Christmas

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 10

Mercifully, the kids slept until 8:30 on Christmas morning, then had to endure the adults’ sluggishness and coffee-making while they (the kids) sniffed anxiously around the “stockings” and piles of gifts.  I say “stockings” because we did not bring ours from New York (you’d think that there would have been room in one of those 21 boxes, no?) and I never thought about getting any here.  So Raquel—in between cooking an enormous meal for nine—whipped one up for Milo, and C.C. used her boots.  Pretty soon we were surrounded by a sea of gift wrap, ripped up boxes and small plastic parts.  The adults were quickly enlisted to install batteries and assemble various toys, and the kids seemed happy with their haul.

Christmas morning is always a little overwhelming for the kids—not that they get SO much stuff, but still they don’t quite know what to play with first.  It takes awhile for everything to sink in.

The kitchen is pretty much off limits when Raquel and her sisters are cooking.  First off, it’s smoky and freezing.  Gena and Mila smoke, but they courteously confine themselves to the kitchen, and open a window so that most of the smoke escapes.  But really they have their work all planned, and extra sets of hands just muck up the works.  Christmas dinner in Galicia means cocido.  Everyone makes it, and everyone eats it at home.  Then they go visiting.  Gena had brought an enormous pot for the dish—it reminded me of my father’s clam chowder pot.  It takes several hours to cook the cocido, so you have to start pretty early.

To make cocido, you start with a big pot of water that you boil, and then add a lot of meat—ribs, a whole chicken, slabs of beef, various unidentifiable pieces of pig, and chorizo.  After this cooks for awhile, you add a whole bunch of whole, peeled potatoes—big ones.  Then you add the grelos.  There is no English translation for grelos—they are some kind of dark, leafy green, earthy and slightly bitter.  Some recipes call for garbanzos also, but Raquel says they are undigestable, so she leaves them out. 

When it’s all done, you scoop out all of the porky meat and put it on one plate.  On another you put the beef and chicken.  You put the grelos in one bowl and the potatoes in another.  The broth that’s left in the pot is saved for making caldo, or soup, another day.

Everyone sits around the table and takes some potatoes and grelos, and whatever meat they want.  Everything has been spiced up a bit with the paprika that has seeped out of the chorizo.  Milo showed me that they tend to put some chorizo between chunks of bread and eat it that way.  It was hearty, filling, delicious.  Not so different from something my Polish relatives would have eaten.  Every culture has its boiled meat, I guess. Barlow says that it is when a Galician is eating cocido that he is most likely to experience morriña.  I think everyone was simply too stuffed after the meal to burst into song; no one could move for awhile after Christmas dinner.

Later, at about 6, two of Raquel’s nieces and their families came to visit; they had already had their own cocido at home.  The apartment is very comfortable even with 7 of us living in it, but at our peak on Christmas Day we were 18, plus a beagle puppy.  Cramped, but still fun.  The kids played in one room, and small groups clustered in the kitchen, in the living area, around the dining table.  It’s not all my family, but it felt like Christmas all the same.

At some point after everyone left, we hauled out the cheeses and jamon again, some cava, and a big salad that had been made two days before but never eaten.  I realized as I drifted off to sleep that I had not left the house for at least 30 hours.  It felt good.