CASUAL

...It's almost impossible to separate those Christmas dinners from one another...

...The sudden burst of abundance in the midst of winter: That's what Christmas is about...

...Every year, the relatives would ooh and ah as the aspic was triumphantly brought on a platter to the table, and the crisis of the children's refusal to eat it would escalate from parental glares to harsh whispers to my father banging the table and forbidding us in a loud voice to have dessert or play with our new toys until we finished our portions...

...They can't have all been there the same year, but my memory puts together on the table sweet potatoes and yams, butternut squash and the white potatoes mashed with milk and butter that—in one of those sneaky family traditions by which chores get divvied up—we were told only Uncle Harlow could make well...

...And then there were pies: made from pieces of cooked pumpkin kept in the freezer since October, apples up from the cellar, Mason jars of mincemeat, a chocolate-pudding pie from a packaged mix that one of my aunts brought...

...That—and the other thing, the other sudden burst of abundance in the midst of winter, almost two thousand years before...

...Nothing until two o'clock, or three or four or, one year, even five, when the ravenous aunts had begun to snip at each other in hunger, and the starved uncles were arguing angrily in the living room about how many terms Sigurd Anderson had been governor of South Dakota, and the children—past the wheedling stage, past the whining stage, past the stage of sitting on the kitchen floor and weeping for food—were crouched together on the sofa, dumb with misery...

...J. BOTTUM...

...There was the year Great-aunt Fern fell asleep by the fire, the year the cousins from Milwaukee came, the year the car was snowed in and we had to walk to my grandmother's house bearing tomato aspic through the streets of Pierre...

...No lunch, no snack, no Christmas gingerbread, no nuts, no fruit...

...The only elaborate thing I remember my mother making for Christmas was an aspic, a sort of clarified gelatin made from a consomme of veal bones and flavored with tomatoes...

...But there was always the onion and breadcrumb dressing into which my father dumped two, three, four little white tins of sage, sneaking back into the kitchen to add more when he thought no one was looking...

...But then at last the kitchen door would swing open in a blast of steam and smoke and relief...

...None of the fancy chocolate a cousin had sent from England, none of the buche de Noel my sister taught us to make when she came back from her junior year in France with her bangs cut at a Parisian angle and her diary filled with recipes...

...My father would look at the pie, then at us children, and then at my mother...

...And then, after that groaning meal, nothing...

...I have no idea where she got the idea—South Dakota didn't run much to French cooking—but she would spend hours working on it, and the result always looked to me and my sisters like jello made with tomato juice...

...But that's what almost everyone who writes about Christmas knows...

...He didn't like the stuff either...

...You see," my father explained every year as we sat down to eat, "this is the way to do it: A big breakfast to stretch your stomach, then no lunch, so by dinner time you're really ready for a full Christmas meal...

...Casual A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN PIERRE My father always insisted on an early Christmas breakfast—a huge feast of eggs poached in milk, and bacon and hashbrowns and pancakes and marmalade and grapefruit and a sort of sweetened toast whose name I can't remember, but it tasted like corrugated cardboard with cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on top...

...At last, while our parents snuck out to the porch to recover their nerves, our favorite uncle would pick up our plates, along with his own, and head off to the kitchen, whistling...

...In Washington Irving's Bracebridge Hall, in Charles Dickens's account of Bob Cratchit's feast, even in Dylan Thomas's childhood Wales, at the center of recollection stands the contrast between the cold weather outside and the steaming dishes inside...

...But the menus never changed...

...And my mother would shake her head, but my happy, roly-poly aunt never noticed and gave us big pieces anyway...

...The food was all more enormous than it was complicated...

...And though the Christmas season was church and presents and staying up till midnight and carols, memories of Christmas Day itself are mostly memories of food...

...And the dining-room table would fill with a turkey or a goose, rolls and salad and green beans, little glass bowls of watermelon pickles with tiny three-pronged forks beside them, and cranberries plopped whole in sugared water, boiled until they started to burst, then set aside to cool...