CHRISTMAS DETAILS

DECEMBER 26, 2023 – In the context of a musical performance, my dad used to say that greatness lay in the details—not any single detail, he noted, but in the aggregate effect of all the details. “Therefore,” he said, “as a performer you have to get all the details right.” Dad’s musical refinement came as no surprise. He had a penchant for details in every context.

Recently, I’ve come to the realization that if the “devil is in the details,” so are unexpected wonders. Perhaps it was exactly this perspective that gave Dad so much pleasure in life—though often he was frustrated by other people’s lack of attention to detail.  In any event, my new awareness was especially acute yesterday.

My wife and I “hosted” a Christmas feast and celebration. In the scheme of things it was a fairly modest affair. We had five well-behaved guests—including our favorite granddaughter—who were also full of good cheer and generous spirit. We fit comfortably around a single dinner table, which Beth had decorated ever so handsomely, including a collection of brightly-lit red and green candles of varying heights rising from star-studded gold spangles. Over a red table cloth she’d set the table as elegantly as I’d ever seen it, with the place settings giving exposure to stemware and china normally relegated to Beth’s heirloom “Magellan Chest.” As she’d worked on all of this, I’d noticed her penchant for detail—attention rendered most evident by a pronounced exception to her rule of perfection.

While the two of us worked in the kitchen, she spoke of a . . . flaw. “I noticed,” she said in a tone signaling something was out of kilter, “that among the cloth napkins I want to use, two are stained—despite my having washed and scrubbed them with stain remover. I put them at our places so none of the guests will notice. I folded the napkins so the stains are face down, but when you lift your napkin off the table, don’t call attention to the stain.”

I laughed inside. Perfectionists, I’ve noticed, often have a compunction to point out an imperfection when there’s little they can do to remedy it. The frequent irony is that unless they’d pointed it out, no one would’ve noticed that something wasn’t up to snuff. In instructing me not to point out the stain (something that in a million years would not occur to me), I thought, was she really reminding herself not to do so?

After admiring Beth’s work on the table decorations and settings, I turned to the Christmas tree she’d decorated more than a week ago. Of course I’d noticed it and enjoyed its elegant cheer, but now I was having to pay closer attention so I could hang two wonderful hand-made, hand-painted objets d’art posing as Christmas tree ornaments. Said objets were a gift of my oldest sister, Kristina, and had arrived just the day before.

When Beth asked, “Can you find a place to hang them?” I knew better than to say “Yes,” then hang them, only to learn that no, in fact, I hadn’t found a place to hang them, at least where they wouldn’t be hung elsewhere by the one of us with better aesthetic sensibilities. I deftly encouraged Beth to “find a place to hang them,” and unsurprisingly, she did. In each case that place was perfect. In admiring the new ornaments, I took closer note of all the other ornaments that Beth had previously hung. They’re ornaments that we’ve had for decades, but for the first time I examined them carefully—nay, I relished each and every one of them and how well arranged they were on the tree. Individually and collectively, these diverse, bright shiny objects gave me great delight.

Details. Details that make life a little bit better than would otherwise be the case—but only, I thought, if you slow down enough to observe and appreciate them.

Unfortunately, my newfound appreciation for the finer points of Christmas decorating did not extend to the execution of one of my (simple) kitchen assignments: making pumpkin pie using canned filling and a frozen crust.

The worst of it is that I’d had the advantage of a practice run at Thanksgiving. One sure sign of dumbness, though, is repeating a mistake relatively soon after the original gaffe. In my case at Thanksgiving my error was filling the pie crust resting on a cookie sheet lying on a countertop four feet from the oven. In transferring the cookie sheet-with-pie to the oven, the filling slopped over the sides of the crust and spilled all over the cookie sheet.

Lesson learned.

Well, not exactly. For the Christmas version I placed the cookie sheet on top of the stove. Given the short distance to the oven rack below, I figured spillage could be avoided altogether or at least minimized.

Theory didn’t translate to practical success. Of course, Beth had to be watching the whole operation so she could point out the obvious—obvious to someone smarter than the pie man. “What you should do is scoop out the excess filling, put it in a Pyrex dish and bake it separately, like a custard.”

“Of course,” I said. In self-effacement I wanted to add, “And I went to elementary school where?” But instead, I readily followed Beth’s suggestion, then pulled out a new cookie sheet, placed the pie on it and put the thing in the oven—no more muss, no more fuss. And to enhance my redemption, I rinsed off the first cookie sheet without incident—mindful of the detail at Thanksgiving involving 10-minutes of scraping the hard-baked spillage off the cookie sheet.

While the next hour ensued, I had no idea that the damn pie would fail due to a far more serious detail than filling spillage. My clue came after I stuck a knife into the center of the pie to test whether it was fully baked. A small bit of filling did stick to the knife, which, naturally, I licked off. No, I didn’t burn my tongue, though that possibility had crossed my mind. Instead I moved my tongue around a bit inside my mouth to make sure my taste buds were getting full exposure to the sample of pumpkin pie filling that I’d licked off the knife. Something’s missing, I thought.

I didn’t have to think much longer. The missing something was the sine qua non of every dessert ever invented in the history of the world: sugar. I’d forgotten to load up the filling mixture with the half-a-cup of unadulterated sugar that the recipe on the back of the can had called for!

I pulled out the Pyrex dish of extra filling—which by then was baked to perfection—extracted a spoonful, let it cool, and sampled it. Only with extreme imagination could I convince myself that the pie filling was edible. Beth then sampled it and without hesitation announced that “no way is this edible.”

Details. Unless, of course, one deems that half-a-cup of sugar isn’t a detail but the central ingredient of a dessert pie.

Not all was lost, however. I discovered that the pie was perfectly salvageable (for me) if I microwave a piece for 30 seconds, sprinkle it liberally with granulated brown sugar, then lay down a thick coat of sweetened whipped cream. Bonus land: the whole pie is mine.

My new awareness of details brings me new appreciation for them. And with that heightened appreciation comes added delight to my life. Dad would surely know exactly what I’m talking about, but I can also hear him saying—in good humor—“What took you so long?”

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson