Don't fuhget the fuhgotz!

I'm trying something new, or rather, something old, for Thanksgiving this year. In addition to my annual whole-berry cranberry sauce, I decided on a whim that I would try to replicate my grandmother's . . . well, her what exactly? If I said focaccia, you'd know what I was talking about, but it wouldn't feel right. We never said "focaccia" in our family.

It was this item that first introduced me to the idea that our family's linguistic heritage was something of an Americanized - maybe "Brooklynized" would be putting it better - non-standard Italian dialect. I was probably in middle school - young enough that I had to write an "About Me" assignment at the beginning of the year, but old enough to know that the word I was typing was decidedly not what I was trying to say.

My favorite food is my grandma's faggots

Well, that can't be right.

My favorite food is my grandma's fagots

That looks way too close to the other one.

"Mom, how do you spell [fuhgotz]?

Her answer, in essence, was that "fuhgotz" was not a real word, that we were just saying "focaccia" wrong. She spelled "focaccia" for me, and I found myself writing in an essay that my favorite food was this thing I'd never heard of before. I wasn't sure how I felt about it.

My grandmother was an excellent cook, and the foods she made are part of her substantial legacy. Fuhgotz were on the table just about every Sunday. (To me, focaccia will always be something you get at a fancy restaurant, not the food I grew up with). They have rarely made an appearance since she passed away, though. Though everyone has recipes for her biscuits, her pizza dolce, her sauce, fuhgotz seem not quite as prominent on our menus these days. Whenever they were forgotten in the oven in the rush of getting dinner for a huge family on the table, my grandfather would say, "You fuhgot the fuhgotz!" I hope we don't.

I asked my mom for the recipe, and she was able to give me a brief outline. It was similar to what I remembered from the time Grandma had shown me herself, years ago, though I hadn't written anything down and so would have forgotten the onions. Mom said she wasn't sure, though: "You'd have to ask Aunt Cathy. She's the only one who really knows the recipe. I just do the biscuits."

I have literally no clue how my first attempt at fuhgotz will turn out. (In retrospect, maybe the first attempt should have been one I tried out at home, not my contribution to Thanksgiving dinner. Oh well.) But this exercise has me thinking. About how fuhgotz is more of a real word to me than focaccia will ever be, even if it doesn't appear in any dictionary. And about the fractionating of legacies. How Grandma crocheted, made biscuits, made fuhgotz, belonged to the Rosary Society. How I crochet. Mom makes biscuits. Aunt Cathy makes fuhgotz. Aunt Sue belongs to the Rosary Society. Grandma could do all of those things, but while we all have treasured memories of these and many more facets of Grandma's life and personality, it seems like we are each the keepers of only some small fraction of her legacy.

Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories - Christmas Stockings

My family had a variety of different stockings growing up. My dad's was the one he had as a boy; my mom's was a traditional looking red stocking; mine was white with a print, and Laura's, similarly, was red with a print; Anna's was a traditional red and white, like mom's.

Everyone's has their names on it. I had never loved the way the name on mine looked, so, at maybe 12 or so, I tried to rewrite it on the opposite side. That side came out worse. While I like my stocking, of course, it never 100% lived up to my ideals of what a stocking could be.

This is supposed to be the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories, but I've got the ghost of Christmas future hanging around me these days, what with the wedding and the rest of my life coming up.

Ben and I recently discussed what to do about Christmas stockings next year, for our first married Christmas. Do we take our stockings from our parents' houses? Buy new ones? Neither one seemed right. Just buying new stockings seemed so . . . callous. How could you just replace your Christmas stocking? But taking our childhood stockings from our parents' houses seemed a little bit like, I don't know, tearing our childhood families apart. It made me sad to imagine just four stockings hanging on my parents' mantle. The stocking family would look like it had lost a child.

We came up with another option. Replacing our childhood stockings at Target seemed soulless, but I thought we could invest new stockings with lots of soul if they were homemade. I'm going to spend some portion of the next year crocheting us stockings! I may pick up some Christmas colored yarn at some after Christmas sales, or I may just use the red and white yarn I happen to have at home. At the moment, I'm leaning towards using this pattern from Crochet Today magazine. The beauty part of it is that if I vary the orders of the colors, the stockings can match without being identical, plus I can always make additional matching-but-not-identical stockings in the future, should our stocking family ever need to expand!

Happy Halloween!

My grandmother, Marilyn Mulcahy O'Hara, with me (in the red jacket and covered up Big Bird costume) and my sister Laura (in yellow jacket and covered up Winnie the Pooh costume), on Halloween, c. 1989. Maybe 1988. I can't tell if Laura looks 1 or 2 years old. I think I actually remember this day, but it's one of those memories that's hazy and may or may not be me remembering the picture rather than the day. But I'm pretty sure I remember parts of it, at least.