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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. (โWeirdโ was a dreaded label. Iโd already heard it applied to me in whispers, because one parent was Catholic, but the other wasnโt.) All I knew was that holidaysโThanksgiving, Christmas, New Yearโs Day, the Fourth of July, etc.โwere for pretending that no one was home. Because I was young, it felt like a game. It wasnโt.
My parents each had their rituals. For every holiday dinner, no matter the season, my motherโs 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. Weโd be eating all of that the next day, too, because there was only so much anyone could take at once.
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