A Unique Memory of The Christmas Eve Feast

I didn't love all of it but "Itsa Christmas"

I loved the Christmas Eve feasts, especially in my early years at Grandma’s. It symbolized family, food love, joy, abundance, and spirituality.

For weeks, we frenzied in anticipation of the Christmas season. It was the time for shopping, cooking, and pausing on Christmas Eve for La Vigilia, awaiting the Christ child, and concluding Christmas Day with gifts and more food.

The feast was sumptuous, and many were eating lots. The smell of fish was pervasive throughout our always-open-doors three-tenement house. I had to prevent myself from fast-forwarding through the evening in anticipation of Christmas morning.

Grandmother, mother, and aunts scampered from the pantry to the kitchen and dining room. The room was aglow with light flickering from the chandelier and twinkling candles in the windows. Adults squeezed elbow to elbow.

In that gleaming dining room, the women presented their dishes . . . smelts, snail salad, red and white pasta, baccala, etc., and stood back with hands clasped. Beaming faces added more glow to the room. They watched, sitting to eat now and then. They trundled back and forth . . . talking, laughing, smiling, proudly wiping their hands on multicolored, handcrafted Christmas aprons, presenting their dishes as Maestrae. Beautiful. But not all was appealing to me.

Dad was banished to the kitchen while we kids were stationed in the nearby parlor.

His enthusiastic and unique request for The Dinner was pickled pigs’ feet. Yes, you read correctly; pigs’ feet, brined. He loved them, and Christmas Eve was the only time anyone yielded to his request. They wanted him to enjoy, if but once a year, his wish. Yes, though it was pork he was eating, it was acceptable enough for the meatless evening. It was his only time and only chance to have them.

My mother tolerated it because it was Christmas. “Peter. You. . . know . . . it’s . . . not . . . fish.”

“Of course, I do, Anna. But I love them. And they are close enough to fish. They’re white. Don’t they call this evening La Vigilia in Bianco?”

“Oh, get off,” she replied. ‘Get off’ was Mom’s blast-off when she preferred not to discuss anything further. But Dad was getting his wish.

He sat in the corner of the kitchen with a mopine tucked in his collar. He opened the jar and pulled out one foot at a time to devour his delicacy. Delicacy? I turned away so as not to see him eating things with toes. Mom stopped, turned, and scowled, again.

My grandmother weighed in. “Livva him alone. Letta him hav-a whatta he wanza. Itsa Christmas.”

And then there were those eels.

I never think of eels except at Christmas because they were part of La Vigilia. My family loved them, some considering the dish a delicacy.

My lack of enthusiasm probably started when I was a kid at our summer rental on the Narragansett shore when my uncle took me to the dock to see the fisherman catching eels one night. At eight years old, I was afraid of the dark. The stage was set.

As they pulled the serpentine creatures out of the water, I watched the slimy snakes squirm, ominously opening and closing their mouths. They were fish but had imperceptible gills, no scales, and, in the dark, no noticeable fins except for a ribbon thing along their backs.

Courtesy of Natalia Gusakova

The next time I saw them was when that same uncle’s mother was making a fish sauce. Percolating on her stove was a red gravy, and sticking out were the antennas of squid flailing amid hunks of dark mounds. “I cooka the calamadda.”

I pointed at the submersibles. “What are those dark things?”

“Ah, Ed-a Wood, atsa the bes, the eelllsa.”

Eels. Even in the gravy, they looked mysterious.

Somewhere along my educational way, I was told of the uncorroborated theory of spontaneous generation; the eel being its example. Aristotle believed that they were sexless and considered them natural originators. Our professor told us that the eels Aristotle caught were just sexually immature.

Eels evolved fifty million years ago. To my knowledge, no one has ever seen eels spawning, so it is difficult to understand how they reproduce.

Every American and European eel is born in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Sargasso Sea south of Bermuda. The warm, salty, calmer conditions in the Sargasso make it ideally suited for spawning. Every year, after hatching, the tiny eels swim off toward land and up the coast to the rivers, spending their juvenile and adult lives in freshwater. At the end of their lives, they return to the sea to reproduce and die.

When they return to the Sargasso, they carry only enough fat and protein for a one-way trip. The trip is not easy thanks to thousands of dams along the eastern seaboard. Juveniles make it upstream with the aid of fish ladders but face the danger of being chewed up by the turbines in hydropower dams on their way back down as adults.

Enjoy your eels and your pickled pigs' feet.

“Itsa Christmas.”