December 21, 2007

Christmas Supplement

Dad cooks memorable breakfast on Christmas

By Michael A. Mick (Special to The Criterion)

My favorite Christmas memory is reminiscing about Christmas Eve as a child at our family’s Mount Street home in an inner city neighborhood on the near west side of Indianapolis.

Our family had an annual tradition of opening simple gifts for each other in the late evening around 9 p.m. then ­getting ready for midnight Mass at the former Assumption Church.

When I was a child, we followed the three hours of fasting before receiving Communion.

After midnight Mass, we would come home and Dad would fix scrambled eggs, homemade sausage, biscuits and gravy. Then we children would go to bed exhausted, and in the morning wake up to find gifts from Santa.

You would only appreciate this story about our traditional after midnight Mass breakfast that my father cooked—men didn’t cook in this “Archie Bunker” era—if you understand that the eggs and gravy were always good, the biscuits were hard as rocks and the strong smell of garlic from the hand-ground pork, sage and garlic sausage lingered in the house for days.

To this day, our 90-year-old mother has never revealed to any of us where the gifts from Santa were hidden every year. It’s still a mystery.

(Michael A. Mick resides in Naples, Fla. He is a former member of St. Pius X Parish in Indianapolis, St. Malachy Parish in Brownsburg and the former Assumption Parish in Indianapolis.) †

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