Ring in the Newberg

Ah sweet midwinter and the grand winter festival contained therein. Along for the ride with the annual commemoration of the our savior’s birth and, if you will be honest with yourself, probably only modestly linked with same in a philosophical sense, comes a wonderful time of breaks, gifts, rain, friends, sugar, home, family, feasts, and with it all, tradition. My little and immediate penultimate has accrued a number of holiday traditions throughout our twenty odd years together and, inspired by a friend’s recent post (hi Jenny!), I will now attempt to make a top 9 list of some of the more interesting, important, and, umm, interesting.

So here it is, the Top Nine Majors Family Holiday Traditions, In No Particular Order Despite Being Numbered In A Manner That Might Suggest That They Are Indeed In Some Particular Order:

9) My grandma started making Crab Newberg (Newburg? Apparently it’s spelled both ways…) every year for Christmas Dinner way back in the days of yore. It is an addictive dish, probably owing to the full dozen egg yolks and heaping cup of butter that the recipe calls for. Which is a good thing, because Newburg leftovers last longer than the post-Thanksgiving turkey marathon.

8) My mom has a cloth advent calendar consisting of a nice cottagey picture, a series of numbered pouches, and a small stuffed mouse head designed to hop from pouch to pouch with the passage of days like a vagabond joey. Christmas would not be complete without it.

7) Neither would Christmas be complete without drinking at least one cup of eggnog out of our cavernous and more than a little creepy Santa Head mugs.

6) O Come O Come Emmanuel, which we sing before our candle-lit dinner every Sunday of Advent. I try to do the bass harmony every time, and fail just as often. I don’t know why it is so hard.

5) Complaining about the cold, wet, miserable conditions while cutting down our own Christmas tree at some random tree farm. I don’t think we’ve been to the same tree farm more than twice.

4) My sister and I arguing over who will get to light/blow out the candles this time.

3) One Christmas, of a year which most likely fell into what could be considered the “middle school” period, I received a set of socks from my aunt Barbara. Not being known at that time for my flawless tact, I may possibly have given the impression that I was unenthused by the greater podiatric comfort potential that this boon afforded me. I have received socks from her family for Christmas ever since.

2) It is an old family tradition (perhaps stemming from the English eighth?) to consume a soupçon of oyster stew come suppertime, Christmas Eve. Every year my sister and I have been forcefully encouraged to drink deep the bitter cup, a practice that I credit for my long life, good health, and gag reflex. Hardy makes the claim that the difference between a true tradition and a mere reenactment is the enjoyment inherent in the event. A reenactment will often be marked, that prosit suggests, by a certain gusto and overall willingness to take part from the enacters’ corner, whereas a true tradition will be performed simply out of obligation and a sense of need. The latter is certainly the case when the annual downage of the O.S. is considered, and one could posit the addendum that, heck, if we had to suffer through it then our kids sure aren’t going to escape. Something about building character. Immortality.

1) Seeing friends who I haven’t seen in too long. After life at Stanford, it’s nice to travel again in circles where YWAM DTS participation is more common than college enrollment, where peers get married and nobody is weirded out by it, where friends arrange a formal party during which a couple of retired missionaries tell their story and the adolescent-to-twentysomething partygoers not only listen respectfully but enjoy it, where going to the local brewery to hear a jazz combo is commonplace, where one can do nice things for one’s female friends simply because they are friends and sans any complicated connotations, where deep and theological conversations are held around a table piled high with illegal fireworks, where Eraserhead and Dr. Quadratic mean something, or where hundreds of other interesting, commendable, but often overlooked ways of life are manifest. God bless Bellingham, I love it here.


Music of the moment: Sufjan Stevens’ “Illinois”. This may be the best album I’ve ever heard. Too bad he’s so good that he’s liable to become popular. Download some free tracks from Sounds Familyre and Amazon.

CGR: 4.3