Festive times

Christmas, past and present

Winterberry (Ilex verticillata)

“One Christmas was so much like the other, in those years around the sea-town corner now, out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.”

That is the beautifully cadenced opening line of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. It always takes me back to the sea-town where I grew up and where I am so blessed to live once again today.

It continues:

“All the Christmases roll down towards the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.”

And then, in exquisite detail, we experience a fiery Christmas in Mrs Prothero’s dining room in Wales. You can read it all (in about 20 minutes if you savor it), thanks to Project Gutenberg, right here. And you can actually listen to the poet’s magical rolling baritone reciting the tale here. I recommend it highly, once you’ve finished with Scrooge and Bob Cratchitt.

Camden harbor, topmasts at Christmas

I didn’t put up a Christmas tree this year. I haven’t had one, actually, since the last child left the household three or four years ago and, quite honestly, I have not felt the lack. There are trees aglow all over town, including on a couple of schooner topmasts down in the harbor, and there are so many house lights, some quiet and tasteful, some gloriously loud and boisterous, that I don’t feel the lack. I remember the explosion of lights in Somerville years ago when I lived in that Boston suburb, where Italian-American families vied with each other for most extravagant display. We went out at night to cruise the neighborhoods, all aglitter with lights that careened around porch railings and up the chimneys and over the shrubbery, all with the quiet blessing of the BVM in an inverted bathtub who adorned most lawns. (Dylan Thomas’s prose does have an effect, doesn’t it?)

My mother always had strings of colored lights put up, tucked into the greens that framed the front door, and electric candles in every window, and a wreath too that, according to Maine tradition, was supposed to stay up until Easter. And the tree: I remember one year an excursion with my father into the cold and snowy woods to select a tree. We brought along my sister and a friend of hers and once the tree had been cut and tied to the roof of the car, we made a little fire right there in the snow and roasted hotdogs for our lunch. Nothing has ever tasted so pure, so elegant, as those hotdogs roasted in the middle of a track passing through woods on a snowy evening.

When I moved overseas, however, Christmas trees became more problematic. The first year in Madrid, all we could find was a Scotch pine, with long, thin needles, impossible for hanging any ornaments. Everything had to be tied onto the tree to keep it from sliding off. The next year, we went with friends out into the Gredos Mountains to a family farm where we were assured we could find a tree to cut down. And we did, a proper fir tree, and took it home. But what I remember best about that trek is the guardian’s wife who cooked us a lunch of fresh chestnuts, roasted them in the coals of her kitchen fireplace, and we ate the sweet, meaty kernels with glasses of cold water. When we left, she silently passed me a little paper sack filled to the brim with chanterelles mushrooms, also fresh from the forest floor. I took them home to Madrid and cooked them in butter and served them over slabs of toasted bread and they, too, were as exquisitely simple as the hotdogs in the snow.

Christmas was not such a big celebration in the Mediterranean world back then. I’m speaking mostly of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, when December 25th was one among several winter holidays that came in rapid succession, beginning with the feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8th and ending, really, only at Candelora, Candlemas, on February 2nd, after which Lent imposed its tribulations. Christmas was important as a religious holiday, of course, and a day of feasting after the Advent fast. It was above all a day for gathering with family and friends (“Natale con i suoi, Pasqua con chi vuoi,” Italians say, “Christmas with the family, Easter with whomever you wish.”), but it was rare to see shop windows decorated with colored lights, and certainly no strings of lights arching over streets, and no haranguing appeals to buy, buy, buy. And no Christmas trees, that strange, pagan, Germanic custom that was rarely transported below the Alps. (All of that has changed in the last couple of decades as America’s consumerist culture has invaded the rest of the world, even the Catholic Mediterranean, to my regret.)

And so, when we went to live in Tuscany, we bought live fir trees, planted in pots, that could be transplanted at the end of the season. Today, there are several of those trees, true relics of Christmases past, growing around the farmhouse, some of them soaring high, as much as six stories, reaching into the mountain air.

Best of all, with a live tree we could revive the custom from my husband’s Swiss childhood of flaming live candles on the tree, something I had never known. In a stone-walled farmhouse, with a bucket of sand on one side and a bucket of water on the other, we were never in any danger. And the pay-off was grand.

Can you picture it? It’s the way Christmas trees were back in the distant past, back, perhaps, in Bob Cratchitt’s time when Tiny Tim’s eyes might have lit up with the glimmer of the flickering lights. (Actually, there’s no Christmas tree in A Christmas Carol, clearly a lapse on Mr. Dickens’s part, but we can imagine it.) Once the tree had been decorated, the little white and red tapers, each four inches tall, were set in wire clips that gripped the tree’s branches, then lit slowly, one by one, as the children gazed in awe, until the whole tree was aglow, shimmering with the magic of light. The magic that would bring the world back from its disastrous plunge into darkness.

Lobster Stew

Back home in Maine we often had seafood on Christmas Eve. Not because we were Catholic, my mother would hasten to explain, and certainly not because we were Italian. We had fish because we were in Maine and Maine is a place where fish can be as celebratory as any fancy filet mignon of beef. In fact, what could be fancier than lobster?

My first celebration of Christmas as a young mother was in Brooklyn where we were living long before Brooklyn became “Brooklyn.” My mother sent a shipment of Maine lobster via Railway Express (indicating what a very long time ago it was). It arrived two days before Christmas, in a big wooden crate that was hard to get up the stairs to our second floor apartment where I had it deposited in the bathtub so the ice inside would not melt all over the floor. Then I called a half dozen or so friends and invited them to come for lobster stew on Christmas Eve. All was well except that, when I opened the crate—or had the willing husband pry it open—what was inside was one pound of picked-out lobster meat in a tin can surrounded by a huge amount of ice. A meager pound. About enough for lobster stew for two with leftovers.

So on our very limited budget, I went out to the neighborhood fish monger where I managed to get enough crabmeat, at that time a good deal cheaper than lobster (no longer!) to add to the lobster and make some kind of an excuse for a lobster stew sufficient to go around. Actually, in the event, it was very, very good and I’ve often wondered if I shouldn’t be adding crab to the lobster every time. People do tend to eat a lot of lobster stew—rich as it is, it’s also what my British cousins call decidedly more-ish.

lobster stew, glowing like the wintry sun at dawn

So. . . lobster stew for Christmas Eve, and I continued that tradition for a long time, using the instructions I had been given by a lobster fisherman who lived next door to me on Buttermilk Lane in South Thomaston. That was just lobster meat, butter, creamy milk, and oyster crackers for thickening. Eventually, however, I graduated to Chef Sam Hayward’s magnificent recipe for what he calls Scotian Lobster Chowder. He calls it that because 1) he learned to make it way, way Down East in Nova Scotia, and 2) it’s chowder because of potatoes.

Keep in mind that this is fully as good for New Year’s Eve as it is for Christmas. In fact, I count it a celebratory dish for just about any occasion—try it for Valentine’s Day if you’re trying to woo your honey.

Sam Hayward might be embarrassed to hear it, but he is widely regarded as the dean of Maine chefs, the one who’s always invoked as an authority even as he brushes off any claim to expertise. Sort of semi-retired, he still spends a lot of time cooking, consulting, and thinking about food. Most important of all is his tireless commitment to the good food of Maine’s farmers, fishers and foragers, and his unsparing efforts to bring that food to all of our tables, professional or not.

I love the combination of lobster and corn but if you can’t find shoepeg corn, use a good brand of frozen corn. And in summer of course, cut the kernels off a couple of cobs of fresh corn and simmer them a little longer, just until done.

Drain the meat in a sieve over a bowl—all those juices add to the flavors