Home for the Holidays: Around the Table
From our four-part series of stories that prove that there’s no one right way to celebrate the holidays, as long as you’re with family
My prairie-raised father was normally a patient, cheerful man. The only time we heard him swearing, in fact, was when he was putting up the outdoor Christmas lights. He was an engineer who liked well-made things that ran smoothly, not the nightmare tangle of half-burnt-out bulbs and wires that he had to haul out of the basement every year. The sound of him gently cursing as he stood on a ladder stringing lights along the eavestrough became an annual tradition—our family’s version of the sound of reindeer hooves on the roof.
The other Christmas task that darkened his mood was the insertion of the tree—usually a long-needled, prickly one—into the fiendishly tiny stand, a green iron thing the size of a teacup. My brother and I would then be conscripted to stand across the room and direct “More to the left” as my father lay muttering under the bottom boughs, micro-adjusting the angle, with his engineer’s need to get it exactly right.
And every year he would carefully unsnarl a set of multicoloured, candle-shaped lights that bubbled like a glass of champagne. But they had to be perfectly upright to bubble. This called for more clucking and tweaking on my father’s part.
My mother never messed with the tree part of Christmas—she was too busy spraying things gold or making a Frank Lloyd Wright gingerbread house. Her way of coping with Christmas was to get wildly creative and quietly subversive. In the halcyon days of the single-income family, parents had time for hobbies, and hers was pottery and sculpting. She especially liked to sculpt children, wearing rubber boots or carrying rakes, inspired by the Hummel figurines that were popular in the 1950s. Come Christmas, my mother would descend to the fruit cellar where she kept her abandoned or failed sculptures. She would then convert them into angels and cherubs by spray-painting them gold and marching these boot-wearing, rake-wielding figures th...
My prairie-raised father was normally a patient, cheerful man. The only time we heard him swearing, in fact, was when he was putting up the outdoor Christmas lights. He was an engineer who liked well-made things that ran smoothly, not the nightmare tangle of half-burnt-out bulbs and wires that he had to haul out of the basement every year. The sound of him gently cursing as he stood on a ladder stringing lights along the eavestrough became an annual tradition—our family’s version of the sound of reindeer hooves on the roof.
The other Christmas task that darkened his mood was the insertion of the tree—usually a long-needled, prickly one—into the fiendishly tiny stand, a green iron thing the size of a teacup. My brother and I would then be conscripted to stand across the room and direct “More to the left” as my father lay muttering under the bottom boughs, micro-adjusting the angle, with his engineer’s need to get it exactly right.
And every year he would carefully unsnarl a set of multicoloured, candle-shaped lights that bubbled like a glass of champagne. But they had to be perfectly upright to bubble. This called for more clucking and tweaking on my father’s part.
My mother never messed with the tree part of Christmas—she was too busy spraying things gold or making a Frank Lloyd Wright gingerbread house. Her way of coping with Christmas was to get wildly creative and quietly subversive. In the halcyon days of the single-income family, parents had time for hobbies, and hers was pottery and sculpting. She especially liked to sculpt children, wearing rubber boots or carrying rakes, inspired by the Hummel figurines that were popular in the 1950s. Come Christmas, my mother would descend to the fruit cellar where she kept her abandoned or failed sculptures. She would then convert them into angels and cherubs by spray-painting them gold and marching these boot-wearing, rake-wielding figures through some holly on the fireplace mantel.
We did own a traditional nativity scene, but as I recall, Joseph was broken and headless and the sheep were missing hooves. The resulting festive decor in our house fell somewhere between Martha Stewart and an avant-garde installation.
These little rituals stayed the same as our family grew up, found partners, or had a child or two, until we were 11 around the Christmas dinner table. Our conversations were usually on the dark side, since we all enjoyed grisly medical anecdotes and comparing our symptoms. My brother-in-law used to time how long it took for us to move from polite small talk over the roast squash to a discussion of boils or perforated bowels. But we laughed a lot, too. And every year there was the same ornament tinkling away on the sideboard—something Swedish called Angel Chimes, with brass angels driven in a circle by the heat of four white candles.
Dinner itself was always wonderful, if unpredictable. My mother was a skilled, risk-taking cook who hated to repeat her culinary triumphs. We would beg her to reprise the seven-layer chocolate-mocha cake, but no, she felt compelled to do something new with apricots and crème fraîche instead. True, there was always a turkey, but prepared differently every year—slow and long, fast and scorched, brined, barbecued or in a big tin can.
Every year until he died at 94, at the head of the table, my father wore his red vest (and never outgrew it).It wasn’t until I met my future husband that I realized that our family traditions were … untraditional. Brian’s family had emigrated from England to Canada when he was five; they travelled by sea and landed in a Toronto devastated by Hurricane Hazel. His parents quickly adapted to life in Etobicoke, Ont., but they held on to all the Christmas rituals they had grown up with. They always had Christmas crackers, whereas we tended to buy some and then forget them in a drawer. They liked to put a record on the rec-room hi-fi and dance to Harry Belafonte. We might just lie around groaning on the broadloom. But their main traditions revolved around dinner.
Brian’s father, Theo, in those gendered days of yore, was the designated turkey carver and drink maker. He did not darken the door of the kitchen. Brian’s mother, Lola, somehow managed single-handedly to produce Christmas dinner in all its Tudor splendour, bringing all the dishes to the table perfectly hot and at the same time without breaking a sweat. There was the huge turkey draped in bacon, alongside a labour-intensive turnip puff, roast potatoes, homemade cranberry sauce, gravy, sausages, stuffing balls and buttery Brussels sprouts.
Polished silver, ironed napkins, little crystal salt and peppers. My in-laws weren’t rich, but they were classy.This was the sort of dinner that would historically call for three servants and a butler to get it all cooked and to the table. But Lola did it all (with tiny assists from me), including the crowning glory, a cut-glass bowl of trifle for dessert. There were the requisite jokes about who got a “hot spot” with lots of rum and brandy. Every year it was harder to find stores that still sold the traditional green sticks of angelica, a candied herb, for the topping, but they were never missing. After dinner came the Christmas crackers. The bad jokes were read aloud with groans, and the paper hats all magically fit. It was silly and boisterous and fun.
It was only the first year after Brian’s father died in 1988 that Christmas dinner faltered. Brian’s brother, Howard, had made the trip over from Europe, where he then lived. Our son, Casey, was six and still into Santa Claus. Lola brought the dishes to the table, and everything was perfect as usual. We all sat down to eat. But soon she had to excuse herself from the table. It was too much.
As new family members joined us, they brought new Christmas traditions with them, but that didn’t always go smoothly. One year Howard brought his Norwegian girlfriend, whom I shall call Astrid. Astrid was very beautiful and a bit haughty (“But that’s just the culture,” we said). She also quickly made it clear that Norway owned Christmas. After all, the story of St. Nicholas belongs to the Scandinavian north. On Christmas Eve, we learned, Norwegians have a tradition of hiding their brooms, because it was thought that witches and evil spirits came to visit on that night. We were prepared to hide brooms or do whatever we could to make Astrid feel at home on her first visit to Canada, but we failed miserably.
On Christmas Eve, Brian and I donned our usual holiday outfits—maybe a ‘smart sweater’ worn with something a notch above track pants. Astrid floated down the stairs in a glistening red dress, almost a ball gown, her cheeks rosy from years of skiing and skating in the winter. In Norway, Astrid explained, the main event is Christmas Eve, when everyone dresses up and eats porridge—a rice porridge with cinnamon and butter and sugar, an offering for St. Nicholas. They might also hold hands and circle the tree, singing.
In Etobicoke, the night before Christmas there was smoked salmon on rye but no porridge. Astrid looked homesick and said little. The next morning, when we were doing our best to prepare a festive breakfast of quiche and croissants, she looked sadly at the fresh multigrain bread we had bought. “In Norway we have very good bread, not like this,” she said. “Canadian bread is good only for toast.” Oh-kay.
We got through Christmas dinner without further ruffles. And although we never had the chance to make a proper Norwegian Christmas Eve for Astrid, on the years he stayed in Oslo for the holidays, Howard introduced a new tradition. On Christmas Eve, he began cooking his mother’s English dinner, complete with sausages and stuffing balls, for his Norwegian clan. Howard died too young, of cancer, but the tradition of the English Christmas Eve dinner continues in his Norwegian family.
Two Christmases ago in Toronto, we were once again 11 people around our dinner table. I made my mother’s cranberry sauce (with orange zest) and Lola’s turnip puff. I roasted the turkey and dug up the stuffing recipe a friend gave me 20 years ago. The Christmas tree tilted a little, and nobody made a trifle, alas, but we toasted absent friends and family. Then we toasted the newest arrival at the table, our granddaughter Zahra Ali-Johnson, just 13 days old.
Who knows what new traditions she’ll bring to the table as she grows up?