Home for Christmas

Aunt Anna has been reaching out a lot these past few months. She’s been worried. As aunts go they don’t make them better.

She called just yesterday, in fact, wondering how things looked for me getting home for Christmas.

“Do you think you can make the drive?” Anna asked. “Because if not you should take the bus, or stay home even, don’t take any chances.

“Please,” she added, more directive than plea. “Promise me.”

“Haven’t decided yet,” I said. “But don’t worry, I promise not to do anything stupid.

“Besides, I’ve got the opera tickets. If I don’t make it down then how are you gonna get in to see Rigoletto?” (Our Christmas gift to her this year is an evening at The Met.)

Anna laughed, but only a little.

“Don’t be a wiseguy. I can wait to see you until you’re all better. Rigoletto, he can wait too.”

I won’t burden you with details but an accident back in August is what has kept me on the shelf these past months. (Many thanks and love to those of you who have reached out and expressed concern.) For reasons that escape not just me but also the medical brainiacs around here, a full recovery, though likely, has so far been elusive. I haven’t cooked or written a thing this whole time. My mood has been, well, foul.

Anna would never cop to being worried, of course. And she is skilled, unknowingly I think, at keeping your mind off of your troubles.

“The only reason I care if you’re coming is so that I know whether or not to make you eggplant, that’s all,” she told me. (I never leave my aunt’s home at Christmas without a tray of her awesome eggplant parm.) “So as soon as you figure things out you let me know, okay.”

What did I tell you? She’s the best.

Merry Christmas everybody.

See you again soon, I hope.

You can go home again

This is the way that Christmas Eves are supposed to wind up. After a few hours of eating and drinking and laughing and gift exchanging the gang, 11 of us regulars in all, parks itself on and/or near the closest upholstered furniture for the annual family photo.

A very good time is had by all.

This is absolutely not the way that Christmas Eves are supposed to wind up. As you can plainly see there are fewer bodies in this 2020 family portrait. Two fewer, actually.

That’s because a series of COVID-related issues prevented my wife Joan and me from attending. We were not the only citizens of the world who discovered ourselves in this deeply unfortunate predicament, just the only ones in our family.

The image above was texted to me moments after it was captured. The banner marks Cousin Josephine’s December 24 birthday, a significant one that I am also very sorry to have missed. The frames that people are holding house select (and individually meaningful) family photographs, ones that I had shipped to the usual Christmas Eve gathering place, Aunt Anna’s and Aunt Rita’s apartment in Queens.

It just totally sucked not being there.

Fortunately this year should mark a return to normal. In just a few days’ time Joan and I will pack up the car and head to where we belong on Christmas Eve. (If you are in need of food visuals of the traditional meal you can find them in this post from years back.)

It will be very, very good to be back home.

Merry Christmas everybody.

Shoes make the man

.

I am not the bravest of men. But sometimes there are moments.

It was Christmas Day, getting close to dinnertime. I was around 16 at the time. I’d been visiting with some of my aunts and uncles and was now walking back to our apartment when I noticed a familiar sight: a neighborhood guy named Rudy trying to get a passerby to get down onto the icy cold sidewalk and tie his shoelaces for him.

Rudy was a cripple. That’s what people like him were called back then. He’d had polio as a boy. His spine was noticeably curved and the fingers on both of his hands bent inward and towards his wrists. Among other things this meant that the man was unable to tie his own shoes. 

That task fell to those of us around Rudy. If you were a neighborhood boy or girl, man or woman, butcher, barber, teacher, plumber, whatever, and took seriously the concept of community, then tying Rudy’s shoelaces was your job, your responsibility. No less important a responsibility than helping an elderly neighbor walk across Atlantic Avenue or keeping somebody’s child from running out in front of a city bus. 

I had gotten down on my knees and helped Rudy plenty of times. At first, when I was little, it seemed funny, even a little creepy. But as I got older I didn’t mind it so much.

Reflecting on it now, I learned an awful lot about compassion and humility by kneeling down in front of that poor man. Maybe some others did too.

Rudy was around my parents’ age. He lived with his sister Frances and brother Johnny in the brick row house where they had grown up together as children. He was as much a fixture in our tightly knit Brooklyn neighborhood as anybody. Rudy was always hanging around where you could run into him, either on the stoop outside of his house, a street corner where other men gathered, or on the sidewalks where he constantly—and very slowly and deliberately—walked alone each and every day.

“Rudy Tie My Shoes” is what people called him.

This was not to be cruel to the man, mind you. A guy who lived across the street from me had a face that was framed by almost perfect right angles. We called him “Frankie Squarehead” because, well, why would you not? His name was Frank and his dome was square. Nicknames like this were just the way of the time, that’s all. They weren’t meant to insult or to hurt anybody.

Anyhow, back to Christmas. I was a short block away from where Rudy was standing when I noticed what was actually going on. He had been walking in the light snow and happened upon a group of four guys around my age. Once I could determine who the others were I slowed my pace in order to read the situation more clearly.

It was Crazy Philip and three of his friends. Which did not bode well at all for poor Rudy. 

Philip was trouble from the day he moved into the neighborhood, around a year or so earlier. He had quickly formed his own street gang and got great pleasure out of intimidating people. I saw him beat the crap out of plenty of guys for no reason whatsoever, occasionally doing the kind of damage that required a visit to the doctor or to the ER. The two of us had come close to blows on more than a few occasions.

To be honest, I was afraid of the guy. He was pure anger and rage, without a shred of good judgment. Not so long after this day that I’m telling you about Philip got killed in a knife fight, bled out right there on our sidewalk. Few were sorry to see him go.

When I saw him and his boys circling around Rudy I knew that I had two choices: Find another way home or take my chances and hope for a Christmas miracle.

“Felipe, que tal?” I yelled loudly while approaching the scene. Unlike me and everybody else within a five-block radius, Philip’s people were from Puerto Rico not Italy. “Feliz Navidad. You seen Anthony today?” Anthony had been my best friend as a young boy; he still was my friend, only we had grown apart ever since he and Philip started hanging out. They were equals in the gang they were a part of, the only two equals as far as I could determine. I had always believed that, if not for Anthony’s known history and friendship with me, and his influence over Philip, his new friend and I would have come to violence long ago.

“We’re busy here, man,” Philip said staring at Rudy in a way that I had seen and feared many times before. “Tony’s at home. You want him, you know where he lives.”

Anthony had only recently come to be called Tony, just not by me.

The snow picked up and Rudy wasn’t wearing a hat, a scarf or a pair of gloves. He was his usual slow self, not speaking, but the man appeared to somewhat grasp the delicacy of his situation. 

“What you lookin at?” one of Philip’s friends said pushing Rudy’s face with an open palm as the others laughed. 

“Hey retard, your shoe’s untied,” said another. “C’mon, let’s see you tie it.”

This was not looking good at all. The only chance I had would be to act quickly and decisively.

“Felipe,” I said loudly and in a way meant to strongly draw his attention away from Rudy and toward me. “Respect. Sabe? I’m just gonna bend down now and help this man out with his shoes. I don’t want any trouble here.”

Asking Philip’s permission to do anything, let alone assist a helpless man like Rudy, was enough to make me want to hurt somebody. Badly. But it was the only possible way out of this. Philip’s boys would do whatever he told them to do. If he decided to let Rudy go on his way then Rudy would go on his way. If not then there was no telling how far they would go, how badly they would hurt the poor guy. Or me.

Philip stared me down in a way that suggested I had miscalculated my ability to diffuse the situation. But when enough seconds passed without him saying anyhing, I moved through the pack until I got to Rudy. I could see how frightened he had become but also noticed a bit of relief in his face. Mine was at least a familiar and friendly presence and Rudy knew it.

“Who he to you, man?” said one of Philip’s boys as I kneeled and brushed the snow and slush off of Rudy’s black leather shoes. “Maybe you should mind your business.”

Rudy’s left shoe trembled as I tied it, possibly from the cold but perhaps not. 

“Okay, now the right one,” I said as much to the others as to Rudy. 

Philip had yet to speak and his boys had turned quiet. I imagined getting kicked in the head and pummeled to the ground.

“There you go, good as new,” I said standing to face the man I had assisted like this since I was a child. “Merry Christmas, Rudy.”

All that was left to do now was to turn around and to face Philip. 

“We’re done here, right Felipe?” I said summoning more courage than I’d thought I had. “The man can be on his way?”

Philip’s frizzy dark hair was topped with white snow, his black and red leather gang jacket wet around the shoulders and down his chest. The guy had the blackest, scariest, most intimidating eyes I had ever seen. Being stared down by them made me feel small. 

“One day we’re gonna get it into it, Tony or no Tony,” Philip said, turning his stare first to Rudy and then to his boys. “Vamos, chicos.” 

Rudy stood motionless as Philip and his boys strutted away. After they turned the corner and were out of sight I gently grabbed Rudy’s misshapen elbow. I can’t speak for him but I myself only felt a little less scared than I had moments earlier.

“I’m gonna walk you home now, Rudy,” I said. “That all right?” 

He didn’t smile or nod or say anything at all, but he did let me keep hold of his arm for the couple-block walk to his house. Before climbing the steps of his stoop Rudy motioned for me to tie his shoelaces again. They didn’t need tying this time and so I took this to mean that the man needed a little more friendly human contact before the two of us parted ways. 

Which was okay by me.

I needed the same thing.

The eggplant that saved Christmas

Christmas Eve is spent with my extended family in New York, but Christmas Day is for my wife Joan’s outside of Boston. Only three of us are in attendance, and so we’re talking about a much, much quieter affair.

Two Christmases ago my mother-in-law Gin shocked us by announcing that Christmas dinner would be supplied not by her but by a nearby Chinese restaurant known as Su Chang’s. I was informed of this well before the Christmas-morning drive from New York to Massachusetts, allowing ample time to brood over so enormous a break in holiday protocol.

Never had I eaten a Christmas dinner that wasn’t prepared by someone I loved and who loved me. Ms. Chang, if such a person exists, could not possibly be included in this group.

At around 4 pm Gin asked me to call over to the restaurant and place our order. The line, however, was busy. Very busy.

One hundred seventy redials on multiple phones and several other attempts at reaching the restaurant later it became apparent that Ms. Chang would not be providing our Christmas dinner after all. 

“I don’t think this is gonna work,” I announced finally, aware that Gin’s infrequently used kitchen housed none of the provisions required to prepare a meal, let alone one suited to a holiday.

The three of us just sat there in silence.

After a few uncomfortable moments I went to the kitchen and had a look around. There was milk, butter, a few other odds and ends in the fridge; the cupboards were pretty much bare. Alone in a small clay bowl next to a pristine toaster oven were three garlic cloves.

That’s when it hit me.

“I can make an aglio e olio,” I announced. “There’s plenty of pasta out in the car.”

There was indeed. No visit to New York at Christmastime (or most any other time, for that matter) does not include a food run to D. Coluccio & Sons in Brooklyn, and so the trunk of our car was overflowing with staples of all types. These included (but by no means were limited to) dried pastas, some lovely anchovies, and several tins of fine olive oils, all that was necessary to make an aglio e olio.

Not exactly a Christmas feast, I know.

“Well, actually,” I heard my wife say, to my ear rather tentatively. “Hm, I wonder…”

I poked my head out from the kitchen.

“You wonder what?”

She smiled.

“We’ve got Anna’s Christmas gifts in the freezer, remember?”

And out of nowhere a peaceful calm came to me. Someone that I love very dearly, and who loves me, would be providing this holiday’s meal after all.

Christmas had been saved!

Inside Gin’s freezer, you see, were the Christmas presents Aunt Anna had given to us only the night before. One was a whole stuffed chicken that she had stewed in tomato sauce, the other a tray of her fantabulous eggplant parm.

“I’m tired of running around trying to buy you two presents,” Anna sighed, fetching the unwrapped gifts from her freezer. “So I decided to give you what i know you really like.”

Both the chicken and the eggplant were frozen when Anna gave them to us, and our intention was to keep them that way until we were ready to devour them. Gin’s freezer was merely a place to store the gifts before returning home to Maine the following day.

However, and as they say, desperate times…

“I’ll run out to the car and get what I need for the pasta,” I said putting on my hat and coat. “You guys can decide what else you want to eat.”

My money was on them choosing the stuffed chicken but when I returned the bird was still cooped up in the Frigidaire. Anna’s eggplant parm was in the microwave defrosting.

I have never known my aunt’s eggplant to garner tepid reviews and this time was no different. Gin liked it quite a lot; she even kept the leftovers. Dammit!

Still, she was far more amused by the eggplant’s mere presence in her freezer—and on her dinner table.

“We’re eating Christmas dinner from the trunk of a car,” she laughed. And laughed. And then laughed some more.

After we’d finished eating I called Anna to tell her what had happened and to thank her for saving our holiday. As is so often the case our conversation was brief but very much to the point.

“You’re not supposed to eat Chinese on Christmas anyway,” she scolded me. “What’s wrong with you? Sei pazzo?”

“I love you too, Anna,” I told my aunt before the line went dead and she was gone.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Fig cookies revisited

These cookies got me in a lot of trouble last year. For a while it was touch and go whether Cousin Josephine would ever speak to me again.

We had just finished our Christmas Eve dinner and the desserts were coming out, the most crucial, as always, being Jo’s outstanding cookies and biscotti. As my cousin began to uncover one particular tray of baked goods I noticed her eyeing me with purpose and more than a little wariness.

“We’ve NEVER put frosting on our fig cookies,” she announced to me and to no one else.

My cousin was referring to a recipe for fig cookies (aka cuccidati) that I had earlier posted right here on this blog. In it I accused Jo, her mother Anna, our Aunt Laura, and even My Sainted Mother of topping the traditional Christmas cookies with sweet white frosting and colorful rainbow non pareils, not a simple dusting of confectioners sugar, as I prefer and as my recipe suggested.

“Honestly,” Jo added with a look of disappointment that still cuts me a year later, “I don’t know where you get your ideas sometimes.”

This is not how Christmas Eve is supposed to end.

Josephine is more a sister to me than a cousin, and I love her very much. The idea that I would accuse her and all the other bakers in our family of sweet white frosticide on so important a Christmas tradition is not an excusable offense. Not where I come from it isn’t.

I won’t defend myself here. Despite a clear, though evidently flawed memory to the contrary, if Josephine says that she has never used frosting on her Christmas fig cookies then she has never used frosting on her Christmas fig cookies.

I cannot be more sorry for suggesting otherwise.

And wish to dedicate this recipe to my beloved cousin.

For starters, this recipe will make around 5 dozen cookies. Mix together 4 cups all-purpose flour, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon baking powder, and 1 teaspoon salt. Add two sticks of cold unsalted butter (cut into small cubes) and work the butter into the flour mixture using your hands.

After a couple minutes the flour and butter will kind of clump together, like so.

Add 2 extra large eggs (beaten), 1/2 cup milk, and 2 tablespoons Anisette. Mix together thoroughly by hand until a dough forms.

The dough will be on the moist side, which is okay, that’s what you want. Wrap it in plastic and chill in the fridge for a good couple hours or more before making the cookies. (I actually kept the dough chilling overnight and made the cookies the following day.)

For the filling we’ve got one ring of dried figs (pinch off the hard ends), 1/4 pound pitted dates, 1/2 cup raisins, 1 cup pecans, 2/3 cup walnuts, 1/2 cup candied orange peel, 1/2 cup honey, 1/3 cup whiskey (I went with Jack Daniel’s), 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, and 1 teaspoon cinnamon. Put them all together in a food processor and mix into a paste.

Like so.

Cut the dough ball into quarters (put the dough you aren’t working with back in the fridge until ready to use, so it keeps cold). On a well-floured surface roll out one of the pieces of dough until it’s roughly 4 inches wide by maybe 18 or 20 inches long. The rolled dough should be around 1/8-inch thick, give or take. Take a quarter of the filling and roll it along the center of the dough.

Brush the dough with an egg wash and then roll it from one side to the other.

Make sure to pinch along the seam when you’re done rolling.

Making sure that the seam is on the bottom, brush more egg wash along the entire roll.

With a pastry cutter or sharp knife cut the roll into pieces that are around an inch and a half wide. At this point all that’s left to do is put them on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. The cookies should bake in a 350 degree F oven for around 20 minutes, give or take. At the halfway mark rotate the baking sheet so the cookies cook evenly. Allow to cool thoroughly.

Then you can sprinkle some confectioners sugar on top before serving. Or not.

Just don’t be pouring no thick white frosting on top of them.

Right, Jo?

Christmas fig cookies

These ain’t my mother’s fig cookies.

If they were they would be topped with a thick, sweet white frosting and colorful rainbow non pareils. This would justify the cookies being called cuccidati, the traditional Sicilian Christmas cookie that I and many others like me grew up craving around this time of year.

But here’s the thing (and with deep respect and sincerest apologies to Cousin Josephine, Aunt Anna, Aunt Laura and, of course, mom): I have grown to like my fig cookies without the frosting and the sprinkles on top.

There, I said it.

For the past several holiday seasons I have been sneaking around the very fine bakers of my family and quietly acquiring my Christmas fig cookies at a place called Ragtime, in Howard Beach, Queens. In between visits to one family member or another I will park my car in an inconspicuous location, quickly slip into the store’s small bakery department, order up a couple pounds of their excellent (non-frosted) fig cookies, and retreat just as fast as I am able, so as to remain undetected.

The cookies remain hidden in the trunk of my car until after the holidays are over and I have safely arrived back home in Maine. Never—and I mean never—is their existence revealed to a single family member back home.

I’m going to Hell. I just know it.

This Christmas will be different, however. After decades in the same location, Ragtime recently closed its doors forever. Those in the tightly knit, largely Italian-American neighborhood lost a food shop of iconic stature.

Me, I lost the source for my favorite (non-frosted) fig cookies.

And so…

For starters, this recipe will make around 5 dozen cookies. Mix together 4 cups all-purpose flour, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 tablespoon baking powder, and 1 teaspoon salt. Add two sticks of cold unsalted butter (cut into small cubes) and work the butter into the flour mixture using your hands.

After a couple minutes the flour and butter will kind of clump together, like so.

Add 2 extra large eggs (beaten), 1/2 cup milk, and 2 tablespoons Anisette. Mix together thoroughly by hand until a dough forms.

The dough will be on the moist side, which is okay, that’s what you want. Wrap it in plastic and chill in the fridge for a good couple hours or more before making the cookies. (I actually kept the dough chilling overnight and made the cookies the following day.)

For the filling we’ve got one ring of dried figs (pinch off the hard ends), 1/4 pound pitted dates, 1/2 cup raisins, 1 cup pecans, 2/3 cup walnuts, 1/2 cup candied orange peel, 1/2 cup honey, 1/3 cup whiskey (I went with Jack Daniel’s), 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg, and 1 teaspoon cinnamon. Put them all together in a food processor and mix into a paste.

Like so.

Cut the dough ball into quarters (put the dough you aren’t working with back in the fridge until ready to use, so it keeps cold). On a well-floured surface roll out one of the pieces of dough until it’s roughly 4 inches wide by maybe 18 or 20 inches long. The rolled dough should be around 1/8-inch thick, give or take. Take a quarter of the filling and roll it along the center of the dough.

Brush the dough with an egg wash and then roll it from one side to the other.

Make sure to pinch along the seam when you’re done rolling.

Making sure that the seam is on the bottom, brush more egg wash along the entire roll.

With a pastry cutter or sharp knife cut the roll into pieces that are around an inch and a half wide. At this point all that’s left to do is put them on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet. The cookies should bake in a 350 degree F oven for around 20 minutes, give or take. At the halfway mark rotate the baking sheet so the cookies cook evenly. Allow to cool thoroughly.

Oh, and here’s the most important part: Sprinkle some confectioners sugar on top before serving.

And please don’t tell my family.

Thanks are owed

To me, the holidays wouldn’t be the holidays without these two wonderful women.

That’s my Aunt Anna on the left and Aunt Rita on the right. By the look of things I would say that they are taking a well-deserved break from feeding a whole mess of us at some family get together long ago.

Time has altered their appearance a bit. Rita will be 90 very soon and Anna isn’t too far behind.

Each lost her husband at a young age. For decades now they have lived together, currently in an apartment in Queens that is just above Cousin Joan’s and near to several other members of our family.

My aunts are about as close as any two people can be. I know marriages—good ones—that aren’t nearly as inspiring.

Anna and Rita are in my heart always, but never moreso than around this time of year.

I am lucky to be a member of the Christmas Eve celebration they host each and every year. It is literally a feast—the Feast of the Seven Fishes to be exact, totally worth clicking on and checking out—and I would no more miss it than I would lop off my right hand, or even that other one.

For a long time I used to wonder when the holidays might finally, inevitably lose their allure. After all, the years have a way of grinding away at the starry-eyed idealism that’s required to truly love this time of year.

But I haven’t grown at all weary. And in a very large way I owe this to the optimism and love of these two extraordinary women.

I am over-the-moon thankful to them for that.

Happy Holidays everybody.

Making it great again

This wine was not born in the best of times.

Soon after its grapes were harvested and crushed, in the Piedmont, Italy’s finest wine region, a United States Naval pilot had to parachute to safety when a missile took down his fighter jet over North Vietnam. The serviceman, John McCain, would remain imprisoned, frequently tortured, for the next five and a half long years.

Days after McCain’s capture Lyndon Johnson held a secret meeting with his top political advisers. The agenda: Devise a plan to mislead the American people into thinking more enthusiastically about the war in Southeast Asia. “The Wise Men,” as the group was known, concluded that the president should feed his constituents a steady diet of optimistic pablum aimed at advancing the falsehood that America was winning, not losing, an unpopular war in which hundreds of thousands had already died.

Earlier that year, as Italy’s rich vineyards lay dormant, three Apollo 1 astronauts were incinerated aboard their spacecraft as it idled on the launchpad at Cape Kennedy in Florida. Race riots—159 of them—erupted across the country in what came to be known as “The Long, Hot Summer.” Albert DeSalvo (aka the Boston Strangler) was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 13 women, and a vile segregationist named Lester Maddox, who’d refused to serve blacks at his Atlanta restaurant, was sworn in as Georgia’s 75th governor.

Oh, and my poor father’s beloved New York Mets ended the 1967 season with a record of 61 wins and 101 losses, 40 1/2 games in the National League standings behind the first-place St. Louis Cardinals.

Like I said, not the best of times.

Me, I was a 10-year-old street kid living in a poor corner of eastern Brooklyn, on the border of Queens. Crime and racial tensions ruled here. The only places to buy cheap wine were crappy liquor stores where the inventory and the shopkeepers hid behind thick bullet-proof glass. Blocks away from the apartment house where my family and I lived was the 75th Precinct House. The 75th was often the busiest and most violent police precinct in the entire country. It still is.

All I can remember being concerned about the year that Aldo Conterno produced this very fine Barolo from his family’s legendary nebbiolo vines was getting through the days without getting hurt or even killed.

All of us in the neighborhood fretted over the same thing, I reckon.

My fourth-grade teacher, a nun named Sister Janita, was a big help to me that tumultuous year. Only not for any of the reasons you might imagine.

Sister Janita had grown too old to be in a classroom educating impressionable young minds. She wasn’t a woman who dispensed advice or wisdom to her students, either, at least not at this time in her career. But she was sweet and kind and functional, and so her superiors allowed the nun to keep her position later in life than was probably prudent.

She was also—how to say this delicately?—a loon.

The good sister had a pet pigeon named Lulu that lived in her second-floor classroom. Lulu had full run of the place, flying freely as she pleased. Many times the bird would land on your desk and coo coo coo until you’d share a bit of sandwich bread or some other morsel with her. Once Lulu landed right on my head and cooed until her mistress came around to collect her.

Sister Janita conversed far more with Lulu than with any of her students. Always kindly, always lovingly, always enthusiastically. But most of all, always kookily.

Considering the state of the world outside her classroom in 1967 I count myself lucky to have spent a good chunk of the year well-protected inside the sister’s benign, good-natured little cocoon.

After all, for several long hours a day that entire school year the biggest fear I had wasn’t getting caught up in a riot or a gang fight; it was getting shit on by a crazy old nun’s pet pigeon as it flew by.

We should all have so little to be troubled about today.

My home now is a lovely little town on the coast of Maine. The free local paper’s “Police Blotter” lists items about dogs found wandering without tags or teenagers caught “borrowing” a stranger’s canoe to go out fishing. The town’s only fire truck is new and spiffy, but it doesn’t get out of the garage much.

And yet all of a sudden I live in a very dangerous place again. We all do.

Let’s face it, the year that this bottle of Aldo Conterno’s 1967 Barolo Riserva Speciale got opened wasn’t much better than the year he produced it. You could argue that it was a lot worse. From election night in November 2016 through, well, just through, it’s been one self-inflicted national disaster after another.

Cracking open a 50-year-old Barolo at this time wasn’t my doing. That would be the work of my dear friend Scott, who surprised a small group of friends with it at a dinner celebration just before Christmas. Scott is a sommelier by trade. He’s also a swell guy to have as a friend.

He knew full well that everybody who’d gathered that evening had suffered, often silently, the entire year. And so, in his small and yet extraordinarily generous way, Scott decided to temporarily wrap us all up in a warm blanket made of joy and friendship and, like Sister Janita’s classroom in 1967, even a bit of fantasy.

For a few moments my friends and I could put aside our fears about the next three or even seven long years and escape to a place where good people who love and respect and care for each other can still get to quietly share a common appreciation of something honest and beautiful…

And, yes, even GREAT!

A Christmas past

You would need to be pressed very hard to find a kinder, more generous, better loved, more widely respected man than Joseph Patrick Giamundo.

Though a general contractor by actual trade, his role in 65 years of life was not to renovate or repair people’s homes and properties. Rather, the man’s primary duty was to provide guidance, support, comfort and, most importantly, example to a family consisting of more than 30 people.

He had no children of his own. An early and rather horrific tragedy put an end to that.

Yet we were all Uncle Joe’s children. And proud of it.

“Patriarch” falls pretty far short of describing the man’s station in our clan. He was just completely and deservedly revered, by his family for sure, but by many others as well.

He still is. And it’s been decades since he passed on.

I came across this picture not long ago and made sure to keep it in plain sight so that I could remember to share it with you for the holidays. It’s one of Uncle Joe’s homemade Nativity scenes, the kind he would throw together using scraps of plywood and two-by-fours leftover from his contracting jobs.

Nothing was so extraordinary about these annually assembled outdoor structures. And yet this one will stick with my entire family forever.

The hand-scribbled sign stapled to the top says it all.

TO THE S.O.B.s THAT STOLE THE FIGURES OUT OF THE MANGER
DROP DEAD

Yep, Uncle Joe’s nativity scene figures got heisted.

His mood after discovering the overnight theft was more wounded than angry, at least that’s how it seemed to me. The few figures that you see in the picture are extras that Uncle Joe gathered up and hastily placed in the manger after all the originals had disappeared. It was an incomplete set but, well,  at least it was something for us kids to look at and feel excited about during the holidays.

For a good couple days my uncle tried to hide his melancholy. When his sign appeared, especially the DROP DEAD part of it, we were all pretty shaken up. Uncle Joe just never spoke that way to people, no matter how much they deserved it. I remember feeling really badly for him, like something uniquely precious, perhaps even like the child he’d lost, had gotten ripped away from him once again.

On Christmas Eve Uncle Joe awoke to find that his Nativity scene figures had all been returned. His mood, of course, brightened considerably, and so did the rest of the family’s. Just before leaving his house to attend the midnight mass at St. Rita’s Uncle Joe put up another sign on his manger.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH AND MERRY CHRISTMAS TO YOU!

I can’t find a picture of that sign. But don’t really need one either.

Merry Christmas everybody.

A Christmas Story

‘Twas not the night before, but Christmas Day itself. Late in the day, actually. It had been dark a few hours already. I remember it being bone-chillingly cold.

I was sixteen or seventeen. The family dinner had taken place earlier in the afternoon. At around seven o’clock or so I walked over to my girlfriend’s house. Her family was a lot like mine, Italian-American tight you know, and so I figured that an appearance on such a holiday would be appreciated, if not expected.

To get to her place I had to walk past the White Castle on the corner of Atlantic and Shepherd Avenues. This was in the East New York section of Brooklyn, I should mention, the place where I was raised. Going past the restaurant on Christmas Day was always both fun and spooky, because this was the only 24-hour period in the entire year that the place was closed. Often my friends and I would go by the White Castle just to witness it on Christmas Day, to see the lights out and the grills cold, to hear the quiet.

Sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against the glass door to the restaurant, was an elderly couple. Elderly to a teenager, I should say. They might have been in their fifties, as I am now. They were bundled up but not enough to my eye; their bodies were next to each other but not close enough to keep each other warm, I thought.

“Cold tonight,” the woman said as I walked past.

“Sure is,” the man repeated.

I nodded and kept walking. Moving was the only way I could keep warm.

After visiting a while I decided it was time to get back to my own family. Mom and Aunt Anna would be putting out an evening buffet and I wouldn’t want to miss it. As I said goodnight to my girlfriend’s grandmother she grabbed me tightly by the wrist and drew me toward her.

“You be good to my granddaughter,” she said in the thickest Italian accent. “Understand?”

Before I could answer the old lady kissed me and said I was a nice boy and that she liked me. Then she handed me a tray of my favorite Christmas cookies: cucidati, or fig cookies. I ate one right on the spot, or maybe it was two. They were extraordinary, better than my mom’s, in fact. I hugged the old lady very tightly and kissed her.

“You keep making me fig cookies like this,” I told her, “and I’ll be good to anybody you want.”

Approaching the White Castle I could see that the couple I’d seen earlier was still on the cold ground and against the door. It was around nine o’clock by now. Three hours before the place would reopen. They were waiting for exactly that, I realized. It hadn’t even occurred to me earlier.

Just as before the woman and then the man remarked upon the weather. Again I nodded and kept on my way. It seemed colder now.

After walking another half block or so I turned around and headed back to the White Castle. This time as I approached the couple I made sure to speak first.

“These are my favorite cookies, and I want you to have them,” I said handing them to the lady.

“Thank you, son,” the man said quickly and without looking up, most of his face buried inside the warmth of his coat.

“We’ll have them with some nice hot coffee in a little while,” the woman said. “Won’t we dear?”

I nodded and started on my way again.

“Merry Christmas,” I heard the woman say. “And good night.”