Family Traditions

 

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 2^nd word ‘John’, but spent about 5 minutes trying get them to give me the 1^st 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 5^th, 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…