hristmas
is quiet this year. Or relatively quiet, considering our rather
spacious abode is usually stuffed to the rafters with family and
Christmas visitors. I’ve grown quite accustomed to sharing
a room with a sibling, but this year there are rooms to spare,
and my sister and I have the pick of where we wish to rest our
heads.
I joked to my father that we are
spilling over with X chromosomes this year—this Christmas
is ladies’ Christmas, as my mother, sister, and I outrank
my father three to one. The eldest brother (pictured below
with his wife, Christina, and President Obama) is off in
a northerly state that appreciates some measure of Christmas weather
virtually year round—we hear that he, the wife, and their
little red dog will quite literally be dashing through the snow
in a one horse open sleigh. We miss them already, but my sister
and I will be sure to eat all the extra Christmas 
morning
pancakes, and something tells me the blessing of technology may
afford us a nice video chat before our respective fireplaces.
Queens, NY, isn’t promising much snow this Christmas, so
it will be nice to see some, even if it’s just on a screen
two thousand miles away. The youngest brother is in another neighborhood
of Queens, but work prevents him from staying for Christmas too
long. We’ll see him Christmas eve night, and he will help
us enjoy the extra pancakes on Christmas morning, but by Christmas
night he will be gone again, and the gender imbalance will be
restored. The little dog will be the only other man in the house,
but he has been returned to us from the groomers with green bows
in his ears and a jingling Christmas bell around his neck, and
we’ve outfitted him in the cheeriest red pajamas, so I think
perhaps the odds are in our favor that he can be counted amongst
our ranks. Besides, he knows where his dog biscuits are buttered.
Our
traditions continue. I’ve already sneaked a piece of German
*Christmas sausage
and *butterkuchen,
and my sister and I enjoyed our first midnight slice of pizza
last night. We deposited an army’s worth of decorative vintage
Santas around the house—one so old and battered by attic
storage that he leans drunkenly over his wooden cane and demands
to be supported by a wall just to remain upright. A series of
successively smaller Matryoshka Santas guard our mantle and still
contain missives from my since-passed grandmother, and a tiny
wooden nativity scene adorns our piano top, with the baby Jesus
safely tucked behind a picture frame (he won’t make his
appearance until Christmas Day).
Our tree this year has the fullest skirt
we’ve ever seen, and quickly swallowed each ornament it
was fed like a hungry and dutiful holiday deity. We’ve done
battle against the failing winter light with winking strands of
Christmas lights, ritually plugged in once the sun sets.
The month of December hasn’t
been terribly cold, but it has been bleak and overcast. The sky
is a white shroud against a weak winter sun and casts a draining
fluorescence over everything, making the whole of New York feel
like a poorly lit office. We light our fires and plug in our lights,
surround ourselves with warm food, happy family, and good memories,
sitting with the ghosts of Christmas past to brighten and enlighten
Christmas present. Wherever you are, we hope you too can wrap
yourselves in warm holiday memories, and if you can’t, our
wish is that you will take comfort in sharing ours.
Flossie Arend
“I’d like four-pair of bratwurst,
and I’d like to smell ‘em.”
I come from a long line of butchers.
My father was a butcher, my grandfather was a butcher—my
relationship with meat goes back several generations. My grandfather
shot a 21-point buck with a bow and arrow in northern Michigan.
We were a family who used the whole animal, too; we made venison
jerky, and sent off the innards to make dog food. As a young boy
I did all the slaughterhouse work—I killed and gutted cattle,
and even spent an entire summer in the “gut room.”
I placed the shrouds on the animals and watched the Rabbis kosher
the meat, and saw nothing but guts all summer long. My father
smoked up our kitchen cooking krainerwurst (in the time before
smoke detectors) and it drove my mother crazy to have the smell
of meat painting the walls.
I can look at a piece of meat from
a long distance away and tell you if it’s good, but smelling
something is the most important—the nose knows best.
I’ve been making what my children
call “Christmas sausage” ever since they were very
little. My own form of hackfleisch (pork tartar), I buy links
of piquant bratwurst from the Forest Avenue Pork Store in Queens,
slice them open, and pull the meat from inside. Forming small,
round patties no bigger than a baby’s fist, I toss them
in a heated pan and let them cook—the smell drives the dog
and everyone else absolutely crazy. It’s the smell of Christmas.
The Bavarian guys at the Forest Avenue
Pork Store have been selling me sausages since the early 1970s.
They know and understand bratwurst—it’s always perfectly
spiced. Most German butchers now depend on processed meat and
preservatives, but meat from Forest Avenue is low preservative
and incredibly fresh, and comes with a very short shelf life.
My father always used to say, “This is the best thing you’re
going to taste all day. I don’t care what you eat today—you
won’t like anything as much as you like this.” It’s
something I repeat to my own children, and they always say, “I
know.”
“I’d like four-pair of
bratwurst, and I’d like to smell ‘em.” I look
at the sausages in the case, check out the color; I weigh them
in my hands, take a deep whiff to check the smell. They smell
like one of the nicer, warmer, fresher days in April—clean—like
the natural spices present in a wild field, hints of white and
black pepper, salt, and nutmeg, ginger, coriander, and mustard
seed. Good, fresh sausage smells a bit like a good pigpen. I remember
a New York restaurant whose slogan was, “The seafood you
eat today slept last night in Chesapeake Bay,” and I like
to think that the pork we eat today must have been on the hoof
in some upstate farm fairly recently.
Our other Christmas morning tradition
involves another German treat, butterkuchen, or butter cake. A
simple cake, it’s topped with flakes of butter and then
sprinkled with a bucket’s worth of sugar. Not
many bakers still make it, but I go to Vicky, the chief baker
at the Oxford Bake Shop in Liberty Avenue, near JFK Airport in
South Ozone Park. She still possesses an authentic German recipe.
Vicky is about 4’8”, and when I enter the bakery she
descends from the kitchen in a swirl of flour dust—you can’t
shake hands with her without leaving fingerprint evidence, so
I have to shake her forearm. She loves my eldest son Geoff, so
if I tell her he wants a butterkuchen, she’ll make enough
to feed a small army. I imagine she’s up at 2 or 3 in the
morning baking in that kitchen. Everyone at Kennedy knows about
her, and we’ve had well-equipped friends fly to Switzerland
with boxes of croissants for the people at Swiss, but we’re
skeptical whether any baked goods ever made it off the plane.
She’s that good.
From the time I was ten years old,
I bought butterkuchen from a small bakery every Sunday after services
at St. Luke’s Church in Forest Hills, New York. It was my
Sunday morning ritual—after washing neighborhood casement
windows all week, a task that afforded me sore and bloody knuckles,
I earned about 5 or 6 dollars to do with what I wish. Back then
a butterkuchen was a buck and a quarter; today, a butterkuchen
would cost me a week’s worth of window washing earnings.
When I first returned from Vietnam,
I noticed that many of the bakeries carrying butterkuchen had
disappeared, and I thought it was gone from Queens forever. Thanks
to Vicky and the Oxford Bake Shop, our family never has to go
without it.
Many of our family traditions are surrounded
by good food-—it only makes sense. If food nourishes the
body, then family nourishes the soul. The holidays are naturally
a warm belly, warm heart time of year. Here’s wishing your
hearts and bellies are as warm as ours. We look forward to seeing
you in the New Year.
Geoffrey
