Or, traditions are reruns. Think about it, when the family has gathered and someone says, as they do every year, "Remember the Christmas that Uncle Fred's pants caught fire and he put them out by sitting in the snow?," it is just like watching Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown for the 40th time.
We had the traditional beigli & chrusciki day on Saturday. (Google searchers looking for recipes? Here's the post from last year.) As they do every year, the rest of the family laughed at the way I line the raisins up in rows on the beigli (if you just throw 'em on, you end up with clumps. I prefer my raisins distributed evenly.) This year, my seven-year-old niece joined us to sprinkle the sugar on the chrusciki, and she even tied a batch of them herself.
At one point when we were sitting around waiting for dough to rest (there's a fair amount of downtime in this process) we were discussing the fact that beigli is usually made with either nuts or fruit, but we haven't been able to come up with any recipes that call for both except the one from my great-grandmother. "It makes you wonder if someone from a fruit beigli family married somebody from a nut beigli family," Mom said.
The answer, unfortunately, is lost to history.
In another family historical note, Saturday would have been my grandfather's birthday. That's the chrusciki grandfather. The beigli grandfather was born December 24.
Missing my grandfathers at Christmas is another tradition.
Posted by Nic at December 19, 2005 03:56 PM | TrackBack