Holding onto a Memory

Flashes of Christmas past and a slice of peanut pie

Very early one Christmas morning, my sister and I snuck out of our beds in our onesie pajamas, crept downstairs in the dawn’s winter light, and opened every one of the presents that had been left under the tree. All of them. Ours and our parents. Even the dog’s present was opened. And we did it all while my parents slept.

This is one of my favorite holiday memories and recalling it and others has become a kind of tradition.

There was the time my older son asked if Santa was real and I gave it all up without hesitation, explaining to him that Santa was fake, and it was time to let go of the myth. He was a toddler closing in fast on the fact that Santa was a ruse. Still, I never attempted to ease him out of the fantasy, I simply barreled in with the truth. And there was the time I spent hours in the dark garage on Christmas Eve night putting together a basketball hoop for the driveway. Zillions of nuts, bolts, and washers. It was 4 a.m. Christmas day when I finally finished.

Memories are funny things. They exist as flashes that we regularly recall, or they are fragments spurred unexpectedly by an old photograph or a greeting card we had saved and then rediscovered. Sometimes they appear as a daydream at a traffic light, coming to us as a surprise in a kind of momentary freeze-frame of a time and place.

Not long ago while walking the dog, one such memory rushed in out of nowhere. My mother’s peanut pie. Not a holiday treat, so the season wasn’t what triggered the memory. Where it came from was a mystery. Why it came to me when it did, I have no idea.

Many years ago, my mother put together a booklet of her most memorable recipes. A white three-ring binder that held dozens of recipes, some handwritten. It included photographs of Mom at the kitchen table and the stove, and a few with my two boys when they were quite young, stirring big spoons in stainless steel mixing bowls, white flour covering their shirts and their hair.

I hadn’t thought about that peanut pie in years, and so its appearance as a memory was a strange yet wonderful thing. It soon had me searching for that old booklet and the decade’s old pie recipe.

After finding it, I asked my sons if they remembered.

“Oh yeah,” one said. “I used to steal tiny slices of it when no one was looking.”

“I remember all the cream cheese that went into it,” the other recalled. “There was a ton of cream cheese.”

There was also creamy peanut butter, milk, and a graham cracker crust. What was not to love? How could one forget?

Still, it wasn’t only the pie itself that the boys remembered. It was a part of the process. “The waiting,” one of the boys said. “That was the thing. The anticipation of the first bite.”

After putting it all together, the peanut pie had to be refrigerated, needing plenty of time to chill and firm up. And the necessary waiting added to the excitement. The anticipation had become an ingredient in the process of the pie’s creation. It was like the anticipation that builds in counting the days before Christmas that made it special.

I’m making Mom’s peanut pie this season, and just as we did back then, I will wait for it to come together in the refrigerator. And with that waiting, the past joys of cooking with my mother—some of which had vanished in the years—will reemerge and linger until another memory surfaces to take its place.

The holidays are like that and isn’t that part of the wonder.

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