Carving

   Yesterday we celebrated the Buren family Christmas, at my brother-in-law Rick's place. What you end up with is a house full of busy adults making dinner preparations and a house full of busy kids being, well, busy!
   Christmas dinner prep has always been a time-honoured tradition, generally with a host of grown-ups (sort of) shoulder-to-shoulder in some one's kitchen doing the where-are-your-serving-bowls-are-the-potatoes-ready ballet. There is a madhouse kind of feel to things somehow and it always seems slightly miraculous to me that a meal actually emerges from all the chaos.
   And in the midst of the chaos, there is imbibing, laughter, reminiscing and a healthy dose of family solidarity. There are not too many other occasions during the year when families are able to take the time to get together like this and, unfortunately minus one bro-in-law, Jim and his family, we were able to accomplish the feat last night.
   At some point in the dinner preparations, there comes the moment when the turkey needs carving. For whatever reason, this has always seemed the most ceremonial part of the Christmas meal to me. The carving responsibility seems to always fall on the shoulders of the man of the house and I guess this is part of the ceremonial quality it holds for me.
   When I was a kid, I have very clear recollections of my Dad at the dinner table, sharpening the carving knife with a sharpening steel, the metallic swish-swish sound making this magical. I'm sure that I associated this sound with the wonderful meal which always followed and just the general excitement for a young boy at Christmas. The sharpening steel itself was always something that intrigued me as a boy, I liked the way it felt and the fact that, as a utensil, it was so different from anything else in the drawer. I would often take it out at other times of the year and drag butter knives along it just to hear the sound. I can remember my brother Bob and I sitting at the dinner table with our knives and forks, swishing them together, simply for the sound they made.
   It didn't even occur to me until I was an adult, however, what my Dad was actually doing, that there was an actual purpose behind all the swish-swish and arm-waving at the head of the table. I had no idea that the knife was being sharpened so that it could slice through the meat that much more efficiently. I now have new-found respect for the whole process.
   At some point when I was a teenager, Dad discovered electric knives. This changed the carving dynamic quite a bit, as you can imagine. Gone was the swish-swish of steel on steel, this being replaced by the bbbbbrrrrttttt of the electric knife. It wasn't quite as traditional as the old way but Dad loved this knife and I'm sure the idea that he was actually able to bring a power tool right to the dining room table and then use it there in front of an audience held enormous appeal.
   I guess I must have watched my Dad carve the bird enough over the years that I somehow was pretty well able to take on the task myself, when the responsibility at some point fell on my shoulders. Carving a turkey was and is no big deal but, at the same time, I don't do it with the same kind of panache as my Dad. He always did the carving at the head of the dining table, with all present. He would go around the table, asking each person what kind of meat they wanted and how much. He would then carve the bird to order. These days, I carve the whole turkey all at once in the kitchen and present the results on platters which then end up on the table. This seems to work fairly well but, I admit, does lack a little of the old formality and ambiance.
   What I have described has been my family Christmas dinner experience and I had made some sort of assumption that this was true of almost every family. In comparing notes with Doralyn while writing this, however, I discovered that this was not the case in her family. Traditionally, her mother carved the turkey in the kitchen and then the cut meat was brought to the table. Not a bad tradition, kind of mirrors our current one, and eliminates some of the "theatrics" at the same time. My experience is that it gets harder and harder anymore to get everyone sitting down and ready to eat all at the same time anyway, there always seems to be someone who needs to head back into the kitchen for some forgotten item or such. With large families, such as last night, there sometimes needs to be two separate tables, as well. Hard to build a lot of carving tradition around a setup like this!
   Rick, by the way, did a fine job of carving last night. This might even have been one of the first times he's done it but the results were great. It's hard to beat a home-cooked turkey dinner and when you have a bunch of people helping out with side dishes you get to feel the love from all over the place!