When I stuff the turkey on Thanksgiving, I use Pepperidge Farm Herb Stuffing Mix. That's how it all begins. Just a little crack n tradition. One year you don't make turkey dressing from scratch, and before you know it you're ordering the holiday dinner package from Colonial Cafeteria. Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to convenience foods. The Pepperidge Farm stuffing. The Betty Crocker canned frosting. The Sara Lee cheesecake.Tradition slippage is something I’m concerned about as a parent. I want my Rachel to be part of a heritage that I learned from Mom and Grandma. I want her to use a special Christmas tablecloth, and not because Martha Stewart is promoting an eggplant-and-fern color scheme for the holidays. I want her to realize that buying birthday cakes from Kroger—or even from La Madeleine—is against the rules: real cakes are made from scratch, and on birthdays you use the favorite recipe of the birthday person (pineapple upside-down cake, in Grandpa’s case). I want her to see that rolling out biscuit dough and cutting it into powdery circles with a glass dipped in flour is more fun than rapping that Pillsbury Doughboy on the ass and arranging sticky lumps one inch apart. Will my Pepperidge Farm stuffing shortcut—innocent though it seems—lead Rachel to a life of Tater Tots and Hamburger Helper?
I know, I know. This is the era of cell phones and Starbucks, and you’d have to be seriously underemployed not to use convenience foods regularly. All lanes are the Fast Lane. Convenience foods are made for, well, our convenience. I accept that. I’m neither a Luddite nor an ecofanatic. I do not live in an old farmhouse using a wood stove for heat, buying only unrefined sugar. I live in Washington, DC. I pick up deli food at Sutton Place Gourmet with the best of them. I would not want to give up my morning Eggo Waffle, snatched from the toaster on the way out the door.
But there are times when fast food just won’t do. Our family Thanksgiving is a heritage I have to offer Rachel. I want her to learn to do it “our way.” Isn’t that, after all, the reason we have children in the first place? I’ve lived for many years halfway across the country from my family in Michigan, so to compensate for the absence of relatives at the holiday table, I always invite a dozen friends—waifs, like us, with no family nearby. Waifs being what they are, the guests change from year to year, though there is now a core group of three or four who have come to consider dinner at my house their own annual ritual.
The before-the-day preparations are a sine qua non of the ritual. Ironing the tablecloth and napkins, which have been dampened by sprinkling. No spray starch. No steam. No Permaprest. Making the pies—pumpkin and apple and raspberry, and not with Pet-Ritz pie crust, either, but with real crust, rolled out on a floured countertop. Grinding the cranberries and orange peel for the cranberry relish. Not with the Cuisinart. I clamp the hand-cranked grinder (a garage-sale find) to the table and fill the hopper with the plump red berries, which crunch and pop as they are mashed. Some juice always drips from the bottom of the grinder, so, just like Mom, I place a bowl beneath it on a chair.
On Thanksgiving day, I get up at 5:30 to make the turkey stuffing and get the bird ready for the oven. Some families have Thanksgiving dinner in the evening, but our dinner is at 1:00. And the turkey is always 20 pounds or more, which is why it has to go in the oven by 7:00, and why I always invite a dozen waifs. That’s how we did it when I was growing up, so there it is.
Except for the stuffing. One year, shopping at 10:30 on Sunday night before Thanksgiving, I stood before the shiny bags of stuffing mix on display at Albertson’s. I picked one up to read the instructions: “Just add water” (which, being translated, reads “Wide is the gate”). I bought two bags. Oh, sure, I sauté celery and onions to “make it my own,” as the package says, but I’m not kidding myself that such tinkering takes the place of laying out bread slices to dry overnight. I started down the broad path, and I never went back.
Stuffing mix aside, so far I’ve held on to Thanksgiving and some of the other celebrations in my jihad against Tradition Slippage. But I have conceded many battles. An entire canon of domestic arts has been surrendered—sewing and knitting and crocheting, for example—skills my mother learned from her mother and passed on to me. The other day I was sewing up a rip in Rachel’s jeans, threading the sewing machine and checking the tension, and I remembered when Mom taught me to sew—on that very Singer Featherweight. I was 10 years old and we made a pair of flannel pajamas for me—pale green with little yellow and pink horses. I learned the word “placket.” But I have not taught Rachel to sew. How could I, when I have quit sewing myself? The maternity clothes I made when I was carrying Rachel is the closest we ever came to sewing together.
Grandma was an expert knitter. Of the many items she made, my favorite was a sweater she knit for me when I was six—dark green, with elves jumping over toadstools. Rachel wore it when she was six, too, and many times I’ve told her how Grandma called me to her side to measure the sleeve against my extended arm, and that’s when I knew she was making it for me. I love that sweater, tucked away now in the cedar chest for some future granddaughter. Grandma told us that knitting socks for the family was one of the things she and her sister had to do at ages six and seven. I marveled at that as the needles cramped my sweaty hands during my first knitting project, at age 13. I was making a pair of bright red booties for my first niece. Quelle ordeal! But how proud I was when my sister folded back the tissue paper and saw my handmade gift!Some domestic traditions passed down to me were more mundane. Take ironing. Before steam irons, I mean. Now there’s a lost art. Sprinkling takes a special touch to obtain just the right dampness, and each shirt, each tablecloth, has to be rolled up to sit for at least an hour to let the moisture spread evenly. I was the youngest of three girls, and therefore the last to learn each task. My first real go at sprinkling came when my older sisters were at camp for a week. Mom never said anything to me, but I read in the letter she wrote to my sisters, “Marian sprinkled the wash. It was so wet I almost had to wring it out.”
Ironing, sewing, cooking—these are traditions that have slipped during my watch. But why choose the hard way? Mom herself was open to shortcuts. Those great biscuits she let me cut out after she rolled out the dough? Bisquick! And I remember she tried a ready-mix cake or two. They were dry, and whether chocolate or lemon, they tasted something like rye crisp, which is precisely why Mom shunned them. But Betty Crocker has learned a thing or two since then, and now box cakes can pass the blindfolded taste test. Convenience creep is inevitable. No doubt some great-great grandmother of mine dropped churning butter and spinning thread when the packaged products became available. I consider this progress.
For all of the warm memories I have about my inheritance from Mom and Grandma, part of my heritage was also the responsibility for preparing meals. Not just for Thanksgiving dinners and other special occasions, but day in and day out. While Rachel has not learned some of the traditions, neither has she inherited that sense of responsibility. She represents the first generation in my family to be freed from the assumption that cooking and laundry are the domain of the women. She has seen that both men and women can cook and iron. Now that's progress.
I have kept Thanksgiving and a few other traditions as my gift of family heritage to Rachel. Call it Tradition Tokenism. But in truth, repeating the Thanksgiving rituals is as much for me as for Rachel. I like grinding the cranberries because it makes me feel close to Mom. And I like seeing Rachel repeat my childhood jobs—getting out the fancy dishes and stemware to set the table, arranging the relish plate.
“Why do we only have black olives at Thanksgiving?” she asks.
“Just because,” I say, giving her Mom’s answer.
“I’m going to make place cards!” she announces, just as I did, and I smile, just as Mom did.
But still, I wonder. Have I held the line sufficiently? Have I passed on enough of Grandma and Mom so Rachel won’t forget them? Will Rachel want to carry on the traditions?
Deep down, I still have doubts. Maybe I should have taught her how to can tomatoes.
