Change of date

What is New Year’s exactly if not just a change of date. One day is December, the next is January, one day is a year, the next another. If we were to celebrate every change of date like we celebrate the coming of New Year… I do not want to imagine that. In fact, I cannot. Knowing what a big fuss is just one day like this, having 365 of them is my idea o f hell. I still do not understand, however, why are humans so interested in this particular day of the year.

 In my world, there are a bunch of traditions that need to be kept otherwise you will fall into the pit of despair, solitude, starvation and bankruptcy. You have to  - no, you MUST have on you dinner  table all sorts of foods and drinks, pork, fish, wines and other alcoholic beverages, sweets, and let’s not forget money and grapes.

I know one of my neighbors is obsessed about having grapes on the New Year’s dinner table otherwise his head will explode or something. I am pretty sure I saw him yesterday in a shop I was in buying some. Also yesterday, I saw way too many people pushing each other at the single man that came with fruits at the market. Poor guy was overwhelmed. But people need oranges, bananas, apples, and whatnot so the new year catches them with plenty of everything. It doesn’t matter the rest of the year they have very little of everything, if they  have these things now all will be fine. And here’s a question that is bothering me. If they are so into having fruit on New Year’s, why not plant an apple tree in their garden, and a grape vine that can be kept for longer periods of time? And pears, and quinces, and plums. I understand they can’t have orange trees, that is okay, but the rest  are easy to take care of. One apple tree can give a small family fruit for the whole winter. I know ‘cause we are a small family and we have at least 2 mature apple trees and who knows how many young fruit bearing trees that live in our Eastern European climate.

And the foods. Oh my, the foods. Must definitely have certain types of foods otherwise you risk starvation in the next year. One of the things that is sort of traditional in our country is something called Beouf Salad, loosely translated Beef salad. I think it comes from French.  My mom is making it right now, on the first day of 2016, not three days before New Year’s Eve like the rest of the world. It is the easiest thing in the world to prepare, albeit it takes a lot of time. Basically, take a bunch of potatoes, carrots, a can of precooked peas if you can’t make your own, a lot of pickled peppers and cucumbers, whole olives, boiled eggs for their white, boiled meat – we use any bird meat because you would never catch us eat beef, not even with a shotgun to our head. This year she boiled a Muscovy Drake. We had a few and he was rather mean to the chicken so he had to go. Fear not, she did not boil it alive, or whole. Bits and pieces.  Anyway, you take these ingredients, potatoes, carrots, meat, pickles, chop them up really small, mix with the peas, make sure there is no juice left in the pickles and peas, then you mix with mayo, put in the olives as they are and place everything on a large plate where you try to give it the shape of a cake. Cover all this with more mayo if you have enough, then ornate with pickled red pepperoni, the white from the boiled eggs, olives, and, my favorite, parsley leaves. (still had some in the garden and I decided, a few days ago, to pick it even if it was mighty cold outside, I could not feel my hands and one of my cats was in the mood to play and started attacking me. The look of surprise and content on Mom’s face this morning when I brought her the bag of parsley was priceless. Then she made me wash it and all the joy faded. – have you ever washed curly-leaved parsley? Ain’t fun. But it looks wonderful.

In any case the salad is delicious. We only make it at special occasions, not because we don’t like it, but because it takes a century to make it. The decorating takes a few decades alone.  I suspect I will soon be called to do it. Or not. I am thinking of letting her and my sister do the job this year. They always make me do it. Sometimes I insist I do it. It is so confusing. J

I suppose I could talk for hours about foods made for New Year’s. The problem is that, except this salad, we don’t follow the norm that much. Yes, mom likes to cook things, but, then again she does that year round, always making something more. You’d think she wants to fatten us up or something.

The holidays traditions for us are rather off the books. Just the fact that she is making the salad today would be frowned upon. Lucky her, no one except  us knows the secret. Mostly because the winter holidays for us are a private affair. Just the three of us. Nice and quiet. Without interference from the loud world outside. There is enough noise the rest of the year. My sister and I have made a tradition of our own. Don’t know when or why it started but, on every New Year’s Eve we stop doing what we are doing around midday and go watch a movie of our choice. During this movie, we enjoy the delicious eggplant salad and open up a bottle of very sweet wine I buy a month ahead to make sure we have at least one bottle available. (This year was particularly difficult to find. It is also a bit expensive, but worth it.) (The eggplant salad if made from our garden, when the eggplants are ready, we cook them on the stove as they are, peel off the burnt crust them freeze them until we need them. After they thaw completely, let the sticky juice out then chop the eggplants into a fine paste. Peel a few onions, raw, chop them as fine as you can and throw them in the mix with oil and some salt. When we take a portion on the plate we mix it with mayo. Serve with plenty of bread. )

To be honest, New Year’s Eve for us is a day like any other. Chicken and ducks need feeding, warm water and fresh straw. The cats were particularly needy and we let them in the house for a few hours. (We don’t normally allow the cats inside because mom doesn’t like them and because they are naughty.) The dog needs feeding; the coops need cleaning. Those sorts of things that need to be done every day of the year, with few variations depending on the season. However, we have these little traditions make the day a bit different. After all chores are done, we have another movie to watch that we make sure to end before midnight.  This year’s pick was Ant-Man, of all. It is a surprising choice because, when my sister learned they were going to make a movie with this title she immediately decided it was going to be the worst movie of all time. We were going to watch it anyway, because we watch all the Marvel movies – mostly because of me – and she had no choice. At the end of the movie, back in October, she decided it was brilliant and that we were going to watch it again on New Year’s Eve. So, yeah… there are happy endings to strange stories after all.  

Keeping with our nice and quiet holidays, we climbed the hill in our garden and watched the fireworks over the village. Not as many as last year but the ones closest were nice.

There is no reason to celebrate the coming of a new year, from my perspective, because it is nothing but another step towards us being older. And who’s to say it will be e a better year? Just because of all the wishes we say or text one another? People should remember that to actually produce a change for the better in their lives, they must work for it.  Nothing ever comes for free. Everything has a price and, when the time comes, we must be ready to pay it.

In the meantime, if we can squeeze a few moments of fun and good memories with the people closest to you, go for it. We can never know what is going to happen tomorrow. We might all freeze to death.

‘cause it’s damn cold outside.

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Here are a few of the Beouf salad decorations from previous years.