True Life Stories:
A
JULIA CHILD CHRISTMAS
by
Joyce Maynard
Originally published in The New York Times
It was two days before Christmas, the year our two youngest children were
two and a half and not yet one. Money was tight, time was tight, energy
in even shorter supply. So naturally we invited fifty of our closest friends
to our house for a buffet dinner -- with ten different kinds of appetizers
and homemade party poppers for every child in attendance. Around our house,
my husband called it Holiday Madness. And it's about trying to make one's
life look like something you'd see in a magazine. Instead of something
you'd see in, well, life.
Back to our party. One of the delicacies I'd chosen for this particular meal came out of a Julia Child cookbook, and was called a Chicken Melon. To end up with the dramatic looking dish shown in the color photograph in my cookbook, you had to completely remove the skin from a large roasting chicken in such a way that the skin remained in one piece,xxlike a length of fabric. Then you removed all the meat from the carcass and tossed it in your food processor, along with lots of things like cream, cognac, and pistachio nuts. While all of that was whirling around in the food processor, Julia explained, you ran a basting stitch all around the circumference of the chicken skin , turning it into a kind of drawstring bag. Into which you then placed the chicken-pistachio puree. Then you roasted the whole thing in the oven. The result was a sight sure to leave one's friends speachless -- a spectacular dish that tasted like chicken, smelled like chicken, but looked like a soccer ball.
In the cookbook, Julia Chld spoke jauntily of slipping the chicken out of its skin (maybe lifting it up and blowing into it, Dizzy Gillespie style, to loosen things up a little). But the whole operation proved to be considerably harder than that, so by the time Steve and I were done, I was cursing under my breath and he was pointing out that if what we wanted was chicken in some sort of vaguely round package, we should have set out a bowl of eggs. Our table -- when the guests arrived -- did in fact come pretty close to matching one of those glorious magazine spreads. But as for the hostess -- she had a splitting headache, and looked like someone who'd just finished running a marathon.
It's the expectations of the season, of course, that get me in trouble every time. It's not only at Christmas that I have worries, not only at Christmas that I grieve over old sorrows and recent losses, question whether I am turning out to be the person I wanted to become, having the marriage I thought I'd have, being the mother I meant to be. Like most women I know, I struggle with those questions all year round. But it's harder at Christmas, because all around us everyone is talking about (or singing about) what a great time of year this is, and how merry we should be. If I wake up some morning, in April, or August, and the world looks a little bleak, I can put on my old Joni Mitchell records and spend the day (almost pleasantly) looking through old photograph albums, cleaning out my closets -- maybe crying now and then. But in December, the pressure to be happy is sometimes enough to make even a reasonably contented person miserable.
I always pore over the pictures in the women's magazines, of cozy country kitchens (fires burning, fresh bread on the harvest table, turkey steaming, children gathered round, cutting out paper chains and snowflakes.) I make lists of activities to cram in, between Decmber 1 and December 24. I study the arrangements of antique teddy bears, toy trains, hand embroidered hearts and perfectly frosted cookies -- the elegantly wrapped packages, the beautifully dressed children, the serene looking hostesses, holding out platters with ten kinds of hors d'ouevres, the warm, loving extended family coming up the front walk with baskets of food and pies still steaming. I want my life to look like that, and it never does. Or else I knock myself out -- stay up all night, baking, decorating, sewing -- so it comes close. Only then I 'm gritting my teeth, yelling at my children, reproaching my husband for not helping out more -- and always, in the end, blaming myself, at failing to be as jolly as I should be.
I always say I love Christmas -- and that's true, but it's also only half the story. I also fear and dread it, on occasion. And heave a sigh of relief, on New Year's Day, when we take down the tree and pack up the ornaments. The truth is, we nearly always have a good Christmas. But because the day is supposed to be so perfect ("the best time of the year," one carol tells me), I always end up feeling a little let down too.
No wonder I spend too much (too much time, too much emotional energy, and certainly too much money) this time of year. The stakes are high, that's why. Pull off a merry Christmas, and you get the feeling that not just Christmas, but your entire life, is on course. Overcook the turkey, cry over your husband's gift of a frying pan, hear your child observe, a little sadly, that he really wanted a Sport Popple, not a Wild Puffalump, and the entire year seems to end with a kind of a sigh. Viewed that way, the extra ten dollars I may shell out, for the deluxe pack of Lincoln Logs, and the five dollars more, for a particularly bushy Christmas tree, seems like a real bargain.
When of course,
a happy Christmas -- a genuinely warm, close, loving family day, depends
on the people who make it, not the foods they prepare, or the gifts they
give. Nothing I wrap up and put under the tree for my children can match
their fantasies of Christmas bounty, and even the ultimate in gourmet
cooking can only warm the stomach, not the heart.
And the thing about those model Christmases they show you in the magazines:
The foods come from well staffed test kitchens, the rooms are set up in
some photographer's studio. The packages are empty. And as for that perfectly
groomed and beaming hostess and mother I try so hard to be: Someone paid
her a hundred dollars an hour, for that smile. And when her photo session
was over, she probably went home and served her family a pizza.
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