Blessedly, some foods seem to have magical healing properties. When I left my family of origin, I needed to reconstruct some family traditions in order to reclaim them in an emotionally healthy way. One of the traditions that had to go was a big, fancy, mom-trapped-in-the- kitchen, crazy-making Christmas Eve meal. In the household where I am the mom, Christmas Eve dinner has always been pizza. It’s the one time of the year when no one has to share or compromise--everybody gets whatever toppings they want before Santa comes. Even if I wanted to change now, the kids wouldn’t let me. My children have always been pizza addicts, even as babies, and the last in line is the worst by far. Scarlett recently found the discarded lid to a banker’s box and, thinking that pizza was secretly being consumed without her, carried it around to each person in the house demanding to know where the “pee-zah” was. That’s how powerful the lure of the pie is. In Dayal Kaur Khalsa’s
How Pizza Came To Queens, four little girls in the 1950s try to figure out what will make their sad Italian guest smile. She doesn’t speak English and they can only guess at what “pizza” (the one mournful word they can decipher) means. They even break down and visit the library, where they find the answer. They bring her the secret ingredients, she shows them the perfect toss, and they all spend the rest of the summer in pizza heaven.
Blessedly, some foods seem to have magical healing properties. When I left my family of origin, I needed to reconstruct some family traditions in order to reclaim them in an emotionally healthy way. One of the traditions that had to go was a big, fancy, mom-trapped-in-the- kitchen, crazy-making Christmas Eve meal. In the household where I am the mom, Christmas Eve dinner has always been pizza. It’s the one time of the year when no one has to share or compromise--everybody gets whatever toppings they want before Santa comes. Even if I wanted to change now, the kids wouldn’t let me. My children have always been pizza addicts, even as babies, and the last in line is the worst by far. Scarlett recently found the discarded lid to a banker’s box and, thinking that pizza was secretly being consumed without her, carried it around to each person in the house demanding to know where the “pee-zah” was. That’s how powerful the lure of the pie is. In Dayal Kaur Khalsa’s How Pizza Came To Queens, four little girls in the 1950s try to figure out what will make their sad Italian guest smile. She doesn’t speak English and they can only guess at what “pizza” (the one mournful word they can decipher) means. They even break down and visit the library, where they find the answer. They bring her the secret ingredients, she shows them the perfect toss, and they all spend the rest of the summer in pizza heaven.
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