It’s almost time for traditional huge holiday meals that fill an entire kitchen with enough food for 20 people for a week. Especially if your parents and grandparents are from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
When I was growing up, holiday meals were a big deal. Times two.
Two Grandma’s houses. One in Curtis. One in McMillan.
Two sets of cousins. Two Thanksgiving turkeys. Two Christmas trees. Two Christmas Eves. Two Christmas Days. Two tables set up: a kids’ table, an adult table with every leaf put to use.
The double-everything was fabulous.
Unless you had to do the dishes.
The dishes somehow landed on the grandkids at every holiday meal. It was an unspoken deal: If we stayed out of the kitchen while they were cooking, we didn’t have to cook. If we didn’t cook, we had to clean. It always felt fair until dessert was over.
Grandma, born in 1921, had a dishwasher, probably a gift from a dish-washing daughter. But we stood there, holiday after holiday, handwashing the dishes next to it. It was taking up valuable under-the-counter storage space, nothing more.
The one time we dared load it, every adult female in the kitchen stopped what they were doing and looked at Grandma and waited. What would she say?
“Good idea, girls!” she said. Grandma never said a cross word to any of us. We all tittered, excited but wary.
By dawn the next day, Grandma had unloaded and inspected every piece. Some rewashing occurred, silently, by hand. No one said a word, and Grandma started the bacon. After breakfast, our mother pulled us aside and said the words we’d live by for the next three decades at Grandma’s: “Wash them by hand.”
The chore was divided in two: One washed. The other dried. Cousins paired up and worked in shifts.
The adults, meanwhile, put away the leftovers. A towering stack of pale brown butter tubs was pulled out and put into service. Country Crock housed the mashed potatoes. Country Crock also housed the gravy and the turkey. Parkay, perhaps, housed the veggies and the cranberries.
The stack of “butter” in the fridge was like a true game of Clue. Tomorrow, the entire lot would be hauled out for sandwiches and the hunt for which held the turkey would begin.
Meanwhile, the dishes would continue to accumulate at the sink. No sooner did we think we were done, when a butter tub would be set free, a big, greasy dish for us to tangle with.
Next was the drying debacle. It was hard to dry that many dishes with one thin towel. Grandma put her towels to use day in and day out, what with the dishwasher never put to use. And so the towels were always thin and always soaked through it seemed. Were the dishes still wet when we put them away? Always.
And it always ended the same way: A water fight at the sink, a roar, wet linoleum, wet socks, The trash bin under the sink overflowing with coffee grounds. Grandma’s peanut butter fudge in a glass pie dish on top of the fridge, saved for later.
Cousins sharing secrets while looking out the tiny window over the sink, a view into the only road through McMillan, Michigan. Sisters, moms, daughters running into each other on the way to the stove or the table. Laughter and jostling, sometimes a swat or squeeze.
Looking back, I can see now that those were some of the best times. When we were put to work in a kitchen full of the women who loved us the most.
Even if the dishes never did seem to end. ♥