Pamela Hill Nettleton: This tradition, yes, breaks the mold

I stayed up half the night trying to build a tiered wedding cake out of orange gelatin. Engineering problems -- mainly gravity -- obliterated my efforts, and the whole thing splatted like a jellyfish all over the kitchen table. On the other hand, my pastry chef daughter's entry was brilliant. She made clear gelatin from scratch (who knew you could?) in the mold of a B-52, and stuck an itty-bitty plastic superheroine into the pilot seat. Voila! Wonder Woman's invisible plane.

But the winning entry came from Uncle John, who poured blue Jell-O into a fish bowl, submerged a miniature deep-sea diver under the keratin waves, poked Pepperidge Farm goldfish crackers and gummy worms down in there at varying levels, and carried a lit votive candle around behind it to cast watery-looking shimmers.

He won, but controversy ensued. Two other uncles had labored mightily to create ring molds of cranberry, lemon and strawberry and pretended to be incensed at Uncle John's sidestepping the "edibility rule"--which, of course, had yet to be written.

"Next year," said my sweet little sister, shaking a finger at Uncle John, "you're goin' down." The Playtex gloves were off, and an annual tradition was born.

One year later, she and her husband duct-taped an 8-foot-long hollow Plexiglas tube to the frozen drainpipe outside their front door, erected a ladder, and set the alarm clock. Every few hours, they woke up, mixed up a fresh flavor of Jell-O, walked outside, climbed the ladder to the top of the tube, and poured another color in to settle atop the already-set layers below. The rainbow Jell-O-meter was born. But it faced stiff competition.

Uncle John designed his own molds out of rope, Styrofoam and who-knows-what to cook up a realistically rendered Jell-O hamburger (with lettuce, tomato, and a Kaiser bun), fries, and a malt. It was a thing of beauty.

Yet he was beat out by my daughter-in-law, Megan, who cooked up gigantic twin Cherry Cokes out of Cherry Coke-flavored Jell-O with Jell-O cherries and Jell-O froth.

Before the turkey comes out of the oven, Jell-O competitors must solemnly parade their entries around the dining room for all to see, accompanied by the strains of Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance." This rule survived only three years. Megan's Jell-O cello licorice strings and frosting f-holes were too fragile for the march. Chris' Emerald City and fields of poppies from "The Wizard of Oz" couldn't be lifted, and Gretchen's life-sized ruby slippers wiggled so much they split in half like the Titanic.

I don't recall the year, but once my husband made champagne-flavored Jell-O out of gelatin sheets and a bottle of something (I hope domestic) he found laying around. From the junk drawer, he unearthed a fiber optic flashlight with long, squid-like plastic fronds. He turned it upside-down, shoved it into the half-set Jell-O, and turned it on. Electric Jell-O. He won. What were the judges thinking?

I've only won once: last year, for my epic "Parting of the Red Sea." An Indiana Jones action figure was Moses and birthday cake pirates wrapped in raffia were the Pharoah's army. OK, so using the Arc of the Covenant was historically inaccurate, but hey, it came in the blister pack with Indiana. The thing took $30 worth of red Jell-O, and like Cecil B. DeMille, I'm not telling how I got the seas to rise up into watery walls to let the children of Israel pass.

The Jell-O competition is now in its something-or-otherth year and has become an essential part of our Thanksgiving tradition. It doesn't hark back to my grandmother in her Iowa kitchen, the way making lefse on Christmas Eve day does for my children. It doesn't conjure up my aunts singing Lutheran hymns in the kitchen the way baking sugar cookies using Aunt Mary's recipe does for me. My ancestors didn't craft mountains out of Jell-O, although cumulatively they probably carried that much of it in aluminum cake pans into church basement suppers. It is a new bud on the ancient tree of generations, our Jell-O competition.

Yet it is in the moving forward that it becomes a tradition for those unborn people who come after us. This Christmas, my first grandchild arrives, and he will never have known a world without the Jell-O competition. To him, "Pomp and Circumstance" won't mean "graduation," but "Uncle John won again!"

Pamela Hill Nettleton is a Minneapolis writer.