With my wife Nadia turning 40 recently I got
to thinking about family traditions. Every family has their own traditions,
like what they do around the various holidays and other events during the
year. Christmas time of course is full of traditions. Growing up as
a kid in New York I remember my mom always served fish on Christmas Eve.
Then we got to open just ONE present, and then off to church for the Christmas
Eve service. Then we would go to bed wondering if we had been good enough
that year to get all the things we wanted from Santa. We would be up by 5am to find out, tip-toeing
down the stairs where my two sisters and I would find a separate pile of
presents for each of us situated around the livingroom. Santa’s presents
were usually the big ones like skateboards or bikes so they were
unwrapped. We would play with the Santa gifts for a couple hours till our
parents got up and then we got to open all the rest of the wrapped presents.
Christmas cookies were always a huge part of
the holidays in our family, and my dad’s mom was the main supplier in our
house. She made a lot of different kinds but my favorites were her fudge,
the green marshmallow crispy wreathes, and the chocolate-caramel bars.
Not to be outdone, among many other delicious things I remember my other
grandma’s famous fruit salad with the whipped cream every year. My mom
has since taken up the torch, and armed with grandma-recipes she makes and
mails me a box of cookies every year. Bless her heart…Christmas would not
be the same without those cookies.
In addition to church and all the usual
catholic traditions that we grew up with, many of my friends in New York were
Jewish so we got to partake in those traditions as well. I
remember going to my friend Cire Wonhsak’s house one December for dinner when I
was very young and I asked him where the heck his Christmas tree was? My mom explained that everybody has different
traditions and that at Cire’s house they celebrated Hannukah instead of
Christmas. No Christmas tree? No Santa?! I felt really
bad for him…but then I didn’t feel so bad when he explained that they celebrate
for 12 days and got presents every day. No way! That’s like 12
times better than Christmas! But then I realized that they only got 1
present a day and I got probably around 12 presents on Christmas so it was a
wash. And I remember going to Temple with them a couple of times on
Saturdays and thinking that their church was just as insanely boring and
senseless as going to our church…so it all evened out in the end.
My large, extended family of aunts, uncles
and cousins are very family-orientated and we love our family reunions.
One of our favorite things to do at these reunions is play huge games of
‘charades’. One great charade-memory I have was the time when the subject
was ‘movies’ and my cousin Caylon tried to act out ‘Talledega Nights: The
Ballad Of Ricky Bobby’. After about 10 minutes he finally gave up in
exasperation as the closest we could come was ‘The Legend Of Sticky
Poppy’. My favorite charade-memory though was the time my Uncle John
wrote down the movie ‘Dumbo’, but then for some reason put his name ‘John’
afterwards. I happened to pick his piece of paper out of the hat to act
out, and I thought the name of the movie was ‘Dumbo John’. I easily got
my team to get the 2nd word ‘John’, but spent about 5 minutes trying
get them to give me the 1st word ‘Dumbo’. Finally somebody
said “Dumbo John” and I let out a huge sigh of relief. But then the
confusion set in…what the hell is ‘Dumbo John’? We all looked at
each other until finally the light bulb went on and Uncle John suddenly
realized it was his piece of paper. I love him like crazy, but I
still think of ‘Dumbo John’ every time I see him.
We also have a longstanding tradition in our
extended family that when anybody turns 40 they get a pie in the face. It
all started when my dad turned 40. My mom wanted to do something special
and she thought it would be a good idea to slam my dad in the face with a cream
pie. She enlisted me do it and I was a little nervous because I
was about 16 and he was my dad. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted
to do it, but I was definitely a little bit worried. It turned out just
great though. He was incredibly confused at first, but ended up laughing
it off and a new tradition was born. In the 30 plus years since then
every single 40+ member of the family has been pied by someone. My dad
returned the favor to my mom a couple years later, and that was a blast because
it turned into a huge food fight with pie and dinner and whatever else we could
get our hands on flying all over the kitchen.
After pie-ing my dad, my next victim
was my Aunt Sue at a Christmas reunion at my parent’s house. Sue was
super excited because she had just got done pie-ing my Aunt Marguerite right
there in the kitchen in front of everyone. She was laughing and
celebrating her expert pie-ing skills until I tapped her on the shoulder and
she turned around and ‘Whammo!’. I got her good, and completely
unexpected. She was so surprised, it was awesome. My favorite
pie-ing though was when I got my Uncle Bob at a ski lodge that we all went to
one winter. He came up the stairs into the kitchen and ‘Pow!’, right in
the face. He just stood there as the pie slowly peeled off his face onto
the floor. Then he carefully took off his round John Lennon-glasses and
there were two perfectly round holes with his eyes peeking out from all that
cream frosting. So f*cking funny.
Another notable pie-ing was the time my Aunt
Sue got my Uncle John. Unfortunately it was originally a frozen pie that
Sue had taken out of the freezer earlier that day, but not early enough.
Her other mistake was not clueing in their three young daughters Annie, Betsy
and Katherine as to what was about to happen. Sue took the pie out of the
fridge, John walked into the kitchen and ‘Smash’! The mostly frozen pie
slammed right into John’s nose and fell to the floor with a hard thud.
The defiant pie laid there on the floor with a little indent of where it hit
John’s nose while John hopped around in pain. The girls started crying
because they couldn’t figure out why mommy was hurting daddy in such a vicious
manner.
Now keep in mind it doesn’t have to be on
your birthday, just anytime after you turn 40. In some cases it
has been a couple years since it is usually best to wait until a family reunion
where there can be a lot of witnesses. I got it about 5 months after I
turned 40 at a family reunion in Portland. I knew it was coming and I was
a little apprehensive about getting a pie in the face, but I was resigned to my
fate. One night at the house that we had rented on the ocean I heard a
lot of whispering in the kitchen and I had a feeling it was coming. Sure
enough I walked in and ‘Bamm’!, right in the kisser. Pie all over my
face/hair/clothes. I had pied a lot of people in my day and I guess
vengeance was due. But as if that wasn’t enough, later that evening my
Aunt Marguerite asked me if her piece of pie looked alright. When I
looked down, her pie and the fork with it came up into my face. Touché.
Well played.
As I said the reason all of this comes to
mind is that my wife Nadia turned 40 earlier this month. As my wife she
is now part of the family and subject to all of the pie rules and
regulations. She has known about the pie tradition since joining the
family 5 years ago and knew her pie was coming, but she always thought it would
be at one of MY family reunions. In her mind she had no reason to be
suspicious the weekend of her birthday that we spent at her brother’s
lake-house in Wisconsin. So I called ahead a day earlier and had them get
a chocolate cream pie from the grocery store to be waiting for us when we got
there. On the exact date of her birthday, July 5th, I got up
before everyone else at 6am, took the pie out of the fridge and brought it down
to the lake. I stashed the pie on the beach under a huge floatation thing
used for tubing. Then I came back to bed just as Nadia and our two kids
Autumn and Jack were waking up.
I suggested we go down to the beach so the
kids would not wake everyone else in the house up. While we built sand
castles and splashed around I waited for signs of someone else waking up so I
could get some help. I needed someone to distract Nadia while I pulled
the pie out from under the float, out of the box, and could then sneak up and
get her. After about an hour I finally heard something from in the house,
and on the upper level where the kitchen was I could see Aunt Amy making
coffee. I told Nadia I had to go get something and I ran upstairs to
enlist Amy’s help. She said ‘Sure!’ and we both laughed in
anticipation. We started to head down the stairs when I happened to look
out the window at the beach and exclaimed: “Oh no! Hunter!!”
Hunter is their big chocolate lab dog.
All I could see was his butt sticking out
from under the float and his tail wagging furiously. I ran down the
flight of stairs and out the back screen door with Amy close on my heels.
Nadia never even noticed what Hunter was doing and was still making a sand
castle. I ran over to the float and pulled Hunter away hoping to salvage
enough of the pie so that I could still get Nadia, but all was lost.
Hunter had eaten the entire chocolate cream pie in the minute or so that
it had taken me to go upstairs and get Amy. His entire face was covered
in chocolate and he was barking happily while jumping up and down looking for
more. Hunter valiantly saved Nadia from her pie-ing…this
time. But beware my dear…traditions run strong and hard in my
family. There are no statute of limitations or double jeopardy rules…this
is not over…
