Under the Tree

Down in the basement under a gray crust of grit and beetle carapaces, stacked in crumbling styrofoam, Snow Village waits like Brigadoon for  the magic day among 365 when someone ventures into the room past the washing machine.  This year there's a trio of happy elves to unpack the boxes  and carry each beloved piece up the stairs to the world of light above. 

 Every one has a story: a Hershey store and truck for the chocolate lovers with its marquee of tasty treats and trio of evergreens on the roof.  The chocolate store is even bigger than the bank, the building presented in honor of two weddings in one year.  Of course there is a Starbucks; what is the Christmas season without the warming cheer of mochas and lattes and the boost of caffeine grande'  Downtown is bracketed by a Krispy Kreme on one end of the buffet and the local greenhouse on the other.  The Schlueters made sure happy holiday memories live in this part of Snow Village....Ralphie's house is just off the main drag and the Von Trapp's elegant mansion can be glimpsed in the hills behind the greenhouse.

 The pink sparkly bottle brush tree was chosen especially for me by Aaron; I hope he's not embarrassed by it these days because it's one of my favorite parts of Snow Village. 

Across the dining room is the white church with the tall steeple and the honeymooners who are so entranced with each other, they have never driven off in their vintage auto with the cans trailing behind. Out here in the country is the grain elevator, and a mill, and the lovely stick house with lights in every window.  Kids are building a snowman in front of the log gas station that's nearly drifted in. They would have even more fun if they could join the group in the sleigh, or feeding Santa's reindeer apples or petting the farm animals near the skating pond or roasting marshmallows by the tree house.  Too bad that scene is all the way in the living room where there's no electrical outlet....

As much as I love Snow Village, it has its shortcomings.  The pieces are heavy for little hands and fragile, discouraging the kind of pretend play kids deserve. Most years something crashes and burns and winds up on the kitchen counter awaiting Superglue. The greenhouse separates from its glazing on an annual basis; the overhead light on the elevator wound up on the basement floor and I've given up trying to keep the kitten and its bucket of milk attached to the gas pumps.  Still, to walk through the dark dining room en route to the coffee pot and stop to wake up the golden glow of Snow Village before breakfast is a good way to begin a winter morning.

It must be the kid in me. I've always been drawn to tableau, dollhouses, dioramas, anything that draws the viewer into another scene. When Josh and Gabe ask for the tenth time if they can unpack the potpourri of buildings, trees, figurines and lights that live under our tree, I understand their excitement. 

Years and years ago, when we placed the little paper mache' houses with their cellophane windows and glittered roofs among the cotton batting, I pictured the cozy living rooms of the cottages with "smoke" coming from their chimneys and heard Christmas carols coming from steepled church with the wooden Nativity in its front yard. Three smaller houses nestled under the lowest boughs of our cedar Christmas tree, but the strand of lights didn't reach that far, so we always pretended those folks were out of town. 

 I spend many an evening rearranging the plastic deer, the little Santa in his sleigh, and making up stories about the goings on in whatever was my favorite house at that moment. 

This year, we resurrected the little village for the first time in many years from its ancient cardboard box. Time has not been kind; many of the fragile cellophane windows are peeled from their frames.  Lee and Ann gently set them on the bookcase, weaving a strand of tiny white lights among them and placing the herd of plastic deer in the snowballs around them.  I found one little grinning styrofoam snowman and two little wooden choir folk to carol in front of the houses. 

 Sure enough, the steeple was disconnected from the church.   The town looks rundown compared to shiny Snow Village, but in the glow of nothing but Christmas lights, the magic of my childhood remains.....

(P.S. What a blessing the cool light bulbs are!  Back in the day, we were fortunate the behemoths we put on our live tree and in the paper houses of the village didn't literally catch fire!  Because the bulbs were so hot...and if one went out, they all did, we didn't leave our tree lit for more than an hour at a time...)

Cook Book Wisdom

By the time we had kids, the Renken family Thanksgiving was firmly established in Columbia where my aunt Anne and uncle Tony, cousins Tracy and John, opened their gracious home to all comers, adorning the multiple tables with imaginative place cards and setting a glorious spread of food that only encouraged culinary one upmanship among the ever competitive Renken relatives, adding to the general merriment and the tendency to overfill one’s plate.

For several years, Lee and Ann ruled the roost as the only great grandchildren to my Granny.  This privileged position gave them their own bracket in the putting contest, access to the pinball machine in the basement, spots at the card table with Granny, books and art supplies from their doting great aunts, and finally, a chance to soak and steam in the hot tub before we bundled back into the car for the long ride home.  Oftentimes, the girls napped, awaking just as night fell and they could count the Christmas lights that had sprung like mushrooms since morning.

Ben was just three months when we made the trip his first Thanksgiving.  We left before daylight with the grand plan that the kids would sleep a goodly portion of the drive. Back then, almost everything closed for Thanksgiving, so there would be no distracting stops for pop or doughnuts or milk or coffee..just the necessities at the rest areas.  But Ben had a different plan.  He began screaming about Kansas City and continued unabated ‘til we reached our destination.  He was a cute kid and a big hit with his grandma, his aunts, and his granny, and I hoped all that attention would wear him out for the trip home.  No go.  He was nothing if not persistent and wore US all out with his yelling until just north of Kansas City.  As holidays go, it was something less than idyllic.

But I digress.  

One year my uncle Steve rolled out the first edition of the Renken’s Recipes to Die For Thanksgiving 1992. Family get togethers were never quiet: I can remember my uncles castigating announcers, the players, and the officials...on a televised game.  The kitchen at my aunt’s was an open air soapbox of suggestions, despite the fact that each family had already had their say about the menu by virtue of the dish they’d contributed.  There was lots of good natured devil’s advocacy, but at some point in the afternoon, voices would be raised in something pretty darned close to an actual disagreement.

Most of the recipes contain a fair share of editorial content…..

From Steve, regarding “The Best Baked Beans”:

I’m not kidding; these really are the best.  They are far better than anything Liz ever thought about.

From Liz’s corner: “Liz’s Most Requested Baked Beans”.

From Steve, about Liz’s recipe: “You will notice that no one claims these are the best: they are just the most requested.  Probably by Terry and what choice does he have?”

Some recipes are quite brief:

Tim’s Beaver Tail

Take one beaver tail and hold over open flame until rough skin blisters.  Remove from heat. When cool, peel off skin, roast over coals or simmer until brown.

Serves 86

Or this one:

Hard-boiled Eggs

By Laura

Mark’s note: Most of you know that Laura does not have a large cooking repertoire.  However, at this one she is great and you won’t mess it up either.

2 eggs in the shell

4 cups water

1 medium saucepan.

Place eggs in saucepan. Add water and bring to a boil.  After three minutes of boiling, fish one egg out on a spoon and carry to the sink.  Halfway to the sink, drop the egg (accidentally) on the floor.  If it oozes on impact, cook remaining egg one more minute before eating and after cleaning up the floor.

But the recipes I turn to the most often are my mom’s.  Some of them are dog eared and stained, fragile to the point of illegibility. But I keep them for sentiment’s sake, even though those recipes have long since been committed to memory.  

Included in the Recipes to Die For are some of the comfort foods of my childhood, like the Raisin Bars, which my mom made at least once a week for my father’s lunch. I loved the combination of plump, sweet raisins after their bath in boiling water and the layer of sweet frosting atop the spicy cookies.  Or the multiple Jello recipes: the cherry jello with bing cherries that was my favorite, although I also like sliced oranges in lemon jello (not mandarin oranges!) and the apple grape jello with crunchy apples and green seedless grapes.  Yes,I am a kid of the Jello generation.

Some of the notes are windows into my mom’s kitchen after I was grown: the Mulled Wine we  would enjoy during winter visits just before bedtime (Good in cold weather and decidedly beneficial if one has the cold or the flu, ), the Hearty Corn Chowder (I use the microwave and make this in a 4 quart Corningware dish.  Good for a winter supper), the Caramel Corn (This is yummy and freezes well) or the Apple Butter in a Crock Pot (This tastes wonderful on hot toast and makes your house smell wonderful while it is cooking).

There are little scraps of paper with random recipes stuck throughout my cookbooks, like the Salsa Cruda with the addendum: I used three little hot peppers. It gets hotter the longer it “ages”.  I used your canned tomatoes.  Easy & yummy with tortilla chips. Every time I bake a Mrs. Peters’ coffeecake, I hear her admonition: Check with a toothpick for doneness.  It is a horrible flop if underdone! The recipe is one I know by heart, but I repeat that phrase like a blessing every time I bake it.

At the very back of my hyperextended recipe box is an assortment of cards that have nothing to do with food and everything to do with life.  When my aunts (Anne and Liz) hosted our wedding shower, they handed out cards to the guests to fill out with their advice for a good marriage.  Forty years later, those words of cheer and wisdom still reside in my box.  My sister: Keep the plants off the windowsill! My mother-in-law: Just talk things over! My Granny: Recipe for marriage 1 woman, 1 man. 1 lb sense of humor, 2 lbs love, 3 ½ lbs. tolerance, Shut up! P. S. Had a big argument with my husband this morning! Ran out of sense of humor…

My granny is gone...and so is Uncle Steve, the witty curator of the Renken Cookbooks….and his brother, my father, though I am certain heaven is a spicier place with the three of them in residence.

My mom was always more of a listener...and the best....letting me chatter on endlessly about whatever was on my mind. So I treasure the little asides recorded in the cookbook, and the tattered recipes she shared as well as this advice from years and years ago about her happy marriage:

Good companionship and conversation...no secrets (almost) Train him right but don’t let him know you are doing it.

Lots of loving!! (with a giant balloon of an exclamation point)

Ma

Be Blessed this Thanksgiving …..

Before You Was Born, Dude

“Well, that was your mother and that was your father,

Before you was born dude,...”

Paul Simon

Before the dudes and dudettes were born? Whoa, that was a LONG time ago!

The one advantage of all that time is it gives us a chance to tell the stories as WE remember them, with paltry few to gainsay us in matters of truth or tale…

He says he saw this girl wearing a big hat sitting at the desk of the dormitory where incoming MU freshmen checked in for Summer Welcome. And...then they wed, implying he married the first girl he met at college.  My husband makes it sound like a scene from a chick flick...but I’m fairly certain he has never seen a chick flick, so it must be the truth, right?  

I remember that day too.  We had a discussion about Allen Drury...Blake was carrying around a copy of Advise and Consent, a scenario which should surprise absolutely no one….

Well, it can’t be a chick flick without some plot twists.

What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?

A few months and a couple of dates later, we were both part of an ag students’ group traveling way up north into Manitoba over the Christmas break.  When we stopped in Tarkio on the way south, it seemed like a perfectly logical place to spend New Year’s Eve with friends.  Only later did my mother-in-law tell me she was delegated to tell Blake’s other New Year’s Eve “date” that he was already busy.  

Blake drove a 1974 baby blue Torino.  It wasn’t “Gran”  by any description: the trunk smelled of sale barn, but that was masked by the blue pall of burning oil.  It took a gallon of oil to drive from Tarkio to Columbia.   Blake had a case of 8 track tapes by Charlie Rich, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings punctuated by Tompall & the Glaser Brothers (Put Another Log on the Fire) and David Allan Coe (You Never Even Call Me by My Name). The tires were constantly going flat.  When the right side was caved in by another car’s  slow motion slide down the icy hill where we waited at a stop sign, it was a mercy killing.   

The next car was a stripped down sedate red sedan…

...which in due course we turned into a family car.  No more oil spills, no more spinning out around the curves.

We married the year Elvis died. For two days I listened to Elvis tunes while I sat on the floor of our duplex south of Columbia staining the unfinished furniture that, along with a carload of houseplants, was my contribution to our new household.  

Our ‘70s wedding was not a fairy tale concoction.  Neither the bride nor the groom thought it essential to get a decent haircut.  The tuxes were an obnoxious beige, and the groom’s new shoes were not brown nor black but rather on the orange-ish side of rust. They didn’t match then and look even worse in the fading pinkish tint of our wedding photos.  The bride wore heels down the aisle, but went barefoot in the pictures for fear of appearing taller than the groom.  

We drove off in our soaped and creamed chariot for our honeymoon...in Union, Missouri.  But our plans for a romantic toast at the Italian restaurant went awry when the waitress carded us.  Newlywed or no, she wasn’t going to serve us alcohol for our wedding night.  So much for being grownups…if I remember correctly, we even thought it was funny back then.

The next day, we stopped by Daniel Boone’s home in Defiance, then drove back to Columbia to study before class that Monday.

Yep. That’s what we did

“That was your mother...and that was your father...

Before you was born, dude,

When life was great!”....

Words to the Wise

7 And now, O Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of David my father, although I am but a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in.

1 Kings 3:7

“I am but a little child.”
Solomon, poster child for wisdom, speaks these words to God, at the very beginning of his story. I picture him standing arms outstretched and empty-handed, the classic pose of a man wondering what to do next.  “I do not know how to go out or come in.”  In other words, God, I wait for your guidance.  What next?   

9 Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil, for who is able to govern this your great people?”

1 Kings 3:9

And this deferential request is granted, because it is neither self-seeking nor self-serving.

13 Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. James 3:13

James reminds us that wisdom isn’t showy. But he lists other admirable qualities:

17 But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere.

James 3:17

Wisdom is often personified as a white bearded man in long robes or a tall hat enthroned on a big chair...or as a hermit sitting around a fire in a cave.  Athena, the goddess of wisdom, wears a helmet and an owl upon her shoulder.  

I see people everyday who are merciful, kind, sincere and considerate and wear no particular costumes, hide no amulets or magic wands ‘neath their sweatshirts, and dispense advice only when asked.  They volunteer and share, without fanfare.  They call by name.  They are aunts and uncles and neighbors to all they meet.  By James’ definition, these Good Samaritans and cheerful givers are indeed wise.

Wisdom is in works as much as words.  As a matter of fact, saying nothing is often the wisest action of all!

She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.

Proverbs 31:26

Even fools are thought wise when they keep silent; with their mouths shut, they seem intelligent.

Proverbs 17:28

Well! Here is good advice for any of us...and a chance to add by subtracting!   If only keeping our mouths shut and our tongues quiet was that easy…..we could all be Solomons….