Question #4:
Do you have a traditional Christmas (holiday) dinner that you prepare year after year? If so, what is it?

In honor of Thanksgiving, I posted my family’s turkey and stuffing recipe, as invented and perfected by my grandfather. I’ve heard two stories about it’s origin, one that he invented it while overseas during WWII, when supplies couldn’t get through, the other that he created it much later. In either case, it’s the ultimate holiday flavor for me.

And yet, there are others. Pfefferneusse cookies were introduced to me by my mother, and at dinner, along side the turkey and cranberry sauce (always fresh, never from a can), there was always lasagna. It’s a rule, you know, that Italian families cannot have a big meal that doesn’t include pasta. My grandfather introduced me to coconut macaroons, and they’re still a favorite, and peppermint stick ice cream is just too cool to miss (no pun intended).

It’s aglio e olio, however, that brings back the most memory. Literally meaning garlic and oil, this is a pasta sauce of diced garlic and olive oil, sometimes with other herbs and lemon – but NOT a pesto – and NO pine nuts. It’s simple peasant food, and we always had it on Christmas Eve, and Easter. In my family, with their New Jersey Neapolitan accents, the Italian pronunciation has morphed to the very East Coast “Ahlya Awlya,” though the recipe has remained largely unchanged.

Food, like music, has the ability to transport me to different times, different places. Aglio e olio makes me an innocent seven-year-old, ice skating with my mother on weekends, or meeting her after school for cocoa in the vault-turned-sewing room at the back of her store. It is loud, boisterous family parties, and quiet contemplative evenings in the glow of the Christmas tree lights. Mostly, though, it is the warmth of my mother’s love, and her tireless work to make every Christmas magical.

Studio 60 made me cry this week. I don’t generally get so invested in television shows that I’m moved to tears by anything that occurs, though I’m perfectly capable of willfully suspending disbelief when I choose to, but this was special. It was, in fact, a magical moment in a medium that has largely forsaken magic in favor of money.

I’m writing, of course, of the four minutes at the end of the show, where musicians from Tipitina’s played an instrumental version of “O Holy Night” on an empty stage, with b roll footage of New Orleans playing behind them, and faux snow falling only at the end. Was it part of the story? Yes. It wasn’t the a-plot or even the b-plot, but there was an on-going thread about studio musicians all over the city calling in sick and letting musical visitors from New Orleans sub for them, thus earning union cards and Christmas paychecks. Was it hokey? Maybe a little. Was it effective? Absolutely.

We’ve long known that music can heal, that music can unite, that music can educate, but seeing it in action is vastly different from the purely intellectual “knowing.” I’m reminded by something that either Peter Yarrow or Noel Paul Stookey said during one of Peter, Paul and Mary’s concerts, years ago, that we are all adept at lying when we speak, but that it’s impossible to lie when we sing.

I’m not the most knowledgable person about jazz and blues. I know I like the genre, I have artists toward whom I gravitate, and favorite cd’s, but I learned Monday night, that just as you cannot lie when singing, you cannot hide your heart behind a trumpet, a sousaphone, a saxophone. The men on that stage played from the heart, and invoked the kind of magic that is found in the best performances, the kind that makes you cry real tears even though you’re not sitting in a concert hall, but curled up with your dogs on a plush red sofa, watching network television.

It was holiday magic, in the best form.
And I feel changed, improved, and more whole because of it.

(NBC is offering free downloads of the mp3 here.)

If you were a photographer who was given the chance to go back in history to capture a Christmas (Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/New Year’s Day) photograph, where would you go and what year would it be?

I’ve been mulling over this on and off all day, as I read others comments, wrote letters to soldiers stationed in Korea and Iraq, worked on some fiction, and really, I’m at a loss for anything historical or particularly poignant with the possible exception of the first performance of Silent Night, on a cold night in Germany, with a guitar for accompaniment.

For a moment, I can almost see it, and then my mind snaps back to reality, and I think about my favorite Christmases, and what snapshots I wish I could have, and the thing is – I have them already, on film and in my memory – all the times my mother made miraculous Christmases on no money, all the times she filled the house with love and magic, even when it was just the two of us, and the nearest relatives were across the country. I remember my ideal Christmas, spent with Aunt Peg and her son Jay and his wife Allison, our first year in California, when they heard we were alone for Christmas and insisted we come visit them immediately – for that night I knew what it was like to have sisters and brothers and a huge family, and for one night I loved it, but I was grateful to get home to my own life, too.

I wouldn’t mind a photograph of my first Christmas with Fuzzy – not the part with his family, which was actually quite nice, in spite of my shyness, but the ride back to his apartment, after , through snow-covered prairie, under starry wintry skies. We pulled off the road and made love in the cadillac under pine trees and the stars. Cadillacs, by the way, do not retain heat terribly well.

I’d love to have had a photo of the first time I hosted Christmas Eve for my family, when my grandmother was still lucid, and for that matter, alive, and we melted the pewter sugar bowl when we stuck a second log in the wood stove. I remember the laughter and the warmth, but not the faces.

Mostly, though, I’d have loved to see a picture of my grandfather’s first Christmas at home after being overseas for so many of the early years of his marriage to my grandmother, because I’m sure that was special and tender.

What’s the biggest change in your life since last December?

I was going to write that the biggest change in my life since last December is that I’m not working full time, but since I’m starting a new job on January 2nd, that’s not quite accurate. Anyway, I’d not been working full time before I began at BigFinancialCompany.

So has anything changed? Well, I’ve become a lot more aware of what I want from life. Improv is helping that a lot, but the time at BFC really brought home to me that I’m as good or better as the rest of the people who work in the mortgage industry, and that I’m much happier when I’m in charge, even if the only person I’m in charge of is myself. Autonomy and flexibility are worth more to me than any money, and even though things have been a little tight around here this last month or so, I’m in a much better place. I mean, I spent the last three months at BigFinancialCompany coming home two or three hours after my scheduled ending time, so tired I was in tears, not sleeping well, and then going back in two or three hours early. NO JOB is worth that.

Is it wrong that I’m just not comfortable in a corporate environment? I don’t think so. I went through a stage where I felt like I wasn’t a real person without a demanding high-paying job, but I’m better now. Fuzzy and I can have dinner together, and I don’t have to rush through so I can get to bed. I’m cooking and baking again. I’m sleeping better. I’m writing more. All in all this has been the best decision I ever made.

For the longest time, I would see all the yellow “support our troops” signs in our neighborhood, and bitch about them First I was annoyed because the HOA set them up in front of everyone’s houses without bothering to ask, and then I was angry because really, I don’t think people are sporting those signs because they particularly care, but because everyone else is. Those t-shirts that say “I support whatever’s trendy” are more accurate than most of us care to admit. (They’re also funny, and I want one, but that’s beside the point.)

Around Halloween, I took the sign I’d ripped out of the lawn back out of the dusty spiderweb-infested back corner of the garage and put it back out, not because I felt like our lawn was somehow naked or incomplete, but because I realized I actually know real people who are in the military, even if I only know most of them via blog, and I support them, even if I might disagree with their views. They’re the human face for me. They’re the people who make it real.

So, last night, I was surfing websites and watching the tivo’d American Girl movie about Molly and WWII, and found blogs talking about sending Christmas cards to soldiers overseas, and I was reminded by the letters my grandparents had written back and forth, when he was overseas during that generation’s war. His always ended with a plea for another letter.

And I thought about how much I love getting mail – even now. I mean, email’s great, but snailmail is SPECIAL. It’s more real somehow.

So this morning, I picked a site I liked – Soldier’s Angels, and adopted a soldier. I gave them my name and contact info. They gave me the name and APO address of a woman currently in Iraq. The deal is to send a letter a week, and a small parcel or two once or twice a month, both things I can easily do, and will cost me less than what I generally spend on designer coffee in a similar length of time. My intro letter has already been sent (I *just* made today’s mail pickup) and there’s a goody basket on its way. Am I a sucker for doing this? Maybe. Do I agree that the other women and men who do this are angels, as they call themselves? Well, there are many definitions of angel. So, I guess I can accept the term, in a sense roughly akin to the theatrical backer usage, because I don’t think there’s anything particularly angelic about reaching out in basic human kindness. I mean, we all live here together, we have a responsibility to give back in whatever way is individually appropriate.

And the thing is, whatever my feelings are about the war – this war, any war – (and I’m a California liberal, so you can pretty much guess), the men and women who are actually fighting it are not at fault. They’re doing jobs I wouldn’t consider doing, and risking life and limb to do it. And that deserves respect.

After all, it’s Christmas.
And even just being on a business trip is rough enough at Christmas.

So really, I decided to do it for him, for them. For their stories of being under blackout conditions in Panama, for my grandmother’s endless repetitions of the tale of her return by (commandeered) cruise ship to the US, and the zig-zag course it had to sail, for their 50 years of marriage, and for the man who, years later, while watching CNN’s coverage of Desert Storm, took out a globe and explained to her exactly how that part of the world related to the parts she knew, her beloved Italy, her even more beloved America, with loving patience and endless repetition.

And I hear his words in my head right now, a phrase from one of my grandfather’s letters to my grandmother: “You looked like an angel, my angel.”