About Those Holiday Traditions

Our annual holiday compromise.

In my junior year of high school, my mother went to work as a nurse’s aide at the hospital where she had given birth to all four of her children. She did this so that my parents could afford to send me, their oldest child, to college. 

This was the same year that I began cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Mom was a new employee in a non-union job, which meant she worked holidays for years. We were a decade away from Dad discovering his inner chef.

“Fortunately,” Mom said to me, “you took Home Ec.”

To which I responded, “I what?”

Home Economics was a required course in junior high. We cooked a few recipes, but my searing memory is what happened after I learned how to make a pin cushion. Mine was made of turquoise wool topped with an embroidered gaunt little turtle. He was barely visible in lime green thread, but this was apparently enough to earn a much-coveted spot in the 4-H booth at the annual Ashtabula County Fair.

My mother, who couldn’t sew, thought this was a very big deal and insisted on dragging Dad and all four of us kids to see “Connie’s first exhibition.” There it was, my lonely pin cushion, hanging just above the right shoulder of a billowing wedding dress made by a 15-year-old girl named Cookie.

Mom took one look at my face and pivoted. “You get a lot more use out of a pin cushion,” she said as she tugged on the arm of my little brother, who was squinting his eyes and yelling, “I don’t see it! I don’t see it!”

Mom’s hospital ID badge hangs above my desk, over my first reporter’s badge from The Plain Dealer. Keeps me mindful of the mother who helped me get there.

Four years later, on a cold and rainy night in Ashtabula, Ohio, my mother decided that, in that same Home Ec class, I had somehow mastered how to cook an entire Thanksgiving meal. She walked into my bedroom and smiled, briefly, as she sat on the edge of the bed. I was reading Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter, about the Charles Manson murders. I remember this because as soon as Mom laid eyes on the cover she gasped, grabbed the book out of my hands and threw it across the room.

“This is how you become a mass murderer,” she said.

This was the same woman who loved horror films and managed to mangle the titles of most of them. My favorite Momism: “The Texas Jigsaw Massacre,” in which severed limbs were magically reassembled, apparently.

But, sure, Mom. Let’s worry about what your daughter is reading.

“I need you to make Thanksgiving dinner,” Mom said that evening, patting my now-empty hand. She looked relieved, not sorry.

Mom did not enjoy cooking, but like so many women of her generation, she felt it was her duty to pretend that she did. She was often unconvincing, and I never judged her for that. She was the mom who played softball until dark with all the kids in the neighborhood. When she laughed, strangers within earshot laughed with her. She collected plastic, pajama-clad Christmas elves that used to come with bottles of Lemon Fresh Joy and let them them hang out with Baby Jesus in the manger. (I once had the nerve to tell her there were no elves in Bethlehem. “Like you were there,” she said, waving me away. End of discussion.)

We had the fun mom. Pass the Hamburger Helper.

I have no memory of the first Thanksgiving meal that I cooked, but it must have worked out because I was in charge of it again the next year, and then for my first three years of college. After that, Mom started getting the day off, at least sometimes. Also, Dad had decided it was time for him to start helping. This was soon after he learned how to use the sewing machine, which he had bought for my mother so that she could repair his pants pockets. She hated that thing, and after she had sewn several of his pockets shut—“It was an accident!”—he took over the mending.

I will never run out of stories about my parents. You see why I had to become a writer.

Anyway, by the time I graduated from college, I had fallen in love with cooking.

I am always happiest when I’m the one hosting Thanksgiving dinner. During my decade as a single mother, my son and daughter and I built our own holiday traditions. None of my relatives lived in town, but love requires no bloodlines. Our table was full of friends who, over time, had become family.

This is 10-year-old Cait making the rum cake, in 1997. In 2012, this photo ran with my essay about our rum cake tradition for Parade magazine. More than a decade later, people still ask for the recipe at this time of year. (I’ve included it at the end of this column.) Remember, the key to a good rum cake is to glaze it slowly. Cait has always been more patient than her mother when it comes to this part.  

Last year at Christmas, Cait’s daughter, Ela, glazed the rum cake for the first time. Oh, my. Her brother, Milo, had asked that we use the castle mold, instead of the standard ring. Great idea, until Grandma had to excavate it out of the pan. I’ll forgive you for thinking it looks like Ela is basting a shipwreck. Or a ham, maybe. In her hands, it became a masterpiece.

Ela expertly ignoring her grandfather’s tips for glazing.

Every Thanksgiving gathering is different in this house. We have four grown kids, all of them married with children. Seldom is everyone here at the same time. You adjust as your family grows, or your family grows without you. This year, Andy and Cait and their families are joining us. We’ll have a turkey, of course, and rum cake and stuffing--and turkey embossed crackers to pop because in a house full of kids what’s a few more decibels of noise?

And, yes, we will have two kinds of cranberry sauce. The real kind comes from a family recipe handed down by three generations of women on my side and is made from scratch. The other kind is a cherished custom from my husband’s side of the family. It is a burgundy blob that plops out of a can with ridges that someone always declares to be such a handy guide for cutting. As if inserting a knife in gelatin were the challenging part of this family tradition.

Here’s that rum cake recipe:

Ingredients

Cake

• 1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts (I skip the nuts whenever a nut allergy is an issue; it’s still good.)

• 1 standard-sized box of yellow cake mix identified as “moist supreme” or “pudding in the mix”

• 3 eggs

• ½ cup cold water

• ½ cup rum

• ⅓ cup oil

Glaze

• ¼ lb butter

• ¼ cup water

• 1 cup granulated sugar

• ½ cup dark rum

To make the cake:

1.    Preheat oven to 325°F.

2.    Spread chopped nuts in the bottom of greased and floured bundt pan.

3.    Mix rest of ingredients together. Pour batter over nuts and bake for about 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted into cake comes out clean.

4.    Cool, then invert on serving plate. Prick top with fork.

To make the glaze:

1.    Melt butter in saucepan.

2.    Stir in water and sugar. Boil 5 minutes, stirring constantly.

3.    Remove from heat. Stir in rum.

4.    Spoon and brush onto rum cake. (This takes about seven hours. Kidding, I’m kidding.)