Read Online Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite by Frank Bruni - Free Book Online

forty-five minutes away, and Uncle Jim never more than an hour. The ninety-minute drive between White Plains and Avon, Connecticut, the suburb of Hartford where we settled, was utterly new territory, a chilling precedent. Mom and Dad called her at least twice a week in the beginning to ease her shock and pain, and tried not to laugh when she inquired about the weather “all the way up there,” or when she asked, in mid-September, if it had snowed yet.
    That first year and for many years after, we drove down to White Plains and back on Christmas Eve, because Christmas Eve was Grandma’s big night, in terms not only of cooking—the seven fishes, strascinat , Italian cakes, Italian cookies—but also of certain rituals, especially the one in which she played midwife to millennia of religious drama.
    She had this unusual crèche. It wasn’t one of those tabletop assemblages of Lilliputian camels and wise men paying bent-head homage to a Lilliputian new family. Her crèche took up a significant patch of the front lawn on Fifth Street, and its centerpiece was a tall, broad wood shack, the pieces of which were hauled every year from a shed attached to the garage and hammered together so that Mary and Joseph would have somewhere dry to hang out from the end of November until the Big Day. They and their plaster-of-Paris entourage were more than half life size. It was as if Grandma had invited a large party of anachronistically dressed dwarfs to camp out in the yard for the holiday season.
    But something was missing: baby Jesus, who was perhaps three-quarters life size. He would stay missing—metaphorically in utero, though technically in a bottom drawer of Grandma’s bedroom dresser—until just before the midnight moment when Christmas Eve became Christmas Day. Grandma held to this pinpoint schedule as if indisputable historical accuracy were at stake and White Plains were in the same time zone as ancient Bethlehem. At 11:58 p.m. on December twenty-fourth—two minutes before the Christ child’s birth—she would dim the lights. She would put on a record of Dean Martin or someone like him singing “Silent Night.” And she would fetch baby Jesus from that dresser drawer, where he lay swaddled in the finest white linens Grandma owned. She’d cradle him in her arms, carry him out to the shack on the front lawn, and put him in his manger, nestled between Mary and Joseph. And she would cry, because it was an emotional moment and because, well, she hadn’t been feeling so well lately. This Christmas, it always pained her to say, would most likely be her last.
     
     
     
     
    Holiday celebrations—which were when the Brunis’ talent for excess really came out—got divvied up so that everybody in the family could host one. Until she grew too old to pull it off, Grandma had Christmas Eve. Uncle Jim and Aunt Vicki had Easter. Uncle Mario and Aunt Carolyn had the Fourth of July or Labor Day or some other holiday that took on more importance than it normally would, so that they, too, would have their rightful chance to put together a feast. Mom and Dad had Thanksgiving, and held on to it even after the move to Avon.
    Whoever was hosting a given holiday treated it as an opportunity—no, a challenge—to lay out more food than anyone else had at their holiday. If there were two kinds of pie at Easter, there might be three kinds of pie at the following Thanksgiving. If there were three choices of ice cream to go with the pies at one event, there might be four choices, plus hot fudge, at the next. There’d be a cake in addition to the pies, in honor of the family members whose birthdays fell in the vicinity of the holiday. There’d be cookies, and probably cannoli, because someone might want something sweet to nibble on after pie, ice cream and cake.
    But the dessert spread usually paled next to all that preceded it: the six, seven or eight kinds of appetizers passed around before the main meal; the main meal itself, which always