It’s November and my husband Christopher and I have made it through the first six months of marriage. The many storms predicted by our well-meaning friends have blown north of us. We successfully dodge the “Where do we spend our first holiday?” conflict with the flip of a coin. It’s heads, so we decide to drive five hours west to his home in central New York and disappoint my parents this year.
From a sociologist’s perspective, our two families of origin are more similar than not. We both hail from white, working-class communities, our fathers went off to the Korean War, our mothers mostly stayed at home, and we each have two siblings. But if you peeled back the veneer, you would notice significant differences, especially if you happened to stop in during dinnertime.
In my northern European household, meals were civilized affairs. We sat at the kitchen table 357 nights a year. The dining room table was reserved for major holidays, birthdays, and 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles. We never raised our voices or interrupted one another and always valued the quality of food over quantity. (Notice any moralizing in that sentence?) In Christopher’s Italian American home, life centered around one of five strategically placed tables. The question wasn’t if you would sit at the table; it was which one. To this day, his parents’ home has a table in the kitchen, dining room, basement, screened porch, and on the back deck. The table holds epic symbolism in the Greco household.
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