Michele LeTourneau
Special to Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Dec 24/02) - Everybody knows what tradition means, right? The dictionary definition is pretty straightforward: an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behaviour.

Passing on the French Christmas tradition of making tourtiere -- all you need is a good stove, the right spices and a few pie shells, which Chloe LeTourneau-Paci displays. Just don't forget the ground meat. by - Michele LeTourneau/NNSL photo

Isn't it delightful to carry on what came before? But oddly, my dictionary suggests that I look up the word treason, that it's related to tradition somehow. Indeed, they have the same Latin root word: tradition.

Doing this little bit of research illuminated for me the terrible nightmare that I lived Dec. 24, 2000. It was a Christmas spent here in Yellowknife, far away from my family. The first Christmas I was to carry on the long tradition of making Christmas tourtiere, that French meat pie handed down for generations and generations.

How hard is it to make meat pie? The main ingredients are ground pork and ground beef. Unfortunately, on Dec. 24 in Yellowknife, our grocery stores, as I discovered, run out of almost everything. Imagine my distress when I found nothing in the meat section remotely resembling ground anything. I was even prepared to deal with ground turkey and take the secret to my grave. I might have quoted Karl Marx, who wrote, "The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living."

I wandered the aisles. I must have known, deep in the dark recesses of my unconscious, that I was ensnared in the very act of treason. I was betraying my family. Not just my mother, but her mother, and, of course, her mother before her, which I never even knew. As I wandered those aisles, I imagined the ancestral matriarch above somewhere in heaven -- she was Catholic and, I'm sure, deserving - trembling with righteous rage.

That's when, in my panic, I found myself back in the meat section. I suppose I hoped for a miracle. And lo, it was a miracle. In the frozen section I found a lone chub of sausage meat. Already seasoned with sausage seasoning, mind you. But what of it? For good measure, I grabbed a few packages of breakfast sausage. I would remove the casings.

Hours and hours of simmering later, with an especially large measure of the right spices, and my children ate tourtiere at the Christmas meal. Over a long-distance phone call, I boasted to my mother. Then in a fit of guilt, because I had not, after all, followed tradition to the letter, I confessed my sausage meat crime.

Tradition, it turns out, lies in the spirit of the act. And perhaps breakfast sausage, as an evolutionary necessity, is my contribution to the family tourtiere recipe.