Since when did everything switch from rushed to warp speed? Christmas and other holidays are always a hectic time, but this is just ridiculous!
Even though shopping online has given some of us a way to avoid crowded malls, it just hasn’t given me a lot of time for other things, as it would seem. For one thing, you can’t shop for your holiday meals online, or not at this house, anyway. I doubt I’ll ever trust my holiday ham or turkey to FedEx. And I still want to make my own candy and cookies, but I have relented and stocked up on store-bought cakes this year; there is just no sense in baking for days when the deli was up at the crack of dawn baking enough for all of us.
The one thing that will never be store-bought as long as there is breath left in my body to stand and do it, is the dressing. I still make it using my Grandmother Young’s recipe, which you really can’t call a recipe since it’s not written down. I just know how it’s supposed to look and it always turns out just the way hers did, even though she killed the chicken herself, wringing its neck and popping it off as the body ran for cover. So, theoretically, I guess some of this dish does come from the store, the chicken, the meal, eggs, milk, cream of chicken soup and some other secret ingredients, but it’s put together by these hands which have been making it now for at least 45 years twice per year, so they’ve had a lot of practice.
This year I’ve been commuting to babysit my new granddaughter in Tennessee, so things are even more disorganized and hectic than normal. Last Friday night when I got home I started wrapping gifts. It was almost 3 a.m. before I got finished. In between gifts I deboned three chickens, made two big pans of cornbread and chopped and sautéed a big skillet of onions and celery.
Now picture me stirring, adding ingredients, checking the oven, measuring, opening cans and crumbling cornbread, with wrapping paper, tape, scissors and glittery ribbon strewn around on the same island.
I got probably a dozen gifts wrapped while cornbread cooked in both ovens. I cleaned up the wrapping paraphernalia after deboning the chickens, and I put all of the dressing ingredients together into a huge dish pan, just the way my grandmother did (only mine is plastic and hers was enamel) and finally fell into bed at 5:30, just as the sun started lighting the horizon to the east. My last thought as I drifted off to sleep, or nap, as the case may be, was that I sure hoped there was no glitter in the cornbread…
At 6:30 a.m. I was back up, and by 8:30 had the dressing in the oven (no evidence of glitter that I noticed), four or five more gifts wrapped and some cookies ready to go into the oven.
I was only a little bit late for the sit-down meal in the church gym. And there was no glitter in the cornbread, thank you Lord!
I hope everyone has a wonderful, blessed Christmas this year. And that we can all relax and slow down a bit in the coming year. Lol, yes, that was a joke.
Merry Christmas from our home to yours, wherever that may be!
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