The Christmas Ham

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Why Tradition is Stupid

It’s a common misconception, I think, that our lives are shaped by the most dramatic events we experience. Like our wedding day, or the birth of a child. Going off to war, or the loss of a loved one. We are told that these are the most important moments in our lives.

I have learned over the years that this isn’t true. It’s the little moments that happen when you least expect them that shape who we are.

For me, it happened in late summer of ‘48 when I was sitting on the porch of my parents’ farm house. 

I had returned state-side three years earlier. The war officially over and having no sense of belonging in a peaceful world, I planted my heels in New York City. 

But after spending a year blowing all of my earnings on whores and opium, I tried moving north to Boston. However, my time there ended swiftly and violently, after I had tried to take home a woman from a bar who had large, motherly breasts and impossibly red hair, only to be socked in my lower jaw by her drunk fiance, a man of short-stature named Seamus Murphy.

For some eighteen months I wandered the American south, calling myself a migrant farmer. But in truth, I was only hiding what I really was: a vagabond, too afraid to return home.

You see, my father had come home from the first world war missing his right leg and his left eye. His scars were visible everywhere he went. But war had left me with scars you couldn’t see on the surface. They were much deeper, and much harder to understand.

I couldn’t face my father now. He would undoubtedly call me weak and useless, as he had many times throughout my childhood. 

But without anywhere else to go, I finally sauntered my way back to my family’s homestead in the Midwest. I didn’t know what to expect, but as I approached the place I once called home, I saw my mother standing in the doorway, leaning against the wooden frame with a hand on her hip. 

Even from afar I could see that her hair had grayed and the years had etched deep wrinkles into her face. But she was still the same mother from whose teats I had sucked my first life-giving nutrients. Who had taught me to read and write, who had starved herself through the Great Depression so that my sisters and I could have food in our bellies.

I expected her to be angry with me for not coming home sooner, but she must have seen through my eyes and into my heart, and felt the deep scars that war had left inside me.

She took me into her arms and held me for what felt like hours, and for the first time since childhood tears streaked my dusty face. 

I finally pulled away and she gazed into my eyes. I wanted to look away, fearing that she would read my heart again, but I couldn’t.

I finally broke the unbearable silence: “Where is father?”

“Oh,” she muttered. “Your father, he…”

I feared the worst. But she only shook her head and turned, leading me inward.

I came to learn that my father had been bed ridden for three years after a stroke had left him mostly paralyzed. My mother didn’t want to talk about it right then, she only wanted to hear about me, about my last five years. 

As for my father, she told me not to see him until I felt ready, but I didn’t know if that would ever happen.

That night I lay awake in my bed, unable to sleep as each time I closed my eyes I felt that I was back in Bastogne, besieged by German Panzers, feeling their guns booming in the pit of my stomach.

I arose sometime after midnight and descended the stairs to find my mother sitting on the porch. I sat next to her and immediately saw that she held a half-empty bottle of gin.

We talked for hours, the gin keeping us warm as the late summer evenings in the midwest could grow deceivingly cold. My mother filled me in on what I had missed. My three older sisters had each married protestant lawyers, moved to the city and started having babies. 

My father’s health had deteriorated and so my mother had considered selling the farm. The workers’ wage demands had grown, and my mother only had time to care for my father, spoon feeding him and changing his bed pan.

But, she lamented, she felt that it wasn’t right to make a decision on the future of the family farm until she could ask me if I wanted it first.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I’d rather return to war than pick up another tiller.

Finally, as she drained the last drops of gin from the bottle, she spoke of my father. Of the verbal abuse and mental torment she had taken over the years, and of the physical toll she had felt from it, and from taking care of him every day. How her only reprieve was to spend nights on this porch, and spirits keeping her company.

And it was then that she opened up fully, and changed my view of the world forever.

As the glow of the waxing moon accented the deep wrinkles on her face, I saw that the last five years had taken at least twenty from her. 

“Have I ever told you about the first Christmas I spent married to your father?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No, mother. I don’t believe you have.”

She stared up at the night sky for a long time, perhaps waiting for dawn, or counting the stars. Or maybe she was hoping that if she willed it strongly enough, she could be whisked back to another place, another time. That she could have made different decisions so long ago, back when life was so simple. Before The Depression, before either world war. 

And at that moment, I saw deep inside her soul and I felt a nostalgia for a time I never knew. I missed the past that I hadn’t experienced for myself, but that I had only heard about from those who lived it.

There was a time when you could slow down and stop to think about what you did. When you didn’t have to worry about wars across oceans.

“I’ll never forget that Christmas. I was just nineteen then. And, you know, I never told anyone this, but I was three months pregnant with your sister then.”

“But wasn’t your wedding in December?”

Her silence betrayed her. 

“We spent Christmas here, at this farm, which belonged to your father’s father at the time.” She ran her hand along the railing of the porch. “My new mother in law asked me to cook the ham. As you can imagine I was extremely nervous, wanting to impress my new family. I asked her how I should prepare the ham, and she told me to make it the way my mother did. 

“So, the next morning, I stood in the kitchen and the very first thing I did was cut off the smaller half of the ham and then tossed it in the garbage. Seeing this, my mother in law shrieked. ‘What on earth are you doing, dear?’ she screamed. I said, ‘I’m preparing the ham the way you asked me to, just like my mother did.’

“‘But what good does it do to cut off half of the ham?’ she asked me. I truly had no idea. So I said, ‘It’s… tradition?’

“We decided to use the party line to call my mother, and ask her why she cut one end off the ham.”

My mother paused then and her lips betrayed a wry smile. “So she told me… do you know what she told me? Your grandmother, she said, ‘because my oven was too small to fit the whole ham.’” 

My mother cackled, belched, then cackled some more, spraying my face with spittle that stank of gin.

She looked me square in the eye, and I swear these were her words: “Don’t ever do something simply because it’s a fucking tradition because you could waste half your ham without knowing why.”