The Mighty Franks: A Memoir by Michael Frank

Author:Michael Frank [Frank, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: azw
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2017-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

FIVE PLACES, SIX SCENES

Christmas at the Maison

It was the centerpiece of my aunt’s year, therefore our family’s year. A holiday made for decorating—and for giving, two of her life’s delights.

On a high closet shelf she kept a box large enough for a child to play in; inside lived yards of green garlands and gold beads, wreaths and sparkles, holly, berries, red ribbons, pottery Santas, pinecones with their tips daubed with white paint, Scandinavian angels, tartan pillow covers, bayberry (later Rigaud) candles, cinnamon sticks, silk birds peeking out of twig nests. Every December, on the first Saturday of the month, my uncle wrestled this formidable kit into the living room, and I was invited to help make Christmas, meaning to hang and arrange and k-nock-k-nock until all this bounty and beauty were arrayed. And these were special days, happy days, when the city of smog and palm trees, the school dreariness and the school bullies, were forgotten and beloved jaunty Victorian (Dickensian) England was invoked as the house was decked out for the hols—because there’s no interior in the world that doesn’t wake up with a swag of green and a splash of red and because everyone needs one time a year when she can kick back and simply play!

In the weeks leading up to Christmas my aunt shopped and shopped. She set up a wrapping station in her guest bedroom, and she turned out dozens of elaborate packages, which afterward she arranged in the living room around a sober carved wooden angel, old, Flemish, and each year shedding more powdery dust. Did it matter that we were Jewish? You’ll never see a Christmas tree in my house—the daughter-in-law of a rabbi? Nevertheless we all know that Christmas is a holiday made for decorating!

All these preparations culminated in my aunt’s annual Christmas Eve dessert party, where the triple-butter brownies were joined by oranges in port wine, vanilla cake with chocolate frosting, almond cookies rolled in powdered sugar, strawberries paired with an enormous bowl of whipped cream, and much more. The word Lucullan was pronounced, and often. Christmas was my aunt at her happiest and most heightened: doing things up; shopping and giving; baking and delighting; enticing us with limitless treats; bringing together (as she and my uncle otherwise seldom did) their friends and their family; and leading. Leading was central. Leading might have been, deep down, the whole point. No one else contributed. No one else collaborated. Certainly no one else was allowed to make a suggestion—the idea, floated at one point by my mother, that we begin by eating something wholesome to offset all the sugar was dismissed as pedestrian and the notion of a spoilsport. Any proposal to limit the children’s gifts, to rein them back into sensible proportion, received an emphatic (and conversation-stopping) Don’t be a Scrooge! Christmas is a time to loosen the purse strings and give, give, give.

My aunt, distributing her packages at the appointed hour, dressed in a red sweater and half a dozen sparkling

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