Hospitality
November 2008
by Christa von Zyclin
Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Hebrews 13:2
As I remember it, my brother laughed so hard the milk came out of his nose, which just made everything worse. It wasn’t quite Thanksgiving yet, but my older sister, at the knowledgeable age of 13, was determined to show our guest a genuine American meal. And what could be more American than turkey with all the trimmings? Herr Steltzler was a distant relative from the old country, and he was visiting his “cousins,” my parents, who had immigrated to the United States just a few years before we kids were born.
So my sister Karin, fresh from her middle school home economics class, had decided to put together this pre-Thanksgiving dinner with real stuffing, from scratch. She took the sage out of the spice cupboard. Someone had given it to my parents years earlier and it had never been touched, sage not being in the repertoire of good German cuisine. “Of course it’s still good,” my mother said when my sister grimaced at the sticky old bottle, whose contents seemed more gray dust than green herb. “It’s been sealed all these years, how could it be bad?” So Karin put me to work cutting up white bread into little squares as she double-checked the recipe from the Betty Crocker cookbook.
It wasn’t the peculiar taste of the stuffing, though, that made my brother laugh, it was the radish that Herr Steltzler was preparing to eat with a fork and a knife.
The lonely bachelor’s feelings
Noticing that Herr Steltzler never touched food with his fingers, we had put bets on it, the three of us kids, how he would handle the raw vegetables, and all eyes were on him as he adroitly speared a radish from the relish plate. Up until now, Herr Steltzler had not endeared himself to the younger generation of the family, what with his stuffy ways and my mother fretting about the commotion and disorder of our tiny house. He liked to sleep late and my brother and I were tired of my parents’ urgent whispers to “for heaven’s sake, behave yourselves!” when we were up early and horsing around on a Saturday morning.
Sure enough, at dinner that night Herr Steltzler managed to pierce the radish with his fork and delicately cut it into even slices before putting it into his mouth, little forkful by little forkful. My brother’s mouth started twisting, holding back his laugh, when my sister, wanting to demonstrate her mastery of European manners as well as American cooking, reached for a radish herself, trying to imitate Herr Steltzler’s niceties. But Karin’s radish slipped out from under her fork, shot across the table, bounced onto the floor, and rolled under the kitchen stove. That’s when my brother laughed until my mother had to send him out into the only bathroom of our house, which unfortunately was right next to our little dining nook, so that we all had to hear his laughing and coughing and sputtering, and then the water splashing away the evidence of our family’s shocking table behavior. Herr Steltzler never blinked.
In the end, it was ironically only Herr Steltzler’s presence in our home that saved my brother and me from a sound spanking. What we were not spared, and what still stings in my memory, was my mother’s quiet lecture about hurting a lonely bachelor’s feelings. What a new thought it was to me, that such a strange man’s feelings could be hurt just by kids laughing. For years afterward, I wished we could invite him a second time, to show him that we had learned a thing or two, but Herr Steltzler never visited us again.
The hospital cafeteria
For years we didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving at our house because my parents hadn’t caught on to this great American ritual. “Every day should be Thanksgiving day,” said my mother, “How is it showing thankfulness to have you stuff yourself on this certain Thursday in November?”
By the time we kids were old enough to insist on the traditions we learned about in school and from our friends, my mom had begun full-time work at the St. Anthony hospital cafeteria. Her English was still awkward, so this was a dream job, and with benefits! It also meant that for holidays, she volunteered to work the long shift, knowing she’d be earning time and a half.
At about six in the evening, towards the end of her shift, when the number of hospital staff and visitors had trickled down to a few, our family would troop in, and my mother would take off her white smock and hair net and join us as we picked up our big plastic trays. Her co-worker Frieda would stay a little longer, making sure that my brother got an extra scoop of mashed potatoes, and that I got the biggest slice of pecan pie.
My mother would introduce us to a few of the doctors at the hospital and I remember how some of them nodded and looked over our heads when they said, “Pleased to meet you,” but one of them seemed genuinely interested and stooped down to tell us what a hard worker my mother was, and how it made a meal taste better when it was served with a smile. Then he gave us all yellow smiley face key chains, which I used for years, even after I found out the smiley face was an advertisement for a strong prescription laxative.
The language school
When our two oldest sons were toddlers, my husband and I left the United States to spend a year in France as we were trained for our future work in Africa. At the language school we were part of a community of expatriates: Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, a German family, and a Finnish family, all of us struggling mightily with French language and culture. Most of us had a baby or two that we were trying to raise far from the help of grandparents or aunts and uncles.
To alleviate homesickness, the Norwegians would have Norwegian nights and the Danes would host Danish nights, so as November approached, we Americans decided we would host an American Thanksgiving dinner. We invited the whole language school, including our French teachers, asking each nationality to bring a traditional ethnic dish to share.
The Swedes brought a potato and anchovy casserole, a combination none of the rest of us had ever considered, but which proved surprisingly delicious. The Germans brought torte—five layers of cake, cream, and berries topped off with an impossibly delectable chocolate glaze. The French brought—but of course!—wine. Bottles and bottles of wine: wine for the appetizer course, wine for the main course, wine for the dessert course. Our teetotaling Norwegian friend, Knute, blinked a few times at this extravagance, but finally even he helped himself to a glass. “After all, Jesus drank wine with meals,” he explained, as if anyone else needed persuading.
The American dishes got mixed reviews: Pumpkin pie was a hit with the Germans; the French seemed intrigued by the herb stuffing; nearly everyone was horrified at the candied yams. “You Americans!” our fellow students said, shaking their heads when they saw the perfectly browned marshmallows adorning the syrup-topped yams and served as part of the main meal. “Do you serve dessert with every course?” Nevertheless, all greeted the sight of le dindon (French for turkey) with something akin to awe. “Wow” was exclaimed in several languages at once, then, “Magnifique!” as we remembered to practice our French.
That Thanksgiving dinner was actually an all too rare moment of international camaraderie. There were so many challenges to living in close quarters with others, especially others of different cultural backgrounds. We were amused at first to find out that a Danish-Norwegian couple was considered a mixed marriage, but we soon learned that as much as many Europeans might look the same, the differences were considerable.
One of my first shocks was when I realized that most Europeans toilet-trained their children starting, I kid you not, at 9 months old (one German mother claimed that her daughter was toilet-trained by 5 months, but all of us were pretty sure it was the mother who was trained, not the child). Yet for almost all our fellow students, the feeling was that if a child wasn’t dependably toilet-trained by the great age of two, it was a sad commentary on one’s parenting skills. American parents were not much admired in this regard.
One peculiarity of our older son was that he seemed to have his whole digestive system stimulated by our common meals in the dining hall. More often than not, at our evening meal, my husband and I would take turns walking the walk of shame as we carried him off with a training pants mishap that was hard to hide.
The kids’ table
The next year we were in Cameroon, Africa, for Thanksgiving, and three of us younger families were invited for the feast by an older couple who had spent decades as missionaries. I was more than a little apprehensive, but I needn’t have worried. Our hosts greeted us with an exquisite table for the adults, and a kids’ table with kiddie cocktails in sturdy plastic cups for the children. As soon as we had finished our dinner of big chickens and potatoes (turkeys were simply not available, but none of us minded), the children were shooed into an adjoining room, with boxes of indestructible, time-tested toys. And Ruth didn’t bat an eye when it became obvious that one of the kids (not ours this time!) had filled his pants. “Oh, we’ve got some spares,” she winked, and sent Harold off to fetch them.
“I like that lady!” My 3-year-old declared as we left that night (and I was glad that Ruth was still in earshot so she could hear this come straight from his heart.) “When can we come back here again?”
These days our Thanksgiving is usually spent at my sister Karin’s home in Illinois. She definitely wins the most elegant table award of our family. My now teenaged boys’ eyes shine as they look over the offerings. Herbs and fruit garnish the turkey. Mashed potatoes that started out as whole potatoes, not boxes of flakes. Two kinds of sweet potatoes, with and without marshmallows. My sister has invited a new co-worker and his wife from Syria, and since we don’t know yet whether they’re Muslim or not, we forgo the bacon bits on the green beans. We know they are struggling with the language, and we work hard to understand each other.
Just before everyone is served, my sister and I can be heard chortling in the kitchen. “That sounds like a witches’ laugh,” my husband says. That’s all right. Just for us, my sister and I always buy one can of jellied cranberry sauce, and carefully, carefully squeeze it out, leaving it in the perfect quivering shape of a can. That’s how my mother did it all those years ago, when we finally started celebrating Thanksgiving at home as a real American family.
It’s Thanksgiving again, and we are so thankful for the hospitality we have received and the angels we often meet when we are the ones who get to serve.
The Rev. Christa von Zychlin and her husband, the Rev. Wayne Nieminen, are finishing their call as pastors in Hartland, Wisconsin, and preparing for missionary service through the ELCA with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hong Kong. Next year they will be experiencing a totally new kind of Thanksgiving dinner!
We're glad you enjoyed this online preview of Lutheran Woman Today. But there is so much more inside each issue. For just 3 cents a day, you can receive a year's worth of LWT's award–winning graphics and articles in your own home. Don't miss another issue — Subscribe now!