What are your favorite holiday traditions? What really makes a trip home for you? (Maybe those are two different questions, or maybe they’re one and the same.)
I’ve heard the traditional Christmas meal includes ham; I imagine it as a spiral-cut honey-glazed bone-in ham, baked to slightly crisp the brown sugar topping. For some, the real staple is homemade mac’n’cheese with mouthwatering sauce and a delicious buttery-crumb topping. What is your favorite holiday staple?
We had a simple roast for dinner, sides including baked potatoes, pan-fried vegetables, and mashed turnip. Turnip is one of my Dad’s favorite vegetables. Clearly, which vegetables you like and dislike isn’t an inherited trait: he loves turnip, my Mom loves asparagus, and I’d much rather steamed broccoli. But I digress.
Tonight, we had a much more iconic meal: thin spaghetti and Mom’s famous meat sauce. While I’d prefer regular spaghetti, no sauce matches Mom’s. For about a half-gallon of tomato base, she adds two pounds of breakfast sausage and two pounds of hamburger. It’s amazing. Best served with garlic bread – or garlic crescent rolls.
Still, even the best dinner doesn’t make the trip home. It certainly adds to the experience, but it’s not definitive. Neither is the five-hour drive up, the pit stop an hour out, or the crawling up the stairs by the end of the first day looking forward to sharing the bed with a cat that tunnels under the covers. These are all incidentals to a homecoming for me, but none of them are that special something.
If none of these define it, what does make a trip home?
