Baby Boomer Sagas's Blog

Excerpt from: “Aunt Marie”, Chapter V | June 18, 2010

Aunt Marie, circa 1950

12/28/10 – In this post, I have jumped around a little.  The time I speak of here is not my first memory of my Aunt Marie.  I  have skipped the first part because it is very long and went directly to one of my favorite times with her.  This is in Chapter V.

Aunt Marie was asked to be my godmother, and when I was born, they gave me her name in anticipation of the day I would receive the sacrament of baptism.

She was the second oldest born to my paternal grandparents, and she didn’t have it easy while growing up. But who did back then? This seemed to be the case with many of the children born to those whose parents had migrated to the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s. She lost her mother while in her teens, and before Grandpa came home with the stepmother, she took on the responsibilities of cooking and cleaning and minding the much younger siblings. She became the matriarch of the family and remained so until her passing.

After Pat and I moved back to New Jersey, it was our tradition to spend Christmas Eve with her and the rest of my father’s siblings and their children. There would be anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five guests at her house on that special night. We always anticipated that event for many days prior. Besides being Christmastime, which in itself is a glorious occasion, I knew Aunt Marie would cook the traditional foods. Our traditional Christmas Eve dinner consisted of fish, and then some more fish. Aunt Marie served absolutely no meat. The practice of not eating meat on Christmas Eve is observed by thousands of Italian Catholics throughout the United States and probably the entire world.

Aunt Marie would usually start serving around 8:00 or 9:00 pm and, of course, everyone in the family managed to arrive at least two hours early so we could be a part of the fabulous pre-sit-down crazies. Aunt would fry the battered flounder, and we would remove pieces of it after she had put it on a serving tray. This stuff was the best. Besides its delicious flavor, it was always tender on the inside and golden brown on the outside. Next, she made a cold baccalà salad, and my uncles would loiter around, waiting for her to walk away from it, which she usually did. Without a doubt, she would always have to stop whatever she was doing to check on some other tasty dish that was simmering on the stove or baking in the oven. Either the linguine was boiling over or the clams oregano was hissing. She would be gone for only a minute or so, but my uncles were fast. Their fingers would be in and out of that baccalà salad before you could blink. When she came back, the second she looked in the bowl, she knew what had occurred, and she would give them such a look. We couldn’t keep from laughing. Then she would affectionately scream at everyone to stop stealing. We couldn’t help ourselves. It was late and we were hungry. Combine that with the aroma that permeated the kitchen and our reflexes kicked in. Salivation was impossible to control in that house that night.