Food writer Wyoming Paul dives backwards into edible memories of Christmases past and arrives at a bittersweet realisation.
1. A few weeks before Christmas, my sister and I would help our grandma make her Christmas cakes in a silver bowl that we could have used as a bathtub. My little sister whizzed the electric beaters through butter and sugar and eggs, the rusted beaters getting knocked away from the huge lumps of butter, her small arms not strong enough to push through, needing Grandma’s help. The plastic beater handle was always sticky, crevices encrusted with sweet-smelling grime. For a long time Grandma baked 30 or 40 big square Christmas cakes every year, which were set out on the dining table, wrapped in silver foil, sealed with cloudy sellotape.
2. On Christmas Eve, my sister and I “surprised” our parents by forcing them to sit on the sofa while we angelically sang Christmas carols, accompanied by the faded candy sounds of a Press-and-Play musical Christmas book. We went through every song, from ‘Joy to the World’ to ‘Oh! Christmas Tree’, and because I was older, I got all the best solos. I believe we also made them sliced Edam and crackers to signify the occasion.
3. We all watched Home Alone.
4. My parents stayed up on Christmas Eve at the dining table, kitchen door firmly shut, wrapping the presents. I stayed up too, listening to the soft, muted sounds of them speaking across the hallway, the rustle of wrapping paper being creased and the zip of it being cut, the ripping sucking unsticking sound of the sellotape being pulled from its tight roll, imagining what was inside, such anticipation!
5. Christmas morning, it was breakfast at our house with Grandma and Grandad, my dad’s parents, who brought boxes of presents and chocolates and food, their very slow footsteps up the long front staircase. My sister and I gave out the presents, the thrill of watching them being opened! For breakfast, Grandma always made a stack of thin, side plate-sized crepes, brought to our house covered in glad wrap, condensation inside the plastic because they were still warm. When he was alive, my grandad would flip the pancakes for her, a master, so the legend goes – I never saw him nimble. We ate flaky hot smoked salmon bagels with cream cheese, capers, and lemon-marinated red onion. (That bagel is still my favourite thing about Christmas. I arrange the toppings on those bagels like I imagine a jeweller would arrange diamonds and I can never stop, because this is one thing my family anticipates – lovingly mocking my bagel etiquette.)
6. Then it was my mum’s big family lunch – 13 cousins, a dozen aunts and uncles. Busy, noisy. My granny’s strawberry ice, fresh strawberries blitzed with sugar and lemon zest, frozen to soft sorbet. The honey and spice lebkuchen biscuits she would have every year, somehow, from Switzerland.
7. A collapse on the sofa at home, early nights. Another bagel because somehow, after all of that eating, we were slightly hungry.
By the time I was a teenager, that sameness felt stale: each year was a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, all of us going through the motions, knowing what would come next, like we knew all of the words that came out of Kevin McAllister’s pouty pink lips.
It wasn’t only that each year was the same. Grandad gone, Grandma alone, Christmases spent in hospital, my mother’s parents in worsening health conditions, beginning to forget. There was a sense of fragility, of pieces of the whole moving and falling away.
Then, two years ago, when my cousins’ mother (my uncle’s ex-wife) died on Christmas Eve in a cycling accident, and the whole next day was a strange, muted mirage – half the family absent; all of us sitting in my aunt’s living room, quietly eating pavlova and whipped cream and strawberries from white plates on our laps, drinking bubbles, the Christmas tree decorated but the air gone from the room.
Christmas gradually became a faint copy of what had once been. The photocopy print was fading, it was being copied off-kilter; half the image had now slipped away over the edge of the page, and the original illustration had been lost. But we still played out the parts that remained, and refused to fit anything else into that white space.
So few events recur every year, and have an old, constant comparison to reflect upon. We have birthdays each year, but you don’t want the same thing for your 25th birthday as you did for your fifth; you always want Christmas to be like it was when you were five.
This year I have one grandparent left living, my grandma, and the past few years have driven hard wedges between many of my aunts and uncles. There will be no big family gathering for my mum’s side. Instead, perhaps, another hospital visit.
One Christmas, when Grandma was in Auckland Hospital – I can’t remember which ailment this was – we visited her in the morning and took her out in a wheelchair. We had a picnic in the Domain and my sister pushed Grandma in her wheelchair at a run so the wind was in her face, and I was scared but it was the best moment of the day.
Then, a few years later, Grandma fell and broke both of her kneecaps. For 18 months she was in hospital and then a rest home – we had a Christmas in each location; she couldn’t be wheeled outside for a picnic. Her mind was completely sharp, pricklingly so – almost everyone else in the rest home was in the latter stages of dementia. The food was awful.
This is the food I remember from my grandparents’ house: Sliced sausages in cheap white bread with margarine and barbecue sauce, or as we called it, “Grandad sauce”. Mince on toast. Curried sausages on toast. Cucumber sandwiches. Egg-drop and corn soup (Grandma soup). Salty boiled green beans. Tiny boiled new potatoes from the garden (Grandad potatoes). Blackcurrant and apple pies. Cadbury mousse chocolate and Squiggles. Pikelets with cream and jam. Bugs in Mud cereal for breakfast. As snacks, because for years they hosted Asian foreign exchange students, there were mini packets of nori, Hello Panda cookies, sweet and salty rice crackers, homemade kimchi – all wonderful.
She made the most delicious, soft, salty, crunchy, perfectly oily roast kumara. I still don’t know how she did it – some people have magical cooking hands, and I truly believe that. Their roast kumara will always be better, and there is no method to that madness.
But once – we cut open a large mince pie, and inside were hundreds of dead ants. My sister and I were aghast. I also couldn’t understand when they would have crept inside the pie! Why would they go there? Half burning, half drowning to death with all of your closest family and friends in a delicious, savoury mince sauce seems almost a mystical way to go. “It doesn’t matter!” Grandma said about the ants. “You won’t taste them.” But we could taste them, and picked around the food.
This was meant to be about Christmas, though, wasn’t it? Christmas and memories and food. But Christmas is about grandparents, I think. Because Christmas, in its true form, only exists when you’re a child, and that’s when your grandparents are at their most important and vibrant and present. So I’m off topic, and I apologise; but Christmas and childhood and memory and food all circle back to my grandparents, and in particular, to her. So let me go on a little.
She said that her mother was once told to cut the eyes, spine and guts from whitebait, and she did it, she went through a whole bucket. She said that when she was young, “eating an apple” was an activity. She said that when she met my grandad – she, a 16-year-old nurse’s aid, he, a 28-year-old patient with his head wrapped in bandages – she decided immediately that he was the man she would marry. She never learnt to drive, because that way he would have to accompany her to the supermarket.
Like words printed in a book and then read years later, a recipe that is made again brings back the person who first cooked it for you. I don’t know how to replicate all of her recipes. It feels too glib to ask now, like requesting a will. Writing this feels glib too, like writing a eulogy, though she’s still here.
But we can whisk the pancake batter early in the morning, flip them in the pan, eat them with lemon and white sugar. We can make the Christmas cakes, pour the brandy-soaked fruit into the beaten sugar and butter and eggs, watch how the brown fumey liquid makes the mixture separate and become grainy. We can say fondly, “It isn’t quite how Grandma made them. But it will do.”
I’m 28. I haven’t been a child in a long time, and maybe I need to stop looking back, referencing that old photocopy, scrutinising it for its DNA match in the present – seeing every way that it comes up short.
Christmas this year is approaching, and quickly. It’s a chance to stop looking behind my shoulder, to be present, to embrace the fact that actually, I’m not Peter Pan, and I won’t be going back. Whisk the crepe batter, sometimes, and appreciate the image – Grandma in her old kitchen, Grandad flipping the pancakes.
But also, move on. Create something new.