Holiday Memories: Which Variety Shall Mama Make?
by Julie Tilsner

Once we become parents, we begin to fret about what, if any, seasonal traditions with which to indoctrinate Junior. After all, when we think back on our own childhoods, lots of us can dimly remember holiday-related traumas, so the same must be true of our own progeny.

So we jump. Traditions we’ve forgotten or purposely ignored since we moved away from home we now take out and dust off like so many Christmas tree ornaments. It doesn’t matter what background or religion you admit to; the symptoms are all the same. If you remember Frank Sinatra singing “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,’ you’ll dutifully go out and search the used-record stores for your own copy. (Or more likely, since you’ve likely got a toddler underfoot, you’ll cop for the easiest route and buy one online. The inventors of the web probably had no idea how valuable online shopping would be to parents.) Your husband will start pining for just the kind of mince meat pie his mom used to make, and he’ll proceed to make your life hell until you can either learn how to make it yourself or find the one shop in town that makes it (and it will never be as good). You may attempt to cook a turkey for the first time in your life. Problems will plague you in these attempts. Last holiday I got the silly notion into my head that I would roast some chestnuts. Nobody told me that I had to puncture the shells in some way before putting them into the oven, and I spent the next week cleaning chestnut shrapnel out of my oven.

Some traditions are more knowledge intensive than others. I have many Jewish friends who knew less about Judaism than your average Baptist preacher until they had children. Then it was a mad scramble to get back up to speed. They enrolled in classes. Their spouses converted. They’d dust off the Hanukkah songbook for the first time in years and ponder the question, “Just where does one get a shank bone in this town, anyway?” In a traditional Jewish Seder, or Passover dinner, the youngest child is called upon to ask Four Questions, including the all important, “Why is this night unlike any other?” (Hint: It has to do with the Jews being led out of slavery in Egypt.) As soon as their child is talking at all, they spend countless hours getting him to utter those four phrases -- which the child will happily do until the guests arrive and the Seder is in progress. Then he’ll clamp shut.