This thing about The Feast of Seven Fishes that Italians do on Christmas Eve was something I learned, I dunno, maybe when I was 40 years old.

I mean, we all have traditions, right? And our own family tradition on Christmas Eve was extra special because it was also my Grandma Ida’s birthday. My Auntie Sis has hosted our family’s Christmas Eve dinner every year since before I was born. (The party starts at 3 p.m. this year; I am admonished not to be late (but everyone know I will be.) And sure, we had fish on Christmas Eve, but I never knew until I was a middle-aged man that we were supposed to have SEVEN different fishes?

My brothers and I got talking about the whole Seven Fishes Feast that we are supposed to know about. Rudi, the professor and my older brother, looked it up and found out that it wasn’t until 1983 that someone in Philadelphia codified it as a “Feast of Seven Fishes.” So it seems to be more of an Italian American invention than something from the old country. My brother Paul, who, like Rudi, speaks a gajillion languages, is the only brother who speaks not only formal Italian but also the Neopolitan dialect, an entirely separate language that I struggle to understand. (Of us three boys, Rudi, a Sociolinguistic-Anthropology professor, and Paul, an ophthalmologist, are the smart ones, while I was always the one who needed extra help on math homework, had grass-stained pants, and got detentions in school.)

Paul once asked Grandma Ida, in dialect, about the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve.

Now, before giving my Grandma’s answer, let me give some backstory: during World War II, Grandma Ida was a very pretty young bride and mother living in Southern Italy, and like all pretty women in German-occupied Italy, she had to hide from German soldiers and at the same time find enough food to feed her family. My father remembers hiding in barns, in farmhouses and under haystacks.

So when Paul asked whether they celebrated the Feast of Seven Fishes in Italy, she looked at him, incredulous, and answered in dialect. (My English translation doesn’t do justice to her poetry.) “Seven fishes? What seven fishes?! When times were good, we had maybe one fish. And for that one fish, we were grateful to God.” If you asked her more about it, she would just say, in a high voice (again, my translation): “Ooooh! You don’t know what things I’ve seen,” and then raise her hand up in the air with an Italian hand expression that I always interpreted as “enough of this talk.”

I remember giving Auntie Sis a hard time one year for not having seven fishes (I counted six), and she pinched me and whispered to “sta zito” (keep quiet!) and laughed.

Wikipedia says that the idea of eating fish on the night before Christmas is a Roman Catholic tradition of avoiding meat on the eve of a feast day, or holy day. Apparently that got codified in America, where people had a greater abundance of, well, everything, into seven fishes. (Seven sacraments? Seven hills of Rome. Who really cares?)

I’ve been luckier than I deserve for all of my life. Like most of the people I know, I have never had the hardship of trying to feed a family during a war, of hiding from marauding soldiers of an occupying army or an oppressive regime. I have never known poverty. I have always been surrounded by people I love and who love me. I think about what it would be like to live in Iran or in Eastern Ukraine or Mali or Haiti or Yemen. Or even what it would be like to be poor and alone in New London.

My Grandma is gone now. But at Auntie Sis’s house this year, I will think of her on her birthday and remember what she said: “We had maybe one fish, and for that one fish, we gave thanks to God.” Happy holidays.