Ravin's Ramblings

Christmas with my family is a lengthy event that actually begins about a month before hand. It begins with my mother, sister, and I gathering in mom's spacious farm house kitchen. The walls are painted butter yellow and the red and white checkered curtains accent her Kitchen-Americana hot pads and cutting boards. We gather there to begin the holiday baking. We start with the most annoying Christmas cookie ever devised. Klugens.

A klugen, it is a small, dark, crunchy German cookie that tastes and smells like black licorice. I say it is the most annoying cookie to bake for a couple of reasons, if the dough isn't the right temperature they won't turn out properly. The recipe (which cannot be halved, quartered, or otherwise reduced—woe on you if you should attempt such folly) makes about 600 cookies. For the first two reasons, it takes roughly a month to bake Klugens. But mostly these are the annoying cookies to make because the recipe is in German.

This wouldn't be a problem if I spoke or read German, but that skill left our family several generations back. It is now up to my father, who picked up a few fragments of the language while he was in the military, to translate this generations-old recipe. He takes painstaking measures to assist us…not painstaking for him, but for us.

He will lumber into the kitchen with his cane, hook a chair back with the end and slide it to the counter next to the coffee pot. He is perfectly situated to be completely in the way, and heaven forbid we should request he take up residence elsewhere. We need him, after all. Zucker, that means Sugar. Really, couldn't you figure that out on your own??? Give me a harder one. Don't you girls have this recipe memorized yet??? I've asked my mother on several occasions why we don't just write it down. Her response is to the point as she stares over the rims of her bifocals at my father. When your father no longer translates the klugens, we no longer have to make them. So we continue; my father te-heing in the corner over his own import to this endeavor while my mother and I add ingredients and beat the dough until our arms burn with fatigue.

Next comes Christmas shopping. My father has only recently discovered the convenience of shopping online, which cuts down on the number of shopping experiences we have with Dad. He usually meets either my sister or I (never both at the same time because all you kids ever do is bicker) at the mall. We walk into the Sears automotive department (because that's where the best parking is, according to my father) and he swings his cane wildly from side to side pointing out particular items and nearly cloths-lining small children. He cackles at my admonishments and tells me that they shouldn't get in the way.

Christmas shopping with my mother and sister, on the other hand, is equally as painful. We meet at the fountain in the middle, because we are all busy women with many presents to buy and we are serious about this business. I am on a mission: Get in, get the gifts I have already written on my list, and get it over with in as little time as possible. Unfortunately my mother and sister don't subscribe to the same battle plan.

They shop in a sensory extravaganza where you move through the store at the pace of two millimeters a minutes. My mother, a short blueberry shaped woman in her wool overcoat exclaims every few minutes at the good deals or unique merchandise. My sister, who is worse than my mother, has to touch everything. It doesn't matter if you quickly thumbed through that rack looking for that cashmere scarf you have on your list, you may have missed something and it is her God-given right to point out the error in your ways.

She will yell your name across the store, like a pet owner calling a dog and you have no choice then, because she will continue to yell your name growing louder and more annoyed at your lack of obedience. You have to stop, go back to where she is (usually about five feet from the entrance as she shops at a snail pace) touch the merchandise, feel the texture, smell it, and oooh and aaah over her good taste. If she doesn't think you've admired it thoroughly enough, she will bombard you with cornucopia of questions. Isn't it pretty? Don't you think Aunt Cleo would love this? Do you think this will match that white shirt I wore on Thanksgiving? Four days after you have entered the mall, you might be allowed to move on to the next store.

Finally, all the preparation for Christmas is over. The only thing left to do is gather the entire family for the feast. My sister and I, with our husbands in tow, head to Mom and Dad's Christmas Eve. My mother has recently become a little bit like the Queen Mum where church is concerned. She starts worrying early morning about the evening service. When most other mothers are baking copious amounts of homemade bread or straightening garland on the tree, mine is leaving roughly three messages an hour on my cell phone. She is wanting to know if I'm on my way yet, did my battery die because I'm not answering, am I out of reception because I'm close to getting there and reminding me, near panic stricken, that we only have two and a half hours to get to the church fifteen minutes away.

She says it is because the church fills up so fast and she doesn't like the metal chairs. I suspect it is because she wants to show us off. For years it was just my mom, sister, and I attending Christmas Eve service. We sat quietly in the folding chairs at the back or crammed into a pew with another family so large they have spilled over to take up three and a half pews. Now, since my sister and I are both married, it's get there early and sit right up in the front. Our family takes up an entire pew and not comfortably…being squished together is a badge honor my mother wears with pride.

With service over, we head home for a Christmas Eve feast. A feast that does not include any of the baking we have been doing for weeks on end, as the cookies are for Christmas. This is a small meal, by tomorrow's comparisons. My father complains about not being allowed to eat any of the cookies, set out for admiration. My mother explains by rote that he will spoil his appetite.

My mother has also started doing something strange at dinner. Whenever my sister, our husbands, Mom and Dad are all gathered for dinner, Mom says the blessing and then begins to cry. Mom's contradictory emotional display is an uncomfortable moment for all of us. We make jokes and tell her it's okay that she didn't make gravy, or blame each other for making Mom cry. She laughs, excuses herself and is back in a flash with some brown-and-serves fresh from the oven.

After the last dish is hand washed and put back in the china hutch, its present opening time. Opening a gift is on Christmas Eve is a tradition that goes back to when my sister and I were little and it was too hard to be good and wait until Christmas day to open your gifts. We were allowed one or two presents the night before. This year, mom was more excited then the rest of us. She grew impatient at our lack of enthusiasm and grabbed her pile of gifts, took them to the other room, and started opening them without the usual crowd participation, which outraged and amused us all at the same time.

The next day, it's a fight for who gets to use the one and only bathroom at my parent's house, and how long they've been in there, and when are we going to open the rest of our gifts? It is always an ordeal to get my father to open his gifts. He pretends not to be interested in them. It's a spectacle where we have to coax, encourage, and bribe him to open his presents and an even bigger ordeal to get him to hold it up to the camera without covering his face. There is nothing like a little family togetherness to make a bunch of adults act like children.

We skip breakfast and pile in to our cars to drive even further out of town, skipping lunch too, to spend the holiday with Dad's sister and her family. She is the oldest woman in our family now, and a sort of unofficial matriarch. What she says the family is doing is what the family does. The kind of woman that, if she were church-going, that would call you up and say I didn't see you Sunday morning, are you feeling well? And you would lie and say you were not and then be ashamed to the bone for being too hung over to attend service.

We arrive mid-afternoon, famished to near faintness. The house (which has two kitchens) smells of a million warm and wonderful things to eat. None of these things are we allowed to touch. There is a certain order to everything. You can't eat now or you will spoil your appetite. Didn't I mention earlier that our entire family starts cooking for this very event about a month prior? So you salivate over sugar cookies you can only look at and smell baked ham that will not be ready for a few more hours.

When the feast is finally prepared; something deeply primal takes control over your body. It is possible to practice self restraint just long enough to walk around the buffet and grab a sampling of the ten million dishes, the ham and the duck, the dilled carrots, the mashed potatoes (with gravy this time) and the seventy five types of holiday bread. Unfortunately, by the time you sit down at the table (my husband and I it is still the kids table because there are no more kids in our family—but this sometimes gets me out of doing dishes so I don't mind) you ravenously eat yourself into a food coma. At this juncture, there is a loss of roughly one hundred IQ points because all blood has been diverted from the brain to help in assisting a now happy digestive tract.

This is the culmination of the holiday, the grand finale. Even opening more presents after this doesn't compare to the actual event of good food and good wine. This is where the memories are shared and the stories are told. This is where photos are passed around the table after the forks and knives are still. This is where women with Q-Tip hair styles stand misty eyed behind the lenses of their Kodak. These are the events that make Christmas really Christmas. I hope yours was as wonderful and quirky as mine.