This is the time of year when families unite for festive cheer. Relatives spread far and wide gather together to enjoy those special holiday traditions. Mistletoe is hung! Cookies are baked! Great-aunt Nattie is wheeled in from the retirement home, a box of Depends under her lap robe! Cousin Giorg is let out on the prison's day release program, an electronic ankle bracelet monitoring his whereabouts! Teenage Yolanda is having a bulimic episode in the upstairs bathroom! Yes, the gang has gathered at grandmother's house once again!

But not everyone's grandma is the pleasant little apple-cheeked gnome that Norman Rockwell would have us believe populate the United States. (And don't tell me that good old Norman didn't have a psycho family member or two tucked away in the closet with all those Saturday Evening Posts.) We can admit it, we're grown-ups: Some grandmothers are - well - different. Mine certainly was. I always think of her at this time of year, and give a special prayer of thanks that she's moved on into the next incarnation where she's possibly been re-born as someone's family pet or the weird little kid next door. No matter what form she's taken, she's no doubt freaking-out someone over the holidays.

It's not surprising that Nanny was a tad twisted since she came from the country - Austria - that gave the world both Freud and Nazis, a combination that endowed its citizens with the ability to psychoanalyze their own messianic tendencies. Nanny favored the Olde Country Refugee look. She never ventured outside without a high-necked, long-sleeved, floor-length black dress on, and old-fashioned shoes that looked like a cobbler had just finished making them from leather he'd tanned himself. All she needed to complete the ensemble was a soot-filled railroad station filled with wailing babies and steamer trunks.

Along with dressing like a character from Masterpiece Theater, Nanny also had a pipeline to God. Whenever she visited my family, she packed a prayer book, her Bible and not one but two rosaries: her primo rosary, and her back-up rosary, in case of loss. Nanny did not want to be in a house filled with sinful children and find herself short on prayer devices. Packing anything less than two rosaries was, in her mind, like going to the Congo and skimping on malaria pills, or entering the DMZ with nothing but a pair of pinking shears.

In fact, if my grandmother could have figured out the plumbing apparatus necessary to install a fine-mist sprayer of holy water throughout the house, she would have done it in a flash. Better yet, had those big plastic bazooka-sized squirt guns been invented when I was a child, there's no doubt that Nanny would have loaded one up with holy water and blasted the hell right out of us - so to speak. I can see it now, Nanny yanking out the cork from a jug of holy water with her teeth, balancing a bazooka spray gun in one hand and loadin' it up with holy water with the other, while the theme from Saving Private Ryan played in the background.

Or maybe she would have gone for an adventure movie approach: bazooka clutched to her chest, her crucifix glinting in the sun, she would have hit-the-dirt-and-rolled into belly position and fired the holy spirit at us until we were drenched with salvation. She would have enjoyed being a water-pistol-packin' grandma for Christ.

Along with being one with the Lord, my grandmother was also quite a story-teller. She enlivened many a family gathering by launching into bizarre tales at precisely the wrong moment. You never knew when the demented raconteur in her would appear but there was a good chance it would come out during dinner when we were gathered around the table. Nanny would let fly with an opening sentence, a first verbal pitch that would guarantee either: (1) a rapidly cooling entrée as we sat, paralyzed by the story; (2) severe loss of appetite; (3) weeping; or (4) vomiting. She hit the jackpot one day and triggered all four responses when she declared that, "Mmmmmmm, Lucky sure is tender!" just as forks were midway to our mouths. We froze. We froze like the instant after the nuclear explosion, just before you crumble into dust.

"What does she mean?" one of my sisters asked.

Nanny smiled serenely and said, "What I mean, children, is that we should thank God for giving us such a tender calf to enjoy. And we'll have many opportunities to thank God as we enjoy more roasts like this one, and hamburgers, and steaks, and - "

"We're eating Lucky?" we children screamed in unison. We'd had our calf Lucky for several months but just a week before this fateful dinner, Lucky had been carried away in a little trailer "to go be with other cow friends and have more fields to play in," our mother had told us. We'd been sad - we all enjoyed petting Lucky - but none of us had been very rigorous about feeding and watering him, and no-one had volunteered to clean out his little stall, so Lucky had become a somewhat disconsolate, manure-caked and thin calf. It dawned on us that our mother, who routinely delivered the Never Tell A Lie lecture, had not only lied to us but had forced us to become pet cannibals. Evidently, Lucky wasn't well-named after all. We took turns crying and sticking our fingers down our throats in the bathroom.

So this year, as I trim my Christmas tree and sing "Over the river and through the woods, to Grandmother's house we go . . ." I'll think of Nanny again and the holiday feasts from my childhood. And I'll take a moment to thank her for my early-in-life decision to swear off red meat, and be grateful that I never had a pet turkey named Lucky.

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