The night before Christmas our family would always join a family friend - Miss Davidson - in her home and we would share a large ham and potato stroganoff dinner.
This was a tradition which we held every year and as you can imagine very much appreciated by a teenagers stomach. One year it turned from a joyous occasion to one of grim determination.
My grandmother had a couple of friends Clara and Hazel Hill. I would volunteer to help them around their place and occasionally would place a game called Kings' Corners. One Christmas eve, the Hill girls invited my grandmother and I for four o'clock tea. Except it wasn't tea. It was a full course turkey and mashed potato dinner.
Knowing that I had a full ham dinner starting less than three hours later, I bravely attempted to eat modestly but unfortunately I couldn't face the whimpering entreaties to eat more - after all I was sharing this meal (suitable for a family of 6) with 3 tiny women in their eighties.
When the meal and I were finished, I then turned away to go to the next stop - Miss Davidson's. The writer O'Henry had a short story in which a hobo would meet with a rich man every year and the rich man would buy him a feast and watch while the hobo would have the best meal of the year. One one particular year the hobo (like I) had to work his way through two full feasts. Unlike me the hobo ended up in the hospital suffering from overindulgence (although I was close to it). Like most of O'Henry's works the twist at the end was in the bed next to him was the "rich" man who was suffering from malnourishment. In order to maintain the facade that he was still affluent (he had gone bankrupt) he had starved himself in order to pay for the hobo's meal.
While I survived the ordeal, I remember the horror that I felt forcing one delicious forkful of food after another while Miss Davidson beamed that once again she had a successful Christmas party.
