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Ham is a tradition in our family-starting this year.

I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. My family ate Tennessee country ham and biscuits for breakfast on Christmas morning. The salt-cured ham was a special treat reserved for the holidays-generally a gift form one of my father's patients who couldn't pay his doctor's bill.

My mother scraped the green-blue mold off the ham, soaked it in water in a five-pound lard tin for a couple of days to remove some of the saltiness, then simmered the ham in the same tin on the stovetop starting late on Christmas Eve, letting it slow-cook all night long so we'd have a ham ready to slice on Christmas morning.

When I married Annie, we visited her family in Richmond, Virginia on Christmas every now and again. Virginia ham and rolls were part of their Christmas Eve dinner. The Virginia ham was incredibly salty and therefore sliced very thin. A little bit went a long way on a homemade yeasty roll.

And then we moved west and lost touch with the Christmas ham tradition, until this year when I happened to see a ham recipe in a magazine. The memories came streaming back. I decided to give it a try.

So I ordered a Virginia ham. It arrived three days before Christmas, right on schedule. I scraped the mold off the ham with a stiff (previously unused) dog brush, put that ham in a canning pot, covered it in cold water, and managed to squeeze it into the refrigerator-taking up a lot of space previously occupied by Annie's fixings for other Christmas dishes. I changed the water twice over the next 24 hours, then brewed 20 cups of black tea and soaked the ham in the tea for another 24 hours.

Annie thought I'd lost it.

On Christmas Eve I toted that pot out of the refrigerator, poured off the tea, emptied six bottles of stout into the pot, and filled it the rest of the way with cold water. Then I put it on our stovetop and let it simmer there all night.

On Christmas morning I made a glaze out of blackstrap molasses, brown sugar, and mustard. I slathered the thick glaze all over the ham and put it into a hot oven long enough to set the glaze. By breakfast that ham was ready to slice. Annie made the rolls my Aunt Wiese used to make and we had a feast. Yum!

I can't wait till next Christmas now. A Christmas tradition has been reborn.