I settled in to making meat pies last Saturday in
preparation for Christmas, a tradition I began nearly ten years ago. As someone
with a French-Canadian background, meat pies have always been something of a
cultural and family touchstone, but I have only recently merged them into
Christmas tradition. Christmas had always been at my mother’s house, and then
it had been passed to my sister, and then to my wife and I. So we’ve had to
make new traditions, but in doing so we searched through our heritage to make
sure that what has been has not been forgotten.
For the first time since starting the meat pie tradition, my
wife was elsewhere as I started, though she promised to return in time to help
me with the crusts. She was at her father’s house, going through his things and
deciding what would be given to whom, what would go to Goodwill, and what will
be thrown away. Her father is now in hospice, and it will be the first
Christmas since her and her siblings were born that he will not be at the home
they grew up in, where so many Christmases were spent.
It will also be my first year without my Mother around. She
fell ill last Christmas Eve and died soon after. However much we try to hold on
to traditions and memories of past holidays, time takes its toll, and some
things will never be the same. And yet life goes on, and we attempt to bring
what we can with us.
I take out my recipe for meat pies, which is a printed-out
discussion I had with my Aunt Eileen via e-mail. Though she died not long after
sending me her recipe, as I read the instructions I hear the words spoken in
her voice, her personality coming through in her choice of words. She speaks to
me every year at this time as she helps guide me through a job I’m not very
good at. So long as I live, something of her lives on as well. So long as I
hold on to tradition.
My Aunt Esther passed away last week. She was another aunt
who was quite good at baking, and I might well have asked for her recipe for
meat pies had she been available on the internet. But she was a little more
old-fashioned, not there is anything wrong with that. Instead of e-mail, we
would get an actual card from her every year at about this time.
I remember when I was a child, all the cards that would
flood our mailbox from people who had strayed from our lives but still kept us
in our thoughts at this time of year. My mom would proudly display them. So
many connections, tenuous, but unbroken. People my parents had known since when
they were young, people who they had known since the olden days. I thought of
them as being old even in the olden days, but now I am older than they were
when I thought such thoughts. We eventually become our parents, we eventually
become older than the parents we knew when we were young. Roles are handed down
along with traditions.
There will be no more Christmas cards from Aunt Esther or
Aunt Eileen, from so many other people who were so important to our family once
upon a time. When we went through my mother’s things, there were hundreds of
cards she had hung on to. It seems as you get older it gets more difficult to
throw things away. But eventually all these connections, like strands of a web,
fall away.
As I work, I decide to put on a little music to get me in
the spirit. Over Thanksgiving, I went through my mom’s things and brought them
to my brother’s, to allow family members to take whatever they might like before
bringing the rest to Goodwill. While doing so, I came upon a Glen Miller
Christmas CD and that was the music I choose to listen to. It was made for her
by my Uncle Paul, also taken from us this year. But listening to the music takes
me back to when I was young, and when all of those people now gone were younger
than I am now. It speaks to me of another age, one that I can only half-imagine.
It must have seemed to those who grew up in such an era that it would last
forever, but it is gone now. They are but the further ripples that fade as they
echo upon humanity’s consciousness, drifting slowly to nothingness. They are
gone but they live in my memory. As much as possible, I want to keep their
memory alive.
For the first time I decide to use the leftover pie crust to
make petes de soeurs. It sounds like a fancy pastry doesn’t it, but the English
translation is “nun farts”. I remember my memere (French Canadian for Grandma)
making them, remember enjoying the name as much as the pastry. I remembered it
had brown sugar, butter and cinnamon, but I check online to see if there’s a
recipe. I’m amazed to see many options out there, how popular petes de
soeurs apparently are. You never know what from your childhood will pass away
into obscurity and what will continue to thrive. Perhaps it is what we choose
to give meaning to, what he hold most dear and refuse to let go.
We try to hold on. So much slips through our fingers however
much we want to keep it. And other things—like my mother’s possessions—we must
learn to let go of. Cleaning out a parent’s home is so very difficult, because
every item was something that had meaning to them, every item was something
they chose to keep with them. Each item we throw away feels like a betrayal to
their memory, like telling them they didn’t mean much to us. I tell myself they
are just things, that they are not what really matters. But in letting go of
the physical ties to our loved ones and the past, we are left with nothing very
tangible.
We need to find physical items to hold onto, need to know
that something endures in a world where so many people are taken from us. But
even more important than things are the traditions we are able to maintain. What
is the point of anything if it is not worth passing on to future generations?
So I try to save what I can from the wreckage that time
inevitably wreaks. Old traditions slip from us, but from them we weave new
ones. Like a patchwork quilt we take all that still remains from what once was
and attempt to weave it anew into something we can pass on to our children.
I see a new generation growing into positions of power, and
I have no desire to force upon them those things I hold dear. But I do want to
share with them what has been shared with me. I did not embrace all that my
parents told me was right, but what I did I clung to tightly. I want to
introduce the younger generation as best I can to my Aunts and Uncles, share
with them the memories that stuck to me in hopes that they may gain from them
and that their influence may remain. But I have no delusions that those I
learned from were flawless, that in the passing from generations nothing need
be changed. I love those who came before, just as I love those who are to come.
I have no wish to limit them but rather inspire them. I want to give to them
what inspired me, and those who have gone before us will never cease to be
worthy of influencing us. We need not fear that, and so we need not fear that
future generations will ever stop appreciating and learning from those who came
before.
What tradition passes on to future generations is every bit
as important as what is passed down through our DNA. So long as the line is not
entirely broken, nothing is ever truly lost, though it may for a time lie
dormant. And like our genes, that which is most applicable in helping us deal
with the world we live in will survive while the rest will fall to the side. In
this way traditions survive, so long as we do our best to pass them on.
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