’Twas the Stroke Before Christmas
Chapter 1

by Steve Chiappa (blinkie)

Page 2

The story starts in Tampa, Florida. It is two days before Christmas, and we are getting ready to begin the annual pilgrimage to my father’s house in Connecticut.

Christmas had always been special in my family: it was the one day of the year that was sacred. My father had always warned me that when I got married I could spend 364 days a year with my in-laws, but Christmas was his. He’d use all the guilt necessary to ensure our presence. All of the children in the family knew that there was only one acceptable excuse for missing Christmas: death! (I think even then he would be looking for a doctor’s note, but what the hell; I’m the same way with my kids.)

The holiday had always been celebrated in our home. My mother was one of three sisters: she inherited the job of caring for her mother, and with Grandma came Christmas. The other two sisters were relegated to the lesser holidays, Thanksgiving and Easter. Everyone came to our house for Christmas.

Preparations for the holiday meal began in early September. A large pot roast was prepared, since you needed the gravy as one of the ingredients for the cappeletti (a type of ravioli) that would be made on the following weekend. When that weekend came, a large folding table would be unfurled and the ravioli-making would begin. The table was needed to store the finished product until my mother and grandmother could carefully count and freeze the cappeletti, and the counting was necessary because the success of the holiday would be determined by how many had been consumed: would this be simply another 1,100 year? Or could we get to 1,500 and set a new world record?

The way I’m describing it, you would think that the cappeletti were our entire meal. Au contraire! The cappeletti were made as a soup, cappeletti en brodo, which was one of four courses that would make up our feast. The first course was cold cuts, followed by bowl after bowl of the soup. By that time everybody would groan about how much they had eaten; making a main course seemed like a waste of time. Whether or not to begin cooking the waiting roast beef and chicken always sparked a great debate between my father and grandmother. While the debate raged on, the rest of us, like a herd of cows, began to graze on the dizzying display of desserts that had suddenly appeared before us.

Our pastry chef was my grandmother, who was an excellent cook by anyone’s standards. She cooked almost everything well, but even she fell short on two items: hamburgers, and oatmeal cookies. They both came out small, gray, and lumpy. Grandma kept a huge blue cookie jar in our kitchen, stocked with some of her delicious chocolate chip cookies. Over them she would place a layer of the oatmeal cookies, as if they could protect the chocolate chip cookies from the raids my brother and I would make on the cookie jar. This security method was doomed to failure: we simply bypassed the dreaded oatmeal, tunneling our way to the chocolate chips. Every day, the level in the jar would drop lower and lower, until nothing remained but those horrid little hockey pucks. The jar would remain that way for several weeks, a kind of cookie purgatory, until Grandma, muttering quietly, would throw the untouched meteorites away and the whole process would begin again.

Meanwhile, back at the holiday table, things were just starting to heat up. There are two things you never discuss in polite company: religion and politics. At our house. they were mainstays of the conversation. Over dessert the battle lines were drawn, my two Republican uncles against my Democrat dad. The debate would rage well into the evening, fueled by the many cans of Rheingold beer they consumed.

(They planted the beer in the backyard. Our backyard was small, about 25′ by 25′, and all concrete — green concrete, so we would feel like we had a real grass backyard. Most years, a layer of snow covered the ground on Christmas, making it perfect weather for the crop Uncle Bill and my father intended to plant. Rheingold was their crop, and early on Christmas morning the cans were planted in the snow, resembling rows of corn. When they were at their best they consumed 96 cans of the foamy golden liquid. Of course they were loath to own up to this dubious achievement, choosing instead to try to bring in a third culprit, my Uncle Walter, to help justify their huge consumption. The only trouble was that Walter wasn’t much of a drinker, and everybody knew it. After two glasses of the sweet German wine that he brought to every family gathering, he was off to the nearest easy chair to do his annual holiday impersonation of Rip Van Winkle. After setting the record, the boys vowed to cut back: they stopped drinking Rheingold—and six months later Rheingold closed its operation. You decide if the tale is true.)

At about 5:00 the great debate over whether or not to have dinner had ended. Not surprisingly, it was decided that we should eat. My father would poll the crowd: “Anybody hungry? Anybody want something to eat?” he would ask. “Oh no, we couldn’t possibly eat another thing!” the crowd would reply in unison. Undaunted, he would emerge from the kitchen bearing a solitary tray of chicken, which he would gingerly place in the center of the table. There it would sit, sometimes for up to half an hour, before a lone hand would reach in, snaring a drumstick. Then the stampede was on! Four chickens and a roast beef later, the crowd, finally satiated, would begin to thin out. As various family members waddled towards their cars, another holiday complete, the sun would begin to set on the old neighborhood.