Holiday Games

Short Story by By Margaret D. Stetz

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Did other families spend their holidays hiding from relatives? I had no brothers or sisters to ask about this. I never told my classmates, in case they thought I was weird. (“Weird” was a dreaded label. I’d already heard it applied to me in whispers, because one parent was Catholic, but the other wasn’t.) All I knew was that holidays—Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day, the Fourth of July, etc.—were for pretending that no one was home. Because I was young, it felt like a game. It wasn’t.

My parents each had their rituals. For every holiday dinner, no matter the season, my mother’s included thawing an orange brick of frozen squash pulp and roasting a chicken. (A Jewish girl from the Bronx should know from turkey? Turkey was a country, not food.) Then there was the extraction of wiggling, jellied, purple mounds that exited the can with a WUMPH, followed by pie with a cinnamon tang like Dentyne chewing gum. We’d be eating all of that the next day, too, because there was only so much anyone could take at once.