Tag Archives: holiday

Joyous voices sweet and clear

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Several years ago, my hubby bought me an iPod Nano for my birthday. I had been resistant to the notion of an iPod. I was used to the ritual of changing out discs in a carrying case I kept with me to use with my portable disc player, and I just didn’t quite see the point.

The funny thing was that I had iTunes installed on my computer and had imported a bunch of my music CDs into its library. One of my Palm Pilots had used iTunes to synch music, so I had given it a try. I hadn’t been terribly impressed with the experience, but I had found iTunes on the computer a bit easier to use than other music playing software, so I had kept it.

The iPod quickly changed my mind. The convenience of something that fit in my pocket and replaced both the portable player and the carrying case with all those discs should have been obvious, I suppose. I found myself importing music like crazy, because the small number of discs I’d imported before that would hardly fill the Nano’s humongous 4 gigs of space.

I spent most of the Thanksgiving weekend importing Christmas music, and wound up with about 3 gigs worth of holiday songs. That left enough room on the Nano for a Scissor Sisters album, a few Queen albums, and my podcasts. So I could set the entire iPod music collection on shuffle for the month of December. I would get mostly Christmas music, with an occasional non-Christmas song to break things up.

And, of course, the iPod carried a much larger portion of my Christmas music collection than I’d been able to carry around in that case for discs.

The following year, Apple released the very first iPod Touch about a week before my birthday. Guess what my hubby gave me for my birthday? I think he got me the 16gig model, which seemed enormous. It was enough of an incentive to get me working a bit more seriously at importing all of my music collection on disc into the computer. I don’t remember how much of my Christmas music I got imported for that second Christmas (and because of a hard disk crash a few years ago, I can’t use the “date added” information in iTunes to make a guess–iTunes thinks the date added for about half my library is the day I bought the new hard disk and started restoring from backup), but it was far less than 16 gigs, and so I had start making big playlists if I wanted to have something I could randomize to give me hours of Christmas music while working.

Christmas music is one of my obsessions. I usually start listening to it a day or two after Thanksgiving and keep listening to it through Three Kings Day. Unfortunately, my hubby is one of those people who really dislikes Christmas music, or at least a lot of it. I’ve managed to figure out a bunch he can stand, and load that up in the player for the car. Otherwise, I listen to it when he’s in the other room or try to remember to use my headphones.

My hubby’s not the only person I know who has issues with at least some kinds of Christmas songs. I know a lot of folks who have problems with the specifically religious music. As a gay kid growing up in a very conservative and uptight denomination, I understand. Some sacred music triggers memories of very bad experiences. I get that what some people hear in those songs is, “You must conform to this belief system that has oppressed you, or else!”

My particular idiosyncrasy is that traditional religious Christmas songs just don’t register that way for me. I know all the words to “O, Holy Night” in more than one language (my Latin’s a bit rusty, but…), and intellectually I get that it’s sacred, but emotionally, it’s Holiday Music, to me. It evokes the same sense of wonder I get when accompanying friends out to the countryside and looking up into the night sky, hundreds of miles from a city, where the enormity of the universe is visible just by looking up. I love singing along to “Angels We Have Heard on High” because I remember the many Christmas concerts where I either sang it or played in the orchestra. In my head, I’m singing the tenor, and bass, and alto part (and wishing I could hit all the notes for the soprano), as well as playing the trumpet and baritone horn parts.

So I get a little bit too enthusiastic about lyrics that sometimes annoy some of my friends.

For me, Christmas is a season of light. We do these things to remember that the sun will come back, to remind ourselves how much metaphorical light our friends and other loved ones bring to our hearts throughout the year, and to give a bit of light and joy to both loved ones and complete strangers.

Sweet and savory

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I love munching on olives while waiting for the big holiday dinner to finish. When I was a kid, there were always at least two kinds of olives out, usually away from the kitchen, often laid out with candy and nuts and some little napkins and tiny plates. It was part of “this food is to distract you and keep you out of the kitchen until the main event” table.

Depending on which branches of the extended family were present, the setting was referred to as either “the olives and pickles” or “the relish tray.” It was called a relish “tray” regardless of whether there was an actual tray. A real relish tray is a bit of glassware meant for a buffet table in a formal dining setting, which has separated compartments.

Sweet and Savory!
Relish Tray, Gene & Michael’s, Thanksgiving 2012

The relish tray’s heyday was before the 20th Century, when the only foods available during the winter months were those which had been canned, pickled, or otherwise preserved during the growing seasons. Home canned foods often are very bland, so pickled foods added bursts of vinegary or briny or sweet delight.

I didn’t know that as a kid. There just were always at least two kinds of olive, and usually sweet pickled beets and at least two kinds of pickles. And if this was the right branch of the family, most of the pickles were home-pickled produce. Grandma B. liked an even mix of savory and sweet choices. Grandma P. always had a lot of very spicy pickled vegetables. If Great-grandma S.J.’s pickled squash was in the mix, it was a very special relish tray, for instance. One year, Great-aunt Pearl (though now that I think about it, she was my Grandma’s aunt, so she was technically my great-great-aunt) had sent a jar or two of homemade pickled watermelon rind, and that may have been the best relish tray, ever.

It just doesn’t feel like a real holiday dinner, to me, if there isn’t a relish tray. If given half a chance, I’ll set out a spread of dozens of different kinds of olives alone. Even if it’s going to be a small group. Each vinegary, briny, and sweet morsel is a little bit of my childhood, coming back for a visit.

Grandma’s cranberry salad

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One of the best parts of my childhood was growing up with a collection of truly kick-ass grandmothers. I say collection because in addition to my two grandmothers, all four of my great-grandmothers were still alive when I was a teen-ager (one lived until I was in my thirties).

My Great-grandma I. taught me how to make egg noodles from scratch, (which is the first step to making the World’s Best Chicken Noodle Casserole {which she also taught me how to make}), and that measuring cups are only guidelines. My Great-grandma S.J. taught me how to crochet, how to make biscuits from scratch, and how to listen in on the neighbors’ conversation on a party line (if you don’t know what a party line is, google it). Great-grandma B. taught me how to make ice tea with so much sugar, it was amazing the stuff would actually pour (and there is a secret, it’s not just about adding more and more sugar, although that’s an important part). I could go on, and on.

But during this time of year there are a couple things I regret never learning from my various grandmothers: I never learned Great-grandma S.J.’s heavy-cream-and-molasses sweet potatoes (I’ve found and tried some recipes, but so far, none come out right), and I never learned how to make Grandma P.’s frozen cranberry salad. I have recreated a close approximation, but it also isn’t quite right.

Every holiday when I get together with that side of the family, someone laments the absence of Grandma’s cranberry salad. I’m not the only one who has attempted to recreate it. Every version I’ve tried has been tasty, but it isn’t the same.

The funny thing is, that unlike most of the other dishes each of them was known for, this one wasn’t a really old recipe. Great-grandma S.J. once told me she’d learned how to make divinity from her own grandmother, for instance. It’s the reason she couldn’t write the recipe down, she’d have to show you. That had been the case with her homemade biscuits. When I make her biscuits I throw ingredients together and mix. If the consistency isn’t right, you add more of one of the ingredients, depending up how the consistency is wrong. It’s hard to describe. You have to experience it.

Grandma P.’s cranberry salad was something she started making when I was an adult. She’d seen it on a cooking show, she said, and just gave it a try. We know it involves canned cranberry sauce (the chunky kind), whipped cream, canned mandarin oranges, and some kind of jell-o. After that, none of us are sure. Or, more truthfully, we had contradictory memories. Some of us insist it had coconut, but others are certain it had marshmallows, for instance.

The thing that I don’t want to say to any of the family: I bet all of our contradictory memories are right. It fits right in with Grandma’s style of cooking. “Oh, I don’t have any shredded coconut? Hmmm, oh here’s some marshmallows, maybe they will be good…”

And probably the real reason it never tastes right, is because it’s missing the most important ingredient. The one we can never replace…

Turn-overs

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A couple days ago we learned that our old car, which we traded in the second Saturday of May when we bought the Outback, has apparently been sold.

I learned this because whoever bought it as been driving back and forth across the 520 bridge without a Good To Go™ pass beginning on May 27. So I was mailed a bill for their tolls. Continue reading Turn-overs →