Christmas Dinner at Grandma's

Christmas dinner at Grandma's was always the same. The table was set with Mother's best China and long-stemmed glasses. Three leaves were added to stretch the table, but even at that, we often had a "kid's table" in the adjacent closed-in porch.

The menu, which never varied, included a huge turkey with Italian spinach dressing. There were mounds of mashed potatoes and a silver gravy boat with thick turkey gravy. Of course we had cranberry sauce (the jellied kind) and also frozen green peas to complete the Christmas colors. The only salad we ate was jello salad, usually lime jello with crushed pinapple and cottage cheese. But the dish that set our dinner apart from any others was raviolas. To this day I still make raviolas from scratch for Christmas. Daddy served a sweet, dark, red wine in stemmed wine glasses to the adults.

After the dinner dishes were cleared off the table Mother brought in dessert: pumpkin pies, a mincemeat pie, and persimmon pudding with lemon sauce. Daddy brought out a box of Italian almond candies wrapped in little individual boxes. It was a once a year treat which he kept hidden until after dinner.

Most of us waited until later for pie because we had already sampled Mother's chocolate fudge, divinity, meringues, and peanut brittle which were on the coffee table in the living room and the buffet in the dining room.

How we ate all that food I'll never know, but it was our traditional family feast and we were celebrating Christmas day.