Not all turkeys are created equal. Seek out something different in your holiday travels with these better-than-Butterball options.
Deep-Fried Turkey This Southern treat tastes as sinful as it sounds. Line up for crispy turkeys on the Thanksgiving buffet at Georgia Brown's in Washington, D.C. (950 15th St. NW; 202/393-4499; dinner for two $70). Fried-to-order fowl are also available from the Cajun Turkey Co. in Dallas (800/809-7881; www.cajunturkeyco.com; 10- to 12-lb. turkey, $49.95).
Smoked Turkey At Clark's Outpost in Tioga, Texas (101 Hwy. 377; 940/437-2414; dinner for two $30), the turkey is cured for 24 hours, then slowly smoked. Or orderfrom Stegall Smoked Turkey in Marshville, N.C. (704/624-6628; www.stegallsmokedturkey.com; 10-to 11-lb. turkey, $42.95).
Tofurky This tofu creation from Turtle Island Foods in Hood River, Oregon, has more meaty flavor than you'd expect from mere soybeans (800/695-2241; www.tofurky.com; one feast with drumettes and wish sticks $45.95).
Traditional Turkeys If your family insists on a classic roaster, seek out a free-range or organic bird for optimum flavor. Two of the best sources: Lobel's of New York (877/783-4512; www.lobels.com; 10- to 12-lb. free-range turkey, $58.98) and D'Artagnan (800/327-8246; www.dartagnan.com; organic turkeys from $70).
Turducken The surprisingly tasty turducken resembles a Russian nesting doll—a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey, each layer coated with cornbread or sausage dressing. Order from Pfaelzer Bros. in Maumee, Ohio (800/621-0202; www.pfaelzerbrothers.com; 15-lb. turducken, $109.95).
—Melissa Clark
For Frank DeCaro, Christmas is all about bionic Santas, robotic reindeer, and an over-the-top New Jersey fantasyland called Fountains of Wayne
Hauling out the holly starts each year—at least for anyone who has ever spent time in the area of northern New Jersey now euphemized as Sopranoland—with a pilgrimage to Fountains of Wayne. I'm not talking about the band that was all over MTV this past summer, but the store, whose tinsel has been stuck in the carpet behind my TV since last winter. Located about 20 miles northwest of midtown Manhattan, just past the Home Depot but not quite as far as the Division of Motor Vehicles, Fountains of Wayne is our own Miracle on Route 46 (491 Rte. 46 W., to be exact; you can ring them up at 973/256-1552). The 21,000-square-foot store sells lawn ornaments—birdbaths, statues, and, yes, fountains—10 months a year, feeding a regional need for outdoor accoutrements that resemble Villa d'Este by way of the Olive Garden. But the store's biggest draw is its annual Christmas display, which delights 100,000 visitors from all over the country each holiday season.
Since the mid 1960's, the store has trafficked in colorful ornaments, twinkling light sets, plush silver garlands, and artificial trees, in addition to patio accessories. Typical customers are families like mine: Italian-Americans whose taste in holiday décor makes Donatella Versace look like June Cleaver; ebullient people who eat seven kinds of fish on Christmas Eve and then run off to midnight Mass at Holy Angels.
Each November, a statue of Santa two stories high goes up out front, and from Fountains springs a winter wonderland—a free, walk-through diorama with hundreds of animated figures that wave, wink, and do everything but Watusi. This Disneyesque spectacle—I like to think of it as "It's a Smaller World"—gives visitors a peek at what Kris Kringle does in the off-season. The store turns glitter, cotton batting, plastic plants, and imagination into such offbeat holiday visions as Santa's Hawaiian luau; Santa as an Elvis impersonator, clad in gold lamé; and a deep-sea Santa in a diving bell.
"Between the labor of setting up the displays and the electricity of running them, it gets expensive," admits Brian Winters, whose dad, Donald, bought Fountains in 1961. But he doesn't mind. "It generates tremendous goodwill and it brings lots of people who wouldn't come otherwise into the store."
People like me come to Fountains not for the idealized retro-forties Christmas of Christopher Radko ornaments or the three-foot Victorian feather trees for which the Martha Stewart catalogue asks $400 apiece. I adore those refined decorations from eras I'll never know except through books and movies. But I can't celebrate Christmas without a little nostalgia for my own less-than-tasteful youth (bottle-brush trees and light-up plastic Nativity sets were all the rage back in the 1960's and 70's).
Fountains makes me happy because not much has changed at the store since then. A friend from grade school still works there, her fingers flying over the cash register keys without ever chipping an appliquéd nail. My late mother's favorite waitress at the Versailles diner over in Fairfield still moonlights there, primping trees without mussing a hair on her lacquered head.
There is something about the place that is "distinctive," as Adam Schlesinger, cofounder of Fountains of Wayne (the band), put it recently—something distinctively New Jersey. The store is so much a part of the local scene that it has been featured on The Sopranos. But I really didn't need to see Fountains of Wayne on TV to know it was special. The place is my childhood, shellacked for posterity, like the Three Wise Men plaques we made in Cub Scouts using pasta shells, corrugated cardboard, and gold spray paint.
For those of us who grew up shopping at stores like Two Guys from Garfield, Park 'n Shop, and Great Eastern Mills—all gone now to make way for big-box national chain stores—the holidays wouldn't be the holidays without a visit to Fountains of Wayne. Well, actually two visits. You have to go back the day after Christmas. Their wonderful diorama is closed, but everything in the store is marked down 50 percent.
That, of course, is a tradition, too.
FRANK DECARO, the author of A Boy Named Phyllis, lives in Manhattan but always spends Christmas in his hometown of Little Falls, New Jersey.
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