Off The Editor’s Desk – 1-2-2019
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Christmas Traditions!
I hope everyone had a great and wonderful Christmas with family and friends enjoying the great dishes that maybe your great grandparents made for their Christmas meal and that the family cooks have kept passing those recipes on down to the next generation.
Our Christmas began with a birthday gathering at Jake’s Supper Club on Sunday afternoon to celebrate my sister Mary Erpenbach’s birthday along with members of her family and my family.
On Christmas Eve, we traveled to brother and sister-in-law Donald and Missy Klatt at rural Downing for our traditional Christmas celebration. Since I was a little boy, our family always celebrated on Christmas Eve. The Klatts are hosting a foreign exchange student, Francesco, who came here from Italy. We enjoyed some delicious bread that his mother mailed to him for the holidays, along with our ham and meatballs and all the other trimmings that the season brings.
Nothing is better than Swedish meatballs over mashed potatoes that are my favorite, except for Lutefisk at Christmas. Lutefisk was a family tradition that was a standard for me since I was a young man going to Grandma Stang’s home in Hersey on Christmas Eve. But now most of my family turns up their noses at the sight and smell of that bleached Cod. I like it covered with melted better, but grandma had some sort of white sauce to pour over it.
On Christmas Day Paula’s brother and wife (Allen and Paulette Klatt, Titusville, FL) and two daughters (Erin Burns of Indianapolis, IN; Jenny Mechel, Winter Haven, FL) and granddaughter (Lydia Frank, Minneapolis) visited at our home and Paula dug out the information she has gained about their family through Ancestry.
But, Paula kept the tradition of baking Christmas goodies going by teaching a couple of our grandsons how to make and decorate cookies, Lefse and meatballs.
The picture below has two grandsons, Tyler and Ross DeWitt getting instructions from Paula on how to make Lefse.
Thanks for reading! ~Carlton