On the Edge of Ideal

Yech! The holiday season is upon us. I don’t mean to be a scrooge, but sometimes the baggage from both past and present gets in the way of the spirit. I’ve searched for the true meaning of Christmas for the past few years by simplifying my involvement with all of it. It’s been easy paring down from the merry mania I see in the malls. For one thing, my husband is Jewish, and my oldest daughter converted to Judaism long before she met her Israeli-born husband. My stepson only celebrates Christmas when he and his wife go to Wisconsin for his mom’s family gift exchange. My other daughter, once an annual participant in Chicago’s Tuba Christmas, is worried about raising her daughter amid the consumerism of the season. In other words, everyone in our immediate family has reasons for not joining in the seasonal buying and decorating frenzy. And my mother? Well, she’s going to be 87 next week and is perfectly happy not getting out in holiday traffic. Finding Christmas presents for everyone, wrapping the gifts then standing in a long post office line to mail out packages are a little too much for her this year.
Gift buying isn’t the only problem, though. It’s the over-the-top feel of the whole season, from spending hundreds of dollars on icicle lights for the house and plastic snowmen placed next to plastic nativity scenes in yards, to Christmas music played right after Halloween hands out its last treat. This time of year women all over the country go into crash mode as they rev up their engines trying to fit thirty extra tasks into their already full schedules. Moms with fulltime jobs and kids to chauffer begin looking for extra hours in the day to write Christmas cards, decorate a tree, attend Holiday school pageants, bake two dozen holiday cookies, select, buy, wrap and send gifts to family members who already have everything a human being could possibly want.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t an assault on the original Christian holiday. It’s a diatribe against the whole November through December season, including Thanksgiving with its airport madness and New Year’s Eve celebrations with $150 a plate gala champagne dinners with a dessert of drunks on the roadway. We don’t even catch our breaths until January when a bout of flu enforces a slow down or two feet of snow closes the roads to the malls. Then the list making and multi-tasking are put on hold, and we’re obligated to just sit because our huge SUV can’t forge through the mountain of snow at the end of our driveway or wires downed by ice have killed all things electrical include our major distractors, computer, TV and radio.
This year I’ve simplified my gift giving by mailing each of the grandkids one present in mid-November. At Thanksgiving I gave a piece of pottery found at a local art show to each of the kids. And last week I sent out my annual Family Calendar created and paid for online. I’m not sending out Christmas cards this year because I’ve already sent enough emails about our last big trip and the birth of our two grandchildren. I even attached a family photo in my last group email. Thank you Hotmail!
Instead I’m looking for the meaning of the season by connecting to my roots… food. I’ve been baking stollen, and Springerles, German and Swiss recipes handed down from my two grandmothers . I really didn’t care for either of them as a kid, and definitely didn’t appreciate the effort it took to make them. Now as a grownup I love dunking the anise-flavored springerles in my morning coffee, and slicing a piece of stollen dotted with almonds, raisins and cranberries for breakfast. My job each year is to perfect the previous year’s batch. My first endeavor ended in loaves of stollen as big as rugby footballs and last year I burned the springerles. This year I produced more manageable sized loaves, and the cookies looked like they were supposed to: white puffy pillows with a springerle design pressed on top.
Yesterday we had our annual Thanksmas dinner with three other couples that live here in Seattle. My cousin, my old school friend, and Leo’s college friend and their husbands are each special to us these are friendships with a long history. I was in charge of the mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing and cranberry sauce, and everyone brings a dish to share. Leo cooked two turkeys, one smoked and the other barbequed on the Weber grill. He and his son were also in charge of cooking two turkeys at our Missouri Thanksgiving.
In my family, my mother cooked the turkeys for both Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. That was her job. It was my father’s job to carve them. He also critiqued them, and in all the holidays that I can remember only once did I hear him say, “Babe, this turkey is absolutely perfect!” Once. My mom tried everything, bird-in-a-bag, a black enamelware roaster, shortening, oleo, butter, basted, injected, stuffed, unstuffed, frozen, or fresh. But the scenario was always the same. The hour to bring the baked bird out into the world would approach. Mom would nervously wipe her hands on her apron then don her oven mitts. We’d all gather in the kitchen as she’d carefully open the oven door, reach in and slowly extract the bird. “Ooh”s and “Aaahh”s could be heard by her supportive admirers as she carefully sat the bird on top of the stove. It was a sight to behold. The tom turkey was always over 20 pounds, the skin a golden brown. Except that one year she cooked it inside a grocery bag when the skin stuck to the greasy brown paper, and its color was more of a bitter chocolate.
After the required waiting period my father would approach with his newly sharpened carving knife and fork. Breaths were held in anticipation as he sliced that first slab from the breast of the turkey. He’d cut a small piece off to taste it... “Hmmm, it’s too dry,” he’d usually say, shaking his head. And my mother’s smile would melt like the oleo she had quickly spread over it right before dad had begun to carve. At the dinner table the members of our extended would over-do the compliments, trying to undo the damage of Dad’s declaration of eternal dryness. Perhaps that was why, when I cooked my very first turkey years later, my turkey was as raw inside as a rare piece of prime rib. Better rare than the dreaded “dry.”
But now that I think about it, it probably wasn’t Mom’s cooking method, timing or the temperature. She was cooking a monster bird with a stove that didn’t quite roast evenly. Even though I’ve avoided that responsibility by turning over the cooking of the turkey to my husband, I will never pronounce a turkey to be dry. It isn’t in my vocabulary. Maybe cooked a little too long, or maybe the meat a little too tough, but never dry.
But Leo’s turkeys are usually very good. And this year they were all perfect. Four out of four. Although he’s adopted his son’s brine method, his own secret to success is still the same. He’s a born nurturer. From the time he gets up (5 am) to make the fire for the smoker, he’s constantly playing with the fire, adding more coals, turning the turkey, pouring off the grease, having a beer, taking off the lid to stoke the flames, taking a shot of bourbon, putting on the lid to keep the flames low and starting all over again. Total, uninterrupted attention. It’s a labor of love, he says. He also loves the bourbon.
“It’s on the edge of ideal,” Leo said as he re-entered kitchen after checking up on his turkeys. Wow, I said to myself as I placed small loaves of stollen into little gift bags, that was really profound. Or maybe he’s had a little too much bourbon.
“You mean cooking turkey. Or do you mean this whole wonderful Thanksmas tradition we’ve started?”
“No, I meant the gauge on the smoker; it’s showing me the heat inside is almost at the ‘ideal’ mark,” he said matter-of-factly. I gave him a second look then went outside to the deck and looked on the side of the smoker. The guage read “Low”, “Ideal” and “Hot,” and he was right, the red indicator was on the left side of “Ideal.”
Ah, the literal meaning. I took it at face value and just agreed with him. And later that afternoon as we sat around the table, our empty plates giving evidence to our fulfillment, I thought to myself as I looked in the faces of people I’d known for much of my life, “Yes, this is on the edge of ideal.”

PEACE.