Issues → November/December 2007 → Features →

Mary's Farm: Orphan Holidays

COMMENT

SINGLE PAGE

SHARE

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING SITES

X

•  del.icio.us
•  Facebook
•  Google
•  StumbleUpon
•  Yahoo!
•  Windows Live

EMAIL

PRINT

(page 2 of 3)

But within all of that, there was always time for a meal. The first really new parts of this house were the kitchen and the dining room. And so these two spaces became almost sacred as other spaces were pounded into place. And there were meals, gatherings, parties -- something for which I wasn't particularly well prepared. My Aunt Peg had given dinner parties on occasion, and as a child, I sat there uncomfortably as the erudite conversation wafted high above my head. But the food was good. That was always something to look forward to.

And there was something else, something much harder to grasp. The dining room in that old Colonial house had a big fireplace; in the winter, the fire was always lit, as were the candles, which gave the room a glow and a cozy feeling, as if we'd all come in out of the cold to gather there. Of course, we had, in a sense, but to my way of thinking there was something more primeval about it -- a kind of bonding together against the rigors of the wilderness of an ever-more-confusing world. Maybe, in some vague way, that's what I'm reaching for when I invite friends to dinner.

My first bit of fortune came with the table that my parents left me. It had belonged to my great-grandparents. My great-grandparents, I should explain, had a lot of money -- money that never made it past the year 1929. The money was gone, but the furniture stayed with us, passed down and down into ever-smaller homes. In our modest house in New Jersey, the table was a circle with four grand chairs around it. Two of the chairs had arms, and with their high, ornate backs, they seemed somehow out of scale against the table, which had a beautiful mahogany finish. As a child, I loved to hide under the table and was always slightly awed by the fierce nature of what held it up: a grand base carved into fearsome eagle's claws, grasping big wooden balls.

In the basement, my father had stored four more chairs to match the set and four leaves that could be set into the expandable table frame. I'd never seen it with more than one leaf in it, because my parents' dining room had been too small. But, once the table made its way to this new house, I was able to expand it completely and set all the chairs around it. I'd already envisioned it many times as the workmen were demolishing two old bedrooms and putting the new wainscoting into place: This is where the table will go. This is where the fun will happen.

The appearance of my new dining room and the banquet-size table must have seemed absurd to anyone watching this process, as this was a home for one person. Who was going to sit around this table? I'm sure it's a question poised on the lips of anyone who enters this house, especially all the men who come to do various jobs, wiring and plumbing and flooring. I can see them glance into the big room and then glance again.

My dinners began some years back when, weary of trying to figure out what to do for Thanksgiving and Christmas, I hit on the idea of what I called "orphan holidays." Gradually, I noticed that I wasn't the only one around who was alone at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Not only were there those who were truly alone, but there were others who weren't technically alone but were in transition -- friends whose spouses had died, friends in the midst of divorce, friends in some other kind of despair. I realized we could all come together on those days, and hosting the holidays fulfilled my need to cook a big meal for many hungry friends.