Our First Pandemic Easter

I wrote the first draft of this story in 2014, after my West-Coast born and bred cousin and I had made our first-ever away-from-home Thanksgiving feast in Montreal. It spilled onto a page one snowy morning in March after I was looking around my tiny student apartment, marvelling how I’d ever managed to pack 15 people into it.

My original intention was to send it to the Vinyl Café.

And then tragedy struck my family: my auntie Diana, the matriarch and kitchen goddess who always organized our family’s holiday feasts, was killed in a car crash early one morning that April.

Three years after that, in 2017, Stuart McLean died.

Now, in 2022, my family will be gathering for Easter at our shared extended family cabin on Bowen Island for the first time in several years. We’ll be celebrating the chance to gather in-person for the holidays after two years of trying to recreate the gatherings over Zoom, or outside, bundled up and stamping our feet to stay warm.

We’ll also be gathering to mourn and remember, to cook and celebrate and toast to absent friends and loved ones.

It feels fitting to reflect, now, on what holiday gatherings — usually dinner-centric celebrations — mean for my family.

We prepare for them stuffed in steamy kitchens, usually at our family cabin. They're filled with laughter and warmth and endless mugs of tea sipped from clunky clay mugs.

The day starts early with a homemade pancake breakfast with oats in the batter and maple syrup heated in the ancient oven-sized microwave. In Diana's kitchen, everything would be cooked from scratch. She was a master at adding a bit of fresh nutmeg here and a handful of rolled oats there — for chewiness, energy and the chance to make the kitchen smell like doughnuts. CBC plays on the staticky radio while we wash dishes and watch BC Ferries cruise down Howe Sound out the window.

If it's cool out the wood-burning fireplace is lit and the smell of woodsmoke mixes with the smell of onions, leeks, fresh herbs and parsnips.

We break for a lunch of fresh bread and soup, eaten out on the patio while we crane our necks to try and catch the first, or last, warm rays of the season. Then it's back inside to bake, cook, whip, fold, sauté and simmer until the feast is ready. Bottles of red are opened and I try to give a toast every year to the wonderful people who surround me.

If everything goes according to plan I conveniently fall asleep in my grandfather's ancient armchair in front of the fire while my cousins and siblings wage war against the mountains of dishes.

Thanksgiving 2012 marked the first year someone was missing from the family feast. My cousin — younger than me by 17 months — was away at the University of Ottawa and ended up alone on campus for the holiday. Her plans had fallen through and she was left to eat chicken strips alone in her dorm while the rest of the family gathered together in B.C. Over the phone we swore to one another we'd never let a family member be alone for the holidays again. I was moving to Montreal to study at Concordia University and we made plans to spend future holidays in each other's company.

But the months leading up to my first holiday away from home were harder than I'd anticipated.

I'd left my quiet B.C. hometown of 20,000 for the big city of Montreal. After living in the same house my whole life, I found myself in a shell of an apartment that smelled like cigarettes and not at all like home. As an introvert I struggled to meet people and ached for my long-distance partner in B.C., my family and my hometown where I'd known everybody since kindergarten.

As my first Thanksgiving away from home approached, I felt an intense bout of homesickness when I thought about my large, sprawling family converging at the cabin without me.

But a promise is a promise, and my cousin and I had been preparing for the holiday for a whole year. My roommate, also from B.C., joined the fray as we assembled a guest list as big as the apartment could handle. Everyone would have to bring their own plates, cutlery and fold-out chairs to sit on.

I found a discount frozen turkey at a big box grocery store and collected vibrant fall leaves to decorate the apartment. I wrote out place settings on scrap paper and decorated them with small, doodled turkeys.

The day before the feast, my cousin arrived by train from Ottawa. As we hugged and danced around the station I felt, for a moment, that maybe, just maybe, Thanksgiving away from home would be OK.

That feeling vanished the next morning when we took in the size of my tiny table and even smaller kitchen, and the mountains of onions, potatoes, yams, brussels sprouts, celery, parsnips and herbs that needed to be prepared. Not to mention bread that needed to be cubed and the turkey that needed to be roasted.

This would be the first Thanksgiving feast we'd ever had to tackle on our own. And we had 12 guests arriving in a few hours.

What could we do but call my aunt Diana? She answered our video call with a cheerful “halloo.” She happily walked us through recipes — noting, for example, not to forget the dried cranberries and apricots in the stuffing — and reminded us of lessons she'd already taught, like how to mash minced garlic by adding a pinch of salt. There were small hiccups, like when I cut x's into the Brussels from the wrong end, but by some small holiday miracle we got it all done. The turkey was nestled in the oven in a nest of root vegetables, stuffed with homemade stuffing and bristling with a prickly plumage of rosemary and pepper.

And then the guests arrived. The couple from Boston brought spicy flatbread; the trio from Newton, B.C., brought a vat of soup, pumpkin pie and extra cutlery; the pair from Mexico brought salad fixings; the guy I’d never met before brought fresh cranberries and oranges for the cranberry sauce; and the girl from New Zealand brought piles of Tupperware for the leftovers.

Fourteen people packed into my apartment that often felt too small for two, cracking drinks and asking how they could help. Someone started simmering gravy and another volunteered to carve the turkey — which came out of the oven as perfect as I’d ever seen it back home.

My cousin and I squished in around the table on folding chairs and borrowed cutlery, amazed we'd actually managed to pull Thanksgiving dinner off. Bottles of red and boxes of pumpkin beer were opened and we went around the table toasting what we were grateful for.

And it was there, thousands of kilometres away from where I usually celebrated, in a city that was often foreign to me, and surrounded by people who months, if not hours ago had been complete strangers, that I managed to finally relax and enjoy my first holiday dinner away from home.

It was hard work, and there wasn’t any fireplace to fall asleep in front of, but it was mine and that was enough.

It's been a rough couple years since I first wrote this story. I know many families will be starting to get back together and grieving those who passed away during the pandemic. There's been a lot to grieve, and we've had to do a lot of it alone.

My family likes to grieve together, sharing sadness and stories, remembering love and loss while squashed into a kitchen. There's no shortcut to healing and no way to numb the sadness of lost family members.

But there are traditions, guiding us through the holidays when we're unsure of where to go from here.

And so we mourn my aunt Diana, and celebrate the family she helped build, and the traditions she helped create for her family — but perhaps more importantly for her love of food.

May you similarly find comfort in reunion and have a chance to play out your own holiday traditions.

Happy cooking.