Photo by Łukasz Rawa on Unsplash
For the first thirty-two years of my life, Christmas Eve was always spent at my grandparents’ house in Calgary. Grandma was the matriarch of our family and was the reason that we saw each other regularly. When my sister and I were kids, we were driven to her house every Christmas Eve Day. She and grandpa lived in this beautiful, mid-century modern abode that was built for my great-grandparents and still had a coal chute in the basement. We would spend the day exploring the house and hanging out with my grandparents while grandma prepared for the evening feast. My sister and I rarely ventured to the basement alone because it was haunted and the switch to turn on the lights was around a dark corner that neither one of us was able to brave by ourselves, but in the evening when the grownups gathered there for drinks we would feel more confident and join them, stuffing our faces with nuts & bolts and ginger ale.
My favourite pre-Christmas-Eve activity was to help make these little sandwich cookies that would be served after dinner. They consisted of two small coins of shortbread held together with a slightly tart pink buttercream filling and topped with a rosette of icing. My sister and I would sit in the tiny kitchen and prepare a tray of them for use in the dessert platter, which consisted mostly of almond roca, shortbread, spritz cookies, and Norwegian favourite krumkake (CRUM-cack-uh). The latter is a delicate cookie that you make by running dough through a patterned hand-crank machine and then delicately roll into a cone shape. It tastes like cardamom and memories and was my favourite of all the desserts.
Admittedly, some years I was reluctant to go to the Christmas Eve celebration because I didn’t appreciate how lucky I was, and a while ago I stumbled across an Instagram video by author Jason Pargin (@jasonkpargin) that reminded me of this fact. In the video, he talks about how many of us have had the same Christmas tradition for our entire lives and how, one day, it is likely that the tradition will end without warning. He concludes that you won’t know what that ritual means to you until it is gone forever. The video is not a pick me up, but he makes an important point and you can watch it here:
This holiday season, therefore, I wanted to talk about our family food traditions and what they have meant to me over the years.
To begin, my parents have two very different attitudes towards cooking. My dad is an artisan, and his approach is to spend hours in the kitchen concocting a complex meal, serve it to us with a flourish, and then tell us everything that is wrong with it. “I should have added more salt to the beans,” he’ll lament, or “I could have cooked the French toast more evenly.” Never mind that he spent his time and energy preparing a meal for his family that is vastly superior to anything I could cook myself, all he can see are the ways in which it is not perfect. My sister and I are exactly the same, and we often have to check each other when we start down the path of harsh self-criticism. For instance, a while ago my sister made me a grilled cheese sandwich. As she slid the plate towards me, she said,” Sorry, I kind of burnt one side because I’m not used to gas stoves.” I looked at her and deadpanned, “Yes, how dare you spend your time cooking me a delicious meal.” She got the point.
My mom, on the other hand, is more of a utilitarian when it comes to meals. For most of my life, she was the primary cook in the household and made dinner every weeknight, with my dad taking over on weekends. Her attitude towards cooking has always been “You can take it or leave it, but I am not making four different meals,” and I respect the hell out of that approach.
There is also a hard and fast rule in my immediate family that there should only ever be one cook in the kitchen at a time. We like to do things our own way, and having a second person in the kitchen irritates us to no end. Many is the time that I have had to steer well-meaning partners out of the kitchen after they ask if they can help with dinner preparations so as to keep my very polite father from exploding into a million bats and scattering into the atmosphere.
But food has always been the mainstay of our family’s culture. As most of our traditions center around eating, I’ve found that those have been the glue that have kept my family together over the years.
In Norwegian culture we have a food called lefse (pronounced LEF-suh to my family), which I describe as kind of like a tortilla made from the humble potato, flour, and a lot of butter. My dad has agonized over the perfection of his lefse recipe, ever since his uncle died. Lefse night in our household has been the single day in the calendar year when it has been appropriate and encouraged to have more than one cook in the kitchen. My dad would lovingly prepare the dough ahead of time by ricing the potatoes, mixing the ingredients together, and swearing profusely. That night, we would invite our extended family over to roll out the dough with a special grooved rolling pin, then cook it on a hot pan. This tradition started with dad’s uncle, who would have the family over to prepare batches of lefse for Christmas Eve. The key to lefse is to roll it out as thinly as possible while still being able to lift it from the table in one piece, which takes a lot of finesse. When I was little, I was told to “roll until you see the stars.” This was because my great uncle has a star-patterned counter and when you could see the pattern through the dough it meant that the lefse was thin enough. Dad took over the tradition of lefse night and I have warm memories of Cousin Bob making us laugh so hard we cried, as well that feeling you get of family cohesion and togetherness. Our lefse nights stopped with the onset of COVID-19, but my hope is that they will eventually resume. There is something about a house full of people that I’ve been missing since my grandma died in 2017.
I mentioned that almond roca was also a staple of the dessert tray at Christmas Eve dinner. This is a sticky treat of triangular-cut caramelized sugar and butter mixed with almonds, with the tip dipped in chocolate. And although I hadn’t had almond roca since my grandma died, in one of my last classes in my graduate degree my classmate, G, brought her own family’s food tradition – matzo roca – to our final day of class. I love, love, love when other people share their own foods and I had to try it. It was delicious – the matzo being a crunchy change from the almond filling I was used to. As I bit into it and the familiar buttery caramel taste took over my tastebuds my eyes filled with tears because it reminded me so much of grandma. I thanked G and we shared a moment talking about our family foods; it remains one of my favourite memories of grad school.
I am not the only one who holds such love for our family’s foods. Years ago, my aunt (an accomplished and highly trained chef herself) had the presence of mind to put together a recipe book for my dad’s side of the family. Every adult was invited to contribute a recipe or two so that our food traditions would live on, and they had the cookbook printed in spiral-bound books. I didn’t really appreciate it as a kid because when you are young you are self-obsessed and believe that everyone will live forever. But now that I am thirty-eight and many family members are no longer around to share their recipes and stories, I value it more than I can say.
Our family has somewhat scattered since my grandma’s death. My one aunt and uncle have many grandchildren and they all celebrate Christmas together. That makes a full house in itself, so my immediate family now celebrates amongst ourselves and sometimes with my other aunt and uncle. Grandma really was the force that pulled all of us together, and now we are notoriously bad at getting together as extended family, though my dad and his siblings keep in close touch with one another through texts and phone calls.
Our family has suffered terrible losses over the years, especially my younger cousin, my dad’s cousin and my grandparents. Years ago, in my depression days, I went to a book even that included the author Teva Harrison. She had written a memoir called “In-Between Days” about having metastatic breast cancer and was my favourite speaker at the event. When I bought a copy of her book afterwards and asked her to sign it, I told her about the history of breast cancer in my own family and asked if she had any advice for me. She smiled up at me from where she sat at the table and simply said, “Savour it all.” So tonight, as I listen to my dad softly swearing to himself as he prepares Yorkshire puddings and other delectable treats, I will take a moment to savour what I have right now. Traditions will change over time and may even eventually disappear, but in this moment, I have everything I need.
Oh Shelley! This is so beautiful, and the perfect gift for an auntie who has to spend the first Christmas away from her family in many years. Thank you for this treasure!
So many wonderful memories. I miss the big events too, though I love the mix of new and old traditions we've built since ❤️