I always assumed that if you took on one holiday meal, you’d never have to volunteer for another. I was wrong. If the kin die off and Heaven takes some of the best cooks, it leaves the family no choice but to divvy up the remaining holiday meals.
Easter went to me, even though I was 8.9 months pregnant and with major complications that included another case of Irritable Uterus Syndrome, a condition in which the ute contracts as if having temper tantrums and threatens to toss out a baby way before it’s due.
No matter. The folks had digested a couple of turkey meals, a pot roast or two, so later I got the big hint to take on the Easter ham.
It went down the way Thanksgiving did.
“Oh, mercy,” an unnamed relative said. “I got this bad hip giving me fits and can’t even take my own garbage to the road. I can’t even go downstairs to wash a load of clothes so if you smell something, it’s probably me.”
Or here’s another one I heard from a different set of kin. “We’ve pretty much given up on the Easter meal. I reckon your daddy and I will be fine having a pimento cheese sandwich after church that day. We ate tacos last Christmas Eve, so I guess as long as we tell Jesus we’re His and recognize the day as one to glorify his rising, it doesn’t matter if we have a pack of Nabs and a Diet Coke. It’s all the same. We’ll just say a longer prayer.”
This side of the family tree knows I can’t bear to hear of people eating the wrong foods on holidays; it must all match up. Turkey goes with Thanksgiving and ham with Easter and Christmas. Not a pack of Nabs or pimento cheese sandwich.
If there’s one thing I’m not going to do is let a holiday UP and die just because someone has decided to UP and quit cooking it.
“I’ll do Easter,” I said, having no control over my mouth or what spewed forth. “All of you come over.” This very sentence was to be my permanent post in the calendar year and not a one-time thing.
“But you’re pregnant,” they faintly protested.
“There’s nothing on the hams that spout warnings to pregnant women. It’s not like a fifth of liquor.” How hard could it be? A 10-pound pig’s ass? A little cheating such as buying the potato salad and rolls? If taking over Easter would please these wonderful kin, then I’d do it, despite the fact I’d never cooked a ham in my life and had no clue what it would be like or if it’d have guts tucked up in the anus cavity like the turkeys did.
“Well, honey,” they all cooed, “you really don’t have to do this. I mean, look. You’re pregnant and the doctor said if you got out of bed you could deliver too early.”
“It’s OK. I’ll do it in shifts. I’ll throw in the ham and then go lie down for a day or two. I’ll chop eggs for six hours and then rest for seven.”
By the time the big Easter Feast arrived at my home on the hill, I was in the throes of early labor, and trying to hold it back was like playing tug-of-war with a dozen elephants.
It's all that fat ham's fault. Gwaltney, $1.88 per pound for the spiral cut, honey-glazed version at Ingles. I don't even like ham, but you wouldn't have known it to look in my grocery cart the day before Easter Sunday.
There it sat in its red foil and netted glory - all 8 to 10 pounds of it - along with a giant cantaloupe, a cherry pie and a half-gallon of Breyer's best.
The kin were coming and I aimed to prove to my relatives that despite months of pre-term labor and complications, that despite one semi-dry pot roast, a turkey or two cooked with innards, I was a woman who could be counted on to lay out an Easter spread with all the trimmings. It was the least I could offer considering all they do for me, which is dinner nearly ever Sunday evening.
I knew I should have called in the troops at Heavenly Ham, but I didn’t have the money for a honey-glazed spiral cut to feed a dozen. Plus, my husband got in trouble for dumping our garbage in the Heavenly Ham’s trash bin. The manager called our house and threatened to cart him off to jail.
This is why I had to haul in a Gwaltney, knowing better than to carry the heavy load up the stairs to the front door all by my enormously pregnant self.
I heaved the bags toward my then 5-year-old. “Honey, don't strain yourself,” I said. “But if you can get this ham up the steps, I'll give you five bucks.”
His eyes twinkled at the prospect of all the candy the cash would buy. He grabbed the groceries, looking for all the world like a sapped burrow as he trudged step after step, finally making it inside.
The next morning’s sun slipped through my Roman shades announcing with tapping panic waves in my chest that this was it. Easter had dawned. A child hopped on my bed and nudged away the remaining dreams.
“Mom, did the Easter bunny not come yet?” Eager eyes were on me, and the bed moved with my son’s hopeful little bounces.
“The who? The what didn’t come?” I rubbed my ever-contracting cantankerous belly. Whatever was in there wanted out, and it felt as if my fine fetus was slowly deconstructing a stick-built house, one bone, one rib, one muscle and tendon at a time.
“Last year he brought me two rubber snakes, a solid chocolate rabbit and Gummi Bears,” my son said, brown eyes shining with advancing tears.
Oh my Lord, I'd forgotten about the Easter bunny. What kind of sorry mother forgets the Easter Bunny for her only child living out of the womb? As a young girl, my family did Santa and the Tooth Fairy, but Mama told us from the time we could understand the word “NO,” that there was no such thing as an Easter bunny, just the Easter Jesus.
She'd buy us a new dress and patent leather Mary Janes for church, and we'd hide eggs and eat chocolate rabbits, but the bunny's arrival on Easter morning was never celebrated. No one would steal the Lord’s thunder. And not unless a divine rabbit learned to rise up from the dead, would it have a place in our lives on Easter Sunday.
“Sweetie,” I said to my child. “Don't you remember mom and dad got you those new Nikes and that ‘Edible Bugs From Around the World’ book for Easter?”
“That wasn't from the Easter bunny,” he said softly, voice starting to tremble. “Will he come tonight instead?”
A giant contraction hit and I crawled back into bed, wondering where I'd failed as a mother. “He may be bringing your little sister for a present.”
“That doesn’t count. She was coming anyway,” he said. Soon as he said it, the mother of all labor pains knocked the breath out of me and I howled like some kind of animal baying at a full moon.
Later that morning I called a certain member of the blood kin to report signs of true labor, wondering if I’d be able to weasel out of cooking dinner. “I’m about to give birth and not sure how I can get the ham and potato – ”
“Well, can I come give you a hand?” came the kind reply. “I'll be over in a little while to help you out with the meal.”
Whoa! ‘Scuse me. Did you hear I’m about to give birth? And here you are still thinking I’m going to get out of bed and cook your hungry hiney a ham?
“I’m really not sure I’ll be able to - ”
The relative protested. “Women cook and give birth every day. It’s a normal cycle of events. I can’t tell you the number of babies that just fell out of a woman’s housedress while she stood at the sink peeling potatoes. What time shall we be there for dinner?”
I was stunned. “Well, if I’m not in the O.R. with my baby and me hooked to life support and fetal monitors, you can come around 6ish.”
“Very good. I’ll bring the rolls. I found some the other day you don’t have to cook or microwave. Just take them out of the bag and that’s it.”
In the South when a woman promises her in-laws a Sunday or holiday meal, she'd better deliver or else.
Just as I was about to get all upset, I remembered forgetting the Easter bunny.
“Listen” I said, changing the subject, “You know that ridiculous mockery of the Lord called the Easter Bunny? You know how he’s been hopping around for years trying to one-up Jesus, and in many households he’s succeeded? We don’t want Niles to think there’s really an – ”
Silence. A cough. “What does this mean? That you’re taking away the magic of his childhood? What’s wrong with the notion of a rabbit coming and bringing treats and goodies? My children grew up with the Easter Bunny coming and it didn’t affect our religion.”
How could I say, “Your son is agnostic. Probably the result of believing a giant pellet-pooping bunny was his salvation in the form of Cadbury eggs and pastel M&Ms?”
That’s just it. You don’t say it. You suck it up and apologize for being a crappy mother who thinks only of herself and the baby half wedged between the cavernous womb and birth.
“I forgot about the bunny because I’ve been so worried about having a healthy baby,” I said. “But you know, instead of all that rabbit nonsense, I read Niles stories about the resurrection of Christ and told him this was the true meaning of Easter.”
“That's about as bad as forgetting Santa Claus,'' my kin said, laughing ever-so-sweetly and passive aggressively. “Don't worry. I've bought plenty of extra candy figuring something like this might happen. You just tell him the Easter bunny isn’t stiff and dead and came here by mistake.”
Bless her sweet ham-starved heart. A woman that generous surely deserves an Easter spread, I thought, and immediately dialed my mother's number as I felt the baby’s leg enter the birth canal. Or maybe it was an intestine or my imagination or something even more sinister.
“Mama, help me. I'm in premature labor and can't seem to worm my way out of this dinner.” I cried and threw a conniption and the hormones poured from tear ducts and other orifices.
“Well, who in their right mind wants to cook?”' my rational mother asked. “Nobody ever really wants to do the cooking, but you have to be gracious.”
“How can I be gracious when something’s trying to exit my hoo-hoo?”
“You can just shove it back up there. It’s probably just your bladder. Tons of us have been tucking bladders back in for years. It’s a family trait. You’re bound to get it.”
“What? Are you saying my – ”
“I’m saying all sorts of pressure is in the womb and pushing down, and things just up and fall out of the vagina. It could be anything. A piece of esophagus, a lung lobe, an extra yard or two of intestine. Unless it’s crying and resembles a skull, just shove it all back up there ‘til the time comes.”
“I forgot the Easter bunny, too, Mom. I'm the town’s worst mother. I’ll bet even the strippers down at Joe’s Titty Shack got their kids stuff from the Easter Bunny.”
“Calm down. Get a hold of yourself. Jesus is all that child needs.”
“Mama?”
“What?” she sounded thoroughly annoyed.
“Something just fell out of me.”
“Did what?”
“The plug?”
“The what?”
“I’ve lost my plug”
“What plug? I’ve been a woman nearly 60 years and never heard of anything called a plug.”
“It’s the pink membrane thing that holds in the baby.”
She was not impressed. “Back when my generation was having babies, there was NO such thing as plugs, uteruses, syndromes, kegels, constant fetal monitoring and all this crazy worrying. You got pregnant, you carried on and cooked and mothered and did everything you usually did until it was time for the doctor to say spread ‘em and the gas man to knock you out with whatever it was they used so we didn’t have to see and hear everything going on down there.”
Thirty minutes after Mama’s pep talk, I was in the kitchen making pasta salad, chopping broccoli and cherry tomatoes and getting blown up by a can of room-temperature biscuits. My uterus felt as if it would drop like the ball in Times Square, and I cursed every person on earth who decided hulks of ham should be the centerpiece for this holiday instead of featherweight tea cakes or even fish sticks. I could do some frozen fish sticks, sisters. It’s one of the kitchen virgin’s specialties.
This traditional and formal 30-pound dinner, however, must go on, and the guests began arriving as I stooped and hauled the Gwaltney out of the oven, grabbing my tightening belly, praying to get through this night without spilling things from my Victoria’s Secret Whopper Woman underpants. I unwrapped the red foil and to my utter horror, discovered I'd cooked the meat in the plastic bag along with other doodads meant to be thrown out before heating.
Casting an eye around the room, I found no one looking before stooping again to rescue the cherry pie, feeling hot black plastic run down my oven mitt. Oh, no, no no. I'd also cooked the pie in its plastic container.
Determined, I sliced through the plastic, trying to hack it out of the meat, yet secretly hoping someone would get a piece caught in his or her teeth. A girl can get pretty mean during a contraction, and I was suffering them every 10 minutes.
“Hmmm. Smells delicious,” a relative said, not a bit bothered that I was now lying down on the kitchen floor and panting. “You really shouldn’t have gone to all the trouble.” This was the general consensus once the food was cooked, the table set and the guests had cast their eyes on the pregnant woman clutching her organs. It’s not their fault, God love them. No one should be forced to do the biggest meals of the year for the rest of their lives, and it was my time – pregnant or otherwise – to lay out the spread.
After dinner, during which I managed to remain semi-upright albeit tilted to the right, Southern hospitality drained to zero. I excused myself to lie down and read “What to Expect When You're Expecting,” a truly frightening chunk of prenatal literature designed to send the fragile hypochondriacs into great shock with such gems as, “Never eat undercooked pork,” or the baby might have two heads, and “NEVER try to get out of bed during pre-term labor,” lest you want a baby in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for up to four months.
I slammed the book in a drawer and called my mother, having given her time to get home and digest the plastic remnants from the Gwaltney.
“Mother, pack your bags, I'm having a baby, possibly by morning, if not in the next hour.”
“What? How do you know? Is that what the doctor said?”
“No, I don’t need a doctor to tell me when something’s trying to crawl out of my body. I have all the signs. Listen, get ready just in case. And by the way...”
“Yes?”
“I'm changing the baby's name if she comes in the next 48 hours.”
“To what now, honey?”
“Gwaltney. Gwaltney Reinhardt.”
***
For those not with child or those with child firmly secured in utero, here is one of Katy Caire recipes for the Easter Ham. Katy wasn’t on a budget and preferred the fine hams from Kentucky, which she says are the most delicious and memorable.
EASTER HAM
Katy says if you aren’t going for the best hams, then concentrate on the special glazes and bastings sauces to “do you proud,” and lift your offering out of the ordinary run-of-the-mill category. While she varied her glazes and sauces, she preferred to blend prepared mustard with brown sugar or molasses into a smooth paste. She also scored the ham and studded it with whole cloves before popping it into the oven at Bake 300, for pre-cooked hams.
“Then from time to time,” she wrote, “I give it a generous drink of orange juice or Coca Cola, beer or burgundy wine, according to my mood and what I find on the shelves.” The timetable, she said, varies with the size of the ham, whether it’s precooked or just needs “beautifying.” Take a slice off every now and then for a taste to see how things are going.
For the accompanying sauce, dribble more of the basting liquid if needed, or add a dash of Worcestershire or hot pepper sauce. Serve with pickled peaches and sweet potatoes baked in their jackets, lavished with butter, and throw in an assortment of green vegetables for the perfect meal.
Copyright 2008 Susan Reinhardt
