The holidays with Kathleen Buckley

I spent my first six years in Alaska, where my father worked for the Alaska Railroad. One Christmas there stands out in my memory, a Christmas party put on by the railroad for its employees and their children. I suppose I must have been four or five, and it was magical. It was held in a large, dimly-lit hall, there seemed to be crowds of people, and there was a Santa Claus who gave each child a stocking with treats. The only comparison that occurs to me is one of the Hogwarts parties.

We all have our ideas of what makes the holidays special.  My father liked the idea of roasted chestnuts at Christmas, as he remembered them fondly from his boyhood in New York City. But when they were roasted in the oven, they never came out like the ones roasted in the street.  Once, after his death, I tried roasting them in the microwave. Do not try this unless you enjoy the pop-pop-pop of small arms fire. Also the exploded chestnuts have to be cleaned out of the inside of the microwave. And they still don’t taste like anything.

I was living in Seattle by then, and Christmas traditions were a little different, and I’m not talking solely about the frantic shopping in the malls and the Christmas-y red and green traffic lights glowing through the wet darkness.

There were two songs that defined a Pacific Northwest Christmas: Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer, which is a favorite of mine, and Christmas In The Northwest … which isn’t.

My stepmother and her mother used to cook lutefisk and meatballs for Christmas Eve, and everyone would admire the lutefisk, which lay in state upon the table, and then they’d eat the meatballs. The lutefisk tradition seems to be dying out, though I can recall seeing lutefisk for sale in a supermarket in Seattle.

My mother and I had a slightly different tradition. In mid-December one year, she was recovering from a bad case of the flu and her appetite had not come back. When she began to feel like eating again, my uncle brought her a pastrami sandwich from a nearby sandwich shop. It was the first thing she had enjoyed in a couple of weeks, and it was what she wanted for our Christmas Eve supper. And that was what we ate every Christmas Eve for some thirty-five years, almost to the end of her life, augmented by champagne and really good chocolates or rum balls.

Oh, and the picture of me in a high chair looking at our Christmas tree? I still have some of the ornaments. 

Thanks!

Kathleen Buckley

Author of Most Secret 

and An Unsuitable Duchess