holidays

[tielan]

Happy Thanksgiving, Americans.

I hope it's a good day for y'all!

I'm one of those people for whom the term 'family' also means 'relatives'. I'd trust my relatives to look after me, to be there for me, to help me out of a hole - even one of my own making, and not to cheat me out of anything that's mine.

I'm not sure if that makes me 'lucky' or not. I'm not really sure it matters, except that I do have "family" - ie. people I can count on - which I firmly believe everyone should have and I know so many people don't.

Our traditions at this time of year are simply: a Christmas with the extended family (relatives and orphaned friends), plenty of food and drink and conversation and laughter, a chance to catch up with the relatives we've lost touch with in the last year.

Oh, and opening presents together on Christmas morning, before we go anywhere for lunch (which is the big meal for us). That's going to be tricky this year since stepbro 1 and his g/f are going to be in China on big travel journey over Christmas. We'll do something when they get back, but I think the stepdad will feel it on Christmas morning.

Otherwise, there's the traditions of Potato Salad (sour cream, boiled eggs, mayo), and Pavlova (there's never enough for seconds and never any leftover), Smoked Salmon, Prawns, Mum's Ohmygod Noodles, and Way Too Much Ham For Everyone To Finish. But that's just food.

There's no Putting Up Of The Tree for us (the tree's already up...my sister didn't take it down last Christmas), or carolling or, really, anything particularly specific.

My aunt on my father's side wants us to go around to her place for Christmas Eve Lunch with that side of the family, and I'm going to see if I can swing the time. We're not close the way we are with my mother's side of the family, but they're good people, even if my uncle is not exactly a thrilling conversationalist. And they're family.

I'm a little curious and I'm not sure I've ever asked this question before: what kind of traditions do you have for this time of year? Are they your own, carry-overs from your parents/family, or adopted from somewhere else? And do you enjoy this time of year, or do you look upon it with dread and loathing?

Comments

[thothmes]

where, I admit, I usually raided the bookcase

Ooooh, a woman after my own heart. I knew there was a reason I liked you! I met my best friend in later elementary school because she was called to the office to escort the new kid (me) to the classroom, and I took a look at the book in her hand, and being shy and desperate to say something to fill the silence, I blurted out "I'm a bookworm. Are you?" This got the conversational ball rolling like an Avalanche in the Himalayas, and by the time we hit the classroom we'd bonded over many a favorite tome. She grew up to become the editor of the New York Times "News of the Week in Review" section.

This would be a much more satisfactory reply regarding what we ate if I was more likely to remember the dishes by name instead of by appearance and taste.

My uncle (a professor of Criminal Law) had done some traveling in China when it first became possible for Americans to travel relatively freely there again, and he had studied Chinese cooking under Joyce Chen. He is an accomplished cook who has taken formal lessons in many and varied cuisines, and has traveled widely, and Joyce Chen was, in her day, the top Chinese chef in New York City. There is still a line of Asian cooking gear for sale with her branding. For the first few years he would call the restaurant ahead of time and discuss the menu and specials, make some suggestions of his own, and then we would show up at the appointed time and just feast, with no ordering, since we all opted for hot tea rather than sodas or other beverages. There was a particularly lovely very lightly battered flash-fried fish with scallions that we would get each year, and scads of veggie steamed dumplings and shrimp shu mai. There was a dish that had many snowpeas, carrots, and mushrooms with a sauce piquant with ginger and szezuan pepper, and another that had lobster, shrimp, scallops, squid, and one other seafood item (I seem to have forgotten what - maybe sea cucumber?) stir-fried on a bed of vegetables, there was a soup with rich broth and broad wheat-based noodles and a dark green leafy vegetable, and a plate of mixed vegetables, chinese cabbage, and tofu in a reddish not-quite sweet soy sauce based sauce which was delightful in part because of the abundant but hidden crunch of the cubed waterchestnuts, there was Peking duck with its attendant pancakes and hoisin sauce, there were scallion pancakes with dipping sauce, there were steamed baby bok choy, and beef with broccoli and cellophane noodles flavored with soy sauce. There was some indeterminate very crunchy white vegetable made into shreds and marinated in vinegar and then lightly sweetened that served to clear the palate. It was all washed down with pot after pot of hot tea. Afterwards there were oranges, the ubiquitous and very American fortune cookies, and an after dinner mint. Mealzilla, and very good and wide-ranging for a place as small scale as Vermont.

We are a large family (14 as a basis, and then there are orphans, strays, and boyfriends or girlfriends or in-laws that folks bring along), so we didn't eat much of any one thing, usually just a bit more than a taste, and we are a family of foodies, so if there was anything unusual on the menu that we hadn't ever heard of, or a taste combination that intrigued, we'd try it that year.

After a few years of the pre-ordered menu, everyone decided that folks were getting stressed by the necessity to get there right on time so the food would be at its best, and we just made a reservation and ordered from the menu. Each person chose a favorite dish, and there were always a few orders of old favorites that drew table-wide approbation, but the younger generation was thrilled to be able to order the lomeins and fried rices and fried pork dumplings that they so loved, and which the older generation had heretofore rejected as too pedestrian. By then I was diabetic, so we always placed an order of steamed vegetables just for me, and these were my "rice" to which I added bits of the various leaner meats, and a taste here and there of the sort of thing I could only eat in very small quantities. I saved my quality carb time for two of the steamed veggie dumplings and one shrimp shu mai.

And yeah, our family knows not to try to go out for Chinese on the Lunar New Year.

A favorite restaurant of ours in New York City's Chinatown is Joe's Shanghai, renowned for its soup dumplings, where the minced meat and mushroom filling and a cube of very rich frozen broth are enrobed in dumpling dough and then steamed until hot throughout. They had some of the most tender and wonderful squid dishes I have ever had. They also have very good pork bao and veggie bao.

My uncle once was in a restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown, and noticed an item that the Chinese speakers were ordering, but that was not on the menu. He asked if he could have some too. They were reluctant to do so, explaining many times that he would "Not like! Not like!", but he was insistant, and pretty sure that it would be worth the price of admission just to satisfy his curiousity. It turned out to be "thrice cooked pork fat" and while he was not about to snarf down the entire serving, he very much enjoyed getting a taste, and said that he felt that it would have been a very delightful dish if he had been a hard working peasant who subsisted on a high-rice diet with lean meat and veggies serving as the condiments, but as an indolent Westerner, eating a fairly high fat diet normally, it was a bit much.

My favorite desserts in Chinatown are the almond cookies, and the bean paste filled pastries with thin egg-yellowed flaky pastry, stamped in red. My brother likes to go Southeast Asian and get the durian fruit popsicles. My sisters and my eldest daughter like the green tea ice cream.