Christmas

Jeff and I have been starving ourselves for the past few days. Well, not actually starving. We did have our morning coffee. Oh, and I sneaked in a couple of double chocolate pomegranate cookies yesterday. But those don't count. I was recipe testing.

Why are we starving ourselves? Because on Christmas Eve night, we will be enjoying a traditional Italian Feast of the Seven Fishes. That means fried calamari, fried smelts, and crab cakes. Snail salad, bacala (a dried, salted fish), and shrimp cocktail. (Those are just the starters.) Then comes the pasta. Two types of pasta, actually -- one with mixed seafood including shrimp, scallops, and lobster; the other with olive oil, clam sauce, and parsley. Then we'll finish with jumbo stuffed shrimp and garlicky broccoli rabe.

Memories of holiday celebrations remain very food centric for me.  When I recall the roasts, turkeys and hams of holidays past, I am instantly transported to the chaos and love of the kitchens where those meals were affectionately prepared.

Christmas was always spent at my aunt and uncle’s home.  My brother and I could never wait to arrive there to play with our cousins, see all the new toys Santa delivered and for me, eat copious amounts of my aunt’s stuffed mushrooms.  These mushrooms somehow verified it was finally Christmas.  They were not fancy, just mushrooms with a piece of link sausage placed in the cap and baked to perfection.  I craved these mushrooms all year.  They would disappear within minutes of exiting the oven.

As we grew older the family increased and now boyfriends, girlfriends, new husbands and wives were also attending the holiday celebrations so the mushrooms would vanish at an even faster rate.  There were never enough of these little bites to meet the growing families’ demands and the competition to score a few was fierce.  I truly miss that.

Everyone I know espouses the virtue of a homemade Christmas, and I have to admit that when someone takes the time to make me something I am genuinely touched by the act and the sentiment that goes along with it. That said, have you ever decided to take on a project that grew so far beyond its original scale and intent that you regretted it? As my family and friends can attest to, I am famous for that kind of thing. But something about the holidays seems to blindly motivate me toward this type of endeavor year after year.

Like the time I decided to make “simple” cranberry wreaths just like the ones I had seen Martha Stewart make on her TV show. I bought the requisite Styrofoam forms from a craft store and what seemed like a bazillion toothpicks that would have lasted a family of four a lifetime, as well as several bags of the dark red berries and a few feet of nice green ribbon to make bows with. After going through the first two bags of berries, and Lord knows how many toothpicks, I took my permanently stained hands back to the grocery store to load up on more supplies. The check out girl just laughed at me when I handed her a fist full of pink bills and wished me good luck with whatever I was doing.

Twenty four hours later I was a mad man, half blinded from trying to push the toothpicks evenly into the form and wearing thimbles (or anything else I could find) to cover my sore fingers, vowing to complete the task that was now driving me crazy. I was possessed and in the process ruined a favorite shirt and an equally beloved pair of pants. After what seemed to me an eternity, I eventually finished. Proudly hanging the wreath on my front door, I stood back to admire my handy work.

It’s become fashionable to say that your favorite holiday is Thanksgiving, and every so often I say those words. What I mean is that Thanksgiving is a holiday that’s entirely about food. The glorious turkey. The stuffing your mother used to make. And pies, pies, pies. When you say your favorite holiday is Thanksgiving, you’re not just praising Thanksgiving – you’re secretly dissing Christmas, with all its mercenary trappings and its promise of day-after holiday depression.

But the truth is I am demented over Christmas. I love it. I love twinkle lights, I love my tree (which I put up the first week of December), and I love Christmas dinner. Unlike Thanksgiving dinner, which is practically written in stone, Christmas dinner is a feast with no real rules. Days of discussion precede it. Goose? Prime rib? Turkey all over again? What about ham?

And then there are the desserts. The desserts of Christmas are divine, and they are true holiday recipes, the definition of which is that you would not be caught dead eating them at any other time of the year. It wouldn’t be Christmas without something like gingerbread, or a Yule log, or a plum pudding with hard sauce.