Keeping Holiday Traditions Alive

As we leave 2020 behind, the holiday feasts are memories to savor, and we look hopefully toward the future, have you thought about keeping a diary of your experiences? For most of us, I suspect that this unusual holiday season included some family traditions, but they might have been adjusted – and perhaps alternatives introduced.

My friend Christian is originally from Germany and now lives in Georgia. He kept traditions alive this year, although downsized, with a family dinner for his wife and daughter featuring beef fondue, a popular holiday meal back in Germany. Homemade sauces included curry mayonnaise with black currant jelly, horseradish, and aioli mayonnaise. As side dishes, he prepared small golden potatoes and a yellow-beet salad with chopped shallots in a balsamic vinaigrette.

Other local friends with German roots, the Loehles, followed a family tradition that has continued since David Loehle was small, and that’s going on 50-plus years. Though just for the immediate family this year, they ate their traditional Christmas Eve meal featuring German sausages: liverwurst, bratwurst, frankfurters, and leberkäse (a loaf of ground corned beef, pork, and bacon). I know the Loehle family story well because I recently wrote a biography of David Loehle’s parents, both children of German immigrants.

Creating new memories

As for my Christmas traditions, our friends Bill and Susan create a Christmas Eve Feast of the Seven Fishes every year for a crowd of about 20 friends and family. It’s a celebration that we all look forward to sharing – friendship, music, laughter, radiant lights and decorations, stories, and of course the delicious meal that brought us together. Every year on the day after Thanksgiving, Mrs. Farmboy has made a traditional English pudding, chilling it and letting the flavors develop until Christmas Eve. (Pictured is the 2019 pudding just out of the steaming pot.)

After the shrimp cocktail, smoked salmon and fried calamari, baked whitefish, puttanesca sauce with anchovies, and shrimp and scallops in white sauce, the guests gather and sing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas (bring me some figgy pudding!)” while the pudding is doused with brandy and lit by Bill and Susan’s son Peter. Then, once the blue flames slip away, everyone tucks into a small piece of the rich treat with traditional hard sauce, a mixture of butter, confectioner’s sugar, and of course more brandy.

There was no plum pudding this year, and no feast. But Bill and Susan cooked up a batch of puttanesca sauce and delivered it along with pasta and wine to their fortunate friends. We waved Merry Christmas from the kitchen door.

Instead of making the plum pudding, we took Farmboy’s own advice and baked holiday treats for our friends. We rode around delivering them the week before Christmas, enjoying a snowy evening tour of the beautifully lit homes in neighboring towns, decorated with creativity and care. It was a whole host of experiences worth recording. Will that become a new tradition for us?

Recording for posterity

Of course, those experiences encompass much more than the food; it’s the interaction with family and friends, the things that create the memories that build themselves into sagas. My son Ben has remarked that, when we get talking during family gatherings, he finds out things that he never knew about me and our family. In fact, he’s asked me to write down my stories – part of the reason for this blog series.

What stories and experiences will you want to share with family in the future? What traditions did you keep this holiday season, and what was new? How did you get through these difficult times? How will you archive them? Notebooks? Videos? Diaries? Photo albums with captions? How will you answer when a grandchild asks, “What did you do during the pandemic?”

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