Sunday, December 21, 2014

A Christmas Story

MAYERLING AT MIDNIGHT

“Give me any two pages of the Bible and I’ll give you a picture.”
~ Cecil B. DeMille

I love sappy, sentimental Christmas movies. I cry as soon as a bell rings and Clarence gets his wings in It’s a Wonderful Life. When Jimmy Stewart goes all Alfred Hitchcock and frightens Donna Reed into the middle of Valentine’s Day, I get chills. That film is one of my favorites.
 And how about those big galoots in Miracle on 34th Street that were too obtuse to see that Edmund Gwynne was not playing a role? He really was Kris Kringle. Anybody with half a brain could see that.
There is another film I love, although it may not be a true Christmas film. Mayerling, the romantic portrayal of a royal love affair gone tragically awry, is a movie I always watch during the holidays.
I was reminded of it the year I went to Austria for Christmas hoping for a snowfall, something we Southerners know little about. Upon arriving in Vienna five days before Christmas, there was plenty of seriously cold weather, but not one snowflake could be found. I bundled up like an Eskimo and walked around the city shivering like a jellyfish.
I saw performances of Swan Lake and The Nutcracker and then sashayed across Philharmoniker Strasse to the Hotel Sacher for a reviving cup of hot Viennese coffee and a decadent Sacher torte. Yum.
In short, my days and nights leading up to “C” Day were pleasantly full with only one snag. Austrian merchants and hoteliers go home at mid-day to be with their families leaving skeleton crews to take care of tourists like me. Consequently, I had nothing to do on the Eve of Christmas or for “C” Day itself.
That is the reason why on Christmas Eve I wandered alone in the near-empty hotel lobby leafing through travel brochures. What to my wandering eyes should appear, but a red and green pamphlet promoting a traditional Christmas Eve dinner deep in the Vienna Woods, culminating with Midnight Mass at Mayerling.
“Mayerling,” I sighed breathlessly as I shoved the brochure toward the only employee left in the hotel. “Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve starred in that movie. So romantic, so tragic and so...”
The hotel person raised his eyebrows and sniffed. “Bitte?”
I nodded vigorously.  “Mayerling,” I said as plainly as I could. “Ya?”
In perfect English, he told me there was one seat left on the bus for Mayerling. Could I be ready by four o’clock?
Grinning wildly, I shouted, “Ya! Ya! Mayerling. Hot diggidy dawg!”
The bus was warm and noisy and loaded with as many nationalities as a NATO Summit. We chugged along until finally arriving at a quaint restaurant steeped in old world charm that might have been decorated by Heidi herself, (played by Shirley Temple).
After a traditional Austrian Christmas Eve dinner of fried carp, roast goose, baked celery root and marzipan, we re-boarded the old bus and rode to the bottom of a hill in the thick of the Vienna Woods.
It was close to midnight when our tour guide doled out lighted “torches” to us with instructions to walk quietly, single-file up the hill to the chapel for Mass. The penitential convent, she said, had once been the site of a hunting lodge where Crown Prince Rudolf (played by Omar Sharif) and his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera (played by Catherine Deneuve) sealed their fate in a murder/suicide pact.
“The altar,” she said to her captive audience, “stands over the very spot in the Prince’s bedroom where the bodies were discovered.” A chorus of expected “oohs” and “aahs” followed.

I had hiked almost to the top of the hill when the first soft snowflake danced on my nose. When I looked behind me, what I saw snatched away what was left of my breath. Dozens of flickering hand-held torches twisted, turned and meandered up the hill illuminating an otherwise black night. The only sounds to be heard came from icy footstep crunches that accompanied the gentle purr of falling snow. C. B. DeMille, uber Hollywood king of dazzling productions in the Fifties could not have staged it more beautifully.
In that moment, all romantic illusions of Rudolf and Mary and their tragic love affair vacated the premises of my conscious mind. Omar and Catherine playing a role were no longer available to cloud my vision of the sacred moment. The quiet midnight torches below etched themselves on my soul as indestructible strips of celluloid.
Eat your heart out, C.B.

I had seen unforgettable images before but none as indelible as the one stamped on my soul that Christmas Eve. I will always cherish the vision of that quiet group of people ambling up a hill at midnight to honor the Christ Child, born to bring us love, peace and hope for a better world.

I expect one day I’ll take that journey again. No, the inner etchings of that night have not faded, nor will they. That said, a remake is not out of the question. Stay tuned!

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

A Feeling of Christmas

 

It’s fruitcake weather Buddy!”

                                                    ~A Christmas MemoryTruman Capote

  

Our house is unusually quiet today while Babe recovers from serious but successful surgery that saved his life. He sleeps a lot. After a certain age recovery is no walk in the park. Emotionally, I am overwhelmed with relief each morning when I wake up to find him still snoring next to me. I am overjoyed that the two of us have been granted additional time together. 

The antique clock we bought at a flea market in Pennsylvania is ticking away the minutes, a stoic sentinel on the mantle over the fireplace. It is flanked on both sides by the traditional manger scene that I gently boxed up last January and with even more care unboxed early this morning. Hoping to festive things up around here, I went outside and pruned the magnolia tree down to a nub to make Christmas wreaths for the front door, side door and back door. Okay, so I got a little carried away. After hanging the wreaths, I rested before I attempted to decorate a six-foot tree with ornaments collected for the past twenty something years.

Although the house is too quiet, the old mantle clock seems to be ticking louder than it usually does. An annoyed part of me wants to get up, grab the pendulum and stop it in mid-tick but I don’t because the ticking sound is constant. When I analyze the prevailing stillness I realize that this house of ours has every reason to be hushed. It is what houses do when there is a sick person about.

The tree is up. It looks awful. I nearly lost my religion stringing lights on the darn thing, so now I am folded into Babe’s recliner trying to recuperate. The top of the already lopsided tree did not get the proportioned amount of lights because my five-foot-four body was too lazy to look for a step stool high enough for me to be able to get up there. The angel looks more deranged than heavenly. If she topples over, she’ll just have to deal with it. Light stringing is normally Babe’s job. This year? Not so much.

The reason I have written a lot of Christmas stories is due to the fact that I was inspired to capture my seasonal thoughts on paper after reading Truman Capote’s 1963 short story, A Christmas Memory. That haunting tale about baking fruitcakes with his cousin Sook is why today I continue writing my own holiday memories about growing up in a small Southern town. 

Looking out my window at the leafless, birdless winter morning, two words thread through my mind unbidden: Fruitcake weather. Could it be the ghost of Capote trying to tell me something? Babe is napping, and when I go in to check on him, I feel an overpowering desire to do something to make him smile. The leafless, birdless trees gently sway in the cold winter breeze as if singing a familiar phrase directly to me: “Oh my! It’s fruitcake weather.”

It hits me that the song of the trees is telling me to go to the store and buy candied cherries and pineapple, pecans and walnuts. The whispered directive instructs me to chop, mix and bake until the fragrance of freshly baked fruitcake is wafting out of every crack, cranny and mouse hole in this unusually quiet house. According to the leafless, birdless trees, baking a fruitcake will help me drown out the sound of time ticking away.


Mama’s White Fruitcake

1             Cup Sugar
2             Cups Flour
5             Eggs
2             Sticks Butter
1             Teaspoon Baking Powder
½            Teaspoon Salt
1             1-ounce Bottle Vanilla
1             Teaspoon  to ½ ounce Almond Flavoring (depending on your love of Almond)
1             Pound Candied Cherries
1             Pound Candied Pineapple
4             Cups Chopped Nuts (mix walnuts and pecans if both are available)

Chop fruit and nuts and dredge with 3 Tablespoons of flour.

In a separate bowl:
Cream sugar and butter until fluffy and add well-beaten eggs, one at a time
Slowly add remaining flour, baking powder, salt, vanilla and almond flavorings.

Combine batter and fruit/nut mixture and mix it all up with your hands, squeezing to get the batter evenly distributed.
Pour into a greased tube pan and bake for three hours at 250 degrees.

If you have a pressure cooker, steam the cake for one hour, then cook in the oven for an additional hour at 325 degrees.

If not, place a pan of water under the tube pan for the entire cooking time.

Cool on cake rack.