LET'S SAY GRACE

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.