Holiday traditions

Our holiday traditions are from long-ago Christmases, with parents and grandparents.  We traveled over most Christmases for decades, and marked the holiday in places as diverse as Hanoi, Salento (a coffee town in Columbia), a hill town in India, and Puerto Natale, Chile.  So we didn’t acquire holiday traditions of our own, aside from our small grapevine tree, Christmas stockings, and a few other decorations.

We almost always had a turkey dinner on New Year’s Day, if we’d returned by then, with stuffing and pumpkin pie.  My gardening companion loves turkey.

This year at Thanksgiving, we had a 20 lb. turkey, shared with our extended family. As the resident folks who lived nearby (we gathered in a large vacation rental), I’d acquired the large fresh turkey and brought the carcass (and more than enough meat) back home. Yikes.

I was not going to cook a turkey for Christmas, that’s for sure, after slowly eating leftover turkey, frozen, etc.  There’s still turkey-garlic soup in the freezer. Thank goodness for an old-fashioned turkey croquette recipe that transformed the abundant turkey bits from the carcass into rather nice turkey burgers.

So I’m planning a pastured pork roast, knoedel, and red cabbage — an Austrian Christmas dinner in honor of Tim’s grandmother and his recently acquired Austrian citizenship.  We’ll have family-oriented Christmas cookies for dessert - perfect, thanks to our friend who’s joining us and a small inspiration on my  part to use some maple sugar that was part of a thank-you gift.   Perfect.

These old recipe cards from my Grandmother remind me of traditions.