Why did Caroline strap on a snorkel mask when there wasn’t a beach in sight? And what did the message she found in a little bottle have to do with it?
CHAPTER ONE
It was late Saturday afternoon, just two weeks before Christmas. Caroline was alone in the house with her housekeeper Davida, who was cleaning the silverware in the dining room. Michael Bublé was singing “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” and Caroline was writing the last of her Christmas cards, in between sips of chardonnay.
It all started that morning after a series of essential beauty appointments. At fifty-three Caroline worked hard to stay young to compete with the ladies at the Glen Abbey Golf Club. She’d already been to the Epiphany Spa for her regular maintenance of a manicure, pedicure and eyebrow waxing. Then she went to the Venere Salon on Dorval Drive for a haircut and a few highlights.
When her stylist was finished with her, Caroline headed to the coatroom to get her jacket. As she stepped into the small, cramped room, she saw an older woman acting very suspiciously. She had her hand in the pocket of Caroline’s Canada Goose jacket!
“Did you lose something?” Caroline said. “That’s my coat.”
“No, no I didn’t, but thanks for asking,” the woman answered. Then she hurried out of the salon leaving Caroline standing there with her mouth open. She was sure she could hear the woman giggling on her way out the door.
Caroline reached into her pocket out of curiosity and was surprised to find a small bottle tied with a curly gold ribbon. When she looked inside, she could see a little red holly berry and a rolled-up piece of paper with the word ‘Message’ on the side. Did that woman put it there? How weird is that? She opened the bottle and unrolled the message.
Christmas: the only time of year you can sit in front of a dead tree eating candy out of socks.
Caroline was chuckling when a salon attendant walked in the coatroom. “Look what I found,” she said showing her the message.
The young lady laughed. “That’s hysterical. Where did you find it?”
“It was rolled up in this little bottle. I think that woman with white hair who just left put it in my pocket. Do you know who she is?’
“Sorry, we can’t give out any personal information about our clients,” the girl answered and left the room.
Caroline put the message back in the bottle and dropped it into her Gucci bag.
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She was thinking about that bottle and the message as she drove to her home on King Street in Old Oakville. Caroline remembered a time when she was a child and the only gift she and her brother received was fruit and candy stuffed into her father’s grey work socks. Her parents told them it was from Santa and that’s all that mattered. Santa had been there! Christmas morning was always the best day of the year. Life was simple back then and Caroline felt a pang of nostalgia.
She had no extended family left now. Her mother and father died a few years apart of stroke and heart failure while in their early sixties. And her brother drowned a decade ago on a fishing expedition in Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, when their freighter canoe hit an ice floe in the middle of August. All of this loss was devastating for Caroline, but her husband Charlie and their daughter Emma were the glue that held her together while she healed.
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As she pulled into the long driveway, she saw her Charlie and Emma sitting in his Lexus with the motor running. He rolled down his window when he saw her.
“Hi Mom.” Her daughter called out.
“Emma and I were just leaving,” Charlie said. “We’re going Christmas shopping at Oakville Place.”
“That’s very brave of you,” answered Caroline, who would rather get a root canal than go near a mall this close to Christmas. But she was pleased that Emma thought her Dad cool enough to be seen shopping with her. Fifteen-year-olds had such strict rules about embarrassment and humiliation that it was hard to keep up.
“Would you stop at COBS Bread and pick up a half dozen eggnog scones?” she asked him.
“Will do, and I’ll get a few mince tarts for Davida while I’m there,” he said.
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Caroline finished her Christmas cards and Davida reported that she’d cleaned all the silver.
“Thank you Davida, that’s all for today. I’ll see you Tuesday.”
“Peace at last,” Caroline purred, as she watched the snow falling in soft fluffy puffs outside the living room window. She flopped on the couch by the fire and snuggled under a red woolen blanket. She’d been savouring the right moment to curl up with the holiday edition of her favorite magazine.
Caroline was slowly turning the pages, drinking in the glossy treats and treasures, when she found herself thrown back into the wonderful nostalgia of her mother’s Christmas traditions.
There on page thirty-two was a full-page photograph of an oven-perfect tourtière meat-pie, complete with an easy step-by-step cooking lesson.
She pulled the pictures closer to her nose, “I wonder if I could make that?” she mumbled.
Caroline took a deep breath and wafted back a few decades into her French-Canadian childhood. She sunk deeper into the cushions on the sofa, savoring the deliciously spiced memories of a good old-fashioned tourtière.
The caption in the magazine read: What could be more scrumptious than a heart--warming, home cooked meat-pie on a cold snowy Christmas Eve? She read the words over and over, staring at the festive looking tourtière on the page. Caroline thought again about her childhood and how the Christmas holidays had always been such a special time in her family. She laid the magazine on her chest and closed her eyes, as the memories washed over her.
She thought about growing up in the small northern Ontario town of Chapleau in the 1970s. How her mom would set aside a special weekend every December for cooking her batch of Christmas tourtières. That meat-pie making ceremony was always an exciting time, since it marked the beginning of their Christmas season.
She could still smell the tantalizing mixture of herbs, spices and sizzling pork and beef that filled the house and launched the household into the festive spirit. She could feel the warmth of her family, sitting around in the amber glow of their small kitchen, cutting, slicing and hatching holiday plans.
She could hear her older brother and her father, planning their yearly excursion into the woods for the best tree ever. She remembered how they tied the leather straps of
Dad’s old wooden snowshoes to their boots and crunched their way through the deep snow. She could still feel the frost on her nose from the cold window, as she pressed her face into the glass and watched them disappear into the woods behind the house.
An hour or so later, they would emerge with flashing red cheeks and the perfect Balsam fir. She could still see the trail from their snowshoes, and sprinkles of spiky cones and needles behind them in the snow. Caroline breathed in and her memory was filled with the fresh scent of a new Christmas tree standing in a pail of water and tied to the living room wall with a string.
She could almost touch the smooth glass ornaments that sparkled like iridescent soap bubbles splashed with paint; and the cardboard boxes that held the decorations, covered in holiday wrapping and old Christmas cards. And she could still see the magical tree lights bubbling away in their little colourful tubes, and the tinsel that shimmered with reflections.
She thought about what Christmas meant in those days. It was never about gifts. It was about the ritual meals her mom made to celebrate the spirit of the season with family and friends. It was about finding oranges and homemade chocolate fudge in her stocking on Christmas morning and eating sweet hard candy with her brother.
Caroline thought about that little bottle and the message she found in her pocket. Christmas: the only time of year you can sit in front of a dead tree and eat candy out of socks. Could reading that message have triggered all these memories and the nostalgia she was feeling?
She looked back at the magazine and thought about her mom’s luscious tourtière meat-pies. How she kept them in the warming oven to welcome everyone home from church on Christmas Eve. She remembered the lighted holly wreaths in every window, bathing the rooms of her house with the welcome glow of a special night.
Christmas was about music back then too. It was about singing Christmas carols in the neighbourhood with a frozen face and frozen toes, while her breath made puffs of white smoke in the cold. It was about the magic of freshly fallen snow that glistened and danced like diamonds in the moonlight. It was about uncles and aunts and neighbours, dropping in with their toe-tapping fiddles and banjos for a singsong in the kitchen.
Now her life was very different from those days so long ago. Caroline looked around her beautiful home and thought about all the expensive gifts she would probably get under the tree again this year. She could just imagine what Emma would think if all she found was a bunch of fruit and candy stuffed in her dad’s wool sock on Christmas morning.
Suddenly Caroline realized how much she missed the simplicity and warmth she felt back then in Chapleau around the holidays.
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Her cellphone rang and jarred Caroline from her memories. She let it go to voicemail while her thoughts retreated like a faded sepia photograph. When Caroline opened her eyes, she felt a longing for those days. She knew when her mom died, the baton had been passed and the holiday traditions had become hers to continue with her family.
And, while she had succeeded in always making Christmas a special time of year, as a busy dentist at Village Orthodontics, Caroline had never quite managed to graduate in kitchen duty. Meat-pies were something she ordered from Patisserie D’Or. But they were not her mother’s tourtières.
Because she hardly ever cooked, Caroline’s husband Charlie had always threatened to turn the kitchen into a library. Emma and Caroline were both quite happy with this possibility. Ordering in from Pizza Pienza, getting prepared foods from Denninger’s or eating out at Harpers Landing was just fine with them.
But eventually, and probably out of necessity, Charlie donned the apron himself and found that he really enjoyed cooking. So thankfully, the kitchen had been saved and Charlie became the cook in the family.
That was a few years ago and he still did most of the cooking. So, when Caroline looked at that tempting meat-pie recipe in the magazine, she was a little worried, knowing full well that her culinary skills certainly didn’t extend to making tourtière.
However, after reading the simple-to-follow-step-by-step cooking lesson, she wanted to give it a try. Caroline was determined to catch the flailing baton of her French heritage. She would teach her daughter how to cook this wonderful meat pie and continue the same family holiday tradition she’d enjoyed so much as a child.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday and a perfect day for a cooking lesson,” she said under her breath. She studied the recipe in the magazine, “How hard can it be?” she murmured, wondering how she’d break the news to Emma.
Caroline leaped off the sofa. She studied the recipe and made a list of ingredients she needed to accomplish the cooking project. Then spurred on by the sheer energy of a new adventure, she put on her most festive looking winter hat and left the house for Fortinos supermarket in downtown Oakville, just a few blocks from home.
As she rode the escalator at the grocery store up to the second floor, she was still furiously calculating how to multiply the recipe to make the same big batch of pies like her mom.
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CHAPTER TWO
And so, it came to pass the very next day, right there on a Sunday morning, that Caroline grabbed hold of her teenage daughter and they ventured forth into the kitchen. Caroline was armed with the tried-and-true magazine recipe for making tourtière and a strong determination to do her mother proud.
Thankfully Charlie wouldn’t be there to supervise. She wanted to do this alone with her daughter. He was a busy realtor working on the Sullivan Real Estate team with Royal LePage and often had showings on Sundays.
Caroline put on one of her husband’s aprons. “I’ll brown the meat and you can start chopping the mushrooms,” she said to her traumatized daughter. Emma looked as awkward as an orangutan at a tea party.
“It’ll be easy, just look at the pictures,” Caroline assured her, while she checked the cooking steps on the recipe page for the ninety-seventh time.
“C’mon! Chop-chop!” Caroline sang out and gently nudged her daughter toward the counter.
Emma picked up the knife like it was a dead rat. “Better not ruin my nails,” she grumbled, examining her freshly glued on acrylics. Yesterday, she’d pleaded and convinced her innocent shopping pal of a dad, to buy her a set of press-on nails at Shoppers Drug Mart. She looked admiringly at her long nails painted with white polish. Then, resigned to the task, Emma dug in and the meat-pie making ceremony began.
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Perhaps Caroline aimed too high.
The first mistake she made was to multiply the recipe by ten! She remembered how her mother had always made at least a dozen pies at once, so she was following in her mom’s kitchen slippers. Or so she thought. What a muddled mess!
As Caroline and her daughter furiously chopped, browned and sliced, pans began to dangerously overflow. The grease from twenty pounds of sizzling ground pork and beef was spitting and exploding on the stove, like a hundred angry firecrackers.
Emma stopped chopping and looked at her mother with a mixture of horror and pity.
“Maybe we should wait for Dad,” she said like a frightened bunny; her eyes locked on Caroline’s every move. “Or you could call the housekeeper. Davida would know what to do.”
“I don’t want to bother her, she’s off until Tuesday. We can do this,” Caroline insisted, as she wiped some splattered ground pork from her forehead. She frantically pulled out more cooking pans from the cupboard and began spooning the meat into larger pots and skillets. “I just miscalculated a bit!”
“Can I go now? Am I finished?” Emma asked, checking her fingernails. She stared at the mile-high mountain of mushrooms she’d sliced. She thought her Mom was getting way too weird.
But Emma knew the ordeal wasn’t over yet when Caroline hollered, “Let’s get chopping and peeling. We need thirty onions.”
“Thirty onions? I hate onions! Maaaaaum!” she begged. Emma squirmed in protest, her lips in a pout, now going for pity and possibly a reprieve. “Peeling onions really hurts my eyes!”
Caroline looked at her close-to-hysterical daughter and grinned. “Not the way we’re going to peel them,” she said. “I’ve got this one covered sweetie,” she called out, running down the basement stairs. She was back in an instant with snorkeling gear.
“Put this on,” she said to her daughter, strapping on one of the snorkel masks.
A few minutes later, Caroline’s husband appeared on the scene. He had judiciously decided to check in with the new kitchen crew and stopped dead in his
Ferragamo loafers! Charlie’s eyes darted anxiously around the kitchen, now a tourtière-induced war zone.
“This looks more like torture than tourtière girls,” he said, seeing the meat-pie explosion in the kitchen. He pinched the top of his nose like he was in pain when he saw what his wife and daughter had on their heads. “Why are you both wearing snorkel masks?”
Emma looked at her dad through her steamed-up goggles, shrugged and pointed to her mother, who was vigorously peeling and chopping onions into a pile on the counter.
“The masks were my idea,” Caroline called out to him.
“No doubt,” Charlie answered.
She continued. “I didn’t know how to use your fancy chopper thingy to dice these onions, so we’re doing it the old-fashioned way, with a knife. The masks really help to keep our eyes from watering. Brilliant don’t you think?”
“That chopper thingy is a food processor,” he said not taking his eyes off her. “And I’m very glad you didn’t try to use it,” he added, drawing out his words like he was talking to a toddler. Charlie took another long look around the kitchen and then at his daughter, who looked back helplessly from inside her mask.
He put his arm around Caroline, “I really should get a court order to stop you from teaching her how to cook,” he whispered. Then he kissed Emma on her snorkel mask and handed Caroline the fire extinguisher. Charlie took one last look at them, bit the inside of his cheek and quickly left the kitchen.
Caroline looked at her daughter, “What was all that about?”
Emma’s sweaty bangs were hanging over the kiss smudges on her mask. There was a dusting of cinnamon on her chin, which resembled a reddish goatee. She was looking at her hands, wet with mushroom and onion juice.
“OHMIGOD! My nails are gone!” cried Emma. “Two of them! I’ve lost two of my brand-new press-on fingernails.”
Caroline and Emma had the same thought! They stared into the mound of freshly chopped onions spread all over on the counter.
“Do you think they’re in there?” Emma asked, lowering her voice to a whisper. “They’re white, so it’s hard to tell.”
They leaned into the onions and looked at each other in panic. Their lips and cheeks were stretched back, distorted by the suction of the rubber masks strapped to their heads.
“You kinda look like a bullfrog with a serious facelift Mom!” Emma teased, sounding more like her old self.
“Can you even see out of that thing?” Caroline asked her, laughing and peeking into her daughter’s snorkel mask. They were close, nose to nose, staring at each other like fish in an aquarium.
Building slowly but steadily, their giggles rose to a crescendo of hoots and screeches, as they pointed at each other. Bent over in belly pain, they looked around at the meat-pie-hell they’d created in the kitchen. They held each other as they shook with laughter and collapsed into a heap on the floor.
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A few minutes later, with streaked faces and a calmer outlook, they launched a successful search and rescue operation and found the missing fingernails. Eventually, they finished cooking the ingredients as directed on the recipe and left it to chill in the fridge before filling the pie shells.
They celebrated their accomplishment with two big bowls of Rocky Road ice cream. The clean up took some time and no doubt, Davida would be scrubbing the residual grease splatter throughout the kitchen for the next week.
Despite it all, later that Sunday night, ten tourtières did get made. They used frozen piecrust shells, which were a blessing, because making pastry would have put Caroline over the edge. They filled the shells and put nine uncooked pies in the freezer, keeping one out to bake for dinner on Monday. And much to everyone’s shock and awe, the tourtière was devoid of the trauma it had been through and was surprisingly delicious.
Caroline vowed to honour her family and continue the tradition of her childhood by making tourtière with Emma every year as part of their Christmas menu.
“Let’s remember to use the snorkel masks next time Mom,” Emma laughed. “That was a wicked idea!”
“Okay, but you might want to forget the acrylic nails,” her mom teased.
“I suggest you girls keep the fire extinguisher close by,” Charlie piped in.
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Caroline always felt a wave of nostalgia when she put the Christmas decorations away. She thought about how the holidays marked the passing of another year and the spirit of hope that came with a new one.
She was thankful for finding a lost memory that revived her family’s very special tradition. Caroline was certain that making tourtière would go more smoothly for them in the Christmases to come. She might even learn how to operate that food processor thingy, although it was doubtful.
To Caroline, that recipe for French Canadian tourtière was much more than a meat pie; it was about a living memory that summoned up a measure of the culture and warmth imbedded in an old-fashioned Christmas. It was about the timeless values of family, love and legacy. And if you looked closely enough, it was also about eating candy out of a sock in front of a dead tree.
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BONUS: Click HERE for Caroline’s delicious tourtière recipe.
Wishing all of you a Merry Christmas! Thank you for reading my stories. Feel free to comment below, I’d love to hear from you.
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Pat Skene
Caroline’s Christmas delicious tourtière recipe
This is Pat's Christmas family recipe for a classic French Canadian Tourtière which was adapted from a recipe she found in a Canadian Living magazine in 1991.
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