Christmas Memories
Christmas Memories
We build our Christmas traditions and they evolve each year. But there is always a special gift at the bottom of the Christmas stocking.
Christmas memories are layered year by year and we have an annual opportunity to embellish our holiday. Memories start in childhood and we forge ahead with them, building. When my now 92-year-old mother was a child in the 1920’s, she remembers that on Christmas all eight children received an orange. That was it. For the big family in the little mining town of Fairpoint, Ohio that was enough.
When my brother and I were very young in the 1950s, we spent Christmas in Fairpoint with my mom’s sister and Baci, my Polish grandmother. There was a big feast on Christmas Eve, Midnight Mass, and then back home to a warm, coal-scented kitchen to open presents. The cousins all received toys and clothes and comic books—and an orange.
By the time my two sisters were born, we didn’t travel to Ohio anymore in the winter but made our own holiday. The anticipation of Christmas started weeks earlier with the arrival of the big Sears, Roebuck, and Co. catalog whose slick, glossy pages we perused endlessly. We hung our stockings with care on the mantel in our row house in Philly, with faith even though there was no flue, and found them filled with goodies down to an orange in the toe.
When you marry, you blend traditions. John’s family didn’t wrap presents; they just woke up Christmas morning to a display of assembled toys. My family’s Christmas morning was a vast heap of crumbled paper, much of it colored comics that my mom saved each week to use for wrapping. I still prefer to wrap; John, not.
How glad we were when we stopped traveling for the holiday, trying to keep both sides of the extended family satisfied! I remember the first year that we just stayed home in State College and made our own Christmas, my mom joining us since dad had died that year. We cut out and sewed quilted Christmas placemats that we still use every year. We hung homemade Christmas stockings near our woodstove and also hung John’s red felt stocking that he made in kindergarten too skinny to hold much more than a small tangerine and some pens.
Over the years, our family traditions deepened, and our treasure trove of handmade ornaments grew. Then the inevitable happened; the kids grew up and left town. There were some years that they traveled to see us, and more that we traveled to see them. Costa Rica was a fun place to visit Alex in December, even better once his son Santana was born on January 2, 2006. Joe and his wife Neian, also a State College native, settled in Boulder and we all welcomed Lilah to our world on Thanksgiving Day in 2011. Our Christmas that year on the Front Range with the baby was magical. Rose gave the entire family a wonderful gift last Christmas (in 2015) when she arranged for us all to stay in Austria for an Old World holiday.
Rose was working in Salzburg for Red Bull, along with a host of other young people from around the world. Some of her friends on the team were headed home to Portugal and Spain for the holiday and we were all able to stay in their apartments all within walking distance to Rose’s place.
If your holiday spirit ever needs to be rekindled, Salzburg will fire it up. Over the next week, our family assembled and spread out into the three apartments that formed a triangle in the center of the old city. Joe, Neian, and Lilah’s apartment had a view of the fortress; my apartment with John was near Mirabell Palace. Global vagabonds Al and Santana crashed on Rose’s fold-out couch, in the center of all the action. John brought our Christmas stockings when he arrived on the 23rd and I purchased oranges from Spain. Finally, we were all together in that fairytale city.
While many aspects were memorable—the Christmas markets on nearly every corner and mountaintop, the Mozart dinner at St. Peter’s baroque hall with opera entertainment, the cobblestoned Getreidegasse with welcoming shops—the most important was that we were all there in that one place. Christmas Eve, I volunteered to take both Santana and Lilah to our apartment so the others could attend midnight mass and listen to the singing of Silent Night not far from where it was first performed in 1818. Having both grandchildren asleep under the same roof was my Christmas gift.
On Christmas Day the festivities started early and went late. In the middle of the day, there was yet another trip to a Christmas market in a nearby village with special activities for children, but I opted to stay back at Rose’s apartment and tend the goose that was roasting in the oven and set the table with the antique plates that she found at a flea market with forest scenes of Bavaria on them. Just knowing that our whole family was going to sit down together and share Christmas dinner was enough for me.
That joy I felt that Christmas was kindled by family and made me realize that nothing else matters. We are in a nomadic grandparenting period of our lives and just want to be available to the youngest of the grandchildren who need help. We enjoy teaching some of what we have learned in life. And we enjoy seeing the Christmas Tree lights reflected in the children’s eyes as they soak it all in, forging their own memories.
None of us need presents. We need presence. And an orange in the stocking.
Merry Christmas!
A version of this article first appeared in the Centre Daily Times in State College Pa in 2016
And here is a good thing to do with those oranges. This dessert is from the very first cookbook that I bought for myself back in 1962, Betty Crocker’s Cooking Calendar. I credit this book, in part, for my credo in eating seasonally and celebrating holidays.
Orange Baked Alaska
6 seedless navel oranges, cut in half with the segments removed of the membrane and then placed back in the orange cup. A grapefruit knife, if anyone has one of those anymore, is a good tool for this.
6 scoops of vanilla ice cream
6 egg whites, at room temperature
one fourth teaspoon cream of tartar
3/4 cup superfine sugar
Preheat the oven to 450°F. Place the orange halves on a baking tray, top each with a scoop of ice cream, and place in the freezer while you make the meringue. Beat the egg whites until foamy, then add the cream of tartar and continue beating while gradually adding the superfine sugar (superfine sugar is preferred because it dissolves completely in the egg white foam, though regular sugar can be substituted). Beat until stiff peaks are formed. Remove the orange halves filled with the ice cream from the freezer and encase each one in a thick coating of the meringue, completely covering the ice cream. Bake in the very hot oven for about 2-3 minutes until the assembly is delicately brown. Serve immediately.