I looked at the table this year. The fancy fake china that we buy every year was out. The turkey was carved. And right there, sitting in a woven basket like they owned the place, were the rolls.
You know the ones. The cheap, brown-and-serve rolls that come in a plastic bag for a dollar thirty-nine. The kind you have to pull apart before you bake them.
Over the years, my wife and I have traveled a bit. We’ve eaten on cruise ships with artisan bakers and dined in restaurants where the bread has a crust you have to fight with. We know fine breads. And if you put them side-by-side, the artisan loaf would deny any kinship with the gummy, half-cooked stuff millions of us grew up thinking was a rare and fine delicacy.
But every Thanksgiving, I bypass the bakery section and grab that plastic bag. I do it because for forty years, that is what my mother and father bought. They didn’t buy them to be ironic; they bought them because they were feeding a family on a working-class budget, and that’s what you did.
We have upgraded to genuine butter, though.
I spent my entire childhood thinking those yellow vegetable oil sticks were the genuine thing. I thought “butter” just came in a cardboard box labeled Parkay or Blue Bonnet.
Today, I insist on real butter. It is the one concession I make to the fact that life has changed. If I told my guests I was serving them margarine or oleo, as the old timers used to call it with their Thanksgiving dinner, I’m afraid many of them would find an excuse not to return next year.
But the rolls stay.
They stay because when I pass them, I am not just passing bread. I am passing a memory.
It seems that memories of our parents and grandparents are honeycombed through the year. They are sweet structures, but they are filled with little holes—moments where the absence catches you off guard.
We wouldn’t have it any other way.
It hits hardest around the holidays. We talk about the “empty chairs” at the table, and the grief can be sharp. Whether the loss was twenty years ago or twenty days ago, you still feel the silence where a laugh used to be.
And sometimes, the loss is more complicated. Sometimes the chair isn’t empty. Sometimes a loved one is sitting right there, but the person they used to be has quietly left the room. Dementia is a thief that steals the person while leaving the body. That, too, is a loss.
But then, someone cracks a joke. Usually, it’s one of their jokes.
We can’t get through a holiday without laughing about the little eccentricities of the people we’ve lost. My daddy was an eternal optimist, but he had a skepticism about watermelons that bordered on theology. He never cut into a melon without muttering, “I’ll bet it’s as green as a gourd.”
I find myself saying it now. I don’t even mean to. It just falls out of my mouth, a little echo of him in the kitchen.
We do it with the food, too. We try to eat low-carb all year, but come Christmas, the rules evaporate. It isn’t Christmas without my mother-in-law’s Spritz cookies—delicate little things that require a press and a prayer. And it certainly isn’t the holidays without my mother’s “chocolate-oatmeal-peanut butter” confections.
We eat them not because we need the sugar, but because we need the connection. (Plus, they taste great.)
Not every tradition survives, of course.
For years, my father bought us those “Lifesavers Sweet Storybooks” for Christmas. You remember them—the little cardboard “book” that opened up to reveal ten rolls of hard candy. He bought them because they were cheap and they filled a stocking.
I carried that tradition on for decades with my own kids. I kept buying them long after my kids were adults. I kept buying them even when it became evident that the candy wasn’t getting eaten.
Finally, I stopped. I realized I was paying three dollars for four rolls of candy that just sat in a drawer. My dad, the ultimate pragmatist, would have told me I was being wasteful.
But I still buy the chocolate-covered cherries. Just one box. Because some things you just don’t mess with.
I used to think that these rituals—the cheap rolls, the specific cookies, the memory of the old color wheel grinding away on the silver tree—were our way of holding on to a fragment of something precious but long gone.
But as I type this, I realize that’s not quite true. They aren’t gone.
Either by biology or by spirit, these people are in our DNA. They are knit into the marrow of our bones. We don’t need the rolls to remember them. We serve the rolls to honor them.
I have to chuckle when I think about it.
As I was cleaning up yesterday, I actually asked my wife if she planned to wash the fancy disposable plates and save them for next year.
I know exactly what her mother and father would have said. And somewhere, I suspect they’re wondering if she saved the plastic bag from the rolls, too.
. . . and that’s what I know today.