Editor’s note: The author, an international nonprofit management and search consultant, now makes his home in Lee, Mass.
Each Christmas for the last 45 years, my wife and I prepared and hosted a traditional Seven Fish dinner. Consisting of at least seven types of fish, although we count bivalves and mollusks to exceed seven, the dinner is a longtime Sicilian and Sicilian-American Christmas Eve tradition. But that night, in December 2019, was different.
For logistical reasons, we had to celebrate the Christmas Eve Seven Fish dinner on December 21. Lorraine and I began preparing the seafood salad two days prior so that the squid tentacles and baby clams could marinate separately in the oil, garlic, parsley, and lemon. Meanwhile, the shrimp simmered in wine, garlic, oil, and lemon, thus soaking up and amplifying their individual flavors, waiting to be combined with the fennel and celery in the seafood salad. We delicately cleaned the clams, then boiled them in wine ever so lightly until they popped open, then stuffed and flash froze them until they were ready to be baked topped with a dab of butter.
The day before the dinner, we gutted, scaled, stuffed, rolled, and skewered the sardines—heads-off but tails upward—and arranged them between blood orange slices and bay leaves; there they nestled waiting to be baked with orange juice and pomegranate seeds, so they resembled little birds, the famous Sicilian “Sarde Beccafico.” We stuffed three dozen calamari bodies, closed them with toothpicks, and then simmered them in a thick tomato sauce that would cling to the squiggly, bucatini-like pasta. We marinated the onions and prepared the breadcrumbs, raisins, pine nuts, and capers that would envelop the fresh cod served with tomatoes, oregano, and braised escarole.
That day of the faux Christmas Eve dinner, we hosted our 20 family members ranging from our year-old twin grandsons to my 97-year-old mother. Judging by the leftovers, almost none, and the good cheer during the meal, we produced another memorable success. But, alas, it wasn’t Christmas Eve.
And then, there are miracles.
On Christmas eve, our daughter Gianna and her husband and three daughters, invited us to join them to view the Christmas light displays in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn. Dyker Heights, one of the original Brooklyn neighborhoods, was a Dutch settlement, located on one of the highest elevations of Brooklyn, near what is now the Verrazano Bridge. Built as an up-scale development for the privileged class in the late 1800s (“commanding an extensive view of water from Sandy Hook to the New Jersey Palisades”), by the 1960s, Dyker Heights became an Italian-American enclave, dotted with dozens of bakeries, salumerie, restaurants, pizza parlors, and half a dozen Catholic churches and funeral homes. Sometime during the late 1990s and continuing today, many of the single-lot, two-story homes—with neat front yards, statues of the Virgin Mary, slim side driveways and backyard garages—gave way to double lot, three and four-story teardown rebuilds; kitschy behemoths, many with marble facades; “classical” statuary; fluted columns; the same Virgin Mary statues in the front yard; and, since the 1980s, elaborate displays of Christmas lights.
The tradition of outdoor Christmas light displays emigrated from the indoor lighted Christmas tree, which itself was originally a pagan ritual marking the lengthening daylight following the winter solstice. By the 1980s, many Italian-American enclaves in Brooklyn (including my hometown of Canarsie), were characterized by ever-increasing displays of outdoor lighting and vernal tableaux for Christmas. Alfred Polizzotto and his family, who lived in the heart of Dyker Heights, added a pair of 29-foot wooden soldiers standing guard and waving their arms in front of his white mansion to the light show. And, when Alfred recovered from a bout of lymphoma in 1988, in gratitude, he greatly expanded the display. His family continues the tradition today. As do hundreds of others in the neighborhood, engaging in a friendly contest of luminary one-upmanship.
That Christmas Eve night in 2019, the area was bustling with tourists, as thousands of locals, busloads of tourists, and the seven of us in an eight-seater Audi toured the area. We “oohed” and “aahed” at the hundreds of displays, many professionally designed and installed, some costing up to $20,000. But what to do for dinner? On Christmas Eve?
Most of the local Italian restaurants were long gone. The Dyker neighborhood is once again transforming: originally Native, then Dutch, followed by middle class Irish, and then Italian-American. This area of Brooklyn is now mostly populated with Cantonese and mainland Chinese immigrants. So, we traveled a few blocks west to 7th Avenue and 65th street to East Harbor Seafood Palace. There, in a mammoth, searingly incandescent Chinese banquet hall, we sat down to another, albeit different, seven fish dinner: clams with black bean sauce, deep-fried baitfish, stir-fried sea snails, squid and scallops with oyster sauce, and shrimp dumplings.
We had our Seven Fish dinner on Christmas Eve. The tradition continued.
