“Will you be serving ambrosia?” Another Mississippian who’d come North to a teaching career included this question in his Christmas greeting, and the answer was, “No, I wouldn’t.” Ambrosia had been stored away with Christmas stockings, Santa Claus, and peppermint canes plus memory of a struggle between innocence and ignorance that can stump you in the process of growing up.
I was 8 that Christmas and eligible to sit at the gown-ups table, elevated to my plate by a folded quilt. Dessert, ambrosia, was being brought in from the kitchen. I’d watched my mother and grandmother peel and dice the oranges and had tried my hand at grating the coconut bought in town weeks before. Everything else on our table had come from the farm (or the smoke house). But ambrosia? I liked it well enough, felt I should for tradition’s sake, but I was way more partial to peach ice cream on July 4th. Ambrosia got lodged in my memory because my mother took her first bite, pursed her lips and said to all: “Umm, ambrosia, food of the gods.”
Gods?! More than one?! I didn’t ‘get it’. The aunts and uncles around the table took no notice, kept right on with their animated chatter. But see, my mother had been a teacher in her ‘first life’ and got to know of Greek and Roman gods whom I wouldn’t meet till eighth grade. I was still in Sunday School and had to ponder hard to picture the fierce, all-seeing God I did know sitting down to a Depression glass dish of ambrosia on Jesus’ birthday. Was my mother on the verge of “taking the Lord’s name in vain”?! Not knowing there were ‘other gods’, in foreign lands, I felt a line had been crossed at the grown-ups table, right there on Highway 12! I couldn’t let it go.
But at 8 you do let go. Next year the Christmas party in my class was filled with revelry: recitations of “The Night before Christmas”, a spelling bee to include reindeer names plus sleigh, manger, and Bethlehem, till James Butterworth raised his hand for permission to say a poem. We didn’t know James could recite anything more than the 2×2 tables up to 12, so we giggled as he sauntered to the front, got our attention with an exaggerated “A-HEM” then delivered: “Christmas comes but once’t a year. If 1 get drunk you needn’t to keer!” (followed by a resounding hiccup and our wild audience guffaws.)
Going home on the bus that afternoon, I found myself revising James’ poem into one of my own. Mine would lack the punch of his drunken version, but I’d have a singular god with a capital G to appease any suspicion of my mother’s plural gods and the “name in vain” concern. I’d even offer to share! I quote: “Christmas comes a day divine, If God wants ambrosia, He’s welcome to mine.”
The aunts and uncles would have delighted in James’ version, not mine. Maybe I was learning discretion along with grammar and multiplication. So after my mother said what she always said about gods and ambrosia, I said mine, silently, behind my napkin, finally able to let it go.
NOTE: I looked up Ambrosia in The Auburn Cookbook, only one I own. It’s still diced oranges and grated coconut. Simple! Even I could pull it off. But where, I wonder, did ancient gods in foreign lands go for oranges and coconuts?
Marion Whitley, who grew up in Caledonia and Columbus, lives in Manhattan where she reads, writes and remembers. Her email address is [email protected].
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