Three days before flying to Iowa for Christmas, we canceled. Flights, parking, rental car, AirBnB: all shut down. The hours spent choreographing the trip evaporated with three clicks and one phone call. Letting family know we weren’t coming: four phone calls to my brothers, my sister, and my mom and dad. Bill and I telling our sons Will and Liam: a quiet night in the living room with the Christmas tree sparkling oxymoronically in the background.
Oxymorons often give my essays a flickering start. I’m taken with juxtaposing words and ideas; their presence floats whimsy over my keyboard. But betrayal and falsehood hung in the air at the point where Christmas light and travel truths converged.
With relief in the decision being made, a pivot was required: What was the plan for Christmas at home this year? Or, to acknowledge a more frightening question, what is our family’s Christmas tradition in Massachusetts?
Bill had made Beef Wellington for Thanksgiving, and we agreed on that for the roast beast. Our sons do not like turkey. Needing the smell of turkey to complete Thanksgiving in Massachusetts, I roasted a small turkey breast—to the point that it was as dry as turkey jerky. A Christmas Beef Wellington would be wonderful. I asked of Bill, “What else do you need to make it Christmas dinner? I need mashed potatoes…”
To which he replied, “Roast parsnips and carrots. Liam will want Yorkshire pudding.”
And as for Will, I knew beef and mashed potatoes would suffice.
I made a grocery list for all items we would need from December 23rd through December 26th. I sent Bill to one store for the beef roast. Then texted him four more times to add Liam’s favorite croissants, plus a half pound of sliced turkey, a wedge of Manchego cheese, and a tub of cubed English cheddar. I wasn’t looking forward to shopping with crowds of people, but when I hit my grocery store around 2 p.m., there was a strange lull. At the self-checkout, there was only one person ahead of me.
Back at home, with sustenance addressed, I wandered aimlessly through Christmas memories, looking for bits and pieces to glean from Christmases past. Honestly, it would be so much easier to fall into the patter of Christmas with family either in Iowa or England. With extended family, there is guidance—a North star of tradition. No plan emerged. Only a void warmed momentarily with memories.
On Christmas Eve morning, I FaceTimed with Mom, and she asked me when we opened our presents. Christmas morning—but wait, could we open theirs with them on Christmas Eve? And could Mom do a reveal for all the gifts we had shipped directly to her house? Yes and yes! Growing up, we always opened our presents on Christmas Eve. At 6 p.m. we relit that tradition: My family clustered around the iPad on the table and took turns sitting in the opening-presents-seat. We looked directly into Mom and Dad’s happy faces and talked one-on-one with them as we opened gifts together. Mom unpackaged the mint colored velvet blanket for Liam and as she showed it to him, she assured him of its softness. Dad unwrapped his fleece long johns from us, then Bill modeled his new fleece top from them. Will received a rain check on new shoes, and I thanked them for the new Dutch oven I’d already been using for a couple of weeks. I held up a card with “FaceTime for another year!” written across the top; our annual gift of internet connections like this for another year.
We laid out the Christmas Day plan for the family before we went to bed Christmas Eve: everyone out of bed at 11; unwrap gifts; cook together at noon; eat around 2; movie in the afternoon. Will asked, “Mom, are we having apple pie?” “Cook together at noon” would include our first ever attempt at my grandma’s apple pie. A quick look at the recipe in the back of my book confirmed we had all the ingredients.
Christmas morning unfurled. I took hot cocoa upstairs to the boys at 11. It’s what Bill’s mum June did for us over the years whenever we were visiting her: tea in bed—every morning, not just Christmas morning. I put bacon in the oven and donuts in the air fryer, the latter a first time experiment. Liam came downstairs and to the smell of bacon, he beamed, “It smells like Iowa!” And the donuts were more like hard and sweet soft pretzels: a science experience that needed some tweaking.
We unwrapped presents then moved to the kitchen island. It transformed to a workshop with separate stations to prep Beef Wellington, veggies, and apple pie. I dusted off one of my great-grandma’s glass pie plates. It had only been a display artifact in all the years I’ve had it up to this point. Will and I made the dough and piled apple slices high above the rim of the plate. We followed the recipe to the letter, except I thought the heat should be lowered a bit given we were using a glass plate as opposed to metal. (Mushy apples resulted and the temperature change was duly noted so as not to repeat that mistake in the future.)
The roasted veggies—to which Bill added potatoes at the last minute—were pulled out of the oven to make room for the Yorkshire pudding. The rapid and multiple oven openings lowered the temperature so that the puddings took longer than normal to rise and turn golden. This gave the spilled oil from their muffin cups more time to fill the kitchen with smoke. I opened windows in the kitchen and living room and finally opened the back door fifteen minutes before dinner was ready. And five minutes before dinner, I boiled green beans from a can, drained them, and melted two slices of Kraft cheese over the top. Then, three minutes before dinner, I microwaved a can of corn. Both represented (mocked or mimicked?) the bowls of farm-to-table corn and beans that Mom makes to go with braised roast beef dinners.
Bill and I went from not needing much in the way of traditional food to scurrying around putting our English and Iowa vegetable staples on the table, including roasted Brussel sprouts—an English tradition thrown in by me about the same time Bill added roasted potatoes to the menu. Just like other Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners prepared in Massachusetts, my plate and Bill’s were heaped with foods reaching fifty years into our pasts. Will and Liam’s were sparse in comparison; their traditions are young yet.
Thanksgiving past: Great Grandma Whittier’s table leafed-out and ready to be set at Mom and Dad’s. Here’s her story—the table’s story: Braised Roast Beef.
Thanksgiving past: Tables ready to seat seventeen of us at Mom and Dad’s.
Somewhere in the middle of all this dinner prep, Bill saw the clock read 3:10. We were missing the Queen’s speech! Every Christmas Day spent in England with Bill’s mum, the world stopped spinning at 3 p.m. to “watch the Queen on Christmas Day!” Fortunately, we have YouTube. While the veggies and beef were whiling away in the oven, we spent ten minutes with the Queen of England. At the end of the speech, I glanced at the unadorned wooden table where we would soon be eating. There has never been a holiday dinner in England or Iowa without a beautiful table setting. Tablecloth. I knew I had a red one in amongst the linens. I snatched it, four green cloth napkins in the same pattern, and a table runner of poinsettias outlined in gold. The cloth was for a long table; it hung heavily draped on our small round table for four. I remembered the holly bush outside our back door; it was covered in red berries this year. I ran out into the clammy English weather dousing Massachusetts and clipped twigs to lay on the runner. June, Bill’s mum, had holly growing in her garden at Christmas time. Christmas crackers were also an English tradition; I had some in one of the many tubs in the garage, but time was up. No one else mentioned them. They quietly disappeared from my vision of a well-laid Christmas table.
Once we’d cleaned up from dinner, we turned our attention to James Bond and apple pie with vanilla ice cream. Bill asserted that there had to be a James Bond movie—that’s what he watched after Christmas dinner in England when he was growing up. Before Bill started the movie, Will and I turned our attention to the pie. I checked three freezers in our house and came up a variety of ice creams: chocolate, mint chocolate chip, chocolate chip… and one box of ice cream sandwiches jammed at the very back of our fridge freezer in the basement. Will would have chocolate ice cream on the side, as in a separate bowl from his pie. I ripped the wrapping off of an ice cream bar, bearing light to crystalized vanilla ice cream between the chocolate layers. With a sharp knife, I carved off the chocolate from one side, tipped the sandwich on its side, sliced off the vanilla slab, and laid it stiffly over my pie. It wasn’t perfect, but it was apple pie ala mode—the only way I eat apple pie.
Christmas past: Dinner table set for six in England in the conservatory at Bill’s family’s house.
We ate our Christmas dinner late enough that we didn’t need to worry about a proper supper. As evening drifted to night, I was relieved that this Christmas Day in Massachusetts was coming to a close. I opened the calendar on my phone to Christmas Day and set up events of the day to repeat every year on Christmas Day. I do not want to recreate “tradition” the next time we are celebrating Christmas Day in Massachusetts.
Unfortunately, the funniest event of the day is unrepeatable. When I woke up early Christmas morning, I picked up the kitchen and living room so there was less everyday stuff laying around. I made sure Santa had put the correct goodies in Will and Liam’s stockings. Then around ten, I went up to shower, leaving Bill in the living room. I took my phone with me to the bathroom; I’d gotten into the habit of playing Christmas music while getting ready, so after I showered, I pushed play on Michael Buble’s Christmas album. I heard the loud hum of music in another room but not on my phone. I turned the volume up. The music got louder in the other room. I hit pause then play again. The music turned on and off in the room below me. The kitchen.
Baffled, I let it play while having a scratching-the-head moment. Then there was a booming voice, “Siri, turn off!” And the music stopped. I looked at my phone and pushed play. Again, music in the kitchen. Again, Bill’s voice, “Siri, turn off!” I might have squealed in delight, for at that moment I realized I had magically gained control of the speaker in the kitchen! I switched to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”… “Siri, turn off!” … then to Pentatonix’s “Hark the Herald Angels Sing!” … “Siri, turn off!” … Finally, I turned on “our song”: “She Drives Me Crazy”… at which point the music in the kitchen went quiet, and melodies returned to my phone.
I don’t know how to connect my phone to the Siri speaker in the kitchen. I was curious as to how Bill worked out how to disconnect it. When I went downstairs, he showed me Siri’s unplugged cord. Today is the fourth day of Christmas and Siri is still silent.
Moments, often highly choreographed backstage, join together to make “tradition.” Then, there are unforgettable events, like that Christmas morning chortle, which cannot be lassoed into tradition.