-- ST ILLUSTRATION: ADAM LEE

You see, I had booked my family into a beach hotel in Penang last Tuesday for a holiday of sorts as my father had a battery of bone scans and blood tests to last the week at a hospital there.

But when I suggested to my mother that we stay on till Christmas Day and let others do the cooking and cleaning for a little while longer, she baulked, and nagged me about the obligations of tang chek, which is what we call the winter solstice in Hokkien.

Ah, tang chek, that time of the year when the days grow longer and people in China keep warm, so my Mum tells me, by eating syrup-soaked wee dough balls Singaporeans call tang yuen, and which my family knows as ee (Hokkien for 'round').

I must confess that I have never quite understood why she is so enamoured of this mid-winter ritual when December in Malaysia is a sopping-wet 24 deg C at best.

Heck, she and I don't even like ee, gluey and slippery-sweet as they are on our tongues.

Still, in my school days, the end of each year meant cycling to the neighbourhood sundry shop to order the rice-flour dough for ee a few days in advance, collecting it the night before we rolled out the dough balls, breaking out the pink, green and yellow food dyes to colour the dough and then rolling out trays upon trays of ee to boil in pandan-and-ginger syrup.

The year's first bowl of ee always went to my father, the Chief Dough Ball Taster, who would pronounce whether the syrup was just so, or needed more ginger or pandan to liven it up.

'Once you have a bowl of ee, you are one year older and wiser,' my Mum would invariably tell me and my sister, building in us the belief that ageing was something to give thanks for, not despise.

Still, the years have a way of chipping away at such beliefs, and when my sister and I grew up and left home - and my father grew frail from cancer - the ritual of tang chek ceded to life's harsher realities.

But, last week, I slowly began to understand what my mother had left unsaid in all her baulking and nagging - that she was missing this simple family ritual, and was eager to reinstate it now we were all home again to see the year out.

Feasting with family is, in fact, the one enduring element about Christmas, a festival I observe but my parents do not as they are Buddhists.

Ironically, Yuletide has pagan, not Christian, roots, centred on a harvest ritual called Saturnalia which the Romans in Julius Caesar's day celebrated on Dec 17 yearly.

It was only in the 4th century AD that Julius I, the then Bishop of Rome, declared Christmas a feast day, with the date of Dec 25 coming by way of another winter feast day to toast Dies Solis Invicti Nati, or the day of the birth of the unconquered sun. How very apt, to drink to new hopes of fierce sunshine in bleak midwinter - and, with it, the continued survival of one's family.

As the American-born writer Paul Levy, a Jew who celebrates Christmas with no fewer than 18 guests around his table, observed in his book The Feast Of Christmas (1992): 'The real key to Christmas is nostalgia. Even the children worry that the coming Christmas will not be as good as past ones, and are very conservative about, for example, having the red lacquer apples on the tree in the same places as last year, and having turkey rather than ham or beef for the main Christmas meal.'

Psychologists, he added, would tell us that parents have been able to pass down such rituals across aeons because they consciously seek to preserve bits of their own past.

And that, of course, comes from a sense of belonging, for does not everyone have a role to play come every Big Makan Day - including, ahem, as Chief Dough Ball Roller?

There are the ever-providing grandmothers, mothers and aunts with their yum-yum kitchen gongfu, turning turnips and such like into rib-sticking meals of memory.

There are the apple-cheeked uncles who love nothing better than to tell a lame joke or three, and then laugh at them harder than the polite chuckles their listeners can muster.

There are the over-achieving cousins, you know, those 'just out of Oxford and on to Harvard' or 'just got promoted to Head Thingummy at the bank/law firm/multinational company' who hold the family name high - and know it.

There are also the in-laws, trying their awkward best to blend in with rituals that are not theirs to cherish.

And who would have it otherwise?

For there is no truer test of the strength of our roots and how much we have managed to cling to them than noisy family rituals of year-end noshing, be it tang chek, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Deepavali, Hari Raya Aidilfitri or Hanukkah.

Mulling over the importance of having people to love, and who love you, in spite of who you are, the American presidential hopeful Barack Obama observed repeatedly in his book Dreams Of My Father: 'If everyone is family, then no one is family.'

I'm off, then, to roll out the ee, but before I do, here's wishing you and your families the blessings and fun of Christmas, and much peace, hope and success in the New Year.

suk@sph.com.sg