MEMORY/RITUAL/TRADITION
- erinedubby
- Dec 23, 2025
- 1 min read
Newsletter
Growing up, my family was very serious about Christmas rituals
Almost all of them were about food, or drink, or both. There was our sanctioned annual cookie line-up: Nutty Nougats (Uncle Clint always ate them all), unnamed chocolate cookies with chocolate frosting (no one can get them quite right since my grandma passed), Jane Filmore’s sugar cookies (I never met Jane, but her cookies endeared her to me). Grandma also made fruit cakes, that I did not like, and nobody seemed to eat, but every year the dense bricks were baked, wrapped in foil, and given as presents.
We always had Manhattan Clam Chowder on Xmas Eve. This began, as many food traditions do, as an accident of necessity and overwhelm (my young mother was weeded, as we say in the biz, with Martha Stewart intentions, invited guests, presents to wrap, and a whole other day of food still to pull off, so yesterday’s soup became the main). Then it became a hallowed tradition. Including the parmesan toasties dipped in the bacon-flecked tomato-based broth (***cut slices of stale baguette, spread with soft butter, top with parmesan, bake til golden***).
And, the best meal of the year, Christmas brunch, enjoyed after the orgy of unwrapping. The perfection of its flavors is cut into my cells like a sense tattoo: the sacred Christmas Strata (Strata is Americana’s answer to quiche, but so under-appreciated) layered with extra hot Jimmy Dean sausage, green chiles, sharp cheddar, white bread left to soak overnight in an annually debated ratio of eggs, milk and Coleman’s mustard.
