John Cowan: Giblet Gravy

Family Christmas Dept: Those rituals have been tossed we re less formal now but we still cook most of the same dishes, including turkey hens with giblet gravy and traditional plum pudding served aflame and garnished with holly. And, when global warming doesn t interfere, we still cool our Christmas wine in the snowbank a throwback to my grandmother s icebox days. Ice was precious then and delivered to the door, so cooling the bottles outdoors became habit, according to Globe and Mail. It is there that preparations begin early in December on the rambling property that in 1917 was bought as a wedding present for my grandmother by my great-grandfather, the senator. My uncle and aunt turned the plot s 142-year-old-cottage into their home in the early 1970s and started holding the family Christmas there and from the 1920s to the 1960s, dinner was held in my grandmother s French-style Victorian home in Sarnia, Ont. The table was set with finger bowls that held floating red carnations and a thick chunk of homemade soda bread was wrapped up in the linen napkins a Scottish practice that may have been inherited from my grandmother s husband, John Cowan, whose family was immigrant Scots. Our family, a group that today can swell from 10 to 25, still sits around the table in pre-Confederation leather chairs that were used in the Upper and Lower Canada legislatures. They belonged to my great-great-great-grandfather, Timothy Pardee, a Liberal cabinet minister who voted against his own party to win the right of women to work at Queen s Park. He bought the chairs at a fire sale in Ottawa and used them in his dining room before passing them on to his son, Fred, my great-grandfather, a Liberal senator and house whip for prime minister Wilfrid Laurier. Fred passed them on to his daughter, my grandmother, who gave them to her son, my uncle John, current host of the annual family meal at his house on the shores of Lake Huron. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.