December 24, 2004
Thursday

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.

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