and she knew it. At the same time Uncle Tripp was losing his touch and he
knew it. Uncle Tripp didn’t say a word after that. I think Trixie
may have given him more than his ego could handle. Or it could have been the
pint of whiskey that no one knew about that was stuffed in his boot. It was probably a little of both.
Trixie, a
nurse, and my oldest sister, a nurse, started talking with Mema, a retired
nurse, from the other end of the table about nursing. Out of the blue Peggy chucked the second
grenade, missing the mark by a mile. She screamed at the top of her lungs,
“I spilled some milk! Someone get a towel! Someone help me!”
“Just use your
napkin Peggy,” I said.
"I’ll
just have to do it myself!” she screamed at me across the table and huffed into
the kitchen.
Uncle Tripp
pushed his chair back and stood up silently and limped away. When Peggy
returned she was crying and babbling about never being able to get the stain of
the white milk out of the white table cloth.
“You realize, Peggy
that you are crying over spilt milk don’t you?” I said. Everyone laughed because the whole thing was
so over the top. Peggy became hysterical and retreated back into the
kitchen. Everyone stared at each other for less than a second, and then
the nurses rejoined their conversation about nursing. My cousin, a mechanic, and my youngest sister
and her husband, both mechanics, started talking about cam shafts across the
table.
The last
grenade came from The Nun. The Nun interrupted Trixie who was in mid-sentence
talking about some sort of medical procedure, and asked her from across the
table, “Trixie. Are you Catholic?”
“Yes, Sister,
yes I am,” Trixie replied.
“Were you and
Tony married Catholic?”
“No, Sister.”
“Well, you
have get married Catholic you know.”
“We can’t do
that Sister.”
“Why not?”
“The Church
will not let us because we were both married before, Sister.”
“You can get
married in the Church, you have to get an annulment of your first marriages.
Then you can get married Catholic.”
“How do you
get an annulment, Sister?”
“You have fill
out some paper work and pay the church.”
“It is called
a bribe,” I said.
“It is not a
bribe Tony,” The Nun said.
“Well Sister,
what do you call it then?” I said.
The Nun said nothing. She stared at Trixie and
me. We stared back. Everyone left at the table stared at us staring
at each other. The Nun stood up and went into the kitchen with Peggy.
Everyone just stared at each other for less than a second, and then the
nurses rejoined their conversation about nursing. The mechanics continued talking about cam
shafts across the table. My brother and I started bragging to our other
cousins on each side of us about our daughters. Now that they were gone, we could do what
families did. That is the way it went
almost every year.
It was a scene
of perfectly orchestrated chaos, born of tradition, and put together each year
by at least four generations of women. Time had changed the players, but
the scene was always the same. The script was usually the same too. The
Christmas carols playing tried to drown out the gossip. The oven was baking and
all of the burners on the gas stove were on high. It was always hot
there. If you had been through this for years, the heat would add to the
friction you would battle all day. These dinners were to be endured. The
grenades over the years will have worn you down. You focused on surviving until
the end of the battle and nothing that happened until the last grenade was
thrown. You would not realize until it was too late that these
dinners would end one day. That was never even a thought.
If it was your
first time there, you would feel completely overwhelmed and inadequate at
first. You would stand to the side and try to figure out exactly what was
happening, who was who, and how to become a part of it. The warmth that you would see after the
grenades were thrown is what would draw you in. The excitement of surviving the barrage would
leave you wanting more. If you were
there, you were considered family, regardless of whom your parents may have
been or where you came from. Your past
was of no concern to the hardcore family. To the hardcore family,
religion did not matter. If you came
from a fractured family, we had a place for you. Every family there was fractured, in the
process of fracturing, or fracturing one more time. If you needed our family, we would take
you. We needed all of the help we could get. Christmas was not a holiday in our family. Christmas was what held our family
together. If you were new to the family, you saw that, and it made
Christmas amazing. If you were not new to the family, you forgot that,
and it made Christmas a memory.
Those
Christmas dinners don’t exist any longer. They were not ended by death or
distance or discontent. They were ended
by egos. Some thought themselves far more important than their family and
put themselves in front of their family. You can lead your family, but
you can never put yourself in front of your family. If you do that, you end up with yourself. And if you are by yourself, you are alone. And that is exactly what happed. In our
family, if you want to be alone, we will leave you alone. Our hardcore
family will not go away, though. Our hardcore family will just go
somewhere else. That may seem sad on
Christmas Day, but it is not. Our family has endured generations of egos
and change. It will endure this change as well. The gift of change, of ending what we know
does not work and starting what we hope will work is a beautiful gift. Now my brother and sisters and cousins are
starting their own family traditions. Everyone
is welcome. You are not judged there. You come or go as you
please. The traditions that you will find there are based on one value
that has been held dear for generations. Family first. This value is protected. Each family is
moving in a different direction now but each is headed to the same place.
Most carry on some of the traditions started fifty years ago, to pay homage to
the Christmas dinners from the past. My
family does not keep a single tradition. Dinner is different every
year. Everything is different every year. Every Christmas is a new
one. That is our tradition.
The one thing
all of our families share, though, is something we learned from the failure of
the generation before us. If nothing
changes, then nothing changes. Families
are made of each of us, not one of us.
That is all.
