NONFICTION - 
​   With the Theme of Making or Breaking Bread       

"It always happened around Christmas: sometimes Christmas Eve,
sometimes the Sunday before Christmas"

​                                   Photo by Weebly.com                                    

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Breaking Tradition - Not Bread
by  Mickey Eliason

​I was blessed with a happy childhood, with no major traumas or dramas until I was into my late teens and young adulthood. But no one escapes totally unscathed by life, no matter how idyllic the childhood. I have a post-traumatic memory for one particular childhood family food tradition.
 
It always happened around Christmas: sometimes Christmas Eve, sometimes the Sunday before Christmas when we made the ninety-minute trek to Kanawha, Iowa, for the holiday celebration of my father’s Norwegian side of the family. For the first eight years of my life, this was at the drafty old farmhouse, and then after Grandpa Eliason died, my grandmother moved the mile from the farm into the small town where we were crammed into a small house with a tiny kitchen.
 
We would arrive in the mid-morning to help Grandma prepare dinner. In farming communities, dinner is the midday meal, and supper is in the evening, although it was generally at five pm so I’m not sure urbanites would consider this evening. We ate around the routines of an agricultural life—one that started with “chores” very early in the morning and involved hard physical labor. Dinner was at eleven, supper at five.
 
So for that Christmas dinner celebration, the men and boys gathered in the living room to watch sports or talk of the weather and harvests. They broke bread, but never helped make the bread. They were bread-winners only in the sense that bread was used as slang for money. The women and girls gathered in the kitchen to prepare dinner and share news of illnesses, family events, and town gossip. All would be well for the first hour or so, until it was time to cook the lutefisk.
 
Just writing about it now brings back the sensory memories and the sheer horror of it all. Lutefisk was cod that had been soaked in lye and then dried in the sun and stored for months. When it was time to eat it, it was reconstituted by boiling it back into a white quivering gelatinous pile of runny blubber. I don’t know if there are sufficient words in the English language to describe the smell. Rotting eggs? No, not quite. Fermented sewage? No, more like rotting fish that had been wrapped in a sweaty gym sock for a week. The odor permeated every corner of the house and lingered in the air for hours, if not days. 

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​I can’t really tell you what it tasted like, because I don’t think I ever took a bite. I do know that those who ate it poured a lot of melted butter on it, so I’m guessing even people who liked it could not tolerate it in its (un)natural state. My grandparents and uncles ate it—whether with genuine gusto or out of an obligatory nostalgia, I don’t know—but the non-Norwegian aunts and my mother wouldn’t touch it. We all looked forward to the next course of non-nausea-promoting foods, the potato lefse and the kringla in particular, but the whole meal was tainted by the enduring odor in the air.
 
Years later when I was an adult, I met a woman from Norway and thinking I could bond with her, I mentioned that we ate lutefisk for Christmas. She looked at me with dismay and a touch of condescension, saying, “Only poor people eat lutefisk. My family has rack of lamb for Christmas.”
 
I realized that my grandparents emigrated from Norway during a famine, seeking a better life in the States. Of course their childhood memories were associated with their poverty. In 1984, when Grandma Eliason died and most of the older uncles were gone, the lutefisk tradition was buried along with them. Sometimes it’s good to honor old traditions, but sometimes they need to be allowed to rot away. I wish I could erase the sensory memories of physical revulsion on what was supposed to be a happy occasion. Maybe that is why I turned away from Christianity. I lost my faith because of the association of Christmas with lutefisk. Why would a loving god inflict such a stench on his people?

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​​Mickey Eliason is a recently retired faculty member from San Francisco State University with a background in nursing, psychology, and public health. She harkens originally from Iowa and spent twenty-five years on faculty at the University of Iowa. She was propelled to San Francisco in 2005 by a midlife crisis, and transitioned from land-locked stoic midwestern to California beach bum. After a lifetime of academic writing, she is experimenting with different writing genres, but mostly to creative nonfiction. She has self-published two volumes of humor writing: a parody of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual outlining unique lesbian pathologies (The Dyke Dykignostic Manual) and short stories written recently (Pandemic Procrastination and Ponderings). Both are available on Amazon.

Other works in this issue:
Nonfiction:
Did They Really Say That Out Loud?  

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