Tag: Christmas traditions

Posted on

Heterodoxy

It started as a Christmas-time gag, and then it became a running
Christmas joke. For a couple of years I used photos of it on most of the Christmas letters I sent out…but not all. My wife told me just before I mailed them that the ones going to her very religious relatives had to have a tamer photo. What was it? It was our family nativity scene,

Over the years, we have had several sets of Nativity figures. One year, our fun-loving sons decided to put them all together. So there was a panoply of multiple Jesii, Marys, Josephs, and competing masses of wisemen.

From there, it multiplied, so to speak, so there were many cats and dogs representing family pets, odd assemblies, and very questionable activities. It was all good Christmas-time fun. And no one who visited seemed to take offense, but there it was—three babies with multiple mothers and fathers. It was enough to make afficiamdo’s of the “Life Of Brian” wish for simplicity.

As a religious friend of mine stated, it was heterodoxy run wild.

Posted on

Stream of Consciousness Saturday – Poppy Seed

I bake at this time of year. It was my “don’t eat and drive” fruitcake earlier this month. But just before Christmas, it’s Grandma’s Poppy seed bread. Every Christmas and Easter, she’d make a large batch of the long loves filled with poppyseed filling; especially at Christmas, it wasn’t the holiday without her specialty.
More than food, it was as important as the little German Santa with a pack on his back, the nativity scene, or the decorated tree. So when Grandma died, a key element of the family Christmas disappeared. Did she leave a recipe or teach someone how to make them? Of course not! That wasn’t Grandma. She’d say, “Oh, it’s simple. Just a bit of this and a bit of that.”

The family, being Carreras’, all pitched in to solve the issue. First, there were the Christmas-time sessions regarding what she said was in it. There were eggs, milk, sugar, butter, flowers, and poppy seeds. But they all baked very little and were stuck soon. So, for years, it was left at that. Christmas gatherings had debates about the bread in place of poppy seed bread. They’d talk about what it tasted like, where she got the special Hungarian poppy seeds, and how Grandma took revenge on family family members through the poppy seed bread.

Revenge through poppy seed bread? Yes. Family members on Grandma’s Naughty List got the loaves with hollows, little poppy seed filling, or ends that were primarily bread. This bit of family lore eventually became a trope at gatherings where we’d laugh at why one might wind up on the Naughty List.

This was where it rested for many years: there was much talk of poppy seed bread but no bread. Then, I took it upon myself to recreate the bread. There were years of failure. Then the internet came along, and I was able to research the tradition via others who created Hungarian poppy seed rolls and bread. I had a credible duplicate of grandma’s bread within a year or two.

I’ve shared the recipe, and the bread is once again part of the family tradition. I continue to experiment, and this year I tried making it in loaf pans rather than large loaves on a sheet.

I have yet to figure out how she knew which ones had little filling and solid ends. My interest is purely academic. I have no intentions of using this punitively—of course not!

Posted on

Poppyseed

All that’s left now is wrapping. Today’s principal job was making the Carreras family poppyseed bread. My grandmother brought the tradition with her from Hungary and baked many loaves for the family every Easter and Christmas.
In our house, it wasn’t Christmas without them. But Grandma was not the recipe-sharing type. If you asked her, she’d say it was simple – just a pinch of this and a thimbleful of that. Only the very brave asked twice.
She died without sharing the recipe. And several of us worked unsuccessfully for years to recreate what she had done. Then along came the internet, and I was able to piece together from German and Hungarian bakers what they did with what I remembered. The result is very close to what Grandma made.
Now, on to family politics. Over the past five years, I’ve discovered how hard it is to fill these evenly. It’s easy to over or underfill, leave voids, and generally not get perfect filling. I’ve discussed this with my sister, who is four years older than me and watched the “poppyseed bread politics” play out over the years.
If you were on Grandma’s naughty list, your poppyseed loaf came with voids and little filling. On the good list? Well, your loaf was bursting with filling. It was also one of the ways she played favorites with her large and unwieldy family.
I struggle to get even filling, but I prefer to keep a less-than-full loaf at home rather than continue that familial tradition.

Posted on

The Poppyseed Roll

Today I have the train going around the Tree to prepare, prep the evening buffet, wrap presents, and…bake grandma’s Christmas Poppyseed bread!.

Grandma was Hungarian and German. An exceptional woman, she spoke five languages fluently – Hungarian, German, English, Spanish, and Yiddish. Her culinary achievements included traditional American cuisine, Hungarian, German, and married to my grandfather – Spanish. She was why the Carreras household consumed Borsht, potato pancakes, Saurkraut, and tons of Spanish food. My mother dutifully learned all this to please my father, but she taught no one the poppyseed bread.

The poppyseed bread played a role in family holidays and politics. Not all of the long rolls of poppyseed bread were created equal. Some had voids filled only with air, not poppyseed filling, and some have ends which are only bread. Displease grandma, and your part of the family got empty ends and voids. Grandma knew.
To be clear, I should say that I am talking about the “lost” poppyseed bread. When grandma died, it went with her. It wasn’t that she never talked about it, she just was forever vague about it, and when she died, a hurried conference within the family failed to come up with a consensus of how the excellent stuff got made. After a year or two and dozens of failed attempts, interest died down. Around 1972 I began a new tradition of making rum-soaked fruitcake ( don’t eat this stuff and then drive). I think the family liked the rum part of it mostly. The poppyseed bread remained a part of our family holiday lore, like the little German Santa that we’ve had since forever. We talked about it like it was a beloved missing relative. I’m sure that my uncle Lenny would have died a happier man knowing that I had eventually reconstructed the recipe.
Having assumed the role of family holiday baker ( twenty rum-soaked beauties every Christmas), I couldn’t let the “lost” poppyseed bread rest. Periodically I’d try a new recipe. At last, I found a few leads online from Hungarian women with the same traditions. The result? Poppyseed bread that my sister and mother couldn’t tell from Grandma’s.
So now comes the question. How vague should I be about the secret? Who gets the voids? After all, it is a tradition we are talking about here!