A Christmas tradition: no Waldorf salad

Year after year, Mary Smith prepared Christmas dinners along a traditional line. Ham, green beans, creamed potatoes with peas, biscuits, and mince and pumpkin pies.

And for the better part of two decades, the laborious Waldorf salad.

Perhaps you know it -- chopped apples, celery and walnuts, with mayonnaise, served chilled. Invented by the maitre d' of New York's Waldorf Hotel at the turn of the last century.

Mary's version -- actually the recipe of her mother, Lizzie, who even kept a decorative just-for-Waldorf-salad bowl in the china cabinet -- included grapes, whip cream as well as mayo, and pecans instead of walnuts.

And it took forever to make.

Of course it would, if you started with pecans in the shell. Washed and chopped a dozen red delicious apples. Whipped your own cream. And -- no kidding -- sliced each grape in half and used the paring knife to remove four seeds.

But that is how her mother made it, and Mary felt duty-bound to do the same.

One year, the busy hospital nurse and mother of eight just didn't feel up to the usual protracted effort. As Christmas approached, Mary dared make what she feared might be an unpopular suggestion.

"Do you think you'd mind if we had something other than Waldorf salad?" she asked her family one day. "It takes so long to make."

You'll never guess what they said.

They said that it would be perfectly alright with them, as they never liked Waldorf salad anyway.

You could have knocked Mary over with a grape seed.

"Here I thought I was giving them a real treat," said Mary, 78, of Jackson, Michigan, now a prep cook at a local restaurant, who has never made a Waldorf salad since.