Guest Author
In this season of merriment, each time I hear “There’s no place like home for the holiday,” my thoughts travel thousands of miles southward to the Caribbean.
My celebrations are low-key: a decorated artificial tree, Christmas music and for my wife — nonstop Christmas movies on the Hallmark and Lifestyle channels beginning in mid-November.
For me, Christmas has always been more about smells than sounds, thanks to my grandmother’s diligence. This year, she’s 92, bed-ridden, ailing. She eats pureed food. My sister feeds and bathes her with assistance from a helper who visits five days a week.
But even as my grandmother walks into the sunset, I feel compelled to pause to celebrate her culinary and cultural legacy. It colors my Christmases past, present and future.
This was the time of year when she came alive and took us along with her.
The kitchen became the nerve center of her operations. For her, for me, for us, Christmas was as much food as it was about the baby in the manger. For my grandmother, it started with early preparation. In October, a large bottle would appear filled with raisins soaked in wine or rum.
In my boyhood home, wine-soaked raisins were destined for a fruitcake. She knew I loved raisins and warned me that the liquor made the raisins poisonous. She knew better and so did I.
The fragrance of Christmas is nutmeg, cinnamon for the cakes and buns. There were no electric cake mixers. My right hand whisked the butter and sugar until the grains dissolved. My grandmother knew how to use youthful energy.
Now even in middle-age, I cannot whisk egg and butter without feeling her critical gaze, without hearing her instructions — beat faster.
Then after the cake, there was the coconut tart — picture an apple pie with grated coconut filling. And of course, she baked buns, sweetened with raisins and brushed with water sweetened with brown sugar. These treasures of Christmas were baked in a neighbor’s backyard stone oven.
The cakes, tarts and buns shared the oven with a whole chicken and a ham that was speckled with cloves. I couldn’t wait to grab the necks and gizzard from the hot aluminum pan as soon as the chicken emerged from the oven.
For drink, she brewed ginger beer and sorrel, a hibiscus-like plant that produced a cherry-red beverage. All that baking and brewing ensured that throughout the holidays, there was also food ready for visitors — house to house visiting was a tradition of my boyhood Christmases.
I’m a long way from my boyhood home. Friends live mostly at a distance, but as Christmas comes, the warmth and aroma of Christmases past will visit my adopted home. My Kitchen-Aid mixer will perform chores I once did by hand. A timer will warn me when the cake and the chicken are baked. But the aroma filling my apartment will signal my grandmother’s approval and let me know what it really means to be home for the holidays.
