The Kitchen Table

     It’s that time of year again. No sooner has the last piece of pumpkin pie been eaten and we’re on to the obsessive search for just the right holiday gift. But are shiny things bought at big box stores really the stuff of memories?

     For me, my most cherished memories of the holiday season don’t include what I found under the tree, or the fact that I had time off from school, but rather with the gathering of family and friends around our small kitchen table. A lot of life happened at that yellow Formica table. It was where my older sister and I did our homework while my mother made dinner, where we played games on cold winter nights, and where my mom taught me to sew. It was where each evening I would have a snack before bed, and on hair-washing days it was where my sister and I took turns sitting under the big blue bonnet of the hairdryer. That table sat at one end of what I remember as a big kitchen, but with the passing of so many years that I’ve now lost count, I know it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been. The entire house was nothing more than a breadbox.

     When November and December rolled around the kitchen table was the place where we all squeezed together, warmed by the oven cooking the turkey. The smell of my mom’s homemade apple and pumpkin pies cooling on the counter, and the scent of balsam from the tree mingled with the good food and laughter we shared in that small room where someone would tell the same story from the previous year, and we would laugh as if it were the first time we had heard it. Later in the day, after the meal had been cleared and the dishes done, we took out the board games. After several hours of Sorry and Yahtzee, someone would bring out the leftovers and we would start all over again.  

     It’s been many years since I’ve been in that kitchen. These days everyone has a life so full of activities and work that it’s hard to gather at the kitchen table even for an evening meal. But on Christmas day this year, as we’ve done since my nephew was born sixteen years ago, my family and I will gather at my younger sister’s kitchen table to play Five Crowns while we gorge ourselves on snacks throughout the morning. Her table is not yellow nor is it Formica. My mother and I are the only two left from those days so long ago around that yellow Formica table. We are a small family, just seven of us now. But we will gather nevertheless to laugh and eat and reminisce with my sister’s in-laws and have the time of our lives once again.

     So this season as you celebrate the holidays in your own special way, turn off the phone, step away from the computer, and return to the kitchen table and the magic of just being together.

            Happy Holidays -

                   Elaine