Every family has their little holiday traditions. We certainly had plenty—Dad would read A Christmas Carol aloud to us kids, as a result of which I had big chunks of it memorized by the time I was in high school. We all worked together under his direction to make platters of egg rolls to give as gifts—no Chinese restaurant can ever come close to my dad’s egg rolls. My mother made sausage rolls. We usually cut the tree ourselves, often at the last minute. We kids made a stocking for Mom and Dad, and when we woke up before dawn on Christmas, there would be a bulging kneesock by each of our beds, filled with chocolate coins and assorted little items and—always—a tangerine and a quarter in the toe.

According to the note on the flyleaf, this little book made its first appearance in our family on Christmas 1978. My mother undoubtedly found it either at a yard sale or at our favorite store, the St. Vincent De Paul Thrift Shop, which means she probably paid 19 cents for it.

Each of the stories in this book starts out as your standard, heart-warming Christmas story of magic and good deeds, then takes a sharp U-turn at the end, winding up with exploding lightbulbs, adulterous elves, and Rudolph’s flabby laurels. more…

I got this book as a birthday present when I was 7 or 8 from my good friend Steve Stasheff (I suspect his mother picked it out, actually). I don’t remember doing much cooking when I was a kid, but I did spend a lot of time reading this book, and I memorized a lot of the pictures. Even today, when I make pancakes or meatloaf, the images from this book are lurking in the back of my head.

First of all, I was fascinated by the test kitchen cooks whose faces and comments were sprinkled throughout the book. Who were they, and what did they know that I didn’t, that they got to get their pictures in the book? They looked kind of nerdy, but they were in a book and I wasn’t. That didn’t seem right.

The book started with a section on Beverages, the whole concept of which just puzzled me. Why bother? The only beverage I was interested in was pop, which we seldom got. I used to squint over the recipes, trying to figure out if they had slipped in a recipe for pop, but all they had were nauseating concoctions like Red Rouser (vanilla ice cream and cranberry juice), Choc-o-Nut Milk (milk mixed with peanut butter and chocolate syrup), and Cheery Cherry Drink: Stir maraschino cherry juice into milk and then “drop a maraschino cherry ’surprise’ into each glass.” I didn’t think a bright red blob would be a good surprise in a glass of milk.

In the Salads section, the Betty Crocker folks rolled up their sleeves and got down to business, which in this book meant one thing: Making food look like something else. In the Betty Crocker cookbook, “Rocket Salad” did not involve arugula; it was a banana, set upright in a slice of canned pineapple and topped with a “nose cone” of half a maraschino cherry.

The salad section relied heavily on such artifice. Canned pears become bunnies (with almond ears and tails of cottage cheese). Carrots cluster, points inward, around a clump of olives to form a black-eyed Susan. And someone even made a Raggedy Ann Salad, using a marshmallow for the head, shredded cheese for hair… I’m going to stop there.

With the exception of the hideous “Ham” Loaf Hawaiian (the scare quotes say it all: It’s Spam, studded with pineapple rings and baked), the section on main dishes is pretty solid. The food stylists did go a little nuts on Meat Loaf a la Mode (meatloaf baked in a pie tin and topped with scoops of mashed potatoes), but other than that, it’s straight-up home cooking. The cookies are pretty basic as well. But then we get to the cakes.

This is the Enchanted Castle Cake, and I wanted it. Bad. I used to sit and look at the little chocolate bar doors and just desire that cake. I never got it, of course, which is probably just as well as there is no way that reality could live up to that image. This one was too freakish for me, though:

I could never figure out what that creature in the center was supposed to be, but it didn’t look appetizing. And note the popcorn-ball clowns lurking in the background. The entire scene just screams “forced gaiety.”

I leave you with the best page of the whole book, a chocolate cookie recipe that really works—my 12-year-old daughter uses it when she bakes cookies, and they are still delicious. But what makes it perfect is the dollop of sarcasm added by my sister at the very end. Happy eating!

My aunt sent me this picture from Ireland last week, along with a note saying that it hung for years in the dispensary (doctor’s office) in Louth Village. My grandfather was the village doctor from about 1930 until, literally, the day he died: He dropped dead of a heart attack in 1985, at the age of 85, while on a house call.

Grandpa was the Platonic ideal of a village doctor. He started his practice in the days before there was a test for everything, so he had to be a good listener. He had a hearty, reassuring way about him: “Totally normal,” he used to say to most minor complaints. And because he came from the area, he knew everyone’s family history for generations. This gave him considerable insight not only into his patients’ health but also into human nature. “Life is a struggle between the church and the hormones,” I heard him observe at dinner one day, “and the hormones usually win.”

He even looked the part of the country doctor, strolling through the village in the warm weather in a white suit and straw hat. And although Ireland has national health insurance, his patients still brought strawberries and chickens to the house.

The dispensary was in my grandparents’ house, which was actually owned by the government. Patients came to the front door, and one of my duties when we were visiting was to let them in and settle them on a chair in the front hall. I remember one night the family was rousted out of bed by knocking on the door; a motorcyclist had hit a tree on a curve just beyond my grandparents’ house. Grandpa got dressed and went out, but there was nothing he could do. The man was already dead.

The print is part of my legacy from my Aunt Eleanor, who shared Grandpa’s practice and took it over when he died. The artist is Mabel Lucie Attwell, who specialized in plump children doing cute things. (This is actually less cute than her other work, at least the things I have seen.) My mother’s family were big fans of hers. I remember having a Mabel Lucie Attwell annual when I was growing up, and when I went through my mother’s papers after she died, I found Mabel Lucie Attwell cards that she and her sisters had sent back and forth when they were in their 20s.

The picture is a bit buckled and grimy, reminders that it hung for years in a house that was heated only by coal fires. Most people don’t know what it’s like to live without central heating, even in a fairly temperate climate like Ireland’s. For one thing, nothing ever dries out completely, which means the sheets are always clammy and paper often feels limp. (Perhaps that’s why the cook, Mrs. Finnegan, used to iron the newspapers.) And the coal fires bring soot and smells with them. Coal smoke is my Proustian madeleine. In my grandparents’ house we burned two kinds of coal, bituminous and anthracite, one in the fireplace and one in the stove, and going out to refill the coal scuttle was another of my jobs when I was over there. This could be fairly intimidating at night, when the coal shed was pitch black.

I haven’t figured out where exactly I’m going to hang this picture, but it will have to have pride of place somewhere. The subject matter, the artist, even the grit trapped inside the glass, all are reminders of things too important to forget.