Surviving the Holidays

By Libby Walkup
Contributing Writer

The holidays put a warm fuzzy in my tummy, usually in the form of stout, vodka sodas or, in the early years, Jack diets, a taste I share with both my grandfather and my father. This, I joke, is the only way I can handle everyone all at once for as long as I’m required, because I am an introvert hiding in an Italian American family of extroverts. “Small” gatherings are similar to that of My Big Fat Greek Wedding (15 to 20 people, many of which have the same name).

I climb the steps out of my Sunday afternoon basement cave, still in my pajamas, looking for food I am not hungry for; my mother stands over a dough roller and a floured counter. I place my dirty plate next to the sink, open the fridge but forgo anything new.

“No one gets any ravs except me! I’m the only one doing any work! They’re mine,” she hollers at me as I find my way back down to my sofa and a movie. My sister, Kristan, also at home, surfs the net across the room. She snickers something over her shoulder, but I hear her get up. (In my defense, Mom hadn’t asked for help.) A few minutes later, as What Happens in Vegas finishes, Kristan yells for me. 

Our family has been making raviolis since as long as I can remember. Days or weeks before Thanksgiving folks in my family (aunts, uncles, cousins) got together and pressed dough, mixed cheese, and forked edges. Traditionally, we ordered Duane’s Pizza, Canadian Bacon and Pineapple, the Pineapple ended up on my plate, rather than in my mouth. “Missing the best part,” someone said once when I was a child. We spread around the flour covered dinner table and throughout the kitchen, grandpa Tato manning the only dough roller viced onto the table. Many of us did more sitting and eating than working. We made enough raviolis for the family for Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. Hundreds. What? We’re Italian, we always plan for an extra twenty or thirty for dinner.

A few years ago my grandparents sold their house in Dilworth and our ravioli making place disappeared. Since then it’s been done at my cousin’s in Detroit Lakes, sometimes at my parents’ house, depending on who’s having the holiday. My dad, the non-Italian, has done the job himself, or so he claims. (He likes to dramatize.) But, either way, it hasn’t been the same. I don’t hold to national traditions, but family traditions, at least in this family, are something you get attached to.
As a previously closeted introvert, or an introvert in denial, just the three girls makin’ up a batch of ravs seemed like a great idea; uphold a family tradition, with two people I love. I was wrong. We bicker and criticize. We all think we know the best way. But, then, I remember the holiday vodka that’s been so successful at warming my belly over the years. Mom mixes us some drinks and we go about our ravioli-making with giggles.

What? Who says you can’t have fun with your sister and your mom while you cook? Fifties housewife style.

We have a hundred raviolis stuffed and sealed in an hour. (It had taken my mom two to make twenty.) Flour’s spilled onto the floor and creeps between the toes on my bare feet and it’s lovely.

When we finish I use the dough scraps, like Tato used to do, and make fettucini strips. He used to drape them over the dusty wrought iron bar of the kitchen lights to dry. I don’t know that anyone actually ever ate the pasta scraps and we don’t have a dusty kitchen light with spokes, so I use a cookie rack that mom digs out of the cupboard (it could be just as dusty). I think I’ll make aglia y olio (garlic and olive oil) pasta tomorrow for lunch tomorrow.

In his memoir, “Invisible,” French painter, videographer, writer, and traveler, Hugues de Montalembert, emphasizes that the “sense of life is life… eternity is now.” These moments, whatever they are to you, are fleeting, so break out the booze and have a happy holiday.

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