The Legend of Joey Trucks: The Accidental Mobster by Craig Daliessio

Author:Craig Daliessio [Daliessio, Craig]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

The Last Ride for Nonna

We’d been in Forest for almost a year. That first Christmas came and went pretty quickly because we’d moved-in over Thanksgiving, and by the time we’d gotten unpacked and the house in order, Christmas was about a week away. We’d barely had time to decorate and put up a tree and all that. So we’d decided to go home, like I told you before.

Now, my family does Christmas like few others. Between the Christmas lights, and the food, and the music, and the relatives, we really make a month-long celebration out of the holidays. Yet for all the effort we put into it back home, I never had the room to do it up the way I’d always dreamed. The house in South Philly was narrow and tall, as all city houses are. It was hard to decorate the upper portions, and we had essentially no front yard. This year...this year I was going to really put on a show. While the kids were still young.

The other thing we didn’t get to do last year was host our annual “Feast of Seven Fishes” dinner on Christmas Eve. Now, you have to understand, this is a very big deal. Festa dei sette pesci is an Italian-American tradition with roots in the old country. Like most of the holiday traditions that aren’t directly linked to the Church, there is no official guideline for the celebration. So depending on whose house you were visiting on Christmas Eve, the table would vary in content.

At our house, the rules are relatively simple: Seven fish entrees, three of them have to be baccala, which is salted cod. The rest can be any kind of seafood. We always open with Uncle Franny’s renowned baccala stew, which is very much like Manhattan clam chowder, only with chunks of baccala instead of clams. From there we have macaroni and gravy with any combination of calamari, crab, shrimp, and sometimes plain macaroni with anchovies fried in olive oil and garlic. We usually have baked baccala, fried baccala, always some smelts, and my cousin tries to find one unique fish we’ve never tasted before to top off the menu.

We eat like kings, and we talk loud, and laugh even louder. There are always guests at the table and nobody is a stranger. Sinatra and Dean Martin sing Christmas songs in the background. We’re big Christmas music people, us Mezilli’s, and usually it’s the classics we’re listening to as we keep “la vigilia.” Dinner lasts until around eight PM when Uncle Franny leaves to go home and get ready for midnight Mass. The rest of us will hang around a few minutes longer, but we filter out a few at a time until the last ones are gone.

Angie and I really missed hosting the dinner last year, but with the move and all, it was really hard to try putting it together, and then too, convincing my family to come to Virginia for Christmas was essentially impossible. So we flew home a few days before Christmas and spent the holiday in Philly.

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