did the baby say stuffing? a Xmas miracle

My niece Ruby was nine months old for her first Christmas. My sister, Flannery, and Ruby came over to my house for a Christmas Eve supper with me and my daughter, Rosie. My sister had just moved to our city, plus this was her first Christmas as a mother. As I read this today, Ruby is a sophomore at Smith College. Rosie is a Vice President of Operations for a real estate development company and hasn't spoken to me in over fourteen years.

Rosie and I had few Christmas traditions. We had tried to visit relatives over Thanksgiving because we preferred to spend Christmas in our own home. This gave us the gift of avoiding the Christmas fights. Eventually, we gave up on traveling for winter holidays because we always ran into snow. Snow can ruin a drive across the Great Plains and snow can ruin air travel.

Staying home for Christmas, we had Cornish game hens for dinner on Christmas Eve. Without my sister and niece, we had usually to the Basilica, the Catholic Cathedral in Minneapolis to listen to the choir sing Christmas hymns but we bugged out before midnight mass.  We went out for Chinese food on Christmas Day. We were regulars at the same Chinese restaurant throughout the year. Going there on Christmas always felt special. A popular restaurant all year,  the place was almost empty on Christmas.  Minnesotans, not even its Jews, had not fully embraced a tradition of going out for Chinese on Christmas.
Some years we spent time on Christmas with friends but we always spent a lot of quiet time together, just the two of us. And we always went to The Great Wall for Christmas Day dinner, usually after going to a movie. Rosie always got the mandarin chicken. I always got the kung pao shrimp. And we always promised one another, on the way over, that we'd order something different that time but we never did.

My sister had decided that she and Ruby would spend their first Christmas Day alone together so they had come over for Christmas Eve supper. I served stuffed game hens, as I did every Christmas Eve. We probably exchanged gifts that evening but I don't remember presents.  I had not cooked a cornish game hen for Ruby, my niece, because she did not eat much solid food and she had only hints of her first teeth breaking through her gums.

As we sat down to dinner, seeing my daughter, my sister and my niece as shimmering orbs around my table, I was happy. Perfectly happy.  I remember noting that my daughter was more vibrant than usual. I realized our somewhat lonely holidays had not met her extroverted nature. Rosie was lit up by our dinner guests.   I loved my sister Flannery and my little niece Ruby deeply but I found myself loving them just a little bit more that evening as I noted Rosie's joy to be with them.  This was her first 'big' family Christmas with me. Well, we had had a couple big ones when she was a baby but she might not have remembered those. This felt like our first big holiday together, she and I, plus my sister and the plumpling angel. Sometimes we went to friends' homes on Christmas day but I think this was the first time Rosie and I had Christmas company. What special guests! In my mind's eye, we had candlelight but I don't think we actually did.

Having a baby around is always bliss. A baby at Christmas more so. Ruby was at a peak of perfect plumpness. I think of how many nativity paintings have a radiant light focused on the Christ child. All babies glow like this for me and Ruby was alive with radiant light that evening. My daughter,  thirty two, still dazzles me, in memory, with her radiance when I think of her, the loving madonna cradling her red-cheeked bundle of joy.  Rosie was the most dazzling that evening, for me at least. I was blissed out, surrounded by three angelic beings I loved unconditionally and bedazzledly. If that is a word and if it isn't who cares!

My sister, born was I was fourteen, was as much a daughter to me as a sister. Our mother had never really cared to tend to her babies and had turned over as much care of her babies to me as she could. I had spent more time with Flannery when she was an infant, then toddler, than our mother ever had. Mom spent as much time as possible out of the house. As the eldest daughter, I tended all mom's babies. And mom gave me quite a brood. When Flannery was born, I was also caring for two year old Dave and four year old Tom, rocketing home from school to get the latest babies from their babysitters, pressured to get them as soon as possible to save on the hourly babysitting fees mom paid while she tried to finish the college degree she had abandoned when she had married our father at age 19.


In my mind's eye, I keep looking around that table,  from Rosie to Flannery to Ruby, then back to Rosie, around and around, noting the radiance in each of these women as they sat around my table, loving them with all my heart. I had this experience at the time as well, looking loving at each of my beloveds around that table. Rosie, a high school freshman, was doing a spiky thing with mousse in her hair. She was wearing a brown velvet dress. A fancy dress. Flannery was a picture perfect madonna, with her thick, blonde hair and red-lipsticked lips. And Ruby. Ruby wore red, a precious jewel in any color but she popped in red.

They were all beautiful. I loved and love all of them so much. Just sitting at that table with the three of them was all the Christmas gift I needed.

We began eating, all of us chattering happily. The meal was not very fancy. My big flourish had been to place a few tablespoons of stuffing in each of the three tiny birds. We joked about that stuffing. It was delicious but it seemed like such a lot of trouble for such a small return. Digging it out of the tiny birds for such a tiny reward. Two tablespoons, maybe three.  We talked about stuffing recipes. Flannery was partial to stuffing with chestnuts. I noted aloud that I liked chestnuts in stuffing but I was partial to stuffing with walnuts. Rosie was fussy, sliding into the eating disorder that I had not yet allowed to enter my conscious awareness.  Rosie, my baby even at fourteen, liked her stuffing plain: no walnuts, no celery, no onions, just those seasoned cubes of bread one buys in bags stuffed into our cornish game hens. The stuffing this night was plain, one of my gifts to Rosie. We were all happy to have it the way Rosie liked it. Who cared?! Stuffing, stuffing, stuffing. We had a lot to say about stuffing that evening. We had all shared, in aimless detail, how we each liked our stuffing. And shared tales of stuffings past.  Just silly, aimless chatter, the company being what mattered.

Which might explain what happened next. It was a Christmas miracle.

Flannery was feeding Ruby tiny bites of stuffing. With no walnuts, celery or onions, the soft bread of that stuffing was safe to feed our baby. Ruby had just begun to eat solid foods. She couldn't eat the poultry. She didn't like the cranberries. Ruby liked that stuffing.

As we laughed and chatted about all things stuffing, Flannery began to exclaim, "Look at Ruby! Look how she likes the stuffing!" We all gazed adoringly at our baby as she opened and shut her mouth, fishlike, to indicate she wanted more.

"Here," I said, "She can have my stuffing." And I scooped out my tiny portion of stuffing and put it on my sister's plate.

My sister kept feeding the baby stuffing. We were all rapt, joyfully watching Ruby gobble stuffing as fast as my sister could spoon it into her mouth.

"She can have my stuffing, too!" Rosie exclaimed. This was a miracle in itself. Rosie was fussy about sharing her food. She had never been willing to share food, not even when she was a baby herself. She was a little OCD. When Rosie offered her stuffing to Ruby,  we all exalted. I think my sister and I may have squealed our surprise. It was so perfect that such a little thing could make us all so happy.  Our backnoise was filled with more aimless talk about stuffing.

"Stuffing!" Ruby said.

Ruby was not yet talking. She and her mother communicated, of course, but we were not yet thinking of Ruby as someone who could talk.

"Did she just say stuffing?!" my sister cried out.

"Did she just say stuffing?!" my daughter cheered.

"She did, she did. She said stuffing. Ruby say it again. Stuffing. Say 'stuffing! She said stuffing. I know I heard it right." We all chattered, repeating the word stuffing over and over, hoping to coax the baby into saying it again. "Say stuffing, Ruby, say stuffing!"  "Say it again, stuffing!"

"Give her some more stuffing, maybe she'll say it then."

"She's already eaten all of it."

We dug around our poultry carcasses looking for more stuffing. It  was all gone.

"It was not our imagination. That baby said stuffing." Stuffing stuffing stuffing. All three of us kept exclaiming the same things. We were so thrilled that our baby had finally said a comprehensible word and such a complex one. Stuffing is not a daily vocabulary word. We all nodded meaningfully back and forth, signaling to one another that our baby was a genius if her first word was stuffing. We remarked repeatedly on how stuffing was a complex word to be her first comprehensible one. A genius! We had a baby genius!

Her first sentence, which came a short time later was 'ree-da-buk'. Read the book. She was read to a lot and she liked it. She sometimes said 'ree-da-buk' dozens of times in a day, pleading the adults around her to read her another book.  At first, we resisted believing she was saying a whole sentence. We told ourselves it had been our imagination. Nope. She definitely was saying "read the book", baby short hand for 'read me a book'.

A genius. She's a sophomore at Smith this year, majoring in math and statistics. On a full academic ride. Once a genius always a genius.