 Holidays
at the LeMay household presented all manner of challenges for my mother
and sister, Karen (a.k.a. Sis), once my siblings left the nest and
brought back new family members.
Ours was a three-bedroom, one-bathroom, no-more-than-
six-people-comfortably-in-the-
living-room house. Yet each Thanksgiving, Christmas or other gathering
we fit 14 or more relatives and friends at a table set up in the living
room. Cramped and often overheated from wearing winter sweaters in a
small house baked by lots of cooking, I recall these meals as the
fondest of fond memories. Everyone was there - something sadly no
longer possible - and all ages equally could tell stories, jokes or
news of the day. (We also all were equally subjected to teasing when
opportunity presented itself.)
Mom and Sis cooked huge meals and wrangled food on a
painfully small counter spaces. (By virtue of cooking dyslexia - I’ve
been known to grab salt instead of sugar in a culinary panic - I was
excused, or sometimes barred, from all but the rudimentary entertaining
tasks. I can boil water … see photo.)
Recently I chatted about family get-togethers with our
magazine’s cooking guru, Arlene Coco of Coco’s to Geaux in Duluth. We
compared holidays, mine in northern Minnesota, hers in southern
Louisiana. Her family tended to cook outside for fall and even winter
(all well and good in states where you can still see the ground). She,
too, came from space-challenged homes where the family ate in shifts:
children, then men, then women. Her family didn’t have kids at the card
table, an arrangement familiar in my home. Moving to the “adult table”
is a major rite of passage.
Arlene recalls more variety in southern fare and registered
surprise at her first northern Thanksgiving, where starches - three,
count ’em - dominated the meal. She speculated that watching football
after eating might account for the heavy menu. I pointed out that
northern folks often lean toward “roots,” like potatoes, in winter.
They store well, for one thing. They fuel snowshoveling for another. My
family’s Thanksgivings rarely revolved around TV football. After all,
you’d have to peer through legs at the table taking up the whole living
room just to see the small screen.
Arlene and I did note one consistency, north and south: The
women prepared, presented and cleaned. I once (or twice) tried to hang
out with the guys after the meal, daring Mom to make me help when the
brothers didn’t. It didn’t take long to figure out that if the
three-starch meal made the women folk lethargic, you’d never know it
from the chatting, laughing and the juggling of dishes - dirty, clean
and about-to-be-clean. I ended up helping - just for the entertainment.
Befitting the season, this issue has much about home in it.
Home on an island (Madeline); lumberjacks far from home in days gone
by; Arlene’s recipes for holidays at home (it’s a starch, by the by).
Jean LemMon, Lake Superior resident and former editor of Better Homes & Gardens, advises how to create cozy home interiors.
This is also the homestretch issue for our 25th anniversary
year. We have had a wonderful year of celebration thanks to you, our
readers, supporters and advertisers.
Have a happy, homey, season.
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