By Christine of A Morning Grouch
If you’ve ever seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding, then you have a pretty accurate glimpse into the type of family I married into. At each of our family gatherings, there is a Tom and a Tom and a Tom and a Tom, and an Athena and an Athena and an Athenoula, and a Voula and a Soula and a Roula. No family event is complete without copious amounts of feta and loads of crispy buttered filo dough. Oregano is sprinkled around like confetti. Each small get-together includes twenty-five family members (or more) and each and every person there is fluent in yell-speak. The high decibel level at all times must be a critical component of the Greek language, akin to where the accent is stressed on each individual word.
I’m not Greek – I’m the Ian Miller in our scenario, and my husband is the son of Greek immigrants. He’s the one who married rogue.
My mother-in-law, Glykeria, cooks the most delicious food I’ve ever eaten. We stopped alternating whose side of the family we go to for Thanksgiving – we just always go to the Greek side. My mouth is watering just thinking about her spinach pie, her cooked greens, and her cheese pies as I write this. She generally cooks enough dinner to feed a family of 10, so she brings us foil-wrapped leftovers on a regular basis. I love her recipes but I really hate cooking, so it’s a double win for me.
The food is just one of the perks I married into. Glykeria and my father-in-law, Tom, babysit our children all of the time. They are kind, loving, and use the occasional English word incorrectly, which I find quite entertaining – for instance, when my mother-in-law calls potholes “potholders.”
As if I wasn’t spoiled enough already, over the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to listen to the treasure trove of stories my in-laws have about their youth. They grew up as goat-herders in a remote mountain village. GOAT HERDERS, you guys.
Even though they were born in the mid-1900’s, their lives looked more like something straight out of the 1800’s. No electricity or running water, primitive farming equipment – such as horse-drawn wooden plows that they carved out of wood themselves. And they didn’t even have horses; they had donkeys. They owned only one or two articles of clothing at any given time, which was either homemade from fabric they could afford to purchase about once per year, or – more often – from things they repurposed, such as fabric from sacks of rice or flour. They grew up poorer than dirt, making blankets from the hair of their goats and using the internal sacs of animals, like bladders, as storage containers for their dried foods.
Their stories are CRAZY.
Tom and Glykeria live in a well-off middle-class suburb these days, and just by meeting them, you’d have no clue about their difficult and fascinating early life. It’s hard for even me to reconcile what I know of their past with who they are today.
My in-laws let me interview them over the past few years, and I’ve documented their stories and added bits and pieces of who they are today – bickering spouses and loving grandparents. You can read all about them in this inspiring, humorous, and heartfelt book, Yiayia and Papou. It’s a quick read, and you’re sure to love it.
Want to win a copy of your very own? Join the giveaway here (or at the embedded Facebook post below)! Details:
1) You must live in the continental U.S and be 18 years of age or older to enter. I will post on this page who the winner is and the winner will have 48 hours to reply before moving on and choosing another winner. The winner must message me their address via this page. The winner will get a book shipped to them within 2 weeks. No purchase necessary, void where prohibited by law.
2) Tag 3 (or more) friends that you think would be interested in reading this book. Think lovers of reading, people who love memoirs, people very into family, and Greeks! Tag all the Greeks!, and those who love reading how seemingly everyday people have AMAZING stories to share if you think to ask.
3) Your odds of winning just depend on how many people participate. I’ll be running the giveaway for 1 week (ends at midnight EST 3/21). I’ll use a random number generator to pick the number of the commenter who wins.
You can also purchase Yiayia and Papou from my local bookstore (1.00 shipping!) and from Amazon here. Add Yiayia and Papou to your GoodReads today.
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About the Author
Christine at A Morning Grouch is a freelance writer who has been published on The Huffington Post, Faith It, Motherly, Sivana Spirit, Kids Safety Network, Bottle and Heels, Parenting.com, Working Mother, and Your Tango.