Christmas Like in the Old Country

On this day of tradition we propose a toast to the Christmas rites that have come to us from distant lands.

Over time the native tongue may slip and the stories of Old World kings and queens may fade, but something about the flame of childhood Christmases will not go out.

And in time, like Santa Claus and Christmas trees, it spreads to us all.

Some Christmas customs have become so familiar they seem almost like our own. Who hasn’t tasted cannoli and strufoli honey balls from a pastry tray prepared by a second-generation Italian woman carrying on the traditions of her youth? Or Mexican tamales? Plum pudding?

In some ways, they’re as American as apple pie.

But did you know that the English must have their Christmas crackers? Or that German children get a candy for every day in December leading up to Christmas from their Adventskalender, a tree-shaped box with 24 tiny trap doors?

Because Balts can’t tolerate a freeloader, their children must recite a literary passage for Santa Claus before they receive their presents on Christmas Eve.

“The week or two weeks before Christmas, they go through the agony of learning stuff,” says our source on Baltic custom, Canoga Park attorney Jaak Treiman, who is Estonia’s honorary consul general in California.

We should have mentioned that an English Christmas cracker is not eaten. It’s a gift-wrapped paper tube with a snapper tab, which when pulled produces a cracking sound. Inside are party favors and a joke.

But indisputably, it’s the rhythms of the kitchen and the look and taste of the delicacies made on festive days that bring home the spirit of Christmas in faraway lands.

Having reputedly conquered half the world in search of a decent meal, the British are prone to venture out on Christmas Day, said Lydia, the bartender at Robin Hood British Pub in Van Nuys, which opens from noon to 2 p.m. to accommodate the habit.

“All the British come in and drink as much as they possibly can in two hours, go home and eat dinner and then fall asleep,” said Lydia, who preferred to remain half anonymous.

“What you usually do,” Lydia elaborated, is “you get up in the morning. You peel your potatoes. You put your turkey in the oven, you go to the pub and drink. Then you go home, have your turkey and pull your cracker.”

And then fall asleep.

We can’t speak as knowledgeably about a German Christmas. The line at Van Nuys German Deli on Roscoe Boulevard was so long the day we called that the proprietor couldn’t spare a minute to chat.

We can only guess by observation that roasted meat and sausage will be served to a lot of the Valley’s 120,000 residents of German and Austrian descent, who outnumber the British two-to-one and the French fivefold.

We need no sources to describe a French Christmas dinner, having experienced many ourselves. It’s an event of culinary excess, with roast turkey and chestnuts, dozens of oysters on the half shell, piles of boudin blanc (a milk and veal sausage) and chilled langoustines with mayonnaise.

The feast always ends with the buche de Noel, a cake iced to look like a log and decorated with mushrooms (no, they’re not real) and forest trolls.

As serious as they are about their food, the French don’t lack for humor. Children’s silliness is encouraged by a holiday cake called la galette des rois that contains a ceramic baby Jesus. Whoever bites it gets to wear a silver-painted crown that comes with the cake and representing one of the Magi.

We also know of a food joke played on former Northridge resident Richard De Maio when he accompanied his wife, Suzanne, to a Christmas reunion with her family in Normandy.

The relatives had their baker make a trick buche de Noel with a real log inside. Handing Richard the knife, they told him to cut hard because it was frozen, stifling their laughter until he was in a lather.

We’ve known since childhood that in the Mexican family the holiday kitchen is abuzz with the making of tamales. Not being allowed at that age to intrude on the circle of female chefs, we’ve always been somewhat fuzzy about just what they were doing.

It was enlightening last week, then, when we finally broke the barrier at a party in the Glendale home of Jim and Rachel Garrison.

Rachel, a Latina, had recruited a team of cousins and friends to make tamales in public, so to speak, as the party swirled around them.

Somehow, we’d always thought tamales were constructed from the inside out, with the corn husks wrapped over a ball of cornmeal in the final step. Just the opposite is true.

The women dip the masa on spoons from a common bowl and spread it over the corn husks, layered in their palms like poker hands. The meat filling comes last, wrapped inside the blanket.

Lasting for hours, the work is conducive to a great deal of banter, and each woman has a style of her own, some wrapping them short, others long, some with pork or beef, others with chilies and cheese.

Why it is women’s work we still don’t know, but one of the craftswomen said they make the men knead the masa, because that’s really hard labor.

Nothing comes that easily for the Valley’s Norwegians, who numbered only 8,188 in the 1990 census.

“They like lesse, and lutefisk,” said Ramona Revheim of Northridge, who classifies herself as “Norwegian by contamination,” the result of marriage.

She said she’s learned to make lesse, a grilled and buttered mashed potato patty, but hasn’t tried lutefisk, a strong, lye-treated fish that has to be resuscitated by soaking.

Her friend, Elsa Breistein, a true Norwegian, goes to the semi-annual lutefisk dinners at the Sons of Norway Hall in Van Nuys but doesn’t bother with lutefisk or lesse during the holiday because her 14 Americanized grandchildren would turn up their noses.

For her own cultural taste, she cooks surkaal, cabbage boiled with caraway seeds and flavored with sugar and vinegar. Once the brood has gone home, she makes pinnekjopp, a cured mutton dish, for her husband, Kaare.

“They wrap ribs with salt,” Breistein said. “Then we have to soak it 36 hours. I don’t care for it myself. I try to make this for my husband. That’s what he grew up with, you see.”

The lengths immigrants will go to recapture the flavors of childhood Christmases could hardly exceed the annual preparation of blood sausage in the household where Jaak Treiman grew up.

German delis sell it, Treiman said, but, “putting on my Estonian hat, I’d say they’re not as good.”

So the Treimans made their own.

First they had to find the blood.

Treiman said his father used to go to a meat-packing plant in San Fernando and pay off a worker to fill his bucket.

Again, it was the women who did the dirty work.

“It really looks gross,” Treiman said. “There’s just blood all over the place. People are stuffing this mixture into the casings. It looks terrible. But as long as you haven’t seen it made and you don’t listen to the name, I think it’s delicious.”

Sorry for the graphic detail. We wouldn’t approve of it in the movies.

But this is tradition! We can’t live without it.

And, while we’re at it, let’s salute the women who seem to know just how to keep it alive.