For a lot of people, the
Christmas season is full of events that are accomplished in a
ritualized manner. There's the real vs. artificial decision about the
tree, which in turn determines the official day for decorating it (ours
is
artificial and we do the honors on the first Sunday of Advent). Are
presents opened Christmas Eve or Christmas morning? What do we eat and
where do we eat it? Tell somebody who's known only jellied cranberry
sauce that we're having the coarsely-chopped freshly-made kind and
you're asking for trouble.
I was 36 when I married Ron. My parents had moved to Florida and my
sister, two hours away near her husband's close-knit family, had
adopted their routines. My first husband and I had had a haphazard kind
of Christmas even during the best of times. So I was happy to be
absorbed into the DeAngelis way of doing things.
That included a festive but meatless meal on Christmas Eve
(traditionally a day of abstinence for Catholics). The main course was
calamari (squid)
in tomato sauce, with accompaniments of
ceci soup (chickpeas in an
anchovy-laced broth), batter-dipped
baccalà
(cod), and dried fruits and nuts for dessert. Ron
grew up always opening his presents Christmas Eve because he was taken
to Midnight Mass even as a little child and the family slept in
Christmas morning in preparation for the very big extended family
gathering later in the day.
Gradually the older generation has passed on, and we no longer gather
at Aunt Nanny and Uncle Flash's for the vigil meal and the family
restaurant for the Christmas day meal. Now it's just me and Ron and
Lynn on Christmas Eve. We have a simple
supper of
ceci soup, go to
the 7:00 p.m. service at the Lutheran church Lynn and I attend, and
then open our presents afterward before Ron leaves for Midnight Mass at
his church. We bring Ron's mother here from the nursing
home for rigatoni and homemade sauce on Christmas day.
The array of presents is the least important aspect of this season for
me. Even when Lynn was little, we didn't inundate her with stuff,
although the things we did get her, like the Fisher-Price kitchen she
loved from the time she was two until she was almost ten, tended to
take up a lot more space under the tree than the things she wants now.
Ron and I want
things so specific to our interests (radio-controlled airplanes and
train simulator software for him and literary fiction or local history
and culture for me) that it's hard for someone not inside our
individual heads to know what might be useful or appropriate. From
Lynn, who's on a limited personal budget, we want nothing but time —
time to be with her and enjoy her before doing so requires a
cross-country trip.
One thing I did have to open tonight was a box that came from
Amazon.com a few
weeks ago. I'd given Ron a list, or maybe I ordered the stuff myself.
I'm not even sure I was aware that it had arrived. Ron wrapped the
brown paper package done up in strapping tape instead of string in
festive paper, and I actually forgot that it was
there.
Inside were several books that together qualified for "super saver free
shipping" (lessons from that Very Frugal Mother again). On my reading
list for the new year are:
Letters
of a Woman Homesteader, the chronicle of Elinore Pruitt
Stewart's life in Burnt Fork, Wyoming at the turn of the twentieth
century;
The Solace of Open Spaces,
personal essays by Gretel Ehrlich about her life in what she calls the
"planet of Wyoming;"
Bad Dirt:
Wyoming Stories 2, new fiction by Annie Proulx, and
My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, and
The Green Grass of Wyoming,
Mary O'Hara's classic trilogy of a Wyoming boy and the horse he loves.
Are you seeing a pattern here?
I'm going to
Wyoming.
This year or not at all.
