Santa Claus and Pecan Logs

First of all, to those who went on Amazon and gave me fantastic reviews, THANK YOU SO MUCH! I am up to 33 books sold now, surpassing my expectations! Word is getting out! If you go to Amazon and search for June Cartino, you'll see White Trash Rising; you can review it at the bottom of the page.

I love the increase in blog visits. If you want to refer someone to this site, just Google "WhiteTrashRising"-my blog will appear. I am trying to do a daily holiday blog post. Each evening after I post, I decide I can't do this daily, I am out of stories. Then I sit down at my laptop, pour a cup of coffee, and the memories come back. No promises, but I did come up with one for today.

Lilly was four when she asked me, “Is Santa Claus real?”

Being a reasoning child, likely to call bull crap on any suspicious statements, Lilly had her doubts about a fat man, eight tiny reindeer, and toys delivered all over the world in one night. The maths weren’t mathing.

            I had long before decided that I would not lie to my child. I might not offer certain information unless asked, but I would not lie in response to direct questions.

            “Nope, sorry kiddo, but Santa Claus isn’t real.”

            “He isn’t? Well, can I still believe in Santa Claus, just in case?”

            “Sweetie,” I told her, “You can believe in Santa as long as you want.”

            Lilly’s grandmother had made a big deal about Santa Claus, spending time and spinning tales to convince her that Santa was real. I didn’t interfere with her, but I found it odd that Grandma would talk about the day she cried and cried when she found out Santa was a lie. Why would she want Lilly to have that day, when she realized that the people she loved the most were liars?

            Now that I had given the news to Lilly, I had to add the warning: “Don’t tell your friends or the kids at school, their parents may not want them to know.”

            I only lied to Lilly once. I had taken her to a memorial service for a nurse who had passed away. On the way home, as expected, the questions began.

            “Is Connie in heaven with God?”

            “Uh-huh.”  It was always best to be noncommittal when Lilly started her probing questions.

            “Why?”

            Okay, this was a simple question to answer. I could answer without terrifying her that the angel of death would swoop down upon her at any moment.

            “Connie was very sick, and she was in a lot of pain, and she was tired of hurting. So, she quit hurting when God took her to be with the angels in heaven.”

            Okay, I cheated. My go-to answer was always God and the angels. The endless four-year-old questions were unanswerable at some point. I could always end the conversation with the big G. and the Angels.

            Lilly paused for a moment. Stumped by the God answer. This was usually a roadblock that required more thinking to get around. I didn’t have to wait long.

            “If God can do everything, and He took her to heaven and made her all better again, and she won’t hurt anymore. Why doesn’t he send her back to us when he’s fixed her?”

            Dammit! Checkmated again by the four-year-old prosecuting attorney. But I still had an ace up my sleeve. A reference that Lilly never questioned at all. The one trustworthy source that Lilly believed had all the wisdom of the ages. This one source of information she trusted completely because she had been named after her, Grandma Pearl.

            “Your Grandma Pearl told me that old people have to go to Heaven to make room for all the new babies. If they come back or don’t go at all, there wouldn’t be any room for the babies. That would be sad.”

            “Are you gonna die?”  Lilly’s voice was sad and frightened.

            “I asked my mom, your Grandma Pearl, that question once when I was little. She told me that ‘Mamas don’t die until you don’t need them anymore.”

            Lilly was satisfied and sat back in her car seat. I had dodged another bullet in the ten-mile drive home. But I had lied to my daughter; the truth was that you never stop needing your mother.

            Mom had become the person to my daughter that she had been to me. The final word on what is right or wrong, what is true or false. I grew up with the absolute faith that my mother knew the answers to the crucial questions. All the questions I had about life and death, good and bad, the whys of the world, Mom could answer.

            I miss Mom the most during the holidays. I knew Mom was the real Santa Claus; she made presents appear out of thin air. She supervised and directed the tree decorating, and she always seemed lighter and more childlike around Christmastime.

            Dad loved Christmas—especially the divinity fudge and chocolate-covered cherries. But Mom made Christmas. I mean that literally, she made Christmas. Mom baked pies and cookies; she made fudge from cocoa; she made chocolate-covered candies; and she always made the white divinity fudge for Dad.

            Divinity must be the most demanding and most frustrating holiday treat to make. The recipe calls for corn syrup, sugar, egg whites, and a touch of vanilla. The challenge was that it was impossible to get it to set until it had been beaten for an hour. The room temperature had to be exactly right; the syrup had to reach the perfect hardball stage; and the egg whites had to be beaten into a perfectly stiff meringue at the correct temperature.

The three kids all had to take a turn stirring it with a spoon until it set. First Mom would stir, then pass the bowl down to the next person. To be honest, rarely did the divinity fudge set into the desired little balls of white fudge.

Mom wouldn’t use the mixer to set the divinity, claiming, “It won’t set with the mixer, and if it does set, it would burn out the motor on the mixer.”

Mom was punishing Dad for requesting divinity by setting him up to hear us kids whine about the effort it took. Dad had to sit in his chair and listen to the complaints and self-pity about sore arms at a volume above the evening news. Most years, Dad just ate his unset divinity fudge with a spoon and kept quiet about it.

One year, Mom found a recipe for pecan logs in an old magazine. She announced: I am going to make pecan logs for Christmas.”

  It would be the perfect Christmas treat, caramel for the kids, divinity for Dad, and the whole thing rolled in crushed pecans. Mom was confident, as I left for school that morning, that when I came home, she would have a kitchen full of pecan logs for sampling.

Walking into the house that afternoon, the scene was criminal. If I had not been forewarned, I would easily have assumed an invading army had marched through looking for rations. Every cupboard door was open; its surface covered with fingerprints in corn syrup or caramel.

Wax paper was scattered everywhere, with dollops of white divinity oozing into a circle of shiny liquid fudge in the center. Sheets of wax paper were on the countertops, the table, and the buffet, and even a couple of the kitchen chairs were adorned. The stove was covered with saucepans, stacked precariously on top of one another. Around the edges of the wax paper on the countertop, empty corn syrup bottles, eggshells and cups of unused egg yolks loitered.

Mom was sitting at the table, a cigarette in hand, a coffee cup nearby. There was barely a corner of space for her ashtray and cup. Mom’s hair was behind her ears, damp with sweat, and blotches of syrup and fudge were stuck to her.

In front of her, on yet another square of wax paper, there was one lone pecan log. It was pitiful, nothing like the glorious picture from the magazine. The poor pecan log before me looked like the few remaining ingredients had been thrown together and slapped around viciously until it formed something resembling a Play-Doh snake made by a kindergartner.

As I stood in the doorway, Mom looked up and declared,

"I’m never making another one of these damn pecan logs again! You and your father better enjoy this one, because it’s the last damn one you are going to get one!"

My inner sarcastic voice wanted to question why a woman who could never get a pan of divinity fudge to solidify thought she could create a log of it. Not to mention having it set enough to roll it in caramel and crushed pecans.

Instead, I bit my tongue.

“It looks like it tastes good.” I tentatively offered.

“I don’t even want to taste the damn thing; you and your father can have it. If you don’t like it, you can pack it up your ass. I’m not making any more divinity!”

Dad, who knew what being called “your father" in that tone meant, was hiding in his recliner in the living room. I cut him and myself a piece of the pecan log and sat on the couch next to him as we ate in silence, listening to Mom clean up the kitchen.