A 'sansgeeving' rerun

By: LOUISE ESOLA - Staff Writer | Friday, November 18, 2005 10:53 PM PST ∞

Writer's note: If the cable channel TNT can play "A Christmas Story" ---- complete with Ralphie's pink bunny pajamas and the Chinese waiter's rendition of "Deck the halls with boughs of holly, far rar rar rar rar" ---- over and over again on Christmas Eve, I believe I can rerun my Thanksgiving column of my childhood.

This column ran in the newspaper last year, before there was a "Geez, Louise" on Page A2.

It has been dubbed by many ---- not including my mom, who stopped talking to me for a while after it was published ---- a favorite.

(Gulp.)

Here goes ...

For those students who spent their lunch hour Friday poking holes in piles of mashed potatoes, the cafeteria cuisine of mass-produced, processed turkey and crunchy stuffing is as close to an all-American Thanksgiving as they'll get.

I say this ---- and please don't get offended ---- because, statistically, half of them are born and raised in Latino homes, as I was.

My extended familia of 23 first cousins and seemingly equal amount of aunts and uncles celebrated Thanksgiving throughout my childhood in Philadelphia, which is where la familia colonized after my mother's generation left Nicaragua in search of opportunity.

Thanksgiving is not a holiday in Latin America, so what usually took place wasn't something you'd see in Better Homes and Gardens magazine.

While my friends' mothers typically spent a month planning a Thanksgiving dinner ---- similar to what the generals did prior to D-day ---- my mother and her sisters would plan the week of, or, in some cases, the day before.

They usually remembered when we told them we didn't have school that week and why.

And they didn't refer to it as Thanksgiving. In their heavy Spanish accents, it was dubbed "sansgeeving." This was confusing for me as a young child in school, though I knew my family was from a place called "Nicawawa."

For our great feast, my Aunt Maria (one of about four Marias in the family) and my mother did most of the work.

They would fix the turkey, which was probably the only Thanksgiving-ish thing on the table.

Along with that we'd see a giant bowl of cold, soggy Caesar salad, a large Pyrex of white rice and a pot of black beans. The dinner was usually held at Aunt Maria's home, which was the only dwelling that could comfortably hold such a circus of big butts, big guts and what seemed like an orphanage of children.

On occasion, to give Aunt Maria a break, the festivities were held at my childhood home: a very narrow, very long row house in the city. It was like staging "The Nutcracker" in a broom closet.

Usually, my Aunt Magda ---- the most progressive of the aunts ---- would elect herself to make the stuffing, which could have passed for what one might see in a garbage disposal.

The food was cold by the time everybody arrived, late as usual, and the music ---- Latin, with its trumpets, bongos and guitars ---- was surprisingly loud coming from a cassette in a tape recorder.

Every year the cuisine was served a la buffet, and finding a place to sit was like searching for a parking spot at the mall a week before Christmas.

I do recall once or twice eating at the foot of the staircase, having to relocate myself and my Styrofoam plate once or twice ---- or 12 times ---- for someone to use the bathroom.

My cousins, brothers and I would spend most of the dinner sifting through the stuffing to pick out the prunes and raisins.

As the evening went on and the rum and cokes were stirred, my mother and her siblings would get into heated discussions over such divisive topics as the civil war taking place in Nicaragua (it was the 1980s). All this over the Latin music blaring from a tape recorder.

The children and I were usually off playing a seemingly cruel version of hide-and-seek: Moments before our senile grandmother would need to use the toilet, we would hide the littlest and most impressionable of the cousins in a small hidden cubby in the bathroom, telling him to stay put or else.

And whoever was "it" never went to retrieve the now-scarred child, who was teased for the rest of his life for having witnessed Mamita on the toilet.

By about 11 p.m., the parents were still in the thick of their debates and trumpets as the herd of children, myself one of them, searched for a place to nap in a house where there was barely room to sit and eat. The beds ---- now home to mounds of winter coats ---- were not an option.

What seemed like hours later, my three brothers and I sat groggy in our mother's cold station wagon as she drove home.

On Monday, when we returned to school and were asked about our Thanksgiving holiday, we could have easily snickered, "You mean Sansgeeving?"

Staff writer Louise Esola covers Oceanside schools. She can be reached at lesola@nctimes.com.

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