damn, i love this xmas eve thing!!

so like, i don't know, about 10 or so years ago, it was probably longer than that cause i was still with my ex husband, i took over the annual xmas eve dinner, that is to say, i laid down the law that i was a grown up with my own kitchen and could hostess ONE holiday as such.
i am italian, right? so we do the fish on xmas eve thing. growing up, there were always seven, and i started that way, but have scaled (hahahaha i kill myself) back, since there are not 32 people or whatever at my house like there always was at my house when i was little. this year we have a record low at 7, maybe 8. my sis, her husband and my niece are usually here too, but my new nephew, born three weeks ago, has grounded them at home in los angeles. my first xmas without my sis. but that is a whole other thing. back to the fish. so, i do the traditional anchovy and pasta dish, i have not yet garnered the ovarian monumentalism to make my nunnie's baccala, but i do the shrimp cocktail, i can't find the proper smelts here to save my life, but i have tried frying the bigger ones from the vietnamese market and they aren't bad...anyway, i am rambling. i love it.
i love feeling connected to the women that all came before me in my genetic line, the ones i know, like my mom and her mom, my nunnie, and the ones i didn't really know but do remember, like nunnie's mom, and the ones i never knew, all before her. my mom was the first generation in her family to be born in the united states, so i guess i grew up not far removed from the "old country" or the freshly emigrated traditions of my italian heritage. (for the record, my dad is not italian, but he was an only child of german and irish second generation americans that had a lot of money and did christmas eve at the country club. poor guy! i didn't know them too well. unlike my mom's side. ahem.)
anyway i do love it! i feel no conflict about being a devout atheist cooking a biblically themed meal to celebrate an ostensibly "christian" holiday (please.) because when i get on my apron on christmas eve, and start chopping garlic and mashing anchovies and deveining shrimp, i am so happy, i don't really have any grandiose words for it, i just love it. i guess it is the tradition, and it makes me realize and reminds me all at the same time, that tradition is important, and people are important, because gawd knows my family are not all fucking hunky-dory, there are feuds and rifts and repressed resentments in it just like any family, you know? there are some assholes and some alcoholics and some deserters and what have you, but i get to still feel good about them all, collectively, as my family, because the women in this family always bothered to do things like cook seven fishes on xmas eve. no matter what.
i am really blabbering now. i just wanted to put this out there, somewhere that i can look back on it when i need to, and share it with anybody that has thoughts about it, i guess.
by the way, for a long time, i used this book with my groups of adult women and men in recovery around the holidays. if you feel a lack of what i am talking about in your life, i totally recommend this book. it knocks my socks off every time i read it.

anyway, hope you all are having a decent day, and get what you want, if you even know what the hell that is, and all that!!! xoxoxox punkmama