Eating Christmas: Rosemarie Dombrowski keeps her mom's 'perfect' holiday traditions

Phoenix poet Rosemarie Dombrowski is embracing old holiday traditions this year.

Here's the latest essay in The Show's Eating Christmas collection.

ROSEMARIE DOMBROWSKI: When I was 20, I proudly announced at Thanksgiving dinner that I would no longer be acknowledging a holiday that celebrated colonialism, and I was now a vegetarian. I turned my nose up at the ham, and I've always hated pumpkin pie.

So my mother concocted a recipe for pumpkin spice cake with dark chocolate chips and buttercream frosting. She refused to let go of traditions, but she made every effort to amend them to my approval.

Still, I spent holidays complaining about the meat that was contaminating my food, or the number of holiday installations that were making my mother's tiny townhouse feel oppressive. To be fair, her decorations were classic and beautiful, with just a smattering of those cheesy interactive ones that I always rolled my eyes at.

After dinner, she would grab one of the latter and somehow get us to play like kids again. Her favorite was a voice-activated Santa preloaded with eight Christmas tunes. She told us all we had to do was request a song and Santa would sing it for us.

"Santa, play 'Deck the Halls.'"

"Santa can't quite hear you. Please try again"

"Santa, play 'Joy to the World.'"

"Santa doesn't understand your request. Please try again."

This would go on for minutes, tears streaming down our faces.

As my mother aged, I begged her to move the celebration to my house, which was more than twice the size of hers and just as meticulously decorated. But she refused. Holiday entertaining was her pride and joy, and there was no way she was going to relinquish it.

At least not until 2022. On Christmas afternoon, I picked her up, drove her back to my house, and reheated the veggie pizza I'd ordered the day before. That's the kind of cook I am. While my mom was eating day-old pizza, I complained about my relationship and my upset stomach and all the work that still needed to be done. I complained about everything. It was a typical holiday in that sense.

Yet all she kept saying was, "this is the best Christmas ever." And since it clearly wasn't, I couldn't shake this uneasy feeling.

After dinner, she calmly told me that she had stopped taking all of her medications. I doubled over, struggled to catch my breath.

"You can't just stop taking blood pressure meds, Mom. How many weeks has it been? My God, how many months?"

In her characteristically soft spoken tone, she said, "maybe a couple." Like all the times she'd fallen and not told me, this was yet another secret she'd managed to keep.

When I asked her why, she said, "you're too stressed, too busy, and I didn't want to put anything else on your plate for fear that you'd complain."

A few months later, my mother was in hospice. I played Frankie and Bing, Pavarotti and Bublé, her holiday staples. Last year, I almost put batteries in the singing Santa.

No matter how silly, I'm not interested in new traditions because the ones my mom created, despite all my complaining, were perfect.