By Ellen Girardeau Kempler
Our family’s holiday latke parties started out of an impulse to create a Laguna Beach tradition uniquely our own. As an agnostic married to a reform Jew, I had helped shape non-conformist family rituals around common practices: candles, lights, music and, of course, food. As our two daughters grew up, we worked out compromises: gifts and menorah lighting at Hannukah and stockings on Christmas morning, followed by a homemade popover breakfast, a movie, a beach walk and Mandarin King. No tree. No synagogue. No church. For years, it was enough. Eventually we all wanted to do more.
The inspiration started with a gallon of canola oil and bags and bags of potatoes and onions. In addition to potato pancakes, our party involved creating a wacky invitation using collage, photos, and references to any countries we’d visited in the past year.
My husband, an extrovert in the most expansive sense of the word, would begin emailing the invitation to people we’d all agreed on. The list was unconventional. It included people of all ages, income brackets and walks of life. It reflected our volunteer interests with the Laguna Playhouse, Festival of Arts, Laguna Plein Air Painters Association, Transition Laguna, and other nonprofits. We never considered how guests would get along, or how we’d accommodate them if they all arrived at the same time.
We decided the party should always be an open house potluck from 4-ish to 8-ish, with no official start and end times. We asked that guests bring a favorite holiday dish and toiletries for the Laguna Beach Friendship Shelter. We agreed from the beginning that we’d have food upstairs and live music and dancing downstairs.
Our first party involved frying over 400 potato pancakes for at least 100 people. The earliest arrivals included friends loosely known as “the wandering Jews.” (It always amused me that they were the ones who brought the “treif,” non-Kosher, food—for example, a platter of shrimp to go with what I irreverently called “the Hannukah ham”).
With the pancakes crisping in the oven and the table set for a bounty of potluck delicacies, we thought we were ready. Then the oven would not open.
“We can’t have a latke party without latkes!” I said.
“Don’t worry,” our friend Ron said. “The party’s not over until you run out of wine.”
He and his teenage son then proceeded to remove the oven door, freeing the featured dish.
Another year we made a rum cake so strong that one mom sat in a chair beside it to keep the minors away. To save time another year, we used bags of shredded potatoes for the latkes. That ended after a friend’s daughter commented that our pancakes tasted like hash browns.
This being Laguna, people often recognized each other and reconnected. The reunions weren’t always happy. One year my daughter’s friend ran up to me. “Oh my God,” she said. “That drunk woman in the corner used to date my dad!”
At the last latke party, my father-in-law chatted with a woman standing beside a Ferris wheel painting he’d been admiring. It turns out she was the artist. That was the same year our cousin’s son practiced break dance moves on the family room floor and unseasonable, 80-degree heat forced us to open the doors and move the furniture outside. The cops shut us down at 8 p.m. (a first). We still wonder which neighbor complained. (We thought they were all at our house.)
When people say they miss our party, I explain our daughters have moved away and we’ve moved on. Our latkes are Laguna legend.
Ellen is a longtime Laguna resident whose widely published poetry, articles and essays celebrate arts, culture, community and the environment.
