Changing Tradition (final)

Every year we have a family tradition during Christmas time where we pick a day to make strudel. There are dozens of ways you could possibly make strudel, but ours has become a staple during the holiday season. It’s type of pastry, but bigger, filled with fruits, sugar, and nuts. In ours we put sliced apples and pears, cherries, white raisins, chopped up walnuts, sugar, cinnamon sugar, and melted butter. Everything gets added layer after layer onto the Filo dough and then rolled up and shaped into a horseshoe. We place it in the oven, baste it with butter every ten minutes and let it cook for an hour until golden brown and lightly crisp. It is very big and it easily becomes breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the next few days!

It wasn’t very long after I had been a part of this family tradition, until we had to alter its recipe. I was just 4 years old when something in my mouth wouldn’t stop bothering me. I kept going to the dentist because of it and they drilled and refilled it every time I went in, until they realized it was a bigger problem than they thought. I had a tooth that grew in yellow with no enamel and it slowly started decaying; explained to me as a tooth that grows inside out. That’s why it kept giving me trouble. I was too young to have the novacain shot, so I was told the only way to numb me was to use the laughing gas, which was cherry flavored. I thought, “Well this is better than getting a shot, right?” Wrong. The experience was horrible. I just hear drilling and grinding, and I feel objects being forced into my mouth that was obviously too small to fit their 8 different tools all at the same time. An hour or so went by, my lip was hanging there, still numb from the laughing gas, and I had a very sore mouth. This whole dentist experience has made me completely hate cherries.

Cherry flavored candy, cherry flavored popsicles, cherry pie, cherry soda, cherry chip cookies, cherry medicine, cherry licorice, cherry chapstick, and even, you guessed it, cherries themselves are an automatic flashback the memory of a bad experience. I can’t be around the smell of them and I can’t eat anything that even tastes remotely like them because all it does it bring back those memories. So what does this mean for our family tradition? I didn’t know what to do. I thought, “Do I just skip out on eating strudel every Christmas?” “Do I suffer through it and eat it to make my family happy?” I felt bad wanting to change the recipe just because I had a bad experience, but there was nothing I could really do. I didn’t want to miss out on it, it’s tradition.
That year I asked if we could skip the cherries on the strudel. There were people in the family who were a bit sad because, well, they like cherries. Even though some of them were not really too fond of the idea, they were nice enough to say yes to my question. A few years went by just making the strudel with sugar, pears, apples, butter, raisins, and walnuts; no cherries. It started to make me feel bad, so I asked if we could start making two every Christmas; one with cherries, one without. That worked well at first, until it ended up being way too much food for everyone to eat before it went bad. Then I finally had an idea. I don’t know why no one thought of it, or why it somehow never came up, but I told them we can do cherries on half of the strudel, that way we all can have what we want. The recipe didn’t alter too much, but it took a while to get a new family tradition compromised.

All because I had a bad experience, I had to alter our family recipe just a little bit so I can still be a part of enjoying it. For the past eight years strudel has been made the exact same way it started out, but cherries now only make room for half of it. I never expected it to be so difficult, but family is family, and at least they still love me. I hope!