As we enter the Holiday Season, the cacophony of voices around family recipes and traditions and what we should all be doing with and for our families and friends is in full swing, but what if there was another option?
What if you gave yourself permission to build your own traditions and create menus filled with new heritage meals?
What if, instead of doing what you’ve always done (or what your mom or grandma or great grandma always did), you switched it up?
I’m not saying you should flip the table and not do anything that’s always been done before (unless, of course, you want to), there is magic in pulling the past forward into the present through the tastes and smells shared across generations, but if need permission to shake things up and create your own menu and traditions…
Permission granted!
I myself don’t come from a long line of kitchen loving women as it seems the women in my genetics had other things they wanted to do like:
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Write poetry and books
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Play the piano
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Garden
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Read books
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Travel
So, when I began hosting the Thanksgiving and Christmas meals in my mid-twenties as my mom went sideways, I didn’t have a lot of inspiration to pull from besides the canned and boxed varieties on the shelves at the store. Literally, zero recipes exist to have been passed down outside of my great grandpa’s oatmeal cookie recipe.
What’s a girl to do? Well, at first I just kept things simple and as similar to my mom’s offerings as possible, but that quickly felt inauthentic. As young as I was, I knew I didn’t want to copy/paste what had been done but I wasn’t sure how to switch it up while also honoring my family and what they were accustomed to.
So, I started by buying a few books at Hastings (yes, I’m aging myself here) in an effort to find some new recipes and see how they might fly over the next few years.
Some flew, some crashed and burned, some are now a staple of our annual get-togethers.
Truth be told, I went a little extra some years because, in hindsight, I really felt like everything had to be just so… and I got in my head that every single item had to be homemade from scratch.
Goodness.
Honestly, though, no one should kill themselves over a meal and no one should feel like they have to prep for several days to the extent that they are exhausted at the end of it all.
Those are lessons hard won by me over the past ~25 years as I’ve found my groove. And yes, even I’m still learning what the balance is each year depending on my capacity and who is attending.
So, what are some of my standbys that I offer to the table for each *Autumn meal?
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Cranberry Pumpkin Muffins (one of those recipes I found decades ago which has become a must have for my brother and both daughters)
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Herbed Buttermilk Biscuits (instead of a basic biscuit to add a little flare)
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Fresh Cranberry Sauce or Cranberry Chutney (instead of the canned stuff, which is a throw back to my “fancy” beginnings and still so worth the effort for the cranberry loving among us)
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Turkey (either grown ourselves or sourced from a small local farm)
Each of the above linked recipes are from my farm blog and were written years ago. The website might be a bit dusty from neglect and a recent template change, but the recipes are yummy and free for the taking.
Of course there are other sides besides potatoes and green beans and dessert is always necessary but my brother now brings a veggie side and my oldest daughter is an excellent maker of all things sweet, so those fall to them now and I couldn’t be happier for it.
But last year I kept it even simpler with a simple stuffed acorn squash and everyone seemed perfectly content.
And for Christmas?
Well, my dad is a vegetarian so my mom always made a veggie lasagna with a garden salad and french bread for our big Christmas meal. This tradition has largely remained the same but with my own shift to the ingredients that were well received and so have been established.
I should maybe write that one down somewhere.
And at the end of every big meal?
We typically all play a fun game together (favorites include Tenzie, Memory, and Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza) and if everyone is in attendance, I corral everyone into a family photo on the couch.
As our family has grown, each meal has shifted a bit. There is no mandatory attendance and we figure out together what will happen for each upcoming meal. The big gatherings are always at our house, though, and we squeeze around my childhood dining room table (made by dad decades ago) and enjoy every bite.
It’s taken a long time to evolve and settle comfortably into place, but it works for me and for us, and as the Family Historian I know that making the memories is just as important as documenting them. Time around the table with our blood and chosen family offers up a solid opportunity for savoring both the food and the moments.
And that’s truly what this season is supposed to be about, no?
Onward,
Melis
*I decided a few years ago, in honor of the stolen land we all reside on in the USA, to move away from a proper Thanksgiving meal, instead pulling everyone together on another day at the end of November/early December to celebrate the Autumn abundance as well as mine and my dad’s birthdays which both fall at the end of November. And so it is.