The Year of the Christmas Potato

If boredom ever strikes while I am wearing a cardigan, I begin to fidget by folding the button-edge of the sweater in on itself until two buttons meet, face to face. Sometimes I’ve thought of folding them all together, until they’re in a perfect stack, with single layers of the cardigan edge stacked between them. This, I think, is what Christmas does to time: it folds in on itself.

Christmas comes in layers, in folds and loops of time. In almost any other given month, like the interminable gray of February, we think in linear terms. The days are a spool of thread, unraveling. Christmas is a playful cat, pouncing the thread into a tangle of memories year over year that refuse to come unknotted. 

There is one ridiculous snarl on the thread of Christmas dinners in my life that rolls around at the most unexpected times: the advent of the Christmas Potato.

One hallowed tradition in my family of origin is the Cheeseball. It has earned its capitalization. About a week before Christmas, Mom takes out three of the probably dozen bricks of cream cheese from the fridge and transforms them into balls of flavorful, rich cheese, ready to be centered on a decorative plate with rows of crackers circled in adulation. 

Why three? One for each Christmas. One with my grandparents on Dad’s side of the family, and whichever cousins could make it from out-of-state. One with Mom’s side of the family, complete with almost a dozen aunts and uncles and a quiet, gently lit assembly at Christmas mass. One for our own little family Christmas, just the seven of us. Each celebration received its own glorified and long-awaited cheeseball, set out among bonbons, chocolate pretzels, and Grandma’s fudge. (Which grandma, you ask? I have the rare blessing of two grandmas who are equally gifted in fudge-making—so both.)

Ten years ago, so photographs inform me, is the year the cheeseball never made it to my maternal grandmother’s house.

The cheeseballs were made ahead of time, wrapped in wax paper and a layer of tinfoil, and set in the back of the fridge to await their appointed time. When we packed up for the Laufenberg Christmas, Mom asked me to get the cheeseball. I dutifully reached back into the fridge, found the tinfoil-wrapped bundle with its familiar shape and heft, and set it carefully into the cooler. One three-hour drive and Christmas dinner later, I was sent to retrieve the cheeseball and crackers from the minivan. Dinner dishes were washed. Mass was finished. Gifts were being passed out from under the tree. I opened the tinfoil wrapping to find not waxed paper and cheese, but a huge, cold baked potato. Our cheeseball, it seemed, was still snuggled happily in the dim recesses of the fridge. The remnants of a family dinner had accompanied us to Grandma’s house. Even the box of Ritz crackers in my hand seemed disillusioned. 

I turned on my heel and walked right back out of the house before I could be discovered in my ludicrous mistake, but the humor of it all overtook me. I stood on the cement steps outside Grandma’s front door and laughed aloud. My breath clouded in the air like frosted-over mirth. It was warm for a North Dakota December, and I stood there with no jacket, relishing the goosebumps rising on my arms while I giggled and snorted over the cheeseball-that-wasn’t. I even snuck inside to get my phone for a picture; the half-wrapped tinfoil around a large brown potato … and a box of Ritz crackers. Amidst the multitude of aunts and uncles keeping too many watchful eyes on younglings; despite the cousins who weren’t sure what to make of me and our large, raucous family; even with no place for an introvert to withdraw from the dozens of people, I had something to laugh about.

The Christmases since then have been quite varied. My first Christmas with my new husband, we couldn’t make it home to see either of our families. Most years since then we’ve made a 20-hour drive from Colorado to Minnesota, and with two hobbitlings in tow. With time, too, my role in Christmas has changed from merely receiving the magic to helping create it for my own children and nieces and nephews. In the ten years after I stood on the front steps giggling joyfully to myself, Christmas has changed. It hasn’t lost its magic, but the sheer sense of unhindered anticipation has diminished. 

Christmas has more layers, more folds now than before. Even the meaning of “going home” has changed: my Laufenberg grandparents have passed away and their farm was sold. I will never walk up those cement steps at Christmastime again. The childhood home that I used to leave at Christmastime is now a place I visit only at Christmas. Grief has woven its way into the fabric of celebration.

Time continues to fold in on itself in the sacred weeks of December. Each time we make the drive north, I see in passing flashes of memory the snowman I made one Christmas morning, the polished wooden pews at mass where we all angled to sit next to Grandma, the bottlenecked entrance to the kitchen where half a dozen aunts were bustling around. Now, too, the snow-fort that my seven-year-old son and my 20-year-old brother built together. I can feel the warmth of the fireplace behind me at my parents’ house when my daughter took her first steps, just after Christmas day. 

The twist of time and memory grows tighter. A tangle of spiced cookies and fudge with aloof cousins and long drives fold over each other in loops and layers. Every memory comes forward mingled, knotted inextricably with the others.

C.S. Lewis said in The Great Divorce that once we are in heaven, the healing of that place will begin to work backwards, redeeming even our broken years on earth. Through the heavenly character of George MacDonald, he says,

“They say of some temporal suffering, ‘no future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.” [1]

I envision it like drops of dye splashed onto the tangle of Christmas memories. First there are only tiny ropes of color, moments of saturation separated from each other by the expanse of thread between. But with time, they begin to link up. 

The year of the Potato-Cheeseball has been immortalized in a small scrapbook. Sometimes I wonder why I printed that photo, why I hold on to the silly, juvenile humor of it at all. Few tubers, I imagine, are remembered as long as this one has been. But between the multicolored threads of sorrow and joy, that memory weaves in and out with a golden shimmer. These moments of mirth are like the seeds of heaven, spreading holy joy slowly across the years. One day, these little drops of dye will diffuse through the whole skein, a spread of delight and redemption breaking into time from the outside. Until then, I cling to the silly, sacred joy of the Cheeseball-That-Wasn’t, and let it ink up the folded years with laughter.

[1] Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001. Pg. 69.

The featured image, “Northfield Christmas Wreath,” is courtesy of Lancia E. Smith and is used with her glad permission for Cultivating.

Gianna Soderstrom

Gianna Soderstrom is a contributing writer to Cultivating Oaks Press and the Anselm Society, and she serves as Assistant Director of the Anselm Society Arts Guild. Adventure-hearted, but also a connoisseur of cozy, book-ish evenings, she is delighted by coffee and cocoa but shockingly, not tea. She is equally fascinated and challenged by the myriad ways that small and steady faithfulness transform a strange place into a home. She is a writer, dreamer, wife to Grant, mama to E1 and E2, and more than the sum of her parts, just like you. Gianna writes here and everywhere else to mine hope out of our ordinary moments.