It’s Thanksgiving Day. Katie and I spend the morning peeling and chopping apples, hand mixing butter, brown sugar and maple syrup (yes, we brought it from Maine), and finally baking the apple crumble. It’s our contribution to Thanksgiving dinner, hosted by the Zureikat family here in Amman.
Of note: in the years I spent as a working-outside-the-home-mom I didn’t bake cookies with my kids. Birthday cakes, yes, the odd banana bread, yes, too. But I didn’t/wouldn’t make time for the “traditional” mom/child pastime. Now I really enjoy it. We cook and converse. No apron-string hanging, rather inventive, interactive cuisine-ing, and talk about God and ethics and culture and school. I’m glad I did the baking bit in this order.
Now back to the main narrative:
All my life I’ve been host family for Thanksgiving, except for once, in 1998, the year my father died. That year we went to my sister-in-law’s home in Maine. Last year, when her father, my father-in-law died, she came to us.
But all those other years Thanksgiving Day started at 7 or 8 in the morning, with my mom in the kitchen with her apron, stuffing the biggest bird we could find (20 or so pounds) and getting it in early for a long, slow roast. We'd primp the house and set the table with our best dishes -- the ones she inherited from my grandmother when she died. There would be cranberry relish, cranberry jello with fruit in it, white and sweet potatoes, asparagus casserole, pumpkin pies. Ummm.
The best college holiday was always the Thanksgiving break. I remember hitching rides Wednesday night from Wellesley neighbors who lived on Long Island and waking tired but eager Thursday morning for the ritual. For years we had the same core guest group: my father’s Iraqi friends from the University of California at Berkeley (all of whom went on to strong careers in engineering and medicine), their families (they married Iraqi women and spent some time back in the homeland as their scholarships required but returned to settle in the USA). There was Mr. Musa, an Iraqi Jewish bachelor or widower who lived not-too-far from us in Flushing, Queens. There was Danny Bank, my big band baritone sax playing flute teacher http://www.discogs.com/artist/Danny+Bank, http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:jcfixqw5ldte~T1 , and Linda Pezzano, my dad’s former assistant who went on to market Trivial Pursuit. We were all delighted when those two had a bit of a fling. Linda, may God rest her soul, died a decade ago after losing the battle with cervical cancer http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/28/business/linda-pezzano-54-marketer-who-aided-trivial-pursuit.html.
When we three girls got to the stage of growing up that meant we could move out, I began hosting wherever I lived. I hosted Columbia Journalism School out-of-towner-classmates back at the Flushing house in 1981. I hosted in Brighton, Massachusetts, when I was a news writer for WBZ-TV and dad and Laila came up from NYC. We used paper plates. When Peter and I lived in an apartment in North Bergen, NJ, we crated our spices and wine glasses a la supplies trekked to the home of those two pious sisters in northern Denmark for “Babette’s Feast” (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/243230.html) to Flushing and served up a sumptuous dinner to a couple of dozen including Linda and Danny. Since we moved to Maplewood, we host annually, serving a brined bird that has a glorious mixture of brown sugar, Dijon mustard and bourbon rubbed under the skin and bubbled into the gravy. Janna and Katie make the cranberry relishes and help peel the pearl onions, and my mother and her husband are among the honored guests. Other regulars are British, Palestinian, and Nebraskan neighbors.
This year, while Peter and Janna carry on the Maplewood tradition, Katie and I were invited to celebrate Thanksgiving with Jordanian friends.
Hala Zureikat is director of Jordan Television. Her friends are a dazzling assortment of talent: a surgeon who lived in Baghdad and photographed daily life there in the 1970s, the renowned journalist Daoud Kuttab (http://www.daoudkuttab.com/), educators, and an Iraq relief volunteer. The women of the group are close friends, getting together when then can for Bible study. The husbands get together when the wives ask them to -- or invite them to a meal.Any body worrying that Katie and I didn’t have a real Thanksgiving can relax. The food was fabulous. The turkey was as moist and flavorful as could be. And side dishes including hommos, tabbouleh, rice, kousa mashi (stuffed zucchini) and spicy greens and beet salad are surprisingly good complements.
(That's Dr. Fadi Haddad carving turkey and Hala's daughter Dahlia passing a plate. Katie standing in the foreground.)Our apple crumble was served alongside an exquisite homemade cheesecake and a multi-layered chocolate cake. We enjoyed a Bible quiz on the Christmas story (this quiz asserts that – contrary to popular carols -- we don’t know exactly how many kings came to pay tribute to the baby Jesus).
Before heading home at midnight, Katie and I were invited to go to Petra for the day with Dr. Fadi, a surgeon and photographer, that coming Saturday. Notes and photos on that adventure to come.
Thanks to the technology known as SKYPE, we spent a few minutes at our Maplewood table, too, Katie and I on Peter’s computer screen at the head of the table greeting my folks and the beloved cast of Roebuck’s, Riecke’s and Marshood’s.
Just two nights ago now the Fulbright House hosted a Seasons Greetings party replete with turkey, trimmings and pumpkin pie ordered from the American Embassy. Scholars and Fellows brought vegetables, salads and desserts.
Peter and Janna will be with us at the end of the year and we will be feasting with them. There are Butterballs in the frozen food section at Safe Way and I may just store one away for New Year's Eve.
No comments:
Post a Comment