Grandma's Traditions

Grandma likes special traditions. When our kids find out that we're going to Grandma's, they always ask if we can make s'mores. (Grandma's actual tradition is roasting hotdogs and eating s'mores, but the kids always seem much more excited about the s'mores than the hot dogs!) Grandma has a fire pit on her patio, so we never have to worry about it being too muddy or too wet to build a fire. She also enjoys the enthusiasm with which they pick up the sticks in her yard for the fire.

Because of Daylight Savings Time, it's never dark enough these days to build a nighttime fire before the kids' bedtime. We have allowed them to stay up late every night during our visit to Grandma's, but the fatigue has caught up with us and made them very cranky. Since we have a nine-hour drive tomorrow with six children, we decided that we must have them in bed on time today. Crankiness is much more difficult to withstand when you're trapped in the car with it. (“Car,” of course, is loosely defined when you have six kids! It's really a huge, black limo van advertising charter service to Las Vegas. We got it on Ebay.)

So we let them make s'mores at 3 p.m. in a chiminea. Grandma had told the kids that she would give them a penny for every sweetgum ball they retrieved from the yard, and they came back with 704 sweetgum balls. They also collected, of their own volition, 294 pine cones. The sweetgum balls became fodder for a new throwing game, and the pine cones ended up in Grandma's chiminea. She thought roasting marshmallows over a pine cone fire would be a great idea. I thought they might taste like a Christmas tree—not that I've ever tasted a Christmas tree, but I did warm up a green bean casserole in the same oven that I had pine potpourri in, and the green bean casserole came out tasting very much like what I suspected a Christmas tree would taste like.

The thick pine cone smoke enveloped my children, stinging their eyes and stealing their breath. Grandma warned us that the pine cones would turn to ashes pretty quickly, and we had a whole package of marshmallows to roast, so we pushed through the inconvenience and roasted away. I prepared the crackers in pairs with a bit of chocolate perched right on top, waiting for the ooey gooey marshmallow to melt it down into the cracker. The sun did a fine job of that, too. It also melted the chocolate I had yet to unwrap and made my job much stickier. A small price to pay, if it meant an early bedtime.

The kids roasted two marshmallows at a time on old, contorted, metal hangers. They skipped back to me to scoop their cooked marshmallows onto the s'more as usual. I sent back Tyler and Tobias, my three-year-old twins, as usual, to cook theirs some more—one side black and crunchy, the other cold and raw! They dropped some on the ground, as usual, and scooped them into the fire with their hands. And when they finally returned, marshmallows bubbling and expanding, and I placed a graham cracker sandwich around them to cleanly scrape it off, I discovered one moderate drawback of daytime marshmallow-roasting.

You can't always see the fire burning.

I suppose the fact that the marshmallows were still bubbling and cooking should have clued me in. Perhaps the very hot sensation on my hands as I closed in on the gooey goodness. At some point, I realized my s'more was on fire, and thinking quickly, I blew it out. I couldn't even see the fire, and I saved the whole neighborhood from a raging inferno. Yes, I am wonder woman. Someone get me a skimpy superhero outfit. Well, not too skimpy. I did just have a baby.

After the kids had enjoyed enough s'mores to make them sufficiently hyper and sticky, I set about cleaning up. The pine cones had indeed turned to ashes, although a few sticks remained with sad little flames struggling to survive. I could still see the heat rising off the ashes, causing visual distortion of the house in the distance, so I stuck the metal hangers in the heat to disintegrate the leftover sticky white marshmallow, most of which was covered in ashes or dirt by this time.

After holding those stupid sticks in the heat for ten minutes, I realized something. That stuff was not going to burn off with just heat. It needed fire. I dug around in the ashes to find those lonely little flames and did my best to burn off the goop.

The Bible talks of the purifying fire in relation to our lives. God cleans our lives with suffering. Of course, the Bible uses gold and silver in its analogy—not marshmallows and metal coat hangers. It's a good thing, too, because when the trials end, I don't want to just be an old bent-up coat hanger. I want to be like gold. I want to be an imitator of God!

Grandma's s'mores tradition will always make the kids smile. They will reminisce about it together for the rest of their lives. I just hope they remember that I'm the one who saved the neighborhood from certain destruction. Even without the costume.