Last year, I did not go to the family Christmas dinner. I don't know why. I think I just wasn't feeling the holidays. I'm sure there was more to it, but that's not what I remember. What I remember was that this was the last Christmas that my maternal grandmother was alive and I didn't see her at that Christmas.

Blink and you'll miss her: G.Ma was wanderlust personified in a tiny, unassuming form. Here she is in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: David Sieple.

G.Ma died this spring from a sudden aneurysm that destroyed most of her ability to function. She could have lived longer on a respirator at a fraction of her cognizance, but that wasn't life to G.Ma. It was a deal breaker for a woman that just couldn't be held in place, even in her older years. Her living will dictated that she be let go, and two days later, she died.


G.Ma was spontaneous, or impulsive, depending on who you talked to. She was known for driving up to her friends houses at random and demanding that they go with her on a road trip, responsibilities be damned. I suppose she found the post-depression era too depressing, and made it her mission in life to have as much fun as possible. She married several times, and had eight kids, and moved cross country to California from Pennsylvania. Her reason: she didn't like snow.

Having lived in that area for near three years, I don't blame her one bit.

Oftentimes you would call her house and someone else would answer, someone who didn't even live there. They often had no idea where G.Ma was. She could be out playing Bunco. She could be across the country. She could even be in another country. Her walls were dotted with souvenirs from other places and pictures from eras gone by of people we didn't know, but whose names she remembered distinctly. The only things that provided any sort of roots for her were her grandkids and husband, and her fat cat Snoopy. Other than that, hers was an energy only matched by the hummingbird, her favorite animal.

It's weird to think that she's just gone. She had no funeral, and no burial. She didn't want to complicate things, and didn't want to be remembered as Not Alive. But the sudden finality of her death was weird. It's hard to put in words. I contemplated that while preparing the post for this assignment.

As part of our Child Development classes, we are often tasked to bring in recipes that trigger memories or feelings about our childhood. The purpose is to realize that everything we experience in our young lives adds up to who we are as adults. It's also a great memory game. You know how it is: you're walking along and then suddenly are hit with a scent that takes you back to a warm and fuzzy, "I am safe" memory? I've got tons of those: tortillas, chorizo, Irish Spring soap, chicken & rice.

I chose to present G.Ma's Golumpki (or as we called it, Pigs in a Blanket) for Spring semester's assignment. I thought it was fitting, seeing as G.Ma had died just a few months prior.

Making Golumpki. I had used tomato paste mixed with herb pasta sauce. My baking efforts have their limits!

I used the recipe from Food.com, since it closely resembled what I remembered of the dish. I however used tomato paste blended with a pasta sauce, and cut out most of the herbs required, because I know G.Ma didn't use them. I put a bed of this mixture on the casserole dish, then made rows of the cabbage rolls on top of that, and topped it with the sauce and rosemary.

I had never realized just how much effort went into the Golumpki, and it made me appreciate the times when G.Ma did make them. Prepping the mixture isn't a big deal. Prepping the cabbage takes a bit more time, and rolling the Golumpki takes finesse.

This dish reminds me of the time when my cousins and I were swimming in the pool of her Glendora house, and then she tasked us to knock down wasp nests, which we did with broom handles. We'd run back into the pool and hold our breaths until the wasps had buzzed off...until someone had accidentally shut and locked the gate to the pool. We found out what a bunch of pissed off wasps could do.

We were rewarded with Golumpki, which took the (numerous) stings away from our ordeal. Not once did we question the need to do this weird chore, and not once did we wonder why G.Ma would enlist a bunch of kids to do it for her. I think it's one of those old school things, like kids riding in the bed of a truck or keeping your face cream in the fridge.

My memories of G.Ma are filled with such oddities. I remember picking berries in her backyard, and breaking her tree when I tried to climb it. Mornings were filled with mixing cold cereal samplers and the scent of crayons as we colored 70s coloring books on the big barn table in her German-inspired  kitchen. Evenings were filled with watching TV on her huge turn-dial set. The summers were the best though, filled with sunburns and donuts, swimming and weird German and Polish food like Golumpki.

Yum. If it were sanitary, I'd just eat the batter, not gonna lie.

But it wouldn't be the holidays without a special G.Ma holiday treat: her M&M cookies. It turns out this recipe was most likely lifted and modified from a 1960s Crisco label, and Crisco is a big ingredient in these cookies. Her recipe is but a tripling of the 1960s recipe, which I found at Click Americana. I swap the flour with Bob's Red Mill 1 For 1 Gluten Free Flour and use M&M minis.

G.Ma used to bake a ton of these, plus some other cookies like Fork Cookies, Butter Cookies, Peanut Butter Kiss Cookies, and Sugar Cookies, put them in a huge popcorn tin and give each family one. I don't know how she did it but they'd always be hard as a rock, making coffee, tea, or milk a necessity.

I'll never get a tin of cookies from G.Ma again, but we picked up the tradition without question. We've already created 3 batches of these cookies this Holiday Season, and I just bought enough ingredients to make two more.

Merry Christmas, G.Ma.

G.Ma, my little sister, my cousin, me, and then my middle sister, in 2015.