The Alphabet Game - A is for...

Art. The obvious choice so for that reason alone I'm not going to use it.

I thought this was a clever little exercise that madamebutterfly is doing over at A New Start so I thought I'd give it a try.

A is for...art. No, no.

A is for...Ambrosia.

The Nectar of the Gods. When I was growing up, ambrosia was served at our table only once a year and that was on Christmas Eve. It was part of the dessert to our formal meal with the fine china and crystal and fancy duds. My father would wear his tux, my brother in his suit, my sister and I in our best fancy dresses and our mother in her finest evening gown and often we had guests as well. We even had servants. Well, we had a servant 5 nights a week but on Christmas Eve we had three servants. There was the young man and his wife my father hired to tend bar at parties and our regular maid. Our maid would cook the dinner and Cecil and Ruby would serve it and clean up.

We also had a once a year salad which was made from canned spiced pears, which were red, with cream cheese applied with a decorator frosting tip so that the pears became a Santa face with beard and hat.

The ambrosia was served with angel food cake. I actually thought for a long time that what we called ambrosia and had for dessert was what the Greek gods ate in the stories. I had started reading stories about the Greek gods in the third grade so I knew about these things. I'm pretty sure now though that what we were eating and what they were eating was not the same thing. What we were eating was really just a fruit salad consisting of peeled and sectioned oranges and grapefruit with bananas and coconut. None of which is particularly exotic. I think what elevated it to the status of ambrosia was the amount of work that went into preparing it. Peeling and sectioning citrus fruit is a task unto itself, getting all the white stuff off, slipping the knife between the fruit and the thin membrane that separated the pieces. That and the coconut.

The coconut which we would buy whole. Deciding which one to get took careful examination and plenty of shaking to make sure we could hear the milk inside. Once we got it home it went through the ritual of seeing who could drive the screwdriver through an eye with the hammer with all of us wanting to try on each other. Eventually the holes would be made and the milk drained out with each of us daring the other to drink it. With the milk drained we'd bash it with the hammer til it broke up in smaller pieces and we could pry the meat out. I love fresh coconut and would grab several chunks and eat them on the spot. And have my hand slapped away the rest of the day as I tried to steal away more.

I don't know where the tradition came from, it just always was and was to be ever so if our mother had anything to say about it. The thing is, no one really liked either the ambrosia or the angel food cake. The grapefruit was always sour and the oranges weren't always sweet and not every one was a fan of bananas and I had long had my fill of coconut by that time and the angel food cake more often than not tasted like cardboard.

But every year we had ambrosia and angel food cake for dessert on Christmas Eve.