Preserving Memories of People and Places in Family Recipes

After finding handwritten recipe binders from her deceased mother and grandmother, Fearless Fabulous You's Melanie Young decides to preserve their memories by preparing the dishes and writing about these two empowering women. She says, "making a family recipe and sharing a story about the person who used to prepare it can be an emotional glue that binds everyone together to recognize that person who is no longer seated at the table." Turn making an old family recipe into a new holiday tradition.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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(00:21):
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Speaker 2 (00:22):
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Speaker 3 (00:45):
Welcome to Fearless Fabulous You. I am your host, Melanie Young.
You can find me on Instagram at Melanie Fabulous. I
hope you are enjoying the holidays. It is twenty twenty four,
it is the start of Thanksgiving Week, and I hope
you were with family, preparing a wonderful meal and gathering

(01:08):
people around. This show is going to be about tradition
and the meaning of what certain dishes can do to
evoke memories of those who are with you. Now are
those who were with you, and how important it is
to preserve those memories through food. I'm doing this because
someone posted on Facebook recently that losing a loved one

(01:33):
around the holidays is like feeling like the family is
becoming unglued. And I understand that I lost three of
my beloved relatives my grandmother, my father, and my mother
close to the holiday season. Not the same ere, thank goodness,

(01:53):
but I did. So the holidays are bittersweet for me,
needless to say, I no longer have my grandparents, I
no longer have my parents, I have no brothers and sisters.
But I do have a wonderful husband, David, and we
will be enjoying the holidays together, which brings me to this.

(02:14):
When this individual posted that he felt like the family
had lost its glue, I responded, as many did, sympathetically saying,
we understand how you feel. So many people said I
feel the same way. I've lost a loved one. There'll
be an empty seat at the table. We can't replace

(02:36):
that person. That will be a sadness. But my response
also was find a new type of glue. Be the glue.
You can create the glue that combine the family together
in a new way. And I added, this is a
time where the empty seat allows you to fill it

(02:58):
with a happy memory. Create a new seat for someone
else to bring to your table. The holidays are also
a nice time to create your own tradition. I'm doing
that now because I don't have a family home to
go to anymore. I sold it. I don't have parents
to celebrate with. I don't have that large family. But

(03:21):
what I have is a tradition that I've carried through
that my parents started many Thanksgivings ago. Being an only child,
my mother hated to cook, her parents were no longer alive.
After we used to spend many wonderful holiday gatherings at
my maternal grandparents' home, my parents decided to create a

(03:41):
new tradition with me, their only child and daughter, and
that was that every Thanksgiving we would take an adventure.
We would go somewhere and celebrate as a family unit
of three in a beautiful location and enjoy the local scenery,
the low local cuisine, and time spent together. I can't

(04:03):
begin to tell you how many happy memories that tradition
means to me even today, even though my parents are
no longer alive, but I continued the tradition with my husband.
We travel every Thanksgiving, usually to Hawaii, where we have
a time share and enjoy time together. I have so
many wonderful memories of this tradition. My parents started it.

(04:27):
We went to Bermuda, we went to Harbor Island, Bahamas.
We went several times to Mexico. One time, my husband
at the time, my then boyfriend, David, invited my parents
up to meet his family and new Poults, and my
parents came and we had a New York Thanksgiving. Unfortunately,
my boyfriend then didn't propose, and my mother wasn't so

(04:49):
happy about that. But the following year, my mother invited
my then boyfriend now husband, David to join us on
a family vacation over Thanksgiving to Hawaii, and that was
the first time that we all traveled together, my mother,
my father, David, and I on a holiday together and
it was to Hawaii, and believe it or not, it

(05:10):
is now where I spent our Thanksgiving. It's kind of
a little memory of that first trip together. And it
is our time to be away and have a beautiful
time together with different type of food, no turkey necessarily,
maybe some great ahi tuna, but it is our tradition.

(05:30):
Many of you may not be traveling for the holidays.
It can be very stressful. I totally get it, and
it's more important to bring the family together to your
home or to a family member's home. So use this
opportunity to create memories and traditions through food. Give you
some examples here, because my original memories of the holiday

(05:53):
were around my grandmother's my maternal grandmother's table, and there
were four days in particular that meant a lot prepared
by four women, my aunt Rachel, my grandmother Rose, my
mother Sonya, and Bertie. Bertie was the help. She was
the lady who helped my grandmother in the kitchen. She

(06:16):
had some really good talents. Many years later, long after
my grandmother and grandfather died, long after my mother and
father decided they were not going to host a Thanksgiving
dinner and said they wanted to travel and bring me
with them. And sadly, long after my parents both died
and my husband and I now travel together over Thanksgiving.

(06:39):
Even though we have hosted, we used to host a
few in New York. I was packing up our home
in Tennessee where my mother passed away, was my family home,
and as we were going through the house, I found
in a box the's binders. They were spiral bound binders,
those kind of loose leaf kind with the Why Insider,

(07:01):
the notepaper, the old fashioned writing paper you had as
a kid, and on each page were these handwritten index
cards with recipes in different handwriting. And I was so
excited about them because they were my grandmother's cookbooks. They
were recipe books, really not cookbooks. That it contained recipes

(07:22):
from her friends and from family that she gathered and
carefully pasted in this book. One of the books was
marked savory, the other was marked sweet. And after my
grandmother died, my mother gathered these books and kept the recipes,
and I felt like I had found buried treasure. I

(07:43):
can actually visualize as I look at some of these
cards what the dish looked like when my grandmother served
it or Bertie cooked it, depending on who was making it.
And I can also visualize some of the women whose
names are mentioned. And I've decided that one of the
traditions I will create, besides traveling of the holidays, is

(08:05):
I will learn to make these dishes and update them
and preserve them and cherish them to continue the tradition
of the women who cooked in my family. That's a
pretty big thing for me because I actually do no cooking.
My husband does all the cooking. But these recipes mean
a lot because they tie me to the women who

(08:27):
shaped me as a person. Why am I sharing this
to you because I want you to try to do
that as well. If you're feeling unglued or detached this holiday,
maybe unnerve, maybe this wasn't the greatest year, why don't
you go and find a family recipe or a cookbook

(08:48):
with recipes you love and learn it and create it
and serve it and make it your own tradition for
the holidays. It doesn't even have to be a traditional one,
but give it a story you picked it. I think
it's a special thing to do for me. These specific
recipes bring me comfort in knowing that even though the

(09:09):
people who I loved are no longer with me, their
recipes are behind and I can remember them by cooking them.
The first one I'll share with you is and I
have many recipes for noodle kugel because I grew up
Southern Jewish and every good Jewish Southern woman had noodle kugel.
It was always served at Thanksgiving or Hanika. My mother

(09:33):
actually celebrated Christmas Eve. That was her holiday. Whatever holiday,
there was always a kougel. But the best of the bunch,
and I have here. I'm looking at the cards. I
have four Coogle recipes, Sonya's roses, somebody else's, but the
one we all love and remember was Aunt Rachel's noodle kugel.
But before I tell you about the recipe and the dish,

(09:54):
let me tell you about Aunt Rachel and why she
was important in my life. Rachel came from the Old Country,
somewhere in Eastern Europe, probably Russia, most likely Lithuania, because
many years later I realized through reading papers that most
of my family came from Lithuania. In the eighteen hundreds,
Is settled in the United States. Aunt Rachel came later,

(10:17):
I'm not sure when, but she married my great uncle Lewis,
whose parents settled in chad Nooga. There were seven brothers
and one sister. Aunt Rachel married Uncle Lewis and they
had a home in Chattanooga, where I grew up with
two daughters about the same age as my mother, Doris
and Shoshana, and Aunt Rachel was widowed early on. Uncle

(10:41):
Lewis died of a heart attack, and I just remember
Aunt Rachel, Grandma Rose, who I called Mimi, and Aunt Bertha,
and my mother and Bertie the help were always working.

Speaker 4 (10:52):
On holiday planning around Thanksgiving and Russa Shaana and the
holidays which we call Honka Honymous whatever it was, it
was the end of the year.

Speaker 3 (11:05):
Aunt Rachel was a beautiful woman with the most silkiest,
creamiest complexion and had a beautiful dark hair, not a
streak of gray. She had a Eastern European lilt in
her accent, and she was always perfectly dressed and very
dedicated to causes like hadassa, as was my grandmother. Back then,

(11:28):
all the ladies were real pearls, real gold earrings, hats
and white gloves wherever they went. And I'm so blessed,
but I still have some of those pieces of jewelry
and I have the gloves. Great mementos of my grandmother
and Aunt Rachel, but the best memento of Aunt Rachel
are her recipes. Sadly, Aunt Rachel died in a high

(11:48):
rise fire. It was very traumatic and that is why
she's one of the women who impacted my life. Aunt
Rachel loved to sew and knit, and the night of
the fire she was doing just so. She was sewing,
watching television on her tenth floor condominy of apartment in
a building called the Continental in Chattanooga that I could

(12:10):
actually see from our family home in River Hills. So
when my mom and dad and I drove home after dinner,
an early dinner, and it was dark, I believe it
was autumn and the cooler months, because that seems like
when everyone in my family passes away. We saw a
fire at the Continental apartments and I just remember going, Oh,

(12:32):
my goodness, there's a fire and it's a high rise.
How are all those people going to get out? My
parents left me at home and raced over to my
grandfather and grandmother's house, which was not too far away.
For some reason, we all lived in this small area
within five minutes dry from each other. Sadly, everyone escaped

(12:55):
the high rise fire except my aunt Rachel. She used
the the fire escape, which you would think was safe
to walk down ten flights of stairs to safety. Unfortunately,
she was overcome by smoke on the third floor and died.
And the headlines were terrible. I still had the newspaper clips,

(13:16):
which I also found in boxes of newspaper clips about
my family as I packed up my family home. It
brought back some really sad memories of losing someone in
a high rice fire, and as a result, I refused
to live in a high rise for the rest of
my life. And you can only imagine what it was
like during September eleventh, watching those poor people falling out

(13:37):
of being trapped in the World Trade Center. It brought
back all those memories of Aunt Rachel. She was a
wonderful woman and it was a terrible way for her
to die. It all impacted me deeply. But what I
choose to do is remember what I loved most about
Aunt Rachel, and that she was a sweet, kind, beautiful

(13:58):
woman and an amazing She made Cola. She made great cheesecake,
I mean really good cheesecake. I don't even like cheesecake,
but I liked her cheesecake. But the noodle coogle, which
I did make once I found the recipe card is
right in front of me and I will share it
with you. It's so easy. Basically, you get a Pyrex

(14:19):
square pan and you butter it, preheat the oven to
three point fifty. You get three eggs, six ounces of
cream cheese, two small packages, one half pint of sour cream,
one stick of butter, of which you'll reserve two and

(14:39):
a half tablespoons ten ounces or a package of egg noodles,
one cup of crushed corn flakes, the juice of one
half lemon plus grated rine, and one fourth to one
third cup sugar. Now I love these handwritten recipes. Nothing

(15:00):
is exact, so you're gonna have to play around with
a little bit because they were not recipe tested. Trust me.
And Rachel says in this handwriting, which is clearly hers,
boil the noodles in salted water as per packaged directions, drain,
beat the eggs, add the sugar, the melted butter. It's

(15:22):
interesting she doesn't say melt the butter. So melt the butter,
add the sour cream, mashed cream cheese. Now that's so
funny because in this wonderful recipation everyone mentions cream cheese.
Oh here it is six ounces of cream cheese. Okay, okay,
lemon juice and combined with the noodles. So basically all

(15:43):
the ingredients you mix with the noodles. You pour the
mixture into the pyrex dish, the well buttered pyrex dish,
and then on top you pour the quarter flakes, and
then you put a little melted butter. That two and
haf tablespoons and melted butter. Drizzle over the corn flakes,

(16:05):
bake in the oven three hundred and fifty degrees for
one hour, and then remove. Now. The other option is aunt.
Rachel says, is you can wait and top at the
corn flakes later, but I think they're better cooked on
top and really crispy. This is a noodle kogel that
is sweet and savory, very creamy and moist, and I

(16:29):
love it. It's interesting because I found my mother's version,
Sonya's koogle. And she says, three eggs beaten, one half
cup sugar plus one half teaspoons salt, one heaping cup
of cottage cheese, one pint of sour cream. Wow, what's
a lot of dairy? Mix well, and then add the
cooked noodles. Meld a half a stick butter or margarine

(16:52):
well back. Then they use margarine in a Pyrex dish,
then pour the noodle mixture over it. She says. Crush
the small box of cornflikes a small box like a
kiddie box, spread over the noodles, Sprinkle with grated orange
peel or lemon peel, and bake one hour at three
point fifty so one of these noodle coogl dishes has

(17:14):
cottage cheese. One does not as cream cheese. They're both wonderful.
One is in my mother's handwriting, serving eight. One is
in my aunt Rachel's. I love the fact that these women,
all of the same heritage and family, the Winer family
who immigrated over from Lithuania in the eighteen hundreds, all

(17:35):
have their coogl recipes. And you know what, I plan
to make every single one of them. I'm holding another
one here. It's a potato coogle, which really is kind
of like a uh dauphin wa potato. Five large potatoes grated,
one medium onion grated, three eggs, three teaspoons of mazzameal

(17:57):
this is my grandmother rose, teaspoon of salt, one teaspoon
and pepper, six tablespoons of oil or chicken fat. This
is really old school. You grate the potatoes and onions,
you squeeze the water out, you add eggs, mazzameal, and
salt and pepper. Put into a nine by nine pyrex
pan the whole mixture and drizzle with butter and bake

(18:22):
of three seventy five. These are all Coogel recipes and
they're all from the women who impacted my life. God
bless them. I plan to master Kogle. I never thought
I would, but I'm gonna use my noodle to create
my own version with these. Another dish that I found
and it wasn't my favorite, that the men loved it,

(18:43):
and it's very traditional Southern Jewish and it's meat rolling cabbage.
It's so funny. I'm looking at two different handwritten versions
that appear to be my grandmother's. One is on a
basic like jotted down on what looks like a notepad.
The other is jotted down on literally a prescription for

(19:05):
Soma tablets whatever those are from some Cornwallis labs. They're
both handwritten in what appears to be my mother's handwriting,
and it's for meat rolling cabbage. And they go like this,
one large can of tomatoes, one can of tomato paste,
two cans of tomato sauce, two onions chopped up, and

(19:31):
it looks like a head of cabbage boiled for two
heads of cabbage here, I'm not quite sure, but boiled
you cook rice, you steam, and then you make meat both.
This is the craziest recipe. I won't even go into it.
This is my mother's You couldn't cook, but my grandmother's

(19:52):
was boil one cup of rice per three pounds of
ground beef. Separate cabbage leaves, cut off the tough spine
of the cabbage. Separate leaves and boil them for about
She has twenty and then crossed out in handwriting, she
adds twenty five minutes. Put in one cup of onion
in a Dutch oven, she says, Add one can or

(20:17):
of whole tomatoes, one can of tomato paste, three tablespoons
of lemon juice, two tablespoons brown sugar to start boil
the mixture. Add more sugar and lemon. Mind you, this
is all handwriting. Mix in the meat, three eggs and
rice and water to light create. Put the meat in

(20:40):
bad in the base of the cabbage, roll up the leaves,
and then bake it three fifty for thirty minutes. I'm
not you know, I'm going to do with something very special.
I'm going to write these recipes down because they're all
scratched in handwriting. I'm going to test these recipes, and
then I'm going to share them with my family. Why
because this is about creating preservation of memories through recipes,

(21:05):
through meals, through meal memories, and isn't that what the
holidays are all about? Meal memories. I'm going to share
two more recipes that I actually know by heart now
because my mother taught them to me and I've actually
cooked them for my husband. One is squash pudding score
squash pie. It is such a Southern recipe. Everyone I

(21:27):
know in the South makes a version of squash pudding
or squash pie. It's all made in a pie pan.
I take five or six winter squashes, yellow squashes, cut
them up, boil them in salted water, mash them, add salt,
add pepper to tastes. Because none of us seem to
use measurements when we do this, I add some chopped

(21:51):
about half of a chopped onion, very chopped up. Finally,
I add half a cup of parp grated parmesan cheese.
You can also do this with cheddar cheese, with the
cheese of your choice. I like mine less cheesy. I
put the whole mixture. I add two eggs, beat them up,

(22:11):
add them to the mixture. Put the entire mixture in
a pie pan. Top with corn flakes or Great netflakes,
because my grandmother used corn flakes. My mother used Great neutflikes,
whatever was the best price at the cereal department. Drizzle
some milted butter on top, Bake in the oven three

(22:33):
point fifty for roughly forty five minutes. When you take
it out, it is a sizzling, delicious squash pudding. You
can add more cheese, you can add breadcrumbs for the topping,
whatever you do. I would butter the bottom of the pan.
My grandmother liked to add more butter. I like to
add less butter. But that's my family recipe. Hand the

(22:55):
down grandmother to mother to Melanie, and I have no
one leave it to, but I share it with you. Finally,
one last recipe that really probably means even more than
in the savory department, even more than the squash pudding,
was the way my mother and my grandmother and Bertie

(23:16):
the Help made sweet potatoes, which I have with the
love sweet potatoes. My favorite way to eat sweet potatoes
these days is simply baked, really baked, drizzled with olive oil,
salt and pepper, and top with cottage cheese I'm so basic,
or goat cheese. I love that my grandfather loved eating
it that way. We were both baked potato fiends whether

(23:38):
it was a baked potato or sweet potato, and I
always have one for Thanksgiving. But my mother and my
grandmother had sweet tooths, so our traditional Southern recipe for
sweet potatoes went like this. They would take an orange.
They would scoop out the orange meat and reserve it

(24:00):
to make and use with cranberry sauce. They would boil
a sweet potato, mash it with butter, salt, and pepper
till it was very finely mashed. They would scoop up
the mashed sweet potato and put it into the carved
out orange half. Picture it orange, an orange, sweet potato

(24:23):
mashed up in an orange half. And then they would
take a plain old fashioned marshmallow, one of the big ones,
not the little tiny ones, the big ones, and they
would top it on top mush it into the mashed
sweet potato. They would put those oranges with the sweet
potato and the marshmallow in an oven under a broiler.

(24:44):
I don't know how long, but long enough that that
marshmallow was perfectly roasted with that brown black crunchiness on top.
They would take it out and it was always so
sweet and delicious. Sometimes my mother would add lemon juice.
Sometimes my grandmother would add orange juice. I never did
any of that because I haven't made the dish yet,

(25:06):
but I would love to. But I remember as a child,
my favorite thing was to steal all the marshmallows off
the sweet potatoes because I like the marshmallows. You may
have recipes like this that you're smiling about or remembering
memories of when you were a young girl or boy

(25:26):
at the table and there was probably a dish that
you just loved and you'd like to sneak extra bites
of and pieces of. So for me, it was sneaking
the marshmallows off the sweet potatoes. Finally, dessert, I can't
leave out dessert. We always had pumpkin pie, usually bought
from a store. We always had fruit cocktail or jello

(25:48):
because my grandmother believed that the women in the family
were all over weight and everybody was weight obsessed, so
she would make sure that there was always jello in
the form of a jello mold cocktail inside for all
the women, and you would get it served no matter
whether you want it or not. If you were female,
with a little bit of dap of cool whip or
whip cream, usually ready whip or cool whip. Nothing homemade, however,

(26:15):
my favorite dish and the one that my mother always
made me when I came home to visit for the holidays,
even to the last meal she cooked for me, which
was the last Christmas Eve. It was literally two years
before she died. She died in December twenty second, twenty

(26:36):
twenty two, so I didn't have a Christmas that year.
December twenty first, twenty twenty one. We ordered in Christmas
because she couldn't cook and it was too hard, so
I just ordered everything in from Whole Foods, the Whole
kit and Kaboodle. But in twenty twenty, during the pandemic,
I flew home to be with her, and she taught

(26:57):
me and some people who were able to come over
how to make her version of what she called Sonya's moringue.
But what is really a traditional pavlova. Pavlova is a
beautiful morangue dessert, very crispy on the top, it's spongy
on the bottom and moist served chilled, drizzled with fresh

(27:22):
cut fruit, usually red berries. It's a wonderful dish that
I've had several times in France, Paris makes it's a
very popular bistro dessert in Paris, also called eel floaton,
but a bit different. Il floaton is a floating egg
white moraine in a sauce pavlova is usually when I

(27:46):
was served, it served is a ring in a spring
form pan with the center filled with berries and maybe
whipped cream and ice cream. My mother made that dish
for me. I can't even begin to tell you how
many times, but I love it so much that she
always made two, one just for me and one for
everybody else, and I always ate it every day for

(28:08):
breakfast after the main meal. Basically, she took egg whites,
she separated the yolk and the white. I think it
was like five or six egg whites. Somewhere. I'm going
to find this recipe because she wrote it down for me,
Thank you, Mom. And she added sugar, probably knowing MoMA
half a coup, but she added sugar to sweetened cream

(28:28):
of tartart it, which helps to get those beautiful whips going.
A dab of salt, some almond extract, and she whipped,
whipped and whipped, whipped and whipped those egg whites into
beautiful white peaks then she would put the entire mixture
in a spring form pan. She would have already turned

(28:49):
on the oven to probably three hundred, a fairly low oven,
heated it well heated, totally heated. Then she would turn
the oven off and she would put the entire mixture
in there and leave it overnight. And overnight the meringue
went hard and it was just beautiful. It was like
crunchy on top, soft on the bottom. And somehow she

(29:12):
called it her overnight meringue. I have to check the
temperature on the oven, but that's pretty much what she did,
and I'm sure if you look for a recipe for
Pavlova you would see something similar. I'm going to try
hard to find that recipe for my mom many years ago.
She typed them all up and gave them to me
and all my many moves. I think the booklet is somewhere.

(29:34):
I have to find it. When I do, I plan
to make my tradition over the holidays to make some
of these recipes because it is my connection that I
have with the women who shaped my life who are
no longer with me. So where am I getting with this?
If you have loved ones who are no longer with
you this holiday season. Bring them back to life in

(29:55):
the form of creating a recipe that they would prepare
for the meal or that reminds you of them with love,
and then tell a story about that person at the
table and say, I made this recipe in memory of
my mother, my aunt, my sister, my grandmother, whoever it is.

(30:17):
Tell a story about that person and share it with
everyone at the table, or just if it's just you
and your spouse, share it with each other. But it's
a wonderful tradition that, as I said at the beginning,
this should be a time where you're glued together and
not feeling unglued. The holidays can put a lot of
pressure on people, so one way to calm it down

(30:39):
is to just dive into a happy memory of a
meal or a recipe and love that beautiful process of
making something. It's a big transition for me to say
all this because I want yours just running away, going
on trips solo or with friends for the holidays, running

(31:00):
away from the holidays because I didn't have a big family,
and slowly they were dying off, and my parents just
really liked to travel and go be alone, and they
would include me, But we never had those big, huggy,
kissy families. After family meals, after my grandparents died, we
created new traditions which I do treasure, and those trips

(31:21):
were still special. But as we all grew older and
my father died and my mother no longer traveled because
my father was no longer there to be with her,
those family meals around the table came back in the
form of her very purple Christmas Eve dinners, and they
were big affairs, always twelve people, always with the squash pudding,

(31:45):
Always with the green beans that she loved to overcook
to death. Loved overcooked green beans. Always with a cranberry
sauce that a dear friend bought that had the right
amount of cranberry ratio to sugar, right amount of oranges,
and some nuts the way I like cranberry. Way too
much meat. It's so crazy. My mother would buy two

(32:07):
prime ribs, think about how expending or standing rib ROAs
they're so expensive, and she would always break two. And
then she would ask a friend to bring the carving
knife because she said, we don't have a carving knife.
I need an electric carving knife. And every year our
friend Bob would bring the electric carving knives, and every
year he would carve one of those standing rib rows

(32:28):
and the other one would end up in the freezer.
After my mother died and we started packing up the
unpacking the house because she hoarded so much. She had
seven refrigerators, including three freezers, so it was a lot
of freezers and refrigerators in her house, some of which
had been frozen shut. As we pried them open, and

(32:52):
I mean pried them open, we found four standing rib
ROAs from Christmas past. They were like the they were
like the ghosts of Christmas passed. I couldn't believe it.
And some were already cooked and just frozen, and others
were still uncooked. It was a total waste of money.
We had to throw everything out and it was really

(33:14):
kind of irritating and why I don't like waste. But
the craziest thing was we found four electric carving knives.
My mother, who always asked Bob to bring over the
carving knive, had four of which only one had ever
been used. The others were still new in the box.
That's how crazy my mother's hoarding was. That's how crazy

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it was. When we were packing up the house. That
was how crazy last Christmas was. We didn't really have
one because we were busy dealing with unpacking a house
and the year after my mother's passing. But I bring
that all up with a smile now because this year
is twenty twenty four and I am approaching this year's

(33:58):
holidays with incredible sense of calm and closure. I feel
more glued together than ever because I have lived past
my mother's passing. I managed to sell de Hooard a
house and sell it. I'm in a better place. And
I had these beautiful recipes that I took from really

(34:21):
a box of chunk. I found these beautiful binders, and
I'm going to pull on to my happy memories through food.
So I want you to do the same. I want
you to create, much like you know when you get married,
there's something old, something new, something burrowed, and something blue.
For the holidays, do that have something old, a memory,

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a recipe, something that brings your past to the present.
Do something new, whether it's have an adventure, have new
people over, take a trip, try something different, have the
meal at a different time of the day, create a
a playlist of music, whatever it is, Do something new,

(35:05):
ask for borrowed. Ask your friends who you invite to
the table to bring a recipe, to share a story
behind it, and ask for blue. Well, I go purple
because purple was my mother's color. She was known as
the Purple Lady. And I always will have a beautiful
purple flower, amethyst, or something purple, a napkin, silverware, because

(35:32):
she will inherited in purple silverware, something at the table
that will remind me of her. I will always have
a rose that reminds you of that grandmother rose. And
I will always have a dish from one of these
amazing women who shaped my life wherever I go, and
that will be my new tradition at the holiday table.

(35:56):
So think about yours, embrace it, and know that that
person who's no longer at the table is with you
in spirit. You can share that spirit through an amazing memory,
a dish, a piece of linen, a memento. It will
always be with you. Happy holidays, happy Thanksgiving. Give thanks

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that you are able to celebrate in good health. I
hope you are. I am. Give thanks for the present
and enjoy it because who knows what the future will bring,
And always choose fearless and fabulous in your life, whether
it's over the holidays or every day, because every day
should be treated as a holiday, it should always be

(36:44):
special to you. Thank you for joining me on Fearless
Fabulous You I'm Melanie Young. Stay fearless and fabulous forever.
Thank you