Christmas Eve

This post is dedicated to Wanda, my former mother-in-law.  When my first child had her first Christmas, I convinced Wanda to celebrate with us on Christmas Eve, while we spent Christmas Day with my family.  Recently she accused me (in good fun) of altering her traditional Christmas celebration all those years ago in order to forward my own agenda.  I beg to differ: circumstances being what they were, it was only her second, maybe third Christmas ever; hardly enough time to establish a tradition for me to break.  Also, my argument at the time was that Christmas Eve was much more special for my sister and me when we were little, so I was giving her a gift by giving her Christmas Eve.  She didn’t buy it.  So this is my written testimony.

My sister, Teri, and I spent Christmas Eve with Oma and Opa, my dad’s parents.  Oma would pick us up from home in Pasadena and drive us to her house in West Los Angeles, about a half hour away.  The roofline of her squat, green 50’s style ranch house was traced a sting of large odd-colored lights: orange mostly, with some blue and green, maybe a yellow or white somewhere in the strand.  A four-foot table-top Christmas tree greeted us when we walked in the door.  Presents were piled in the spare bedroom, all papered with the same paper.  Every year, the same paper!  White with red poinsettias, I believe, with some kind of strange goldish accents.  Either she hit a good sale once and bought tons of the same print, or she had one monster roll of the stuff.  I never knew which, and by the time I thought to ask she had run out and had no idea what I was talking about.

Oma spent all day fluttering in and out of the kitchen.  I never paid attention to what she was doing in there, except that she’d call us in to feed us boterkoek or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  I assumed they were none-of-my-business-and-I-wouldn’t-understand-anyway kinds of things.  So Teri and I spent the day playing with our Tinker Toys or Lincoln Logs, rolling around with Casey the keeshond, banging on the electric organ, or sitting on Opa’s lap while he read a Raggedy Ann and Andy story in his deep voice, smelling of tobacco and coffee.  Anything, really, to keep our minds off the presents we’d open after dinner.

Dinner was always the same:  spaghetti.  During the rest of the year Oma was the pot roast queen, and no meal…no meal…was served without homemade mashed potatoes.  Christmas Eve, however, was always spaghetti with meat sauce, green salad tossed with green onions, tomatoes, and Hidden Valley Ranch dressing, and homemade garlic bread with tons of Kraft parmesan cheese.  (I tried to convince Wanda to make spaghetti for Christmas Eve, but that was going too far.)

Once dinner was done and post-meal conversation had subsided, it was time for PRESEEEEENTS!!!  Oma and Opa had the uncanny ability to give us the perfect gifts.  Teri and I knew that the best presents of the year were hiding behind that perpetual sea of mono-wrap.  I still remember my ultimate favorites:  a Strawberry Shortcake jacket, Western Barbie, and a drop-waist mini-dress that reminded me of a figure skater.  If we got clothes, we’d stand in front of the heavy curtains hiding the sliding glass door and model for pictures.  By the time we were done oooing and aahing over the last present, the spent wrappings were already gone.

New clothes were kept on and worn to the candle light service at Culver City Presbyterian Church.  Our other grandmother was there, too, so we’d all sit together.  They had a segment during the service called the Children’s Sermon:  a guy (every year the same one, can’t remember his name) stood in a corner at pew-level rather than on the pulpit, invited all the kids in attendance to join him, and gave a short kid-friendly talk about the significance of Christmas.  It looked like a painting where Jesus is talking to a group of children, except the 70’s version where Jesus is clean-shaven, short-haired, and wearing thick glasses and a suit with big lapels.  I was always too shy to walk up there and join them, so I stayed in my pew between Oma and Opa, drawing pictures on my program with the short pencil provided to write your name on the offering envelope.  My favorite part was singing Christmas carols; especially at the end when the older teenagers would light the candelabras set in front of the tall stained-glass windows, all the lights were dimmed, and we’d sing the long version of Silent Night followed by Joy to the World.

Christmas Day at our other grandma’s house was lovely.  We always wore something pretty.  Our presents were always thoughtful.  Dinner was lovely.  The conversation was mostly polite, unless Grandpa Wally picked on Aunt Peggy and made her cry.  My grandmother was always a gracious hostess.  We tried our best to use our good manners and be considerate guests, honest we did.  It was all so…lovely.

I remember the year I asked Wanda to take Christmas Eve, and I told Teri about it.  “Oh my God!”  she squealed.  “Remember how all the wrapping paper was the same for years?  And how it disappeared before we could even finish unwrapping the damn presents?  And remember how Oma’s presents were always the best?  And spaghetti, every year!  And the salad always had green onions and Hidden Valley Ranch dressing.  Remember her ugly 70s couches and taking pictures in front of those gawd-awful curtains?  Remember those orange Christmas lights?  Remember going to church and seeing Grandma, and then we’d see her again the next day?  Remember how boring Grandma’s house was?  Is Wanda going to make spaghetti?  She has to make spaghetti!”

Boterkoek

(BOAT-er-kook)

An essay for school.  It also counts for Mellow Yellow Monday.

Butter cake

Every Christmas, my Dutch grandmother used to bake what seemed like hundreds of buttery golden cookies called boterkoek.  Oma never used measuring cups or spoons: only her hands and memory.  A week before Christmas, she would pull out a massive green CorningWare mixing bowl.  Into it she would heap handfuls of white flour and sugar, counting quietly to herself with each dump.  Eggs would crack in next, sliding down the powdery mountain of dry ingredients like miniature round saucer sleds.  Vanilla would stream straight from the bottle into the middle of the mound before yellow bricks of butter were released from their waxy paper wrappers, tumbling into the bowl with a muffled thud.  Then she’d plunge her bare hands into the mix, squeezing cold butter and eggs through flour and sugar, until the mass of simple pantry staples emerged as decadent cookie dough.

Every Christmas I compile a mental list of childhood treats I want to make for my own family.  And every December ends with a cold, empty, unused oven in my kitchen.  I’m not much of a baker, but this year I’m compelled to finally make boterkoek.

I call Oma and ask her for the recipe.  She writes it down and gives it to my more computer-savvy step-mom, who emails it to me.  Three days before Christmas, I print the recipe and start to compile my shopping list.  My heart sinks.  Despite my lack of culinary knowledge, I know the recipe is wrong:  too much flour, not enough butter, no sugar.

As a little girl I’d stand on tiny tiptoes to watch Oma work her magic in her blue and white kitchen.  Once the dough was finished, she’d pinch off a piece for each of us to eat right away, raw eggs be damned.  Half of the dough became round cookies. Oma would roll Gobstopper-sized balls of dough between floured palms, flatten them onto an aged cookie sheet with the tines of a fork, and brush them with beaten egg.  In thirty minutes, crisp cookies with glossy, tawny edges would emerge from the oven. The rest of the dough would be pressed into a rectangular cake pan, baked for twenty minutes, and sliced into thick, soft yellow squares called butter cake. I could make myself sick on butter cake, and easily go back for more. The smell of sizzling sugar, butter, and vanilla became the hallmark of a proper Christmas.

Butter cake, up close.

As a little girl Oma and I giggled together as she flipped through her mental rolodex trying to remember a name, or when she’d accidentally speak to us in Dutch instead of English.  Today we gloss over her memory loss as a rule.  Pointing it out to her is outright forbidden.  Afraid to breach the canons of Alzheimer’s care for the sake of a cookie recipe, I call my step-mom, the patron saint of impossible situations.

No luck.  Oma insists the recipe is correct.  Forgot the sugar, you say?  Then add sugar, for heaven’s sake. How hard can that be?

Very!  How much do I add?  What about the flour-butter ratio?  There is no pressing her further:  I’m stuck with what I have.

I refuse to panic yet.  I still have one more trick up my sleeve:  the Internet.  I don’t expect much diversity in the recipes, since boterkoek is specific and regional.  I should only need two or three references to reconstruct Oma’s recipe accurately.  I head to the Big Bad Web and start my search.

Leon, Oma’s second husband, took her traditional recipes and ran with them.  He adapted her boterkoek recipe to an icebox method.  Instead of turning bits of dough one-by-one into little balls, he’d wrap the whole thing in wax paper, roll it into a big pasty log, and refrigerate it overnight.  The next day, Oma would slice the hardened dough into cookie rounds, sweep fork tines and egg wash across the tops, and bake them for about twenty minutes.  Leon’s method cut the prep time in half and made the cookies more uniform.  Oma declared him a genius. Eh. I still preferred butter cake.

Dutch butter cookies

Leon passed away several years ago.  The scent of homemade boterkoek hasn’t curled around the corners of Oma’s kitchen since.  Plates of sunshiny butter cake and browned-butter cookies, accompanied by tall glasses of milk and mugs of dense black coffee, no longer grace the breakfast nook during the holidays. I need to resurrect this recipe, and perfect it, before I become a grandmother myself.  My kids are teenagers now.  My time is running out.

My Internet search has turned up lots of boterkoek recipes.  None of them are the same.  All of the ratios are different.  There is too much discrepancy from one recipe to another.  I cannot recreate Oma’s recipe.  Christmas is tomorrow.

I pour sugar into the biggest mixing bowl I have.  I estimate the measurement based on my Internet findings.  I use the rest of Oma’s recipe as-is, even though I know it’s wrong:  a mountain of flour, one solitary stick of butter, an egg or two, and a splash of vanilla.  My bare hands plunge into Mt. Boterkoek as a small puff of flour spills onto the counter.  Maybe I can’t make the boterkoek of my childhood, but I can still use my grandmother’s recipe.

Noncation, Day 3

Day 3

8:20 am:  Wake up against my will.  First the house phone rings, now my cell phone is ringing.  It’s Shelly.  Shocker.  “Dad wants to know if you felt the earthquake?”

“When was it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, okay then, I’ll let you go back to sleep.”

I drag myself out of bed and turn on the computer.  There was a 3.0 magnitude earthquake in Marina del Rey around 3am this morning.  Can you even feel a 3.0 magnitude?  Apparently so, because my friend and former coworker, Kelly, is complaining on Facebook about all the stupid phone calls she got at work.  Better you than me, my friend!

8:30 am:  Notice a new voice mail message from Jess.  She and John left for their fishing trip today.  She just called to say good-bye and she loves me, and she can’t say more because she’ll start crying.  Oh brother.

8:35 am: Perform my morning house-sitting duties.  I unblock and unlock the cat door, then check Sahara’s water.  The food is gone.  You’ll recall that she didn’t show up when I fed her last night, nor did she come in for the night…where the hell did her food go?!  Maybe a window upstairs is open where she can sneak in.

9:00 am: Can’t decide if I want to walk down to the Reyn this morning or not.  I’m hungry now, so I heat up half of a veggie burger leftover from last night.  I read through my email, check Facebook, and catch up on blogs that I follow.  I notice my toes are frozen, which is strange because my feet are never cold.  I don’t even remember the last time I wore socks, but I happen to have a pair so I pull them on.  I can’t walk across the kitchen floor in them.

9:10 am:  Shelly calls on the house phone again.  They’re at a Nissan dealership in Reno, NV, because their fuel pump died.  It’s difficult to get to:  their whole back seat has been removed and all of their luggage and assorted trunk crap are piled next to the car.  They have at least two hours to kill until the car is ready.  This isn’t the first time they’ve had to take their car in for work on vacation.  It might not even be the second.

I tell Mom about the cat food.  She asks Rob if there’s a window open upstairs.  Yes, he says, but there’s a screen on it.  I check it myself.  The screen’s intact.  What manner of rabid critter came in and ate the cat’s food?  And how?  Am I lucky to be alive? It’s too much for my brain to comprehend right now.

9:30 am:  The veggie burger was insufficient.  I need to go to the Reyn.  Since it’s so close I really should walk.  I even have new sneakers.  And socks!

New shoes! New socks!

I can’t convincing myself to walk.  I’m can’t even convince myself to go, really.  I should take a shower.  I can’t convince myself to take a shower.  WTH is going on with me this morning?  It’s too cold for a shower.  There’s a heater in the bathroom.  I need my laptop.  I need water.  Walking back-and-forth through the house has me warmed up.  I finally take a shower.

10:30 am:  Can’t seem to organize my thoughts.  Should I go to the Reyn or not?  Should I walk or not?  Of course I should walk, duh.  Should I wear a dress today?  A dress would be nice, but then oh then I can’t…I can’t…shoes.  I can’t wear sneakers.  If I wear a dress.  Jeans.  I can wear sneakers with jeans and walk.  Yes, I should walk.  Why do I feel so dopey?  Do I even

11:00 am:  want to go to the Reyn?  Yeahhhh theyhavewi-fi.  Laptop!  I should charge it.  Lay down a sec.  Gotta finish getting dressedooh I forgot to send someone my blog address walkin’ ‘cross the housez me winded…

Wait a minute…why am I winded?  Iron!  Good grief, I’ve let myself get anemic again.  No wonder I’m having issues.

11:30 am:  Drive to the Reyn for a proper breakfast. Vitamins and supplements come with me.  The eggs today remind me of my grandmother’s.  Even my coffee cup looks like something out of her house.

The Reyn Special (wheat toast not shown.)

Wednesday coffee.

12:00 pm:  Publish “Noncation, Day 1.”  Compose “Noncation, Day 2.”  I wonder if I should be drinking coffee, seeing as it might block my iron absorption.  Psh!  I’m at a coffee shop; how can I not have coffee?

Something o’clock pm:  Still feeling funky, though not as bad as this morning.  I can form complete thoughts in the present, but the past looks like this:

Spinning teacup madness.

I remind myself to keep taking iron until my body says stop, which it will eventually, but has not yet.  At some point Jess texts me that John is already being an ass.  By the time I respond he’s treating her like a princess.  Gotta love young adults.  She leaves one more voice mail just before they set sail.  Joe and I have dinner at Daphne’s (Greek-ish, healthy-ish).  I catch the tail end of my favorite show, So You Think You Can Dance.  I feed the cat.  She looks startled.  Joe leaves. House-sitting duties happen.  I crash into bed.