Image at right: learning to perform a Newari style blessing on my last day in Kathmandu in July.

I’ve spent enough time overseas at this point that I often find myself watching events here in my motherland with the conscious distance of a foreigner. So while Hindu pujas may have lost their exotic veneer, ostensibly familiar ceremonies strike me conversely as peculiar: the intricate social dance we enact with polite acquaintances, for one, or rituals of restaurant decorum. Certainly the episcopal Christmas eucharist I found myself at today (thanks to my girlfriend, a divinity student) struck me as about as strange as any of the festivals I was privy to in Southasia: eating the body and blood of Christ actually seems much stranger than eating actual meat that has been first been sacrificed and offered to a god.

Part of me is most at home when I am out of place, for in not atypical modern fashion there is no one place I truly belong to: I’ve never quite felt like a New Yorker, though I drive like one when I’m in Manhattan, jaywalk like one anywhere, and I’ll fiercely defend my old neighborhood pizza joint, Sal and Carmine’s, as the best slice on earth. Meanwhile, living in Caledonia county, VT this fall, lovely as it’s been, has held constant reminders that I’m an unusual breed in those parts as well, if not a flat-out flatlander in most eyes. In Nepal, at least, I’m obviously “from away,” a bideshi, which status begets a certain amount of tolerance towards me when I fail to act in expected ways. Perversely, for someone like me it becomes easy to feel at home in a place where one is an acknowledged outsider. Perhaps this is why I felt so at home last night, Christmas Eve, at the home of a high school friend and his first-generation Polish immigrant parents: an American most at home elsewhere, at the home of foreigners who had made America their home, and for whom (I surmise) Christmas serves both to connect with traditions from the old country and to reground themselves in the new one.

The venue was the Moore residence (the name is an Ellis island substitute for an original I can best approximate as Zbienievski), a neat house on a quiet street in Riverdale. Gathered there were Kate and John Moore and their son David, Kate’s twinkly-eyed grandmother who speaks not a word of English, Kate’s sister Margaret and her two sons, the pregnant wife of the older son, and a two couples of family friends. I arrived with my girlfriend Thandiwe and my mother; my father, who lives in a dementia care facility in Manhattan, was with us at the Moores’ two Christmases ago, just days before we “placed” him in his first institutional home.

Christmas eve dinner has been a mainstay of the Moore family for years, presumably ever since John Moore arrived in this country from Poland via an Austrian refugee camp with his wife, a few hundred dollars, and two or three words of English. And though no word is spoken during dinner about the provenance of the dishes shortly to be described, the meal smacks overwhelmingly, deliciously of tradition. I mean, would any single person acting independently come up with the idea of serving five different cold fish dishes as part of an appetizer course? The reasons for this single-minded extravagance lie in Catholic observance and long family practice accommodating it and now, in this generation, standing in for traditional religiosity: somewhere along the line, the operative question was “what is the most enormous feast we can have without eating any meat?”


The evening begins with a breaking of bread: wine glasses wielded, everyone mills around the kitchen breaking bread with everyone else and wishing them a merry christmas in a series of quick face-to-face encounters. This simple practice has the effect not only of introducing or reacquainting everyone but also of building a feeling of fellowship: we’re all here together, doing the same thing, with the same sorts of wishes and hopes. Then it’s to the table, where we sit at assigned places marked with slips scrawled in Polish-inflected phonetics: to my left sat Yvonne, once she deciphered the slip marked “Ywon” on her plate. The Maestro, John, has already set the cold appetizers out along the length of the table he and his son had expanded with a new leaf just for the evening: two kinds of pickled herring (one in cream sauce), cod with a tomato and onion “Greek sauce,” a fresh tuna salad with roasted red peppers, a canned tuna salad wrapped in lettuce leaves, a salad of diced vegetables, peas, apples and pickles dressed in mayonnaise, a wild rice pilaf, and bread and butter. By any normal standards, this is already a meal in itself, and a generous one. But the guests know what’s coming, and each seems to have a strategy in mind for how to cope with the onslaught of delicacies--some have primed their metabolic pumps with cannabis brownies, and at least one guest is taking a power nap on the couch.

Now, gentle reader, be advised: the appetizer of would-be lofty rumblings on sense of place has been cleared, the soup of interpreting traditions has been supped, and the main dish to come smacks of a different flavor entirely. This essay is about to devolve into a sort of carnal blow-by-blow description of a meal that simply deserves to be commemorated. Let the food porn commence.

An hour after the meal has begun, half of us have migrated to the kitchen, where John is heating up pierogis he’s made with chanterelles from his woods. It’s not hard to coax everybody back to the table, the axial center of the universe on this night, where the delicate pierogis are followed at a leisurely pace by a light, pure-tasting mushroom soup made from dried boletes (porcini). Matt, the older of Margaret’s sons, mentions in his understated way how he looks forward all year to this soup, and how it always tastes the same. Dave admits that he always dreaded it--apparently he spent his formative Christmas Eves eating bread and butter. In one of the evening’s more self-conscious moves, Dave has been called upon to record some of the recipes for posterity, but it hasn’t happened this year.
More milling follows the dumplings, along with plenty of wine and a brief jam session (electric guitars and drums) by a few of us downstairs. In the kitchen, John calmly sautees breaded scrod and amasses the tower of fillets, teetering, on a platter. Into another pan goes sauerkraut with yellow split peas, and mashed potatoes are in the works. Somehow everyone finds the appetite to fill their plates once again: fish and kraut and buttery, golden mashed potatoes, along with a salad of shaved cabbage, onions, parsley and vinegar. I a point of saturation with food and wine--not overindulgence, for I have been mindful and even up to now restrained--but fullness, a brimming over of contentment and good will. I catch the bright eye of Babcha, a grandmother “out of central casting” as my mother puts it, and someone mentions with a wink that she’s really in it for the sweets. Sweets. Course number five, and it’s nearly midnight. But a really good dessert makes room for itself, and without forcing it I sampled all four confections: first thick, rich chocolate cookies that resembled burger patties and rolled cookies with apricot jam, lemon zest and walnuts--Sarah’s creations. Then John’s poppy seed roll, a handsome labor of love. Finally, along with the last drops of coffee from the tall, ornate porcelain pot, comes Babcha’s contribution: a poppy seed cake laced with what I can only assume is chocolate ganache, dotted with golden butter frosting, and soaked in spirits. It’s sheer soft, heady, sumptuous pastry heaven. I catch Babcha’s eye and make what I hope is a universal sign of dessert appreciation. I go back for seconds, finally tossing in the white flag with a single bite of cake left on my plate. We’ve been sitting (and standing, milling, drumming, napping) for nearly 6 hours.

(End of explicit content)

Today I found I hardly needed to eat anything, but to call it a fast would be ridiculous.
I don’t know quite how to wrap this up. A final nod in the direction of tradition? Ah, tradition--a word I find myself using a lot these days, and one that has taken on an almost hallowed aura in my own mind. But what separates beautiful, wise, sustaining, and nourishing traditions from rigid, unyielding, repressive and lifeless ones? Is there any clear distinction, or way to cultivate the one while shedding the carapace of the other? To be continued, perhaps.