Tuesday, 1/3

It's one tradition I'm more than happy to keep alive.  And I'd like to think my grandmother would approve of it, as well.

First of all, welcome to 2023.  I hope you had a great New Year weekend, and that if you overdid it just a little Saturday night that you're back to normal.  It's been three days, after all, but I DO know how some people like to send out the old year and bring in the new, so if you're one of those...

Hopefully, you've recovered by now.  Hopefully.

Now that we're out of the holiday season we can look back a little at some of the things we did, some of the traditions that we carried on and some traditions that may have fallen by the wayside.  I know that for me the past three years have tossed a BUNCH of holiday traditions out on the street, but on New Years Eve I was able to carry on one that's been around since before I was even born, back in the age of dinosaurs--

The Broken Glass.

This goes back to my Grandma Schwemin (my mom's mom).  Every year for New Year's Day dinner the dessert would be Broken Glass, a dish some call Cathedral Windows.  It's a mix of Jell-O, Dream Whip, and a graham cracker crust, and it's something to which everyone in the extended family would look forward.  She got the recipe out of an old magazine, and my mom ended up with it.  After my Grandma couldn't make it herself any more I was given the task, and even though our family no longer gathers for a big New Year's Day dinner, I still make the dessert, and my siblings and nieces come for their (yummy) piece of family history.

(I know it's family history, by the way, because my niece Mallory once wrote a school paper on the dish and its traditional role.  And you don't wrote school papers on something unless it IS history, right?)

The dish is rather ephemeral; it only lasts a day or so after you make it before it dissolves into a mush.  And that, I suppose, is one of the reasons why it's so special.  That, and the fact that it's been around for every year since before all of us who eat it were born.  And over the past few of those years, I've been wondering about something.

I plan on making the Broken Glass on New Year's Eve for as long as I'm able.  Hopefully, in 40 years I'll still be enjoying it.  But there will (theoretically) come a day when I'm no longer able to put it together.  Will one of my nieces or nephews step up to carry on the tradition?  Will one of their future children (or even grandchildren) take a swing at it?

I have no idea.  And like I said, that's so far in the future that it's probably not anything I need to wonder about at the moment.  But it IS one of the few family holiday traditions that we still carry on, started back in the 1940s, almost 80 years ago.

It would be kinda cool to find out that in another 80 years, around 2102 or so, that the Broken Glass was still being enjoyed by the seventh or eighth generation of Schwemin/Koski family members.  After all, that's what traditions are for, right?

(jim@wmqt.com)