Holiday Devolution

Every time I’m getting ready to host one of the periodic holiday meals at my house, I am slightly seized with a little niggling hang-up which I think I’ve finally thought through. It has to do with my location on the devolving formality continuum.

If we trace my small lifetime of family meals back to earlier days, we’d start in Tazewell, Virginia, where “the grannies” (as we often referred collectively to my paternal grandmother and great-grandmother) had a concept and execution of even ordinary Sunday dinner which involved family convening in a lovely dedicated dining room, and food prep relegated to the kitchen which was through a swinging door, past the “breakfast room,” and down the hall. Although we kids (and adults) freely scampered back and forth, there was a clear line of demarcation between the dining setting, and the “rest of life” settings.

While my grandparents engaged some domestic help, they weren’t quite Downton Abbey, with a houseful of servants, a kitchen on a completely different level of the massive house, and all pertinent protocol adhered to. But I think that my grandmother’s notions of meal presentation could be placed on a timeline of style, with the King’s banquet table anchoring one end, and the peasant’s kitchen-centered humble holiday bounty at the other.

My mom has a dining room which adjoins the kitchen by one open doorway. She often sets up beverages in what she likes to call the parlor (I grew up calling it the living room, and I’m having trouble adjusting to the word “parlor.”) She will put a nicely arrayed tray of veggies and dip in the family room, and the kitchen is a busy place indeed. People hang out there--it’s everybody’s quarters and there is no one but family doing the work--but there is still a line, albeit fuzzier, between prep and dining.

So, I realize that I have some relics in my head about how things at holidays are “supposed” to be done. I intellectually rejected them as requirements years ago. In fact, when Jeff and I designed our house add-on, we very purposefully made the kitchen/dining area a space to live in. There is no separation. There is no “dining room.” That’s what I knew best represented my personality and I designed out any provision for making the meal magically appear out of thin air, as happens in the Hogwarts dining hall.

Still, there’s this weird little vestigial thought that pops up when I’m thinking out what I need to do about Christmas dinner, and it says “People are going to be all over the place, and there will be blobs of mashed potatoes everywhere, a sink full of pots, and probably several people’s computers. How will you make it look like Christmas dinner?” "Frankly," I reply to it, "there is no point in worrying, since the dishes and flatware are a hodgepodge anyway."

So I realize I really need to embrace my position on the formality continuum, as being a cozy spot next to the paintings of some Dutch realists of yore--where everything happens in one room, the dogs and cats are underfoot, and there is no line of demarcation. It’s the kitchen feast. I was apparently not only NOT to the manor born, I was possibly born to the tree. Or in a tree. Or maybe under one.