Bless us, everyone

By TAD BARTIMUS

I take down grandmother's cut-glass cranberry bowl from the tall shelf where it sits, undisturbed, 364 days a year. I wash the oval platter my father carried home in his little red wagon from a hotel liquidation sale in 1927. I set the table with the mended lace cloth, polish the silver candlesticks, put on my mother's pearl earrings.

I've carried these heirlooms from pillar to post to perform my family's Christmas rituals no matter where life takes me. I cook the recipes of holiday foods I ate as a child: sage stuffing (never oysters, always apples), sweet potatoes (they must have caramelized marshmallows on top) baby peas with pearl onions (why does it always require shopping in four grocery stores before I find the last bag of onions left in town?).

This year I will cook the dinner from (asparagus) soup to (sugar-roasted) nuts. "Dixie's good dishes" are "Tad's good dishes."

The same foods, decorations and songs of the season are at the heart of traditions practiced for generations by my family in the small farming community where I learned them. They evolved before the interstate rail and highway system and commercial air travel made America the most mobile nation in the world. New wives and husbands coming into the Bartimus clan brought their own variations to the main theme.

Then, in the 1950s, my parents hit the road and set up their lives someplace else. It wasn't the same, celebrating in a tract house in another town, but the familiar trappings helped ease the transition. In time, "Ruth's good dishes" became "Dixie's good dishes." Grandmother died and Mother got to cook the turkey; I was trusted to bring the rolls ("but don't get any of those store-bought ones!"). Through the years, all amenities continued to be ritually observed but our Nuclear Family was splitting apart, aging, dying away.

Now it's up to me. This year I will cook the dinner from (asparagus) soup to (sugar-roasted) nuts. "Dixie's good dishes" are "Tad's good dishes." The sights and smells of my family's annual feast are identical (though I cant get the gravy quite right; I think Mom forgot something as she waved her hands and said, "it's so simple, just add a little of this and a little of that"). Everything's the same except all the people who will share it with my husband and I were strangers to us three years ago.

A vivacious widow with six grown children who never come for the holidays is providing the dining room; a debonair divorced businessman will bring the wine; a femme fatale with a foreign accent will prepare her organic vegetables; a grown-up flower child will coax us to eat her tofu hors doeuvres; the gay couple down the road promises a divine dessert. All of them will bring to the table a rich heritage and well share a day of remembrance and celebration. Traditions are what we make them. Family is where we find it. Bless us, every one.

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