’Twas the Stroke Before Christmas
Chapter 1

by Steve Chiappa (blinkie)

Page 3

So, Christmas dinner is the most important dinner of the year, and it starts with cold cuts. For many years, I have been entrusted with a most sacred and important assignment: bringing those cold cuts.

Every year, a month or so before Christmas, I’d get a call from my dad to go over The List of Things I Must Bring for Christmas Dinner. Actually, The List hasn’t changed in 20 years: prosciutto, parmesan cheese, and Genoa salami. (The salami is for my son David. He has his own family now, and lives in Oregon. Although they’re not with us most years for the holiday, his salami lives on.) My family is originally from New York, where these items are easily found. Years ago, everyone else moved to suburbia, leaving me as the keeper of the flame. My job brought me into the city every day, though, and I’d visit every corner of it to get the things on The List. After all, it was Christmas.

Even after I had moved to Tampa, seven years previously, I had The List and my assignment. The first six years had been easy: we’d go to New York and stay with my wife’s mother in Queens, where it was easy to ferret out the tasty treats — I simply had to follow the line of old people who emerged from their houses once a year for their yuletide fixings of mortadella and prosciutto. After standing in line for three or four hours, I’d have what I needed for the trip to my father’s house. Armed with a load of Italian goodies — including two salamis — I would be almost done. The only thing left was to buy a dozen loaves of Italian bread.

One year on Christmas Eve, we took our daughter-in-law, Chandra, back to the old neighborhood so that she could get a sense of what our family traditions are all about. Now, we love our daughter-in-law to death. We’ve already told our son David that in case of divorce, Chandra comes with us. But in some areas she hasn’t got a clue. You see, she comes from Ohio, the land of bowling alleys, Applebees, and white bread. So on this shopping trip, we went into our local bread bakery for the four or five loaves of Italian bread we’d need for our trip. (These were just our walking-around loaves. They would be a far cry from the dozen or so loaves that we would be bringing to Connecticut.) And that’s where the trouble started: Chandra spotted a Napoleon. She had heard of them, but had never tried one — this delicacy evidently had not made it all the way out to Ohio yet.

The problem was, you should never buy pastries in a bread bakery — and vice versa. We were in the bread bakery, and the pastries bakery was around the corner. We attempted to explain that to her, but wound up dragging her out of there, though not before buying a loaf to consume on our way to the patisserie. Around the corner at the pastries bakery, things were beginning to get chaotic. The bakery had been there for nearly 100 years, and the scene on Christmas Eve remained the same through the ages: thousands of diabetic Italians, mostly over the age of 90, came out of their cocoons (in a scene reminiscent of Invasion of the Body Snatchers) for their holiday overdose of sugar. The shop was bedlam, teeming with people and piled, floor to ceiling, with confectionary delights. Panettone (Italian sweet bread) was strung like garlands. Patrons swarmed around the harried salesgirls the moment they came from the back room carrying new trays of confections.

Enter Chandra. Poor, sweet, naïve Chandra. Her proper Midwest background led her on a search for the end of the line, but this was New York. This was Christmas Eve. There was no line. There was mayhem. Nothing can keep an Italian from his pastry. Quickly, I swooped in: darting between an old lady with a walker and a man with a cane, who was about to take a bite out of an éclair, I was able to snare a Napoleon, as well as a dozen or so other assorted goodies. A few minutes and a hundred dollars later, we were on our way. Mission complete.