Some holiday traditions are not for the faint of heart

GREG BEAN

A s I was grazing through the Greater Media Newspapers website last week, I came across a notice soliciting favorite family stories for their Holiday Traditions special section that will be published Dec. 19-20. “Does your family have a special holiday or festival tradition that helps mark the holiday and ties the generations together?” the announcement asked. “Tell us about the traditions that bring back cherished memories of days gone by. We will compile these heartwarming stories and images in a special edition. … to warm the hearts of readers.” Well, here are a couple of my favorite stories about family holiday traditions, although I don’t know if they’re the kind of tales the editors are looking for.

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In my family, it was a holiday tradition that everyone in the extended family congregated on Christmas Eve to share suspicious food and exchange weird presents. My all-time favorites were one of those singing fish, and a contraption for scraping iced automobile windows that involved a wire plugged into the cigarette lighter that heated the mitten you wore on your hand, and also heated the scraper so that it melted the ice. The singing fish scared the dog, which attacked and dismembered the thing the first time it opened its fishy lips. The first, and only, time I used the electric mitten de-icer, the thing shorted out and caused me to dance the Eskimo version of “Gangnam Style” right in the driveway.

My wife’s family had a much more restrained version of Christmas that involved cups of coffee laced with Baileys Irish Cream, and opening gift-wrapped sweaters in front of a blazing fireplace (“Oops, forgot to open the flue!”). Hers was a highly civilized gathering, and not a soul, to my knowledge, had ever turned up wearing a Cadillac sweatshirt, festooned with festive red and blue battery-powered headlights at strategic points on the breast, like one of my female cousins had done the previous year.

Like many young couples with small children, however, there was always a lot of angst about where we would spend the holidays, since both families wanted us to spend it with them, and they lived about 300 miles apart.

So, one unfortunate year, we worked out a complicated plan that involved us driving those long winter miles to her parents’ house, where we would celebrate Christmas on Dec. 23, and then we’d hop in the car and drive back to the town where we, and my family, lived, so we could endure their particular brand of holiday torture on Christmas Eve.

Problem was, we stopped at a fast-food place on the way out of town, and all contracted especially virulent cases of food poisoning.

The effects of our maladies continued unremittingly throughout the celebration. (“Of course I’d like a coffee with Baileys!” Gaaaarp! “That’s a beautiful turkey, Nana!” Bleuuch! “I ate all the red and green M&M’s, Grandpa!” Ewaaaagh! The baby, who could not talk yet, simply got a sour look on his face before exclaiming, “ Aaaaaghuhwah!” and spewing something that might have been sweet potatoes all over his new sweater.

Needless to say, the family gathering was shorter than usual that year, and we spent the long night running from our beds to the communal bathroom in the hall. By next morning, we were no better off when we mounted up for the drive home. Again, the trip was punctuated by regular stops at the borrow ditch so one of the parents or children could heave, but by the time we finally made it to my aunt’s house, where the family gathering was being held that year, we were marginally improved, at least healthy enough to walk from the car to the house under our own steam.

There my aunt met us at the front door holding a platter upon which rested an entire smoked salmon, eyeballs and all. “I made this just for you,” she said. “And Pastor Rasmussen sent over a plate of lutefisk (a Norwegian dish of whitefish soaked in lye until it becomes a quivering, gelatinous, and highly odiferous mass) that he says you’re just going to love!”

“Gaaaarp!” “Bleuuch!” “Ewaaaagh!” “Aaaaaghuhwah!”

The next year, we moved almost a thousand miles away, and developed our own holiday traditions, none of which involved smoked fish still sporting their eyeballs.

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My friend Al has another priceless holiday tradition story, also curiously involving fish. Seems that he and the woman he was married to at the time were called to attend a gathering of her family that included her parents, her siblings, aunts and uncles, many children, and two grandmothers. Their particular holiday tradition involved starting the Christmas feast with a large bowl of clam chowder prepared by his then-mother-in-law.

Although he’s too much of a gentleman to suggest that alcohol might have been responsible for what happened, he does note that his mother-in-law had been growing increasingly absentminded, so she might not have noticed when an unusual ingredient fell into the pot. I’ll let him take it from here:

“So there we were, sitting at the table, and my mother-in-law is dishing up the chowder, but when she comes to Grandma Lillian, the chowder makes a loud plunk as it’s ladled into her bowl. Clam chowder is not supposed to go plunk! I’ll never forget the look on Lillian’s face when she dipped her spoon into that bowl of chowder, and came out with my mother-inlaw’s entire partial plate, teeth, gums and all!”

He then goes on to describe mass projectile vomiting, but I’ll spare you the details, which are just about what you’d imagine.

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I sure hope they include our stories in the special section. We don’t have photographs, but would be happy to draw crayon depictions from memory. P.S.: Al says that if you’re at loose ends this holiday season, you’re welcome at his house. He’s making clam chowder.

Gregory Bean may be reached at [email protected].