Three memories of Christmas Eve

One Christmas Eve in the early 1990s, while driving along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Baltimore, I looked up at the old high-rise public housing projects that were to be torn down a few years later. I had done some reporting on the poverty and crime in those buildings, and had met a single mother who yearned to get her son to a better neighborhood and school. While stopped at a red light, I noticed how, on the side of one building, there was but one sign of the holiday — a small, lighted Christmas tree in a window 10 or 11 floors up, someone’s faith burning in the December night.

The sound of snow crust crunching underfoot: One long-ago Christmas Eve in my Massachusetts hometown, my little brother Eddie walked with me to St. John’s Church so we could serve as altar boys for midnight Mass and maybe earn $5 each from the pastor, who seemed to be grouchy every day but Christmas. We had never been out so late at night on our own, and the road to the church was cemetery-quiet but for the crunch that our boots made.

When my kids were small, I built a train garden in our garage. We created a miniature village on an old oriental rug, and I called the project The Oriental Express. I had spent a good part of the day preparing the Christmas Eve Feast of the Seven Fishes, including baccala, the traditional dish made from salted codfish, reconstituted in water over a couple of days, then baked with potatoes, tomatoes, olives and herbs. Before dinner, some friends and neighbors stopped by to see the train garden and have a drink in the garage. One of the visitors, an Italian-American guy from New York who was a paisano of a paisano, asked to use our bathroom. I directed him to the one just off the kitchen. He was inside the house a long time, so I went inside to check on him. I found this guy seated at the kitchen table, spoon in hand, helping himself to my baccala. “Oh, this baccala is so good!” he said in a heavy Queens accent. “Just like my mother used to make.” I wasn’t exactly happy that the guy dispatched fully a third of my casserole without an invitation, but it was Christmas Eve; the aroma of the baccala had reminded him of his mother and, overwhelmed with food nostalgia, he had grabbed a spoon. I understood, so I poured him an empathetic glass of Orvieto.

Merry Christmas