The foods that I like best for Thanksgiving are bittersweet. Turnips are an acquired taste, but they are my favorite. After Steve and I married, I realized that cranberries didn’t come from a can and so I added fresh cranberries with orange rinds and walnuts to my list of favorite holiday foods. Another family favorite is brussel sprouts roasted in olive oil, garlic with slivered almonds. I buy it on the stalk, always pointing out to Johanna the striking resemblance this vegetable bears to the human spine and brain.
One other thing besides these “foods that say Thanksgiving to me,” is an invasive vine called bittersweet. My dear friend Angela first introduced me to bittersweet. Angela was like a mother to me who quickly became an adopted Italian grandma to my two eldest children when they were still very young.
We met Angela when I was pregnant with my second. Her young adult children were not married. Angela doted on our children to fill the grandparent and grandchild void in all our lives. She taught Steve and me how to cook Italian meals, introduced us to real ingredients and flavor. She even threw in polka lessons on the side. I’m not sure where the polka lessons came from in her Italian ancestry, but we ended most Sundays dancing in Angela’s living room to Polka records played on the stereo.
Angela, who was a master gardener, traveled with clippers in the dashboard of her car, just in case she saw a natural roadside display of wildflowers begging to be a centerpiece on her table or if she encountered some overgrown bittersweet. Angela had a map in her head of all the best places in the Town of Huntington to find bittersweet. When she gathered it in late September and wove it into wreathes, I didn’t think much of it. But when it turned that beautiful autumn gold with a delicate red center, just in time for Thanksgiving, I knew Angela was a decorating genius.
We spent many holidays with Angela and her family. None was quite as memorable as the Thanksgiving when I was nine months pregnant with my third child. We were hoping to be carrying a baby in the sling to Angela’s house for Thanksgiving. Instead, I waddled in to Angela’s house feeling like my insides would fall out with every step. Nonetheless, Angela delivered a beautiful holiday, complete with fresh and whole cranberry sauce with orange rinds and walnuts, warm turkey and brussel sprouts, carrots, yams and the like, all set atop a table decorated with candles and bittersweet vines. It was a joyous celebration of friends, family and food.
After dinner, Angela helped me to her favorite recliner, put my feet up and gave me a blanket while my husband, Steve, and her daughters cleared the dishes for dessert. The two of us were settling in to watch Martha Stewart’s Christmas crafts on PBS. We joked as we watched the show, about whether Stewart was a genius or a psychopath and if the perfect children she did those crafts with were going need therapy when they grew up. We liked the ideas just the same. Then, just as dessert was announced, labor pangs made it impossible for me to move and even more difficult to breathe.
I passed on dessert and excused myself to one of the secluded bathrooms off a bedroom at the end of the hall. There I labored with Steve long enough to know that this baby was going to make an appearance for Thanksgiving after all, not in time for dinner, but maybe for dessert. During a harrowing drive, speeding to the hospital, while I lay screaming in the back of our station wagon, Steve rolled down the windows, hoping to catch the attention of police to get an escort to the ER or assistance for a roadside delivery. We made it just in time. They rolled me from the ER to the delivery room and the midwife, still dressed in sweatshirt and jeans, barely had time to put on gloves, when MaryAngela came bursting out in time give us all a very Happy Thanksgiving!
Back at Angela’s home, my two eldest, David and Anna happily enjoyed dessert with their Italian grandma. When we called Angela to announce our baby’s arrival, we shared our joy that our baby girl was named to honor her Italian grandma, as we named MaryAngela for Angela Mary who had taken us into her home and into her heart. Angela was deeply moved as we planned Thanksgiving part II at our home the next weekend. I had to have dessert.
Angela brought all the fixings and Steve made the turkey as I sat on the couch nursing our new baby girl. Then after dinner, Angela sat next to me and held her namesake with delight. Just then a sharp pain interrupted our fun family feast. We gave Angela ice for a nagging pain in her back, but still the pain was visible on her face. Her daughter took her home after we kissed goodbye and thanked her for always being there.
The next morning we got the call that Angela’s back pain was an aneurysm that split her aortic artery. She was to remain in the hospital to be stabilized and a very dangerous surgery was planned to repair the artery. I went to visit her in the cardiac ICU, tucking MaryAngela in the baby sling beneath my wrap so we could visit with Angela without the hospital staff complaining. Angela doted over her namesake as we recounted our eventful Thanksgiving.
I told Angela of my plans to make the Christmas cookies she had taught me to make, trying to cut out the shapes in Martha Stewart fashion. Angela smiled and reminded me not to concern myself with the end products, but just to enjoy the time with my beautiful babies; making memories that last was more important than festive cookies.
Angela did not survive that surgery. Our Italian grandma was taken from us just as we were sweeping the bittersweet petals from the table and replacing it with Christmas candles. It was a sad end to a joyous holiday season. We rejoiced at our inspiration to name MaryAngela for Angela just in time before she died.
If most of us are honest, Thanksgiving, Christmas and the holidays are indeed a bittersweet time. For me it’s painfully obvious. Steve and I were engaged on Thanksgiving and years later gave birth to our beautiful daughter to mark that momentous day. I also lost my sister in an accident just days after my son was born and two weeks before celebrating Thanksgiving with my grieving parents as they held my first-born son. Johanna also went into emergency surgery one Thanksgiving and was in a coma for an entire holiday season.
The blessings and the pain, the bitter and the sweet mix in our mouths and in our hearts during the holidays, just like the varied tastes of our Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts. If you are experiencing the sweet, be grateful, if life is bitter, be thankful still. For God’s blessings are bittersweet and through them all, our lives are made into a bounteous feast that leads our hearts towards home.
Eileen Benthal is a writer, speaker and wellness coach with a B.A. in Theology from Franciscan University. She and her husband Steve live in Jamesport and have four young adult children. Their youngest, Johanna, is a teenager with special needs. Eileen can be reached at FreeIndeedFreelance.com.
