The importance of Christmas family traditions...

[MineralMan]

My mother-in-law is 81 years old now. Her husband, my wife's father, died three and a half years ago, after more than 50 years of their marriage. They had many family traditions, and I got to participate in them in the 18 years I've been married to their daughter.

One of these was their traditional Christmas Eve supper. My wife's mom would make fresh egg noodles, and stock from a chicken. It took her a lot of time. It was a pretty bland soup, with just the stock and the egg noodles. The chicken was served on the side, after it had served its purpose in the stock pot.

It was a simple meal, reflecting the simplicity of the time when their mothers worked all day in a kitchen when they were children. It was a meal of poverty and hard times. In the old days, the chicken would have been snatched from the farmyard for the meal, and the noodles made from the eggs of the other chickens, along with flour from the 50 lb. bags always on hand.

Well, since my father-in-laws death, that soup had not been on the Christmas eve menu. My mother-in-law mourned hard over his death, and still mourns, but in a more stoical way. She doesn't find pleasure in the kitchen any longer, though.

So, this year, with one of my wife's sisters and her husband in town, I decided that I'd revive that Christmas eve tradition. My wife mentioned my plan and her mom said that would be OK, she guessed.

Now, I didn't make homemade egg noodles or cook the chicken all day to make the stock. To tell the truth, I never liked that noodle soup much. So, I used store-bought egg noodles and Swanson's chicken broth and bought a couple of rotisserie chickens to cut up for the side plate.

But I added onions, carrots, and celery to the stock, and seasoned the soup a little more than she did. This was my soup, not hers, even if the principle was the same. I only spend about an hour preparing the meal, rather than all day.

So supper time came around and I brought the simple meal to the table. I remembered one other part of the the normal routine, though. My father-in-law, somehow, always ended up with the bay leaf in his first bowl of soup. So, I had added a small bay leaf for each of us to the dish. I served up the soup while the chicken was passed around the table. I made sure that each bowl contained a bay leaf, so everyone could complain humorously about that bay leaf, as my father-in-law did each and every year.

It wasn't the same meal, of course. It was a variation of it. But my father-in-law was the main topic of conversation over supper. We told stories from the many years he had been the head of my wife's family, and heard stories about his parents and my mother-in-laws parents. While the mourning will never be gone, it was good to just tell the stories and recognize that in the telling, his legacy lives on. My mother-in-law, in her quiet way, dug in and ate two bowls of the soup, and seemed to enjoy it, even if it wasn't her recipe.

And everyone complained about the bay leaf in their bowl. I think this will be the new version of that old tradition, and I'm very glad I did it. Traditions are important, and in ways we often don't recognize. It's a pity when they are lost.