In My Mother's Kitchen: Assorted Notes on Growing Up in North Dakota
One side effect of growing up in North Dakota is that we rarely saw our family. The United States is a big place, and our closest family members was in western New York or Kentucky, each of which was a minimum of 18 hours of consecutive driving away. While as an adult I was capable of driving that straight through if I had to, certainly anyone with kids would have to stop a lot, making the trip substantially longer. Drives of that length meant any trip had to be for several weeks, at minimum.
Flying presented its own challenges. There are so few airlines going into our part of North Dakota that flights between Grand Forks and Cleveland routinely ran more than $500 for a single person when I was an adult, and sometimes a lot more. My family clearly wasn't going to spend that kind of money to schlep four people routinely. For that reason, I can probably count on one hand the number of planes I was on in elementary school - there was my grandmother's funeral, and a wedding in Texas, a bar mitzvah in California (that was when we were in Montana), a bat mitzvah in Boston, and while I'm sure there were a few others they were far outweighed by the long road trips to visit family.
Similarly, those challenges kept people from visiting us. If you exclude my bar mitzvah and my sister's bat mitzvah, the only family members who visited us in North Dakota were:
- my paternal grandparents
- my paternal uncle
- my father's maternal aunt & uncle
- my maternal grandmother
- one maternal aunt
- one maternal aunt and her family
I'm pretty sure that's the full list. There were more family members at my bar mitzvah or my sister's bat mitzvah than visited us the entire rest of my childhood combined. The upshot is that I don't have a lots of childhood memories of visiting or being visited by family for the holidays. If we happened to be at someone's house during a holiday, it's because it was convenient timing for a longer trip. The only Thanksgiving that I remember having family visit for was the one that overlapped my bar mitzvah.
Instead of family, we usually did holidays with people from our synagogue. Some, of course, were mass events at the synagogue. We'd have a latke party for Hanukkah, a costume party for Purim and a big community seder every other year. The synagogue we attended for Sunday school would have a regular lox and bagel brunch. There would often be some kind event the once a month we had a student rabbi, even if just a reception after services. Otherwise, seders and Thanksgivings were swapped around at various houses. I can think of Thanksgivings at at least three different houses besides our own, and seders at several more. This is probably why my parents to this day are still good friends with many people from our synagogue, and in casual contact with many more. It probably also explains why to this day I'm in touch with more of my peer coreligionists from North Dakota than I am of my high school classmates. It is probably also why I've always been comfortable with the idea of family being people you choose at least as much and often more than "official" relatives.
The only holiday that was uniquely "ours" was New Year's Eve. As I've discussed before, for a stretch of my life running perhaps four or five years through late elementary school and perhaps into junior high, my family would have a seafood dinner for New Year's Eve. This dinner always included boiling a lobster, which is the only time I've ever had that. We usually had shrimp cocktail. I sort of remember having cheese and crackers too, but my grip on the details is tenuous at best. I don't particularly recall why we stopped doing it. We may have just lost interest - it turns out boiled lobster is a lot of work and doesn't taste that great once you've had it a few times.
As adults, both my sister and I have picked up "lucky" foods for New Year's Day. My sister does black-eyed peas on account of living in Georgia, and M likes to have pickled herring on crackers. Neither of those nor any other lucky food were part of our childhood New Year's Eve. Frankly, the only North Dakota-centric foods worth mentioning in any context are the Norwegian traditional foods lefse and lutefisk. Lefse is sort of like a potato tortilla soaked in butter and cinnamon, and is best when made by a Norwegian grandmother. If you don't have a Norwegian grandmother, acceptable variants can be bought in most North Dakota grocery stores. Lutefisk is a lucky food in the sense that you're lucky if you don't have to eat it and unlucky if you do. It is a Norwegian cultural food in the sense of "remember this thing our ancestors moved to North Dakota to avoid?" and is best avoided by anyone who has functional taste buds.
EDIT: 6/5/22 - added some relatives to the "known visited" list.
Flying presented its own challenges. There are so few airlines going into our part of North Dakota that flights between Grand Forks and Cleveland routinely ran more than $500 for a single person when I was an adult, and sometimes a lot more. My family clearly wasn't going to spend that kind of money to schlep four people routinely. For that reason, I can probably count on one hand the number of planes I was on in elementary school - there was my grandmother's funeral, and a wedding in Texas, a bar mitzvah in California (that was when we were in Montana), a bat mitzvah in Boston, and while I'm sure there were a few others they were far outweighed by the long road trips to visit family.
Similarly, those challenges kept people from visiting us. If you exclude my bar mitzvah and my sister's bat mitzvah, the only family members who visited us in North Dakota were:
- my paternal grandparents
- my paternal uncle
- my father's maternal aunt & uncle
- my maternal grandmother
- one maternal aunt
- one maternal aunt and her family
I'm pretty sure that's the full list. There were more family members at my bar mitzvah or my sister's bat mitzvah than visited us the entire rest of my childhood combined. The upshot is that I don't have a lots of childhood memories of visiting or being visited by family for the holidays. If we happened to be at someone's house during a holiday, it's because it was convenient timing for a longer trip. The only Thanksgiving that I remember having family visit for was the one that overlapped my bar mitzvah.
Instead of family, we usually did holidays with people from our synagogue. Some, of course, were mass events at the synagogue. We'd have a latke party for Hanukkah, a costume party for Purim and a big community seder every other year. The synagogue we attended for Sunday school would have a regular lox and bagel brunch. There would often be some kind event the once a month we had a student rabbi, even if just a reception after services. Otherwise, seders and Thanksgivings were swapped around at various houses. I can think of Thanksgivings at at least three different houses besides our own, and seders at several more. This is probably why my parents to this day are still good friends with many people from our synagogue, and in casual contact with many more. It probably also explains why to this day I'm in touch with more of my peer coreligionists from North Dakota than I am of my high school classmates. It is probably also why I've always been comfortable with the idea of family being people you choose at least as much and often more than "official" relatives.
The only holiday that was uniquely "ours" was New Year's Eve. As I've discussed before, for a stretch of my life running perhaps four or five years through late elementary school and perhaps into junior high, my family would have a seafood dinner for New Year's Eve. This dinner always included boiling a lobster, which is the only time I've ever had that. We usually had shrimp cocktail. I sort of remember having cheese and crackers too, but my grip on the details is tenuous at best. I don't particularly recall why we stopped doing it. We may have just lost interest - it turns out boiled lobster is a lot of work and doesn't taste that great once you've had it a few times.
As adults, both my sister and I have picked up "lucky" foods for New Year's Day. My sister does black-eyed peas on account of living in Georgia, and M likes to have pickled herring on crackers. Neither of those nor any other lucky food were part of our childhood New Year's Eve. Frankly, the only North Dakota-centric foods worth mentioning in any context are the Norwegian traditional foods lefse and lutefisk. Lefse is sort of like a potato tortilla soaked in butter and cinnamon, and is best when made by a Norwegian grandmother. If you don't have a Norwegian grandmother, acceptable variants can be bought in most North Dakota grocery stores. Lutefisk is a lucky food in the sense that you're lucky if you don't have to eat it and unlucky if you do. It is a Norwegian cultural food in the sense of "remember this thing our ancestors moved to North Dakota to avoid?" and is best avoided by anyone who has functional taste buds.
EDIT: 6/5/22 - added some relatives to the "known visited" list.