Breaking with Tradition?

Or maybe just not going where habit wants to take you?

For a bunch of my adult years, I've been trying to create some Christmas
traditions. I had some a couple of decades ago. Admittedly they were simple
post-University ones. Not major hand-on-able traditions. And since I don't
have kids, and the cats don't care, I don't suppose I really need a legacy
to pass along.

Instead, my Christmas traditions since the 80's seem to have become more of
a struggle with time, made complex by my paranoia with winter. When I worked
in the advertising agency, Christmas was synonymous with year end (although
the varying clients had year ends scattered throughout the year) and usually
merely meant more, more, more in terms of last minute work. The more
responsibility I had in the department, the more frantic that last minute
chaos became.
And while I'd moved to Ontario with my own 'tweak' on Christmas
entertaining, which involved some festivities (and food) on Solstice, I
started to run into competition for the date. So, that fell by the wayside.
But because I was so busy, eventually, with the agency job, I got over
worrying about that.

And when I got married, I sort of envisioned that we'd start our own little
round of traditions. Except that at first they involved fitting in with our
other friends and hobbies. Which was okay. But when we moved away from the
city, that fell by the wayside too.

And every Christmas we end up trying to coordinate some get-together with
his family, but that involves enough brothers that it's seldom concrete or
planned very far ahead. (And is at the very teeth-clenchiest time of the
driving year!)

So, really the only Christmas tradition we seem to cling to, is
food-related. And even there, we're negotiable. Some years I've cooked a
duck. (We have a real fondness for a duck!) More often than not, we have NOT
done a turkey. Until recently, there weren't a lot of turkeys that were
two-person sized. And while I don't mind leftovers, in fact, I could get a
lot of enjoyment out of them, most turkeys just seem way too huge.
But chicken or turkey, if that's what we have, we've always stuck to our
favourite route: sage stuffing with nuts and raisins, and now cranberries,
gravy, mashed potatoes, and brussel sprouts. [sigh. When I think of how much
Dad loved brussel sprouts when we were kids, and how often they were served,
and how much I hated them!!!]

I suggested this year that maybe we should be wild and crazy. And even if I
roasted a chicken, if maybe we should just be untraditional, and do
something different.... (I can always do it again, the way we're used to,
for New Year's!)

I think, when I started the conversation, he got a bit nervous... but when
I finished my proposal, he seemed up for it.

It's hard though. Hard to break from habit. I thought to myself, hey, maybe
I can track down enough info about that turkey that Jed Bartlett was cooking
on West Wing, that he called the Butterball Hotline about. Maybe I could do
that! I thought that surely in an internet search I'd find the recipe. Or
someone's interpretation of the recipe. Nope. A few incomplete quotes was
all I could find. Then I thought, no problem, I'll watch the episode, and
make notes of everything said on the subject. Nope. Season 2. We've loaned
seasons 2 to 6 to a best friend. But not one who just lives down the street.
(Not that you get many friends living down the street when you live in the
country!)

Anyway, I got a small turkey. (So small, actually that all the recipe info
I can track down doesn't even recognize it as a real turkey! Recipes for
cooking a turkey BREAST speak in comparative terms!)
And I thought I'd brine it. And do a sausage stuffing with cornbread.
(Maybe next year I can actually get Jed Bartlett's recipe....) And make a
different kind of gravy, with rosemary and sherry. And mashed sweet
potatoes.

Of course, this is weird and scary and will probably make it an even
whackier Christmas than I usually have.
But there's always New Year's. I can make it the correct way on New Year's
if I need to. We like roast chicken. It won't be a hardship!

But it does feel a bit like preparing to jump off a cliff! That's West
Wing-like....

anti-v