My book "Back in the meadows of Avigliano," ends with the words "Christmas" and the reason why I posed at the end is that Christmas in period of which I speak, that my childhood was the "great festival" and was prepared with care. During the year, everything was done in anticipation of Christmas and involving children and adults with a flurry of magic that I found only in fairy tales. It began in early December, when the streets turned the pipers. My grandmother often hosted them by giving them a hot meal and a spare, wine and enough money. Before leaving, we cheered again with a rich and beautiful melody that I listened to sitting on the sacks of corn and my little dog in her arms. Sometimes I give myself the bis and played for me again. Their repertoire performed the best in front of the manger of the neighbor who set up along one wall of her kitchen, next to the furnace. The crib used all our available time.
My grandfather set up in one side of the cellar among the barrels, carboys and bottles on his head while hanging hams, sausages and bacon and all around among the shepherds, Mary and Joseph, a rich line of flashing lights. Just get a visitor was there to take it a must see a scene that I have not seen him since then. Sometimes I would sit there next on the straw to look at the fountain, the shepherds, the grace of Mary, Joseph and the patience of all those people who flocked to the Savior. He was not there, the grandfather of twenty-five laying it down at night, just returned from church. It was a cold, damp cellar, dark, but it gave off heat that vision, I was in the midst of a crowd in there as if there had been real life.
My grandmother, when she went to the mountains for fresh grass, uprooted a tree with roots, a brilliant green, that beautiful cakes decorated with almond paste, the holly, mistletoe, cookies baked and cooled, cells of honey from hives and pull knobs of jelly candy. It was a tasty delight accommodate all those goodies. Those who passed by, he was tempted to do a tasting and grandmother, knowing the habits, every time you come back from spending, bolstered the sweet and ended up missing that Christmas was full.
Towards the end of November, the grandmother scooped me out of bed early in the morning to go to the Novena of the Immaculate Conception and I, wrapped in my coat, gloves, scarf and hat, let me pull up to church on foot. There, while the faithful prayed and sang, I watched spellbound lighted candles to the Virgin Mary and with their glow and glitter, half asleep, I prayed with his grandmother and won when I was about to fall sleep, she squeezed my hand tightly and I understood: was filming I opened my eyes to pray. The output is going to run by John and the baker to buy Raffiolo mostaccioli, fleas and nougat. Christmas Time spent going to visit relatives and the sick in the family but also friends.
Grandma said it was proper to make a bit 'of relief to the sick and did, within two weeks, visiting all the suffering people of the place. Finally there was a moment for me when we went to buy my new clothes and could not miss the red dress or dark green velvet with bows and patent leather shoes and I felt like the protagonist of The Red Shoes.
The real Christmas was in the kitchen of my grandmother, a kitchen so big that when I moved house I designed a similar, just remembering all the time spent in the kitchen full of life and memories.
was not a kitchen but a kingdom, the kingdom of my grandfather, the home cook. We'd both he and I with his white apron with my checkered apron, on a massive chair with a slotted spoon to fry the donuts in hand he had mixed for a whole day. The technique was to drain them in a paper bag where he had placed the bread and bay leaves and only when they are dry, the passed in honey with anicini. The first was zeppole for me that I shared with my dog, the second for his grandfather.
The real Christmas was the scent of anise in the air, when his grandfather rubs it on the sweet and poured coffee. Even today, I put a drop of anise in the coffee, these days, and I remember my grandfather with his habits. Christmas in the air I breathed, I saw the sparkle in the streets, I felt I was living in the scents and the church with all the religious functions which never failed. I have been human contact with the people we met, a Christmas so different from today in our virtual world, then it was important to see and live it, not just once a year for lunch, but always.
The Christmas dinner was the culmination of all work and when was gathered around the table, in the large kitchen of the grandparents had a feast of aromas, flavors and foods. The raffle completed the family reunion in the air and added the scent of tangerines and oranges with the thousands of skins that were as numeretti folders. Then the table becomes a market place in addition to the folders were nuts, roasted chestnuts, hazelnuts, home, dates and nougat and sweets of every sort. In the end I do not remember anything because I fell asleep on the legs of my grandmother poured exhausted from long and tiring day.
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