Everyone stampedes around the kitchen, the busiest time of the year for my parents. It was 4:00pm preparing for our Christmas dinner with all of my relatives. My mom is of course stressed out from trying to juggle a million things at once, and my dad is watching the grill making sure our steaks weren’t getting over done. 

Me and my brother are just sitting in the living room enjoying the limited time with our cousins. Watching Christmas movies, eating cookies that we made the day before (we had to sneak those or else my mom would yell “You're spoiling your appetite!”). All was good in the Phippen house until my mom let out a gasp. She forgot dessert! She starts scouring the pantry looking at what she could whip up, but all we had was this chocolate jello box and a pre formed pie crust.

At this time, my dad comes back inside with the perfectly cooked steaks, feeling very accomplished. He lets them chill, and hangs out with the kids. This didn’t last long however, because my mom yells to me and my dad that she needs help. I was young at the time around 10 years old, and my dad wasn’t the best chef in the kitchen but we still did our best to help. 

She needed help with the dessert. She gave us very simple instructions: 

Mix the Jello packet in hot water
Let it chill for 60 minutes in the fridge
Put it into the already molded crust
Serve
My father and I looked at each other; it wasn’t a very confident look, but we knew we could handle it. 

We follow the instructions and work together. We taste test the pudding, we try to find additional add ons, we laugh and we enjoy our time together. 

When it comes time for dinner, my brother, cousins and I help bring out all the food. We enjoy our food and time together as a big family, and now the part my dad and I anticipated. Dessert.

Together, we go to the fridge and look at our masterpiece. It looked as if we did a perfect job! Happily, we grab the knife to cut pieces off for everyone. This was the hardest part—that we didn’t even take into consideration. One by one, pieces came out looking like goo, the crust was falling apart into pieces. We felt defeated looking at the final product, but we weren’t going to let this happen. We knew we needed to do something to make it more appealing to the eye, in hopes our family would even take a bite out of it!

Now comes time for the add ons, we decide to just cover the entire thing in whip cream to hide our mess. In the end what looked like a pile of mush, turned out to be one of our favorite desserts. 

To this day, my dad and I look forward for our time to shine in the kitchen, making our Pudding Pie, a crisis turned into tradition (and no, we still haven’t figured out how to properly cut it yet).