(no subject)

[pantryslut]

misia asked (not as part of "ask me anything," but in her own journal):

1. What was the "must-do" holiday for your family when you were growing up -- the one everyone would always find some way to celebrate, no matter what?

Christmas. Christmas is my mother's favorite holiday, period. She loooves it. She loves making cookies, putting the lights up, decorating the tree, listening to carols, the whole shebang.

Her second favorite is Thanksgiving, because it's an excuse to cook a turkey and she adores turkey.

2. Did your family holiday celebrations tend to include only your nuclear family (mom, dad, kids, dog, station wagon) or did they tend to include your extended family as well -- how many people are we talking, here, on average?

Xmas usually involved a trip to Chicago to visit my father's extended family. When I was a kid, this meant Grandma and Granpa, my aunt and uncle and two cousins, my uncle's brother John (Uncle John) and my uncle's mother Marge, my grandmother's brother John, his wife and kid (my cousin Johnny), and my grandmother's other brother Ronny, and my great grandparents. Usually John and Ronny and family only came to Christmas eve at my great grandparents' house, which did not include my uncle's relations; everyone else (including the great grands) came to Grandma's house on Christmas day.

Confusing? Well, when my grandfather died, my grandmother remarried, and her husband Bob has, like, eight adult kids, all with families, about half of them still living in the Chicago area. They all come to Christmas eve now that my great-grandmother has also died. There are so many of them, I can't keep track, even though they've been married for almost 20 years now.

To add to the confusion, when I was very young there used to be bigger Selke family gatherings full of dozens of distant relations; I don't know what happened to those.

3. What were the traditional dishes served at holiday meals that everyone loved... and what were the ones that everyone hated but someone felt compelled to make anyhow?

Turkey. Turkey, turkey, turkey, any excuse for a turkey. Also Christmas cookies on Christmas. Sugar cookies, chocolate chip cookies, and spritz cookies are required. There usually were other experiemental cookies such as jam thumbprints, peanut butter cookies, oatmeal cookies, chocolate pinwheeels, etc. It depends on who was making 'em and who was eating 'em. Sugar cookies must be decorated with all those weird decorating nonpareils, but there must also be some merely dusted with cinnamon sugar because those were mome's favorite.

We tried to keep my grandmother from cooking on Xmas day, because she's just terrible, and would usually try to cook a fossilized ham or something awful if we didn't intervene.

4. Favorite Family Holiday Celebration Embarrassments: Everyone has a story like this to tell, and sometimes it doesn't even involve them as the person who did something gigantically embarrassing, so what's yours?

My grandmother once gave my mother and my aunt monogrammed sweaters. She forgot my mother's middle initial, so she guessed -- wrongly. She also forgot that my aunt wasn't using her maiden name anymore. My aunt had been married at least 12 years by this point.

5. The family holiday meal is now over, and everyone's stuffed to the gills... what happens next, in your family?

If it's Thanksgiving, we all watch football on TV (Mom too, I feel compelled to add after seeing the genderedness of other people's comments). I honestly don't remember what we do after the Christmas meal -- sleep? The kids went off to play with their presents and load up on candy.

6. What's your weirdest Family Holiday Tradition?

It might be the Santa visit. Santa always visited the kids on Christmas eve at my great grandmother's (later my grandmother's) house. We always knew it wasn't the real Santa, even as little little kids. The weirdness comes in two parts. First, nobody ever wanted to have to play Santa, so as I got older I got to witness the drama of Being Drafted, and that became a game in and of itself, guessing who would be forced to be Santa against his will this year.

Second, my mother's side of the family has their own Santa tradition that melds into the above, my father's family tradition, in a weird way. See, my great-grandfather was a model for the Coca-Cola Santa painter. I was always told that because Santa couldn't be everywhere at once, he had lots of helpers, like the guy at the mall, or like my great-grandfather (who apparently really did give out gifts to poor kids in Tuscon, which his how he got the modeling gig in the first place). Or the draftee! My family has been very, very helpful to Santa over the years, in other words.

6.5: If your mother saw your answers to these questions... ???>

...would she have anything to add? I don't know. She might know what we do after the Xmas meal. She might or might not remember those shadowy early Xmas eve parties full of cousins.

She might add that we never spent Xmas with her family because they lived too far away, out in California, while we lived in Michigan.

She might relate some of the horrible driving sagas that sometimes resulted from midwinter treks to Chicago by car.

And she might say that New Year's became sort of our small family holiday instead of Christmas. We used to sit around and eat munchies all day and watch football, just the immediate family. This occasion, too, had its own traditional dishes: tuna ball (which I made for my housewarming last week), deviled melbas (but not on melba toast), and another that I am forgetting. And cucumbers dipped in cucumber ranch dressing. And any smelly fish products my Dad could talk her into buying.