ROOTS & BRANCHES

Over the years, my tastes in alcohol have made the rounds from beer to wine to occasional mixed drinks.

But I’ve never been a whiskey guy, which is probably why there’s a bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon whiskey of unknown vintage on the top shelf in the home I inherited from my parents.

We’ll come back to that Maker’s Mark in due time, but with a nod to the current holiday season, I’d like to talk about the genealogical aspects of holiday traditions.

“Holiday culture,” to paraphrase a line from one of my favorite college professors, comes about “on mother’s knee and other low places.”

Well, maybe not those other low places. But certainly our ideas of what’s appropriate for various holidays is often formed early on in life, and such folkways and foodways are much of the rich detail of investigating ancestors and recording family history.

In my area of Pennsylvania, for instance, a holiday meal isn’t complete without PA Dutch potato filling as a side dish … for some people, that ritual almost becomes the main course! I’m a dissenter from that this I don’t like onions—a staple ingredient in all potato filling recipes—although part of my family lore is that my late mother would kindly make a small onion-free dish of filling for me.

Christmas Eve for me always revolved around church—sometimes two services, including a candlelight gathering ending around midnight that made the greetings of “Merry Christmas!” fully accurate—and I was well into adulthood until I realized that for a lot of people, it was an all-out party night.

New Year’s Eve for my parents almost always included dinner at the nearby Lincoln’s Restaurant (now, alas, long gone) and I’d be fascinated by my mother having a mixed drink, which was often her only drink of the year.

Often for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, we would host elderly relatives of my mother, William and Florence Moyer, who helped make up for her mother having died when she was 6 months old.

We called them “Uncle Bill” and “Aunt Florence,” although the blood relationship was more distant. Florence was a first cousin to my mother’s mother.

Bill and Florence had no children of their own. Bill was one of the most genuinely sweet men I’ve ever known; Florence was more of a difficult person.

But she was good for a little comic relief at holiday meals.

Another PA Dutch staple is mince pie, which is a concoction with fruits and spices and usually topped with ice cream … and a shot of whiskey.

That’s where the Maker’s Mark comes in. Every year like clockwork, Florence would manage to spill the whiskey on the table. Jokes would be made about Florence being under the influence, even though this was likely her only alcohol all year.

Ah, those holiday traditions.