CRÈME FRAÎCHE PINK GRAPEFRUIT CREAM PIE.

2008 was my first year without holidays. Up until 2008, I lived with hefty doses of holiday celebration, spanning the Jewish, Christian, and vaguely pagan roster of ritual occasions. My parents were both Jewish, but their families had always celebrated Christmas along with Chanukah, and we readily observed Passover, Easter, Thanksgiving, and any other opportunity to gather and ritualize thought and feeling. My mom, in particular, was an eager proponent of ritual.

She ritualized everything, from the arrival of my first period to the transition of seasons. Christmas was an opportunity for elaborate decoration, and she ran wild with ribbons ordered from Japan specifically for the tree and boxes of ornaments she’d collected for decades. At night, once the tree was lit, we’d turn off all the lights and lie down beneath it, reveling in its quiet beauty, the subtle flow of electricity releasing scent from the tree’s bark and needles. We were warm, we were bright. We even sang Christmas carols together, good Jews that we were.

Each night of Chanukah, we used the shamash candle to give that day of the miracle a particular meaning—the first night for peace, the second for remembrance, the third for abundance, and so on. By the eighth night, we’d recite back our litany of good intentions, buoyant with good will and the promise of Chanukah gelt.

So why, in 2008, did all of this end? It ended because on June 19th of that year, my mother died. Of the many disarming, bizarre, and confusing rites of passage I would go through as a twenty-four year-old motherless daughter, my first year enduring the holidays without my mother was perhaps the strangest. At every turn, all I wanted was her. At every turn, she was gone. And so were the holidays, since they had been entirely under her direction.

My father and I, it seemed, had no energy left in us to summon the strength necessary to resurrect holiday cheer. We had no eight nights of good will. We had no ribbon. We had no cranberry scones or raspberry linzertorte or latkes. I watched as the opportunity to “do” the holidays myself, in my mother’s place, floated by me, and in my grief-laden stupor, I let it evaporate.

This was also the year I realized I’d need to double down on my capacity to self-protect, self-soothe, self-do-whatever-the-heck-I-needed-to-do-not-to-weep-all-the-time. My father and I called each other to say happy Chanukah once or twice. I spent Christmas with friends. All the rest was too filled with my mother—her presence, her much weightier absence.

Over the past eight years, I found a balance that worked for me—I’d go home for Thanksgiving, a holiday that wasn’t too heavily weighted with maternal memory. For the other holidays, I did whatever I wanted and needed to do to ensure I stayed sane: I visited friends in far flung locations, observing their family rituals with a hungry kind of longing; I went to the desert and spent days lounging by pools of rented houses that miraculously wiped my emotional slate clean; I went to the ocean or the forest or the river on my own. I suppose you might say I was making my own rituals.

This year, much is different. I’m not going home for the holidays, though my father and his fiancée Susan often ask me to. A part of me is still scared of an unknown maelstrom of sadness that might bring. But I feel ready to take some small steps. In particular, I feel ready to make some of the holiday recipes I used to make with my mom. I feel ready to welcome new holiday traditions, and to welcome new family, as Susan joins ours. Not just ready, excited. I know that eventually, soon, we will start making our own rituals once again.

To begin, this lush ruby red grapefruit curd cream pie, wrapped in a cozy gingersnap crust and topped with a cloud of Vermont Creamery crème fraîche whipped cream. I’ve been waiting all year to make this cream pie during citrus season, when sweet and tangy are at their peak. The crème fraîche is a perfect accompaniment to the grapefruit’s bright acid, and there’s no better crème fraîche than Vermont Creamery’s. You’ll be seeing a lot more of the stuff in the coming year, as I’ll be partnering with this dreamy company to bring you creamy treats throughout 2017.