Eating Christmas: How the kitchen became a safe space for Christopher Hooper

Growing up in rural Arizona, Phoenix storyteller Christopher Hooper spent a lot of time in one particular room of the house. Here’s the latest essay in this year’s Eating Christmas series.

CHRISTOPHER HOOPER: I grew up thinking the holidays lived in the kitchen. The smell of bacon sizzling, cinnamon rolls just ready to come out of the oven, and laughter that left tears on your face.

My first memories were at my grandparents’ house, in my birthplace of Bagdad, Arizona. My mom had me four days after her 17th birthday and went off to nursing school in Phoenix, so I lived with my grandparents, three uncles, and an aunt.

They called me “Chrissy Toy.” I was special, the first of the next generation.

My grandmother, Marvella, was Texas to her core, and my grandfather, Chick Jr., was from Oklahoma and was kind and steady as a rock. Every Sunday, she made black-eyed peas, ham hocks and cornbread that my grandfather would crumble into a bowl of buttermilk while he read the newspaper with me on his lap. Most kids had picture books; I had the classifieds and the obituaries.

I started my life raised by southern folks who still remembered the Depression in the way they would leave nothing but bone on a piece of fried catfish.

During the holidays, when we would all come together, the men watched sports while I was in the kitchen with the women. I picked herbs from the backyard of my grandma, watched pies cool on the windowsill and shared snacks with our little black poodle named Satan. He was my first best friend. And some people wonder why I turned out gay.

The last Christmas we spent together before I left my grandparents, I remember my Aunt Ricky pressing her face to the window and whispering, I see Santa. I see Rudolph’s nose. Do you see it? And I thought I saw it. She wanted me to believe, and I did.

After my mom got married, we moved to Phoenix to live with my new stepfather. And life got complicated.

My stepfather was an alcoholic. Holidays were the one time that he was on his best behavior. And my mother tried to make every holiday something to remember.

When I was 8, my mom, Ruby Faye, taught me to fry chicken and make biscuits like a true southern lady, and soon I was making full meals for everyone.

The kitchen became this safe room when the rest of the house felt like it was going to explode.

At 16, I moved out on my own and I wrote my grandmother a letter, and I told her I was gay. And she wrote back, and she said she loved me no matter what and that I was “special” and always would be.

When Alzheimer’s took most of her memory, my aunt told me she was foggy most days — except when I called. She’d snap into focus, tell me stories about Texas and her five sisters, and picking cotton as a small child in the Dust Bowl of West Texas, then slip back into the fog when I hung up.

The last time we talked, I was 36. She was in the hospital bed. She told me she was scared, and I didn’t know what to say, so I went back to what always worked. “Grandma, tell me a story,” I said. So she did, and she died the next day.

I spent my whole life in restaurants and kitchens. I went to culinary school and now I have a small baking business making desserts that make people happy and remind me of those years with the people who loved me the most. Every time I crack an egg, have my fingers in dough, smell that sizzling bacon and whip up some biscuits and gravy, they’re all there: Satan waiting for crumbs, my grandfather with his bowl of cornbread, my mother frying chicken, my aunt at the window pointing at Rudolph, and my grandmother making those black-eyed peas and telling me stories.

The holidays aren’t the same as they were. Everyone but my aunt and one uncle have passed on.

But every holiday, I share that legacy with my husband and my friends. I go back to the place that has always been full of love and laughter — the kitchen — and when I cook, I’m never cooking alone.