The Imperfect Homemaker
I enjoy cooking Thanksgiving dinner. It all started in 1975 on Ray’s and my first Thanksgiving when he got two days off from graduate school and I got one day off from work. It was the first time that I had missed Thanksgiving Day with my parents and grandparents. Growing up we had Thanksgiving lunch at Mama Sue and Daddy Leland’s house and Thanksgiving supper at Granny and Granddaddy’s.
At age 21, I don’t think I had ever even made a dish to take. Now I was responsible for the whole Thanksgiving dinner. I called Mama Sue to find out how to do it. I have probably made her dressing every year since. I made it even in the years that Ray and I and our children got to be with my parents or grandparents on Thanksgiving Day. If I didn’t need to make it for that day, we hosted a Thanksgiving dinner for friends on some other day near Thanksgiving. I still make my dressing from the index card I wrote on in 1975.
This year I had a hankering for Mama Sue’s jam cake which I have only made a few times and that was many years ago. The three layers of cake turned out well. They tasted exactly like Mama Sue’s. The caramel icing was a different matter entirely. I was apprehensive, but excited, when I put the sugar and butter in the iron skillet and it started to caramelize. Adding the milk went well, too. Things were still going fine when Ray took this “Susie Homemaker” picture (my Mama Sue was the epitome of Susie Homemaker, by the way).
I like recipes that say “cook this for this long.” Mama Sue’s caramel icing recipe doesn’t say that. It says, “Put back on to cook til almost hard ball.” Uh-oh. Mother taught me how to do that when I was a girl, but it is an inexact science in my book. I got out my candy thermometer and stirred and stirred until the red line reached almost to the “hard ball” line. When I did the “set off and beat with mixer” stage, the concoction split into butter and bits of caramel candy. Hardly spreadable on my “perfect” three layers.
When our daughter Bethany and her family arrived, she made her wonderful easy caramel sauce. The cake stand where I had expected to see a recreation of Mama Sue’s beautiful caramel-covered three layers was unneeded, but the sauce-covered bites tasted just like Mama Sue’s. Maybe I’ll get advice from my Aunt Dot and try it again sometime.
Even with my mishap, I was still feeling all homemakery over the weekend. Ray and I sat side by side on the couch and watched Christmas movies. I made Christmas ornaments and we both fixed one broken this and that after another — dollhouse furniture, the wooden reindeer and wooden Christmas tree precious hobbyists and church members gave us decades ago. I even made new felt antlers for the green and yellow John Deere® reindeer my brother gave our son John for his first Christmas 39 years ago. One of the antlers has been missing for decades.
I trimmed the quilt squares my Mother embroidered after her stroke over four years ago. Maybe sometime I’ll sew them into a throw. I cut out a new pink felt nose for the bunny puppet who’s been missing his. Maybe I’ll get it sewn on sometime.
We mamas fail sometimes. We enjoy success sometimes. We finish some things and leave others unfinished or completely undone. The key is to succeed at and to finish what is most important, so that we can say with Paul:
I have fought the good fight,
I have finished the course, I have kept the faith;
in the future there is laid up for me
the crown of righteousness,
which the Lord, the righteous Judge,
will award to me on that day;
and not only to me,
but also to all who have loved His appearing.
2 Timothy 4:6-8