My Christmas holidays used to be filled with big family gatherings, including many kin I only saw at that time of year. They would travel from far and wide to be close enough to New York City to see the Rockettes do their thing. Since moving to Martha’s Vineyard, Christmas just isn’t the same.
Have you ever noticed that all those relatives who are more than willing to drop by for a week or so in August find the trip just too trying in December? “It’s just too hard to get ferry tickets,” they cry. “Little Johnny is in the pageant this year and needs to rehearse,” they moan. What they really mean is, “You can’t go to the beach that time of year.” Or, “All the nice restaurants are closed by then.”
Well I don’t miss them at all. First of all the lack of company has simplified my life in many ways. Take meals for instance. My family likes to have lobster for Christmas Eve dinner. This evolved because a previous in-law was Italian and Catholic and her family always did seven kinds of fish for that meal. I’ve since been told that it’s neither and Italian nor Catholic tradition but since my husband likes fish it stuck. We’ve whittled it down, however, to lobster and clams casino, and the fewer people I have to feed, the fewer lobsters I have to buy. This makes my wallet happy. I also don’t have to come up with a non fish eaters menu. There’s one in every family, isn’t there?
Before I moved to the Island I had holiday food issues. In the Hudson Valley seafood isn’t as plentiful as it is here. I had to go to the local fish store and order those lobsters two weeks ahead of time. One year I showed up for my dinner on Christmas Eve morning and they couldn’t find it. I had to make do with whatever was left in the display case, a couple of African rock lobster tails, a few crabs legs, a couple dozen shrimp. As we sat down to this amalgam of saltwater misfits the phone rang. They had found my lobster order in a bag behind the freezer. I never felt safe again. My food anxieties followed me to the Vineyard. The first time I went into the fish store to order my Christmas Eve lobsters the guys laughed at me. No need, they said. It took me years to trust them.
It’s a scientific fact that you can’t cook big meals for many years without having a few food mishaps. I would hesitate to call them disasters except for the year the non fish eater’s wife developed a near fatal allergy to lobster right in the middle of dinner. Fortunately she has other allergies and carries an adequate supply of Benedryl with her. She was a true lobster lover and very disappointed at this turn of events. Then there was the time the new (southern) daughter-in-law insisted on making her mother’s recipe for corn bread which turned out to be more of a pudding than bread. Many tears on her part required a telling of my own history of food catastrophes, which eventually cheered her up at my expense and started a new family game called “tease the cook”.
Food traditions grow as families do and after having numerous in-laws join us the number of side dishes (tomatoes Provençal for one daughter-in-law, corn bread and oyster stuffing for another) grew exponentially to the point where the only thing I didn’t serve was that green bean-french fried onion-mushroom soup thing. We had to have Mom’s broccoli casserole, and Katie’s sweet potatoes and marshmallows (she told me when she grew up I could have skipped the sweet potatoes and just cooked the marshmallows), Cathy and Diane must have my napa cabbage salad--you get the picture. The table looked like the buffet at the Harbor View, which is were we go now. The biggest benefit is no leftovers. Which is especially helpful since the refrigerator is already full from the night before, because I still cook some of those traditional side dishes.
Yes going out to the Harbor View is great. It bustles with cheerful holiday revelers who stuff themselves with multiple trips to the dessert table then go home for a long winter’s nap. We are no different. Our pre dinner plans to take a long walk afterwards always fizzle out. You’d think we’d be more realistic.
No comments:
Post a Comment