Apple picking time

Holly and I went apple picking last weekend, just as we do nearly every fall, only this year we got a jump on the apple season. Normally we forget to go until Columbus Day weekend, which is the last weekend most orchards are open, and then we scramble to find one whose website confirms it still has apples available for picking.

This year, we thought of it early, and we had our choice of locations. I’d never even gone in early October before, let alone late September. We felt so organized, so ahead of the curve.

And somewhat to my surprise, it was markedly more fun than usual because the apples, while plentiful, were less abundant than they are in mid-October. So we had to actually search a little bit to find our bounty, which made it more like an Easter egg hunt, more adventurous. In mid-October, apple picking is the proverbial low-hanging fruit. Also high-hanging fruit, mid-hanging fruit, and fruit all over the ground. It was fun to go at a time that the task still required a little expenditure of effort.

Actually, any kind of intrigue or challenge makes apple picking more fun. In general, it’s one of those things you do because it’s seasonally appropriate but not really all that interesting a way to spend the afternoon. I love being outside in the fresh air and sunshine of an apple orchard on a fall day, but I’d much rather be hiking than standing around collecting apples. And it takes so little time before the bags get so heavy. I also have a guilty little secret in that I have what can best be described as pedestrian tastes when it comes to apples. I like soft, sweet apples, whereas New England orchard apples tend to be crisp and tart. Intellectually, I know that’s what sophisticated apple consumers favor, but I like the round supermarket Macintoshes with the almost squishy pulp.

While I wandered amidst the trees trying to convince myself that surely I must be getting at least a modicum of physical exercise, Holly filled two bags, one with Cortlands and one with Macouns. Back home with dinnertime approaching, Holly made an apple crisp. I cut up the apples for her, wondering as I do every year while making apple crisp whether Los Angeles street gangs make a dessert they call apple Crips, but Holly did the rest of the work: mixing the topping, melting the butter, blending in the egg. Emerging from the oven an hour later was a hot, fragrant, spicy apple crisp, a perfect way to end the weekend.

Holly and I each had one serving; Rick, who avoids desserts, tried just a bite; and Tim ate the rest. Holly mildly scolded Tim for eating so much of it, but I think she was secretly flattered. If she wants to make another one, we could always go again. There’s still nearly three weeks left of the season. And surely I can manage one more afternoon of apple picking, even if I still maintain that as leisure time activities go, it’s more picturesque than fun. It’s a decent way to spend an autumn afternoon. And the apple crisp – or apple Crips, if you’re a gang member – makes it all worthwhile.

So much fun I forgot to post

I was feeling a little bit ambivalent about our plan to head to the beach last Sunday. I knew the drive would be long and the traffic heavy, and there were items on my To Do list that would go undone for yet another week if we were out all day.

But as my two children reminded me, it’s a tradition. Every summer, we spend one afternoon with friends on the beach. And even though these particular friends live only three miles away from us the rest of the year and we generally see them several times a month, the annual meet-up during their Maine vacation is a tradition now ten years old. So no one wanted to miss out.

It turned out to be a perfect beach day, and none of the inconvenience mattered compared to a gorgeous afternoon of bright sunshine, dry air, tossing waves, and happy children on Boogie boards.

Not until we were driving home did I realize what was missing. How had I managed to overlook something so critical? I double-checked, and then triple-checked, but no: the proof was right there, painfully obvious in its absence.

It wasn’t my wallet or my phone or my purse, or either of my children, that I’d neglected to bring home from the beach with me. Instead, it was any technological record of the fact that we’d been there. Caught up in the fun of visiting with friends, watching the kids jump in the waves, and taking a long walk along the water’s edge, I’d forgotten to take a single photo. Or jot a Facebook post about what we were doing. Or tweet a witty 160-character description of the beach crowd. Or press a button on a virtual map to show just where we were.

My presence at the beach had disappeared as quickly as my footprints in the sand, all because in the spirit of the moment, I’d completely forgotten to press any buttons on any screens connected to any social media platforms or other digital networks.

If a tree falls in the forest….. I muttered to myself as I scrolled pointlessly through my phone just to be sure there weren’t any photos I’d somehow overlooked. If I didn’t snap it or post it or tag it or collocate it, how do I know it happened?

And for that matter, if friends can’t immediately show their appreciation for all the fun I’m having, am I really having the same amount of fun?

I knew it was a ridiculous concern. I’d been having fun for nearly four decades before Facebook even existed. And yet, I realized as I drove home from the beach, in the course of just a few years, my perspective had been somehow intractably altered. Posting on Facebook is like having an automatic cheering section behind you; suddenly everything you do seems worthy of enthusiastic acknowledgment, as if we are all toddlers learning to walk again. Photo of my kids on the last day of school. Hooray! Bon mot about the complicated but rewarding life of a freelance writer. Love it! Tongue-in-cheek and yet inexplicably poignant line about how happy I am to be celebrating 22 years of marriage. Go, you two, go!

If I can’t “share” it, how can I share it?, I wondered, even though I knew that not so long ago, this question wouldn’t have even borne semantic sense to me.

“How was the beach?” my husband asked as the kids and I arrived home.

“It was wonderful,” I said. “Everyone was sorry not to see you, though.”

“I learned how to use a boogie board,” my daughter reported.

“We ate lobster rolls,” my son added.

Oh, right, I remembered. This is how you share when you can’t “share.” This is how you communicate what happened when you don’t have photos, hashtags or links to help tell the story. You put it into words. I remember this.

When I woke up the next morning, there were no red flags on my computer screen telling me that a few dozen more people had “liked” my afternoon at the beach. In fact, it seemed as if no one except for me was even thinking about my afternoon at the beach.

So I wrote a note to our friends thanking them for a great day. And I reminded the kids of the boogie boarding and lobster rolls, and assured them we’d go back again next summer.

It’s a tradition, after all. And sometimes you really don’t need to crowdsource your experience to know you’ve had a good time.

Mother's Day

I’ve never felt particularly attached to Mother’s Day. I ‘m not overtly opposed to it as a “Hallmark holiday,” the way some people are, but I just never take it very seriously. When I was growing up, my parents paid very little attention to holidays like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day; my earliest memories of celebrating either of those holidays was one year when June was a particularly hot month and my older sister decided the best way to honor Dad was for the three daughters to choreograph a swim show in his honor. This became yearly tradition, both the part in which the three of us planned out and performed our water ballet and the part in which my father said “The best Father’s Day gift would be not to have to watch a swim show.” To this day, my sister calls me a few days before Father’s Day from wherever she happens to be – an academic retreat in Italy, this particular year – to ask if I’m done choreographing our show yet. (My sister also reminds me periodically of her expectation that I will help her choreograph a swim show for Independence Day, Labor Day, and the occasional unseasonably warm Columbus Day.)

This past Sunday, there were no swim shows, but we did have a simple brunch with my parents in their new screen house, which is just about the right size to hold the four of us, the two of them, and the dog. (Admittedly, we all would have fit even better without the dog, but I didn’t want to spend the remainder of Mother’s Day searching for her in the woods. Or removing ticks from her fur.)

And somehow it just felt festive in unusual ways, far different from the usual bouquets-and-breakfast-in-bed (neither of which have I ever actually experienced on Mother’s Day, but that’s what I’ve seen on TV commercials). From Rick, I received the gift I most wanted on that particular day: he did a spring tune-up on all four of our bikes, didn’t complain about the task, didn’t ask me for any help, and cleaned the whole project up when he was done. From Holly, a homemade necklace in a homemade jewelry box. From Tim, plenty of good cheer and affection.

At Tim’s afternoon baseball game, all the mothers wished each other a happy Mother’s Day, and all the fathers who were present wished us one as well. At the restaurant where we ate with my in-laws after the game, there were complimentary chocolate-dipped strawberries served after dinner “in honor of mothers.” There was even a balloon sculpture artist at the restaurant who was specifically targeting the mothers in the room for his patter and antics; mercifully, some very swift bill-paying by Rick enabled us to escape before he reached our table.

Mother’s Day still isn’t high on my list of important holidays, but this year it was more fun than I remembered, with baseball and strawberries and bike tune-ups done without asking. Too cold for swim shows this year, I’m afraid. But I suppose with the current rate of global warming, it’s not out of the question for next.

Rabbit, rabbit!

“Rabbit, rabbit,” I mumbled to myself as I wrote the date at the top of my journal page at 5:19 yesterday morning.

I’ve been saying “Rabbit, rabbit” on the first of the month for as long as I can remember. When I was growing up, my sisters did as well. We learned it from our mother.

And thanks to Facebook  it was easy for me to ask one of my mother’s cousins if she does this too. My mother’s family has all kinds of random superstitions and curious traditions, and being in closer touch with one of her cousins through Facebook has helped me to untangle where some of them come from. 

For example, this same cousin referred to doing skits on Christmas Eve, and she even used the word “stunts,” just as my grandparents always did, which I consider to be something of a malapropism since they usually involve singing camp songs while playing the piano and not, say, performing a trapeze act from the rafters. 

Nonetheless, this particular cousin is related to my mother through my grandfather, not my grandmother, so when she wrote about it on Facebook, I discovered that my long-held assumption about the side of my mother’s family from which this tradition originated was wrong.

I can also credit Facebook for the discovery that other friends do “Rabbit rabbit” too. Well, not a lot of other friends. Two other friends, to be exact. One who is about ten years older than I am and grew up in New York and Maine; the other a high school classmate from southeastern Massachusetts. So I’m having trouble finding any kind of common thread as far as what kind of people practice this tradition and why.

But in the age of Google, it’s always easy to find a little bit of information, albeit quite possibly fallacious, about whatever question happens to be on your mind at any given moment. Today I Googled, and discovered that the origins of “Rabbit rabbit” are unknown, possibly British, and it’s more popular in New England than in other parts of the country (my mother’s family was from Chicago, though, so that doesn’t explain the presence of the tradition in her background). I also learned Franklin Roosevelt was one of the superstition’s better-known adherents.

As with any good-luck superstition, though, if you believe in it at all, then once you know about it, you can’t give it up. So when the first of the month arrives, “Rabbit, rabbit” for good luck it is. Most months I find I have very good luck; those when I don’t, I figured it could have been worse had I skipped the ritual. I don’t really know who does this and I don’t really know why, but as far as I’m concerned, I’m in good company. Rabbit rabbit: April has arrived.

Comfort foods

Tonight a group of my high school friends will be coming over for appetizers and desserts, just as they did the Tuesday before Thanksgiving last year. Thursday, we’ll host Thanksgiving dinner for thirteen (a thought that would have horrified my maternal grandmother, who was superstitious and never seated thirteen at the table. But I’m hoping the fact that we’re actually dividing the group between two tables mitigates the potential for bad luck). In early December, it will be time for the annual cookie exchange, an evening of food, wine and conversation, at the end of which we all take home dozens of Christmas cookies made by each other. And once that party is over, we’ll start our yearly candy-making for Christmas gifts.

It feels good to be welcoming back these seasonal rituals. Their sameness is soothing. When I told Holly on Saturday that the annual gathering of high school friends was in just a few days, she responded, “Yay, chocolate chip cheesecake!” She remembers correctly. I’ll make chocolate chip cheesecake for that gathering, pumpkin pie and apple crisp for Thanksgiving, eggnog cheesecake and a peppermint chocolate layer cake for the cookie exchange.

All of these are foods we don’t eat the rest of the year, and there’s no particular reason that each recipe came to be assigned to one particular event. But I appreciate the sense of tradition behind it. There’s no reason to associate chocolate chip cheesecake with my high school friends and chocolate peppermint cake with the cookie exchange group. It just took hold that way.

Cooking traditions can be such a welcome ritual in uncertain times. We host Thanksgiving every year; most years I try to experiment with one or two new dishes, but I never worry about it, knowing the old favorites will always be, well, the favorites; and yet there’s always room for something different. The roasted squash salad tradition dates back to 2006, when my friend Nicole gave me the recipe, and everyone has come to expect it, but the idea of making turducken rather than traditional turkey is one Tim came up with just this year. We’ll find out if it sticks or not.

I’m finding it reassuring to pull out the annual recipes: the apple crisp recipe in my mother’s handwriting on a tattered recipe card; the recipe for chocolate mousse pie (which is always another choice for Thanksgiving dessert, alongside the apple crisp and pumpkin pie) printed out from an email address I haven’t had in seven years.

At every party and get-together, everyone is appreciative of the food no matter what I make; sometimes I worry that I wouldn’t even know if no one liked my cooking because they’re just glad I’m willing to host these events. And that could be true; they could be thinking “Oh please, not the roasted squash salad again!” But unless I ever hear that, I’ll turn back once again to the familiar favorites. It’s part of what makes this time of year feel so familiar, so ritualistic, and so dear.

 

Grandfathers, grandsons, barber shops, and a bucket 'o fried chicken

The first time Tim ever went to get his hair cut, it was with my father. The two of them – Dad then in his early sixties, Tim a toddler – together climbed the stairs to the old-fashioned barber shop on Walden Street in Concord Center, just as fathers and grandfathers and sons have probably been doing together since the nineteenth century in this particular spot or one just like it. For all I know, Henry David Thoreau himself got his hair cut at Palmucci’s Barber Shop, from one of the predecessors of Dad’s barber.

And for the next ten years or so, the tradition continued. Every month or two, Dad would pick Tim up and the two of them would head to the barber shop.

It was the kind of rose-hued tradition that age-old memories are made of….except that when Tim turned twelve, he admitted that, as kindly as his grandfather’s barber always was and as much fun as it was to have this special grandfather/grandson outing which had gone on for as long as Tim could remember, he wasn’t crazy about how his hair looked after a cut by Raffaele.

I suppose it goes without saying that I was a little bit disappointed by Tim’s truth-telling. As a family tradition, it had been such a particularly pleasing and picturesque one. How could a mother not get misty-eyed at the sight of her father and her son trekking off together for dual haircuts?

But at the same time, it’s never an entirely bad thing when your twelve-year-old expresses his preferences dispassionately and honestly, and another part of me knew the importance of respecting what Tim had to say. It was nothing against his grandfather or his grandfather’s barber, he emphasized; he just wanted to get his hair cut somewhere else.

So I started taking him for haircuts elsewhere, at a barber shop with only a couple of years of history (and surely no Transcendentalists among its past clientele), where his hair is cut by young women whose name badges say Shayla or Ashlee.

But somewhere around that same time, probably during football season while they were both watching a lot of NFL games on TV along with the barrage of advertising that inevitably accompanies the broadcasts, Tim and his grandfather both developed a hankering for fried chicken from KFC.

There’s no fast food in Carlisle, of course. But the two of them made a plan for a Friday evening when Dad would pick Tim up around dinnertime and they’d go to a neighboring town to share a bucket of drumsticks and wings.

But when Tim told me about the plan, I reminded him that he already had a commitment that evening; his good friend Austin was coming for a sleepover.

No problem, my father said generously; he’d bring both boys to KFC.

And then last weekend, with football season once again under way, Tim and his grandfather decided it was time for another pilgrimage to KFC. This time Tim didn’t even have a preexisting commitment to his friend; but still Dad said “Let Austin know I’ll pick you both up at 5:30.”

Thus was born a new tradition, and I had to smile on Friday as I saw the boys hopping into the car with Dad – and returning two hours later stinking of deep-fried grease and sipping the last of their appalling 24-ounce Cokes --  because it drove home so vividly the message that traditions are what you make of them. When Tim was an infant, I might have dreamed of him heading off to the barber shop with his grandfather someday, the same way I might have pictured sledding excursions or Christmas Eve church services or Tim’s first road race: the kind of tradition I imagined I would treasure.

But real life intervenes with daydreams sometimes. Even the words “KFC” make me a little nauseated, but the fact that Tim and his grandfather found their own way to a new tradition still makes me smile. Yes, it’s smelly and greasy – but it’s theirs. A special tradition. Not the one I would have picked, but the one they picked. And so now I dream of this new one continuing for many years to come.

Super Bowl sentimentality

I don’t normally look forward to the Super Bowl. It’s not that I lack affection for the Patriots; it’s the sport of football itself that leaves me indifferent.

But this year I found myself looking forward to the Big Sunday. Sometimes it takes a few years of repetition before I begin to recognize a ritual for what it is, but for the past five years or so, we’ve watched the game at the same house, attending a party that seems to double in size every year.

And although big parties aren’t always my favorite place to be, this one is special because the guest list is loosely centered around the families of Tim’s wide circle of casual friends: the boys with whom he’s played baseball, sat in class, played at recess, and attended birthday parties for the past seven years or so.

It’s a group of people – parents and kids alike – whom I generally really like. But more than that, this year for the first time I began to sense how transient this ritual might well turn out to be. Our boys have all hung out together or at least attended school and played on teams together over the past several years, but that probably won’t last too much longer. In another two years, they’ll start high school; those who go to the public high school will attend classes with three times as many kids from the neighboring town as from their own, and some will go to private schools nearby or even off to boarding school. They’ll still be happy to see each other and maybe they’ll become part of Carlisle’s traditional day-after-Thanksgiving soccer game, an event that typically draws together old friends after they’ve gone off to college. But this particular group of fifteen or twenty boys won’t make up Tim’s daily peer set anymore, and their parents won’t be such a regular part of my life either.

I find that hard to face, but in a way this sentiment is very much in keeping with how I’ve been feeling ever since the start of the school year: Everything is perfect so please stop the clock right now. Both of the kids are happy and well-adjusted, with a healthy mix of social, recreational and academic interests. Holly is finally past the mercurial stages that can make the early years of school difficult; Tim isn’t yet thinking about SAT scores or learning to drive. This, right now, fourth and seventh grade, this is perfect. This is where I would freeze us, if I could.

And so as I began coring peppers and mixing filling for the tray of chilis rellenos I was bringing to the Super Bowl party, I thought of the other parents whose presence in my life I had taken for granted for so long: from the sometimes-hilarious, sometimes-tedious days of toddler playgroups, to the continuous birthday party circuit of their early grade school years, to the spring and summer baseball games at which we spend so much time gabbing. Even as I recognized all the specific privileges that my parenting circumstances afforded me – a friendly and safe community full of like-minded families with similar priorities – I indulged once in a while in twinges of boredom, admitting to myself if no one else that I’d rather be reading a book or working on an article than attending another library sing-along.

And yet as with so many things, the awareness that it won’t in fact last forever is finally making me appreciate it. Tim will probably always have friends, but not these friends; I’ll always have other parents to share the parenting experience with, but not these same couples I’ve known for almost a decade. The boys will grow apart and so will we. Even now, the boys hang out after school at the library or the general store or the soccer field on their own, so we parents don’t spend as much time gathered together watching them play. Soon we’ll see even less of each other, and that realization makes me sorry.

So this year I headed off to the Super Bowl party with something I didn’t usually take along: a sense of anticipation. I was looking forward to seeing all those other adults whom I see less now than I used to. Tempis fugit, in this situation as in all others. I don’t know how many more years this particular party will happen for, or who will attend in future years. This time, I’m looking forward to all those familiar faces. We grow older as the boys grow up, and it’s good to be spending time together once again.

Cooking oil, talcum powder: The smells of Chanukah

For the first night of Chanukah, I made a traditional latkes dinner, and the house filled with the fragrant aromas of this particular holiday.

Okay, that’s patently untrue. Sentimental, but untrue. The house smells like cooking oil no matter how much I run the kitchen fan, and not only that, my hands smell like dirt from peeling potatoes. Dirt is a pleasant smell in the spring when you’ve been out gardening, but it’s not as welcome when you can’t get it off your hands in mid-December.

Still, the latkes dinner was worth the stinky house left in its wake. It reminded me of the Chanukah parties my family partook of annually during my childhood. We’d go to my aunt and uncle’s house. Although Jewish traditions have phased out of our life almost entirely at this point, when I was growing up we still celebrated the major holidays with relatives. My favorite was Chanukah, just as it was with most kids: because of the presents, but also the food – latkes may in fact be the only Jewish ceremonial food anyone would actively choose to eat – and even the ritual of lighting the menorah. Even as a child, I enjoyed public speaking, just as I still do, and being asked to recite one of the readings was a treat for me.

My grandmother liked to shop at department stores, which was typical of her generation and station in life. She gave Chanukah gifts that I now realize were the kinds of things you find at department stores and were different from gifts I’d be likely to receive from anyone else, and I loved them despite what I now realize was their overall tackiness: bubble bath sets, perfume in fancy bottles marketed to little girls, miniature purses. The sharp, artificial floral scent of cheap talcum powder or bath salts still reminds me of getting presents from my grandmother.

Latkes were a once-a-year treat, and for good reason. I once read a description of this particular delicacy as “food that makes you feel like you swallowed a couple of rocks.” Not just one rock; a couple. And once I knew better, from a nutritional standpoint, I stopped seeking out opportunities to eat latkes. I certainly didn’t make them myself. But a year ago, I decided to try, and it wasn’t as difficult as I thought. Plus they tasted delicious and brought back good memories.

So last night I made them again. Like last year, they took much, much longer than I expected – we didn’t eat until 7:30, an hour later than usual – plus I ended up with twice as much batter as I needed; I should really make myself a note on the recipe for next year. And did I mention that the whole house smells? And that my friend Jen, who will not know last night was the first night of Chanukah and whom I have not seen in over a year, is coming over for coffee later this morning and will think my house always smells this bad?

But oh well. My grandparents are long gone and so are our Chanukah get-togethers. Once or twice each December, we’re over at my parents’ house at the right time to help them light their menorah, but most of what my kids know about the holiday comes from discussions at school. It’s not really part of our family tradition anymore.

Still, this is two years in a row of latkes. So even without the floral bubble bath or the general excitement of a high-profile holiday, maybe we’ll make this Chanukah dinner our new yearly tradition.

O Christmas card, O Christmas card....

Due to various circumstances -- most of which fall under the category of personal laziness -- I hadn't been to the post office in three consecutive days when my 9-year-old and I finally stopped by yesterday afternoon. Our post office box was packed with envelopes. The two of us unstuffed it piece by piece, hauled the load home, and spent a very pleasant half-hour opening Christmas cards. As I should have realized, if you're going to take a three-day hiaitus from collecting your mail, mid-December is not the optimal time to do it; on a typical day during the holiday season, we receive as much personal mail as we often receive in an entire month or more at other times of year.

But it was worth it, because catching up on the trove of cards that had arrived during that time was so much fun. I know a lot of people don't enjoy Christmas cards as much as I do, but for me it's a hallmark of the season. And even though lots of satirists have fun poking fun at the different strains of holiday greetings, I can only say that I like them all. I like the posed, professionally produced family portraits. I like the funny offbeat candid snapshots of kids running through pumpkin patches or digging sand castles. I like those taken in people's back yards and those taken at the far reaches of the earth. I like seeing what people did in Disney World, at Niagara Falls, on Mount Kilimanjaro, in the Caribbean. I like those that were clearly intended to be Christmas cards as the shot was composed and those that have more of an "I guess this one will do" feel to them.

I like holiday newsletters, too. I don't mind when people go on and on about every twist and turn in their family's year. Perhaps because personal stories and how people tell them are such an integral part of my career, I'm interested not only in the facts people include but the subtext about what they chose to say and why. One of my friends wrote a fairly long newsletter but had exactly one paragraph about each child and one detail amplified in that one paragraph: a daughter learned to drive; a son started working at his school's radio station; another daughter is going to be in a play soon. How did she choose those singular details?, I wondered. Were there other ideas that she cast aside?

A few details that friends have chosen to include in the past struck me as unusual enough that I still remember them years later. One friend broke the news of her divorce, apologizing ahead of time for breaking the unspoken rule of including only good news in Christmas cards. Two different women I know who are both mothers of men in their 20's routinely discuss the goings-on of their sons' girlfriends, which I find a little odd -- these aren't even members of the family. But it's still interesting. One of my husband's childhood friends even once started a Christmas card with "Thank God that for once we don't have to start with the news that Tina is pregnant."

Our own Christmas card situation has me annually tearing my hair out. I decided the first year Rick and I were married to write a 12-stanza poem describing our year. It was a fun way to narrate events, and I discovered that the kind of people who complain in general about holiday newsletters don't seem to mind poems because of the poems' innate tongue-in-cheek quality: we're not boasting about anything, we're just trying to come up with rhyming couplets. After we’d done two years of holiday poems, a friend of my mother very offhandedly told me an anecdote about a young woman she knew who had done the same thing for a few years but then found it too hard to maintain the tradition. Needless to say, I took this as a challenge, and that's the primary reason that our holiday poem continues to exist nineteen years later. Now a small number of our friends even write little rhymes back to us.

In the past, we threw in a photo card as well, assuming that some recipients would read the poem, some would look at the card, and some might do neither. (Or both.) But as home-computer technology has improved, the cost of commercial printing has gone up, and the environmental impact of photographic dyes and materials has come into question, we ceased ordering glossy photos and just started embedding small snapshots into our newsletter.

It's one of those traditions I love for about 11 1/2 months out of the year, and then dread when it's time to start writing. But as with any big writing project I face, the sense of relief I have when it's behind me makes all the stress seem worthwhile. As Holly and I pored over the pile of cards we received yesterday, I thought about how those same people would be receiving ours in another few days. I hope they enjoy our work as much as I've enjoyed theirs. Because every single card I receive means something to me, and I hope it's a tradition that never stops.

Christmas candies and cakes and more

What I like least about Christmas: the pervasive awareness that for so many people, Christmas is not what they wish it was. It’s hard to celebrate wholeheartedly knowing how many people are unable to celebrate the way they would like to – and the way that so many marketing messages tell us we all should – because they are hobbled by illness or financial woes or physical distance from loved ones.

But there are many things I do like about the holiday season: the parties, the decorations, the special concerts and performances.

Way up at the top of the list of what I like about the holidays, though, is the food. Every year, the list of foods I traditionally make for the holiday season seems to grow. When we were in our twenties, Rick and I developed the habit of making truffles for gifts, and that was our sole holiday cooking ritual for years. But now the roster has expanded. The candy we make for gift-giving includes the original truffles but also peppermint bark, toffee, peanut brittle, and peanut butter balls. For entertaining, we make chocolate mousse pies, eggnog cheesecakes, peppermint chocolate layer cakes, at least two or three of each every season. For parties, we buy specialty cheeses and dips.

Sometimes I almost regret the fact that we eat so well all year long, diminishing the specialness of fine food on holidays, but we purposely avoid these special Christmas foods the other eleven months of the year so that they always seem like a novelty when their time comes around. It’s true that eating large and rich meals is not a luxury reserved for holidays, as it must have been for almost everyone centuries ago when a Thanksgiving or Christmas feast stood out markedly from the menus of the rest of the year. But the candies and eggnog cheesecake and peppermint layer cake are always something I’ve gone eleven months without, and the return to those savored treats are among my favorite things about the holiday season.

This week, I’ll start baking in earnest: for our annual cookie exchange party tonight among a small group of friends, for gifts for the kids’ teachers and our neighbors and other friends; later for Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas Day brunch. I could happily live without ever hearing another Christmas TV ad from Target or another story about Black Friday shoppers gone mad, and I wouldn’t even mind a ban on inflatable ten-foot-tall Santas in people’s front yards. But the tastes of Christmastime bring back all the best of the season to me, and I’m looking forward to the kitchen soon filling up with the aromas of chocolate and butter once again.

A new culinary tradition for snow days

We’ve long had a tradition that when the kids have a snow day, I make bacon for them. It’s a cozy and pleasing habit: they love the taste and I like the way it makes the house smell for the rest of the day. I’m a fan of food-related traditions in general, so I’ve always found it satisfying to have one special food dedicated to snow days. And true, bacon is not good for them from a nutritional standpoint – “salted fat,” as a friend of mine referred to it recently – but surely for a special treat it’s okay. After all, if they have it only on snow days, how often are they really going to get to indulge?

Well, once or twice a week this winter, it turns out. And yesterday morning, as we embarked upon our fifth snow day in three weeks, I told them we’d have to skip the obligatory bacon. “It’s just getting to be too much,” I told them. “Thirty years from now, your doctors will ask you how you developed such a bad cholesterol problem and you’ll have to say, ‘Remember how much snow we had in the winter of 2011?’”

The kids took it pretty well. Either they’ve grown mature enough to accept the occasional disappointment, or they’ve grown old enough to appreciate a nutritional hazard when they see one, or else we’ve actually had so many snow days that they’ve reached the previously unimaginable point of being tired of bacon.

But we needed some kind of gustatory observance of the day, some ritual to mark the special ambience of a snow day even if snow days feel more like the rule than the exception this winter. “How about chocolate mousse?” Tim suggested.

That gave me an even better idea. “I’ll make something for you that I used to love when I was your age,” I told them, and pulled out my mom’s recipe for Pots de Crème. I instructed Holly to fetch from the china hutch the tiny covered porcelain pots that are specifically dedicated to this particular dessert. They are the same dishes we used for Pots de Crème when I was growing up, and because back then it was my favorite dessert, my mother gave me the set of dishes once I was an adult. Holly uses them occasionally for tea parties, but I couldn’t remember ever making Pots de Crème in them for my kids.

It’s an easy recipe, and as I whirred the chocolate in the blender and heated milk to a simmer, I reflected on how much delight I had gotten from this dish when I was little. Ineffably rich and concentrated in its dark chocolate taste, it’s one of the few desserts that works perfectly as single servings in these miniature white and purple-sprigged dishes; it’s so rich that no one asks for seconds. And there’s just something so special about a dessert served in its own dish, topped with a little lid as if what’s inside is a secret until you’re ready to taste it.

Like everything my mother made when I was growing up, I assumed this recipe was standard special-occasion fare in every household – until, when I was in second grade, my class put together a cookbook with each child’s favorite recipe. Within days after we all brought our photocopied (actually mimeographed) cookbooks home, other parents were stopping me on the school plaza to tell me how much they liked my contribution. It was the first time I’d discovered the social currency of a really great recipe.

We ate our Pots de Crème after dinner last night. When I was growing up, my mother even had tiny spoons to serve with it; I don’t, so we used regular teaspoons and savored every bite. My guess is we’ll make this specialty again on future snow days. It doesn’t fill the house with an aroma the way bacon does, but it definitely makes the day feel like a special occasion.

Candy time

Today is the kids’ last day of school before vacation, and last night I was engaged in a favorite ritual that I’ve been doing some variation of for almost as long as I can remember: preparing teacher gifts.

Actually, there’s been a lot of variation. When I was Tim’s age, my mother made gifts for my teachers, just as I do now for my kids. She made breads or coffee cakes wrapped in Saran wrap with brightly colored ribbons, and I felt a warm sense of pride as I deposited them carefully on my teacher’s desk that last morning before vacation. By high school, I was making my own baked goods for favorite teachers and academic advisors.

Once I finished college and started working, the tradition resumed with office mates. I hit on a holiday gift specialty when I was in my early twenties: truffles. Or what I – and the recipe in the circa 1950s cookbook I found it in – call truffles. My elder sister, a purist when it comes to any kind of culinary claim, would point out these really aren’t truffles for reasons I can’t define, but I’m sure she’s right, as they’re too easy to make to deserve that elegant a title. Nonetheless, recipients love the truffles.

After Rick and I were married, we conducted the gift-giving ritual together, and our guest list was growing. I remember one year when our entire dining room table was covered with little cardboard boxes shaped like Chinese takeout containers and decorated with holiday prints as Rick and I got organized to bring gifts to our office mates on that last work day before Christmas. I worked in a department of nine; Rick had even more co-workers than I did. We rolled truffles by the hundreds in those years.

And then Tim was born and along with gifts for the workplace we had gifts for daycare teachers to consider. I started expanding my repertoire. A mere dozen truffles were fine for our colleagues, who really didn’t expect a gift at all and didn’t necessarily give one back; but that didn’t seem sufficient for the daycare teachers who devoted hours every day to Tim. Thus began the basket tradition: I bought big festively decorated wicker baskets or bowls and filled them with a variety of goodies: the original truffles, but also maple scones, spiced nuts, Cheddar shortbreads, molasses cookies, peanut brittle, peppermint bark, banana breads, cranberry muffins.

And so it continued once Tim and then Holly started public school, though the contents varied from year to year, and so did the numbers we needed to produce. There have been some years when both of the kids had a teacher and a teacher’s aide, and last year Tim had two main classroom teachers plus a classroom aide. The kids can hardly carry the bounty.

But it’s so much fun, even as I acknowledge to myself that I probably enjoy the ritual of preparing the goodies and assembling the baskets more than the recipients could possibly enjoy the contents. Now the kids help by writing labels for each little bag or packet.

I have to admit too that I toned it down a notch this year. The array of sweets and savories, breads and muffins and nuts and cookies, was always impressive, but it started to seem a little overwhelming. So this year I focused just on candy-making, which is my favorite anyway: each teacher will get peppermint bark, peanut brittle, toffee, and of course the truffles. Since those early married days, we’ve never yet gone a year without making truffles.

Last night we set up the assembly line. Holly wrote out labels; I packaged the candies into decorative cellophane bags; Tim sorted them into boxes. The number of recipients is a little less staggering this year: one teacher per child, plus the bus driver; and Rick wanted to bring gifts to three administrative staffers at his workplace.

I’m self-employed now, which means I get to gift myself. My gift is all the broken or misshapen pieces of candy that didn’t make the final cut into the boxes. It’s a wonderful tradition, but after two weeks of nonstop candy making, I’m glad we’re done for the year. I hope the teachers know how much we appreciate them, far more than even my chocolate truffles can reflect. And I hope members of their families, if not they themselves, harbor a serious sweet tooth. I think they’ll need it.

Wrapping bee: The wrap-up

I understand that “new tradition” is something of an oxymoron, as is “first annual.”

But yesterday evening did feel like a new tradition and a first annual, because it was so much fun and met a need and augmented the cheer of our holiday season. And oxymoronic or not, those factors do seem to me like the ingredients of a new tradition.

Wrapping Christmas gifts has long been a bit of a sticking point in our holiday routines. Even before we were married, Rick and I were in the habit of staying up late on Christmas Eve to do our wrapping together. This is not the best way to spend Christmas Eve. The work is tedious, the practice is superficial and the timing ensures that you won’t get to bed at a reasonable hour. We always wake on Christmas morning tired rather than refreshed, and not because of meaningful holiday-related rituals or festive celebrations running too late the night before but just because we weren’t organized enough to get the necessary chore of wrapping out of the way sooner.

For the past few years, I’ve tried to make it different, especially after we started the far more fulfilling Christmas Eve tradition of hosting my sisters and their families as well as my parents for Christmas Eve dinner. We’d go to church in the late afternoon, have a wonderful evening of conversation and food and fun – and then after the dishes were washed, it was time for Rick and me to start wrapping. That’s just not the right way to head toward the mythical hour of midnight on December 24th.

A couple of years ago, a seemingly insignificant line in an article about Christmas baking caught my imagination. The article described a variety of homemade gifts that you could prepare several days before Christmas – “So that on Christmas Eve, you can put your feet up and wait for Rudolph,” the writer concluded. I loved that image: being enough ahead of schedule that I spent Christmas Eve, or at least the part after the dinner guests left, just relaxing. Or reading. Or sleeping.

But I was never able to make it happen.

And then I had a spontaneous exchange with a friend earlier this week. “We should have a wrapping bee,” I wrote to her. “Just get together for an hour and get all our wrapping done.” Not only did she like the idea, she was available the same night I was, and so was another friend of ours.

So last night we had the First Annual New Traditional Wrapping Bee. It certainly wasn’t an hour – closer to three and a half. But we did it: we got all caught up on our wrapping. I have three or four gifts to pick up today and I can wrap those tonight and then I’ll really truly be wrap-free by Christmas Eve.

Not only was it efficient, it was such a good way to visit. I heard about one friend’s Thanksgiving trip to London and another friend’s perceptions of her son’s new school: we talked about everything from peculiar habits our mothers have to reasonable responses to bullying. We talked about books, vacations, and of course the gifts we were wrapping. We made our way through a bottle or two of Chardonnay.

So for me, the evening bore all the hallmarks of something I certainly want to make a yearly occurrence. The conversation with my friends nourished my spirit; the activity filled a necessary practical need. On Christmas Eve, I’ll put my feet up and wait for Rudolph, and I’ll think very warm thoughts about my two Wrapping Bee buddies and how great it is to start new traditions together.

O Christmas tree, no Christmas tree....

“Just don’t say anything about it at school,” I cautioned my children. I was fairly sure that if their teachers heard about our December scheme, they would suggest putting my kids on the school’s free lunch plan.

But it wasn’t really a matter of economic hardship that inspired us to try skipping the Christmas tree this year. It just seemed that there were several good reasons to take this seemingly radical step. True, we usually spend about $70 on our tree – we have a big house with big rooms, and it’s hard to go with something that feels out of proportion to the space where you plan to put it – and this is a year that we’d rather put the $70 toward Christmas gifts. But we could have looked for a tree costing half that much. We could have even gone outside and found one to cut down or transplant: although the forests surrounding our house tend to generate spindly needled pines that look more like the one in Charlie Brown that the densely branched, triangle-shaped Douglas fir of a Christmas card image, there have been several years in the past when we’ve chosen a tree from the nearby woods.

The cost was a factor, but there were other reasons too. Christmas trees are messy, leaving needles all over the floor, both from when we first bring it into the house and when the needles begin to fall off. They need to be watered regularly and even so can seem like a bit of a fire hazard sitting in the corner of the living room.

And much as we support the idea of buying local, we spend less if we drive to another town for our tree rather than buying it right in town – but none of us really felt like doing the drive this year.

“How about we skip the tree?” my husband suggested nonchalantly.

I expected the kids to be horrified. No tree? “Is it even Christmas without a tree?” I imagined them saying, certain the kids’ disappointed faces would drive us straight into the car heading to our favorite nursery, checkbook in hand.

But to their credit, the kids were circumspect. “What about all our decorations?” they asked. Every year we set aside much of one December weekend to pulling plastic storage bins down from the attic and unpacking decorations together, one fragile piece at a time.

“We can still put up decorations,” my husband assured them. “We just won’t necessarily hang them from tree branches.”

“What about lights?” the kids asked next.

“We’ll wrap lights around the ficus tree by the living room window!” Rick suggested.

“Decorate a houseplant?” Holly asked, looking over at the three-foot-tall ficus tree. “But that means….”

I braced myself, imagining all the different icepick-to-the-heart ways that Holly might finish that sentence. “But that means…Santa won’t visit us. But that means….it’s not really Christmas. But that means….we’re not celebrating right.”

“But that means,” Holly continued, “that I’ll be able to reach the top of the tree and put the star there without any help!”

So Holly, unassisted, placed the tree’s singular ornament at its apex. And then the kids went on to spend just as much time this year decorating as they normally do. They strung cranberry chains along the banister, placed candles on all the tabletops, suspended mistletoe from the upstairs railing. Then they went around the house hanging ornaments from other surfaces: the edges of tables and counters, windowsills.

When they were done, the house looked beautiful, just as it does every December: luminous and sparkling with small pretty objects sprinkled throughout the house. And while it’s true that we have no scent of pine in the house right now, it’s a small price to pay for not having needles strewn across the floor.

Last week a friend asked me if I had any suggestions for how she could simplify the holidays as she tried to balance the needs of four children ranging in age from four months two nine years. “Primarily, make sure you discuss with the kids which traditions matter most to them,” I told her. “Be sure you’re not doing anything just because you think it matters to someone, when in fact it really might not.” Or, as the company I used to work for often said, “We have no sacred cows.”

If anything was a sacred cow when it comes to celebrating Christmas in our household, I would have thought it was the tree. And yet when Rick suggested we try going tree-less – less expensive, neater, and more environmental – everyone jumped on board. We’re not ready yet to make a permanent change. Next year it’s quite likely we’ll decide we want it back. But this year, we’ll gather around our ficus tree, lit with tiny yellow lights and perched on a gold tree skirt with presents encircling its base, and celebrate the holidays as merrily as ever. Holly has been singing all weekend, “Deck the halls with Tim and Holly!” And indeed, that’s what we did. We decorated the halls, and it all looks beautiful. Different from past years, but beautiful nonetheless.

It's tradition -- or not

Last week, Holly and I went to Staples in Bedford and plowed our way through both kids’ school-supply lists. (Tim wasn’t interested in coming with us.) This afternoon, on our way up to Maine for the weekend, we plan to make a quick stop at Old Navy to buy her a few new school outfits and try to pick out something for Tim as well. (He’ll be with us but says he plans to read in the car. A shopper he’s not.)

This is not how we usually buy our school supplies and fall clothes. Ever since they reached school age, I’ve taken the kids individually for a special late-summer evening excursion. I planned it all out the first time the week before Tim started kindergarten, and we’ve done it that way ever since: we pick a weeknight the week before Labor Day to leave in the early evening for the mall a half-hour a way, buy school supplies, go out for dinner together at Friendly’s, and then continue through the mall to buy some clothes.

It was a tradition. And those have always been sacred words for me.

But as the kids get older, and as I get older, I am beginning to concede that not every tradition has to be carved in stone. This is not an easy admission for me to make. I have often said that I am unusually attracted to traditions, rituals and routines; I like being able to rely on certain habits and events to recur year after year. I love the children’s book Over and Over, in which the little girl goes through a year’s worth of holidays and then at the end says to her mother, “What’s next now?” and her mother says “Now it all starts over again.” That book comforted me when I was a young child looking at the pictures; it comforted me all over again as a parent, when I would read that book to my children and feel reassured that I was creating certain traditions for them as well, including the one related to back-to-school-shopping.

It’s just that at a certain point, I had to admit that tradition wasn’t all that much fun. We always got too late a start at the end of the day and ended up still at the mall at 9 p.m., which I wasn’t happy about. And the mall itself was overwhelming to me. There were office supply stores just as close to home, so I wasn’t sure why it was so important that we go to one a half-hour away. And dinner always took too long compared to the errands we needed to accomplish. Plus, you know…Friendly’s?

So this year we decided to do it differently, breaking the shopping into two separate trips, staying closer to home, going in the afternoon instead of the evening, skipping the dinner part.

Maybe this tradition will turn out even better. There’s something rather romantic about stopping for back-to-school clothes on our way to the coast for Labor Day weekend, after all; much more so than just heading to the department store and then turning around and going home afterwards. And I certainly won’t miss the tuna melt and French fries at Friendly’s.

On the second day of our trip to Colorado last month, we bought tickets to the gondola that ascends Aspen Mountain, just as we do on our second day of our Colorado vacation every year, and once we’d reached the top, the kids stood in line for their turn at bungee jumping, just like they do every year. As always, I enjoyed watching them tumble against the bright blue sky, and they thanked us for the excursion, but none of us got much of a thrill out of it. It just felt like something they’d outgrown.

The next day, we went whitewater rafting. Rick and I had been before, but the kids never had, and initially the plan was for just Rick and Tim to go. We thought Holly was too young and would be scared in the raft. But she watched a video of rafting at the outfitters’ shop and assured us she wanted to do it, so we went. We had an amazing time. Before it was over, the kids announced they absolutely wanted to go rafting next time we’re in Colorado – and do a more challenging course next time.

“Sounds good,” Rick and I told them. “Next time, less gondola; more rafting.”

And I admitted to myself that I’d be fine with skipping the gondola next time. It was great for a few years; now it doesn’t matter to us so much anymore. And the same is true with the back-to-school tradition.

So this afternoon we’ll make a quick stop to pick out some school clothes and then we’ll head to the beach if the weather clears up. Maybe we’ll do that again next year at this time; maybe we’ll do something else. Traditions are wonderful, but so is being able to recognize when it’s time to end an old one and start a new one. Or even try something just once and try something else the next time. Judicious decision-making can be a tradition in its own right. It’s taken me a long time to be comfortable with that idea, but I think I finally get it.