Ways and Reasons to Celebrate--New Year's with the Benners

What does Christmas mean to me (Jason)?  Had I access to the back of the box from the 1500-piece puzzle my (Benner) family has put together every year for the past nearly three decades, I could give you the mostly harmless version put forward in poem form there.  We had never noticed the poem before.  After my sister A read it aloud dutifully poker-faced, I said to Kali, "Remember that conversation we had the other day when we were trying to find a good definition of 'trite'...?"  It strikes me as possible that we had read it before, but had all forgotten it, because it didn't really say anything even though most of what it said was true on some level; my working definition of the word.

Just one of many enjoyable--and characteristically amusing and intellectual--moments in the Benner Christmas gathering which occurred on and around the New Year's weekend.  This is the second year, I think, that it has been held in Keezletown rather than the ancestral homestead in Pennsburg, PA. The justification for this break with convention is that there are two Benner babies in Keezletown these days, and there are as many family units here as in Pennsburg, plus Pennsburg and Keezletown are roughly equidistant from each of the other two siblings' spots.  Therefore, the pull of tradition has lost out to the hard facts of logistics and wear and tear on parents' states of mind.  Thanksgiving is hard to imagine anywhere but Pennsburg (more central to the larger family's logistical web), but at least for the time being Keezletown is getting the Christmas nod.  Five hours on the highway is just really different for the under two set than for everyone else.  We are most grateful to have avoided the ordeal, and truth be known we would have had to bow out.

Which would have been felt as a loss, particularly by our eldest.  A day or two ago Alida was being her usual spunky self and sounding off about nothing in particular, saying antisocial things immediately followed by their contradiction (she is so 5).  She spouted, "I hate Christmas!"  "Really?", Kali said, playing along.  Then, in undisguised sincerity, "I love Christmas."

For a sweet, warm, interested 13-year-old like her, what's not to love?  A whole bunch of people who have loved you and paid you attention for the whole of your life but whom you don't see often gather in one place to prepare and eat delicious food, tell stories, give gifts, laugh, and lounge together for a few days at the beginning of winter.  Maybe if your other options are having your senses flooded with fast-moving media or school-clique minidramas, it could seem boring.  If your other options are hanging out with your family, taking care of your ducks, or reading, it is a shimmering treasure in the year.  My childhood was in many ways much like hers, except for school (I went).  Holidays were similarly wonderful.  What a gift, and what an education!  I am so pleased that she is picking up on what matters.

What did we actually do together?  Well, I can't remember us gathering around a screen even once, which might be the main difference in our family schedule from the mainstream.  Otherwise it was pretty typical, I would think.  Eat, talk, play games, wash dishes, make cookies, eat, give some presents, wash dishes, enjoy some drinks, shoot some hoops (put that new net to some use!), split and stack some firewood together, meander around the gardens a little, talk, talk, eat, talk, wash dishes, etc., etc.  Nice family time, in other words.

One thing we have done recently that is a little unusual, very rewarding, and easily replicable is that each year my sister C has been collecting, on New Year's Eve, predictions (not resolutions, exactly) for the coming year.  Interspersed with the collecting is the reading out and collective judging of the previous year's predictions.  This is every bit as simple and fun as it sounds.  It requires only a kind family with a reasonable attention span and one member with initiative to lead the activity and another with the wherewithal to keep track of a piece of paper for a year.  C fills both functions for us.

I feel that I could easily become dependent on the rituals we are fast accumulating around the new year for my sense of transition between years.  Certainly I felt way more ready to accept the fact of 2017 being the actual, factual, current year after having toasted out the old and in the new on that night.  How helpful to have a ceremony for reviewing the past year and getting set for the one coming on!  It feels so fitting to do this with the people I have loved the longest and the best.

Given this spirit of reflection and anticipation, we were pleased to discover that the meal we prepared for the Benner "Christmas Feast" mirrored in edible symbology the New Year's ethos that has emerged.  Tradition states that pork (paired with sauerkraut...can't remember why) is the auspicious choice for a New Year's celebration since the pig forages by rooting in a forward direction.  Chicken is inauspicious since it forages by scratching in reverse.  We made both!

I'll detail that meal in particular, even though all the food we ate was special and delicious (ok, so the conventional candies are an exception...sometimes yummy but it's a stretch to call them special when they shoot off the production line at the rate they do and at the societal/environmental cost they do). Mom's pies and gingerbread houses, K's quiches, C+M's snacks, J's potstickers...all scrumptious and I could go on!

Janelle and I decided we wanted to provide and prepare the Christmas Feast for everyone, and to challenge ourselves to source as much of it as possible from our own stores of food: grown, harvested, and preserved by us, here, during the past growing season.  Here is the menu:

1 salt-cured ham from one of our pigs.  Long-boiled, then oven-browned.
3 roasted chickens, butchered a few days ahead, aged in fridge.  Lightly herbed and buttered.
Lentil cheese loaf (for C the vegetarian) with homemade cheese from our local milk share
Stewed tomatoes and shallots (for the lentil loaf) - was there ever a more succulent combo?
Ham gravy thickened with our home grown/ground barley flour
Chicken gravy
Sweet potatoes roasted with garlic and olive oil
Mashed white potatoes
Sauerkraut
Dilly beans
Steamed turnips with butter
Garden peas (1 small bag left in the freezer yet from 2016)
Cut sweet corn
Cranberry salad

Not every ingredient was from our place.  The cranberry salad had apples and oranges from the store and we picked the wild cranberries in WVa, the butter came from our neighbor's milk (we skimmed and churned it), the olive oil is imported of course, we gleaned the sweet corn from a neighbor's field, and all the salt and pepper were from afar, as were a few other ingredients (especially for the lentil loaf). But everything else was as local as it gets.  It seemed that that notion held meaning for more than just us, and some made a point of mentioning the fact, which was welcome.  To us it felt like a real accomplishment; the fulfillment of long-held dreams and ambitions of ours.  Also, if I do say so myself, it was among the most savory, simple, and satisfying meals of my life.  A way to celebrate and a reason to celebrate rolled into one.

May the 2017 of each person who reads this post be filled with many such celebrations of his or her own kind.  Happy New Year to you!

ps. And once all the Benner's made their departure we rang in the New Year just the five of us by making fresh gingerbread with our recently harvested ginger, eaten with an applesauce yogurt combo OR a lemon sauce made with our one and only ripe lemon from our tree. Yet another unique culinary experience! The other thing that we are attempting to make into a New Year's tradition is getting our onions and leeks seeded. We didn't quite get it done on January 1st but by the 3rd the shelf was installed in the common room and trays of seeds were in there to remind us that spring is a coming!