Thanksgving Past

So the world turned another round and Thanksgiving is upon me once more.  A day of feasting, of family and friends, of being thankful for the times we have and for the times we've had.

As always I recall how the family gathered in the past.  My father's two brothers, their wives and children, would all gather for our feast - a table covered with so much food that it seemed impossible to be consumed.  The brothers would gather around the turkey and ham as they were being carved for the platters, occasionally being sampled by one or another to ensure a consistent quality, or so they claimed.

The feast became and increasing logistic problem as the families grew, necessitating ever larger tables and increasing quantities of food, most of which was digested while lying about in a soporific daze. Eventually, as the children became adults, married, and produced even more family members it became impossible to gather. Death and debility also played a role.

My own brothers began, first with our parents and then without, to gather our families to continue the tradition. This did not last, owing to the dispersal of members across the country and the difficulty of coordinated travel for a single gathering. The pattern established by our parents seemed to be repeating down the years.

This year  we share Thanksgiving with my nephews and their families since my own children gather at Christmas time instead.  As we sit at the table I will look across the corn, mashed potatoes, turkey or ham, and remember the sage words of advice my father gave to me years ago at one of the earliest Thanksgivings I can remember.

"There's too much good stuff here, don't waste your appetite on the rolls."

Mementoes and Memories

Each year as the holidays are upon us and too-much-to-do  rums smack into not-enough-time  we begin to decorate the house for the arrival of holiday guests.   This effort involves turning our otherwise contemporary setting into something outrageously rococo.  Minimalistic sensibilities are abandoned in a overly enthusiastic  attempt to make our surroundings "gay and festive."  Bright ribbons, festive wreaths, and dozens of wildly colorful seasonal decorations are set upon every available horizontal surface.  

But the overwhelming cascade of seasonal adornments pales before what is to come.  The pinnacle of decoration is to build our holiday tree.  We first place the bare tree in its place of honor, then bring the storage boxes from the attic and begin to adorn the branches with large and small decorations both bright and gaudy.

Decorating the tree is a process without a distinct objective.  There is no specific plan to be followed, but rather a successive layering of artifacts. The ornaments are an eclectic collection of cheap jewelry, small treasures, expensive glassware, artfully crafted metal and wood creatures, and religious items from a half dozen cultures, all collected over our years from places we've either lived or travelled First the lights are tested, then strung in a rough pattern to ensure that the tree has no places lacking colored illumination.  Small and large balls are hung wherever there seems to be an empty branch. This is easy at first but becomes increasingly challenging as the festooning progresses.  When the entire store of balls is exhausted we then place larger items among, between, next to, and behind the ornaments and earlier objects.  That done, we affix strings of beads and ribbons, and drape colored cords in spirals around the tree.  As a finishing touch, an old bedraggled and beloved angel acquired years before is affixed to the tree's peak where it leans leftward, as always.

After hours of work the tree has been transformed into a thing of unbelievable layered, multifaceted complexity.  There are so many objects chock-a-block that it would be impossible to derive a unifying theme or even to see the tree beneath. Consequently, hardly anyone looks too closely, save to search for some favorite item. It is something to be admired as a whole.

So why, you may ask, do we take so much time each year to build this overwrought objet d'art?  Why do we expend so much time administering to its details?

The answer to that question is not simple since the effort, the process of decorating the tree is a labor of love and remembrance.  Every single item placed on the tree evokes a memory of the time and place it was acquired.  Some items are treasured gifts from people we've known.  The bright globes are from France, Germany, Italy, as well as the United States.  The small golden owls are from a temple in Burma, the multicolored tassels from a market in Seoul, the glass spheres from a trip to Austria. Other decorations were from Spain, the Netherlands, England, and Scotland.  We have small pottery animals from Japan, straw figures from Mexico, and garlands from all over.  Each item has its tale, each its own memory of its place, and each is a marker in the history that we are writing with out lives each holiday season.  The tree is a symbol of who we were and who we are, but that is not the reason for doing so much work in erecting it.  That process, the decoration of the tree, is an annual celebration of seasons past and, if there is still an empty place we can find, a place for more to come.

So, in the end, each year's construction of the tree means much more than building a bright seasonal decoration. It is renewing and reliving a warm, glowing symbol of our family's history.

Grandma's Nut roll (Not a fruitcake!)

This is a fun project to do with your friends or kids, although you may not be able to keep them from snacking along the way.

One of  the delicious treats my mother -in-law prepared each year was her exceptionally rich nut roll, a concoction that combined the tastes of nuts, candy, and two sweet dried fruits.  We started making this roll ourselves twenty years ago as a Christmas treat for family and friends.  Strangely, we have never experimented with different ingredients, but I imagine that dried pineapple, mango, or papaya would work equally as well as dates and raisins.

The recipe is simplicity itself: Graham crackers, Walnuts, Pecans, Dates, Raisins, and Gum or Spice Drops, and Marshmallows.  That's seven pounds of ingredients, folks!

Tear off six or seven pieces of waxed paper about  twenty inches long.  You will use these to shape and hold the rolls later.

Measurement of the ingredients is simple since all of them come in (about) one pound packages that can simply be dumped into a large bowl for mixing after they have been chopped.  The graham crackers provide structure for the roll and so should be crushed into small pieces.  The most tedious task is cutting the gum drops into small pieces since their original size is out of scale for the other ingredients.

After you have everything except the marshmallows thoroughly mixed in the large bowl you need to melt the marshmallows with a cup of milk over low heat until the mixture is smooth. At this point you mix the other ingredients while stirring to coat everything with the melted marshmallows.  It never seems like there is enough, but persistence pays.

This next step cannot be done by one person since the mixture is extremely sticky.  One person should quickly place handfuls (about a pound) of the gooey mixture onto each sheet of the waxed paper.  The other person, who has clean hands, should immediately press it into a loaf shape.  Wrap the rolls tightly and refrigerate until cool (and solid).  Rewrap each loaf in fresh wax paper as soon as possible since the original wrapping with adhere tightly if left too long.

We generally cut quarter inch slices, since thinner slices tend to fall apart.