My Favorite Party
Rebecca Sicree on Christmas Pizzas, Hospitality & the Best Gift of All
When my son Tom was sixteen, I asked him which of our Christmas traditions he would keep for his own family. He thought for a minute, then answered, "Opening one present on Christmas Eve."
"But we don't do that!" I protested.
"Yeah, but I wish we would."
"Isn't there anything we actually do that you would keep?"
He didn't hesitate. "Pizza on Christmas Eve," he replied.
I never planned on pizza. When I was growing up, my mother always prepared a beautiful roast beef dinner on Christmas Eve, during which we shared oplatki, the postcard-sized Polish wafers stamped with Nativity scenes. (On Christmas Day, she served leftover roast beef sandwiches and got to relax.) My husband's family, which has their big dinner on Christmas Day, did have pizza the night before.
My mother-in-law did not plan this either.
"One year the Boy Scouts gave us their leftover pizza supplies, which we happened to use on Christmas Eve," she explained. "The next year the kids all claimed that it was a tradition, so we couldn't stop doing it."
I was married thirteen years before I ever spent Christmas in my own home. (We finally realized that we could no longer fit six kids, their winter clothes, their gifts, and the gifts for both extended families into our sagging station wagon and still see out the rearview mirror). That year I tried, really tried, to cook my own roast beef dinner on Christmas Eve. At four in the afternoon, I found myself trying to calculate how I could feed everyone, clean up, and still transport various altar servers, choir members, angels, and sheep to the Children's Mass at 6:30 without resorting to desperate measures, such as time travel or bi-location. At that point, my husband stepped in, gently returned all the food to the refrigerator—and ordered take-out pizza.
Now we have a tradition that, like the laws of the Medes and the Persians, cannot be changed.
Rebecca Sicree writes from Boalsburg, Pennsylvania. She and her family attend Our Lady of Victory Catholic Church in nearby State College. She and her husband Andrew have ten children, six of whom are now adults.
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more on Christmas from the online archives
31.6—November/December 2018
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