As the holiday season winds down for another year, hopefully there are new memories added to your seasonal repertoire. I find my collection of stories and events held in my heart from these days grows every year. The memories themselves seem to make the holidays come alive.
Perhaps it is not surprising that most of them have to do with family, and many of them have to do with food. My first memory is of Thanksgiving morning. My brother and I would wake up unbidden except for the scents making their way through the house. No alarm clock was needed when the room was slowly being filled with the smell of onions, celery and giblets being fried in a stick of butter.
The stuffing was being prepared and mom was hard at work on the dinner. I could stretch lingeringly in my bed; all was right with the world.
I do not get that smell on Thanksgiving morning anymore and so I find it difficult to imagine it is Thanksgiving Day at all. But to this day, that simple smell can take me back, far back, all the way back.
From a wonderful turkey dinner to a long afternoon’s nap, the time to prepare for Christmas begins with its own food memories. At some point, mom would work up the nerve to bring her children into the kitchen to roll out, cut and bake the sugar cookies. Each of us would be covered with red and green icing as we decorated the little cookies. They would not be pretty exactly, but they did the trick.
Of course, they paled compared to the cookies and candies mom would make while we sat and watched. There is an almost visceral reaction to be had when the smell of boiling sugar and melting almond bark mingles with the scent of a cut pine tree.
Then Christmas Eve would roll around and we would be bundled off to my Aunt Bev’s house for a buffet. There would be smoked fish and little meatballs, cheese by the block and dad would be forever trying to get his kids to try something new, like kipper snacks on saltines, but usually would not succeed. They had bones.
And there was the oyster stew, a large pot of steaming milk with great slabs of butter floating on top with huge oysters floating throughout. The family was pretty much split down the middle when it came to eating the oysters or not. For many years I was in the “no oysters in my stew” camp, but recently I have had a change of heart. This has not impressed the oyster eaters who always received my share.
From Christmas we came to New Year’s Eve, when mom did not really make dinner. It was the one night of the year when we would have chips and dip, snacks, barbecued smokies and other hors devours. We would enjoy the left over cookies and candies from the week before and indulge. It was a great night for just grazing and waiting for midnight to strike.
Now that I am older, I think about my waistline a bit more than before, but I still enjoy the foods and the memories these last weeks have granted me. I am grateful above all for the family and friends with whom I have shared these meals and foods. It is one of the great gifts of humanity; we have the wonderful ability to make a meal so much more than the simple eating of food.
Our meals are profound reminders of our connection to others. Father. Gerald Mahon, my first seminary rector, was constantly working on this group of young men, trying to get us to dine with some thoughtfulness and respect. He would remind us constantly that our gathering at table was more than “going to a filling station,” it was to be an encounter with community and a touch of God.
It is true and easily forgotten in this culture of drive-up food, and the pile of empty bags in the backseat of my car is a prophetic reminder, but the power of our gathering for meals changes us. It makes us companions, in the truest sense of the word, people who share bread together.
Perhaps that is why our meals during the holidays are so elaborate, because they need to be, they need to be more than just getting some food. Perhaps that is why, when God became a human being, he desired that our deepest, most intimate encounter with him would be at a meal. Sure, a person could just go to Mass, in the same way I suppose someone could just go to McDonald’s on Thanksgiving Day.
We could allow this meal, every Sunday, to renew our companionship, our depth of commitment, our transforming love.
It is pretty clever that Jesus chose to be born in Bethlehem, a name that means “House of Bread.” It is pretty clever of him to have a feed trough as his first bed. It is pretty clever of him to make it clear in this Christmas time that the meal matters.
As Emeril Lagasse is fond of saying, “It’s a ‘food of love’ thing.” And a feast that never ends.