Some December ramblings for your amusement

December 1, 2003

Hmmm, another month ahead of me, so full of possibilities. Entry #251, too. Not bad over the course of four years, if I do say so myself. I imagine myself using the old layout that I had at the very beginning of the site, constantly trying to archive things manually and make sure that everything was up to dat across the site. Well, it’s still hard in some ways, but I’m making do. I’m sure there’s something I’m missing to get a title image etc. on all the pages I’ve created but not linked to (such as the pictures, forinstance), but I’ve put all that on hold for the time being. My site, after all, is just fine the way it is for the moment…it just doesn’t have links to pictures. No matter, maybe I’ll get all that done in time for Christmas. Wait, didn’t I joke about that at one point in the past? Ooops, that may not be as funny in less than four weeks.

Christmas. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, to quote an old choir song. I’ve never really been certain why, but then again, for the last four years December has meant little beyond the stress of finals combined with a four hour plane ride home, and then a few days to soak in the Christmas spirit before everything comes down. My family’s never made a big deal about Christmas trimmings–as in, fringe Christmas stuff like caroling, gathering around a piano and singing Christmas songs, having parties, making decorations, pretty much just doing normal holiday stuff. If I ever found myself inside a Norman Rockwell painting, I’d be totally lost. The last time I remember doing anything extra-ordinary for Christmas was in…hmmm…must have been about 1993. My Mom and I went to the house of a family we knew and participated in their annual Christmas party, doing things like decorating, making Christmas-y stuff like oranges with cloves stuck in them (they smell WONDERFUL, if you’re curious), and just generally having a merry old time. There might have been eggnog with rum, but I don’t honestly remember.

There’s another thing my family has never done–eggnog. For us, eggnog is something that’s bought in the store and kept in the refrigerator for a few weeks and slowly ingested. And it’s typically not real eggnog, either, but rather imitation nog flavored beverage. I don’t recall us ever having made real eggnog, and I certainly know that rum has never graced the likes of the nog-flavored beverages in our house. One of the little things I’m sure I’ll regret later in life. Well, not the drinking part, but rather, the full holiday spirit thing. All this might have something to do with the fact that I grew up in a house–well, two houses actually–where Christmas was a traditional day of driving to pass me off from one parent to the other like some silly football play. It was always in one direction, too, from my Mom’s house in the morning to my Dad’s in the afternoon/evening, since his birthday is the day after Christmas and I would always spend Christmas night there to be around the next day.

The last time I personally made a bid deal about Christmas was a couple of years before my last Christmas hurrah in 1993 when I decided to play chef and do a lot of baking for Christmas. I took hold of about a dozen different cooking magazines from my aunt’s house in Auburn when I was visiting for Thanksgiving and marked the ones I was interested in, and she photocopied the pages for me to take home. What I was left with was a myriad of multi-colored photocopies to work from, and I ended up making about six or seven batches of cookies, a couple of pies, a cheesecake, and some other random things. I haven’t done anything like that since then, but in the spirit of never living anything down in my family I get grief every year about the springform pans I made my Dad buy. He recently pawned them off on me after they sat in his pantry for about a decade, so maybe it’s time to put them to good use again. I had some trouble with the cheesecake last time around, so maybe I should give it another shot. The highpoint of the marathon baking was a couple of batches of mint chocolate cookies. Very good. I had one when they came out of the oven, and somehow they mysterious disappeared in the time it took me to lean over and tie my shoelace. My sister claims responsibility for eating TWO WHOLE BATCHES OF COOKIES that I barely got to sample, but I’m not sure that a human being is capable of ingesting food that quickly. There was a good amount of Cool-Whip missing, as well, so she may have used that to help her. If I can find the recipe again, I’m making two batches and so help me, she’s not getting a single one this time around.

The hard part is finding the recipes again. I’m not exactly known for my high organizational skills when it comes to many things, keepsakes in particular. Well, not that I’d consider recipes to be keepsakes (with the sole exception of beef cubelets, that is), but I lump them in because I probably wanted to hang on to them. It’s quite simple, and they’re in one of two locations: they’re either at my Dad’s house or they’re at my Mom’s house. Don’t ask me to get more specific, though if I ask nicely I might find a manilla envelope of them hiding in a drawer somewhere next to a Bundt and a couple of springform pans, waiting for my triumphant return. I’m much better about recipes now, and the ones that I use most frequently I have printed out and in plastic sheets in a binder, though that was mostly for the sake of not having to print the recipe out every time I used it. Even now I still find sheets of the same recipes time and again as I go through papers, binders, etc. If I find all the cookie recipes again, I think I may have to copy them over by hand since the multi-colored photocopies probably wouldn’t look quite as good as the nice laser printouts, not to mention that I have no need for decade-old advertisements from the pages with them.

So where was I? As yes, the impending Christmas holiday. My Mom already has out some of the Christmas decorations, including the wreath over my door that makes it difficult to shut as well as the bells on the door that let you know when someone’s arriving through the front. Soon the other Christmas decorations will be out, including the little door wreaths that go over doorknobs that I’ve been putting out since before I could reach doorknobs, my mother’s rocking horse collection that I still puzzle over and its connection to Christmas in general, and the artificial garland around the banister. It’s not really that tacky–it goes well with the artificial Christmas tree, after all. As usual, our house looks nice on the inside, and our contribution to the neighborhood as a whole is usually a pair of wreaths that can only been seen from one angle on the street. We have a huge hedge in front of our house, so it’s difficult to make thngs seen. I’m not certain my family has ever decorated the outside of the house, at least not in my memory span. And I don’t mean huge, gawdy displays that border on doing injustice to the holiday, but rows of lights hung from the gutters, lights on a tree or two in the yard, or even a plastic light-up Santa that slowly waves its hand like the Queen of England. Yeah, we never had that last one, at least.

Christmas also used to mean putting up with my Dad’s “Bah humbug!” routine that my sister and I got a good chuckle out of for so many years, but he’s changed his ways and been more than happy to do the bare minimum of holiday celebration, as in purchasing and raising a Christmas tree. My Mom bought the artificial tree a couple of years ago after fiascos both with live trees and trees that had a bad side so big we almost had to turn the good side to the corner for uniformity, but my Dad still does things the old fashioned way. Well OK, modern fashioned way: buy a tree, bring it home, and recruit me to do a lot of the set up and decoration. Come to think of it, since I’m not gone at school, I’ll probably get roped into doing a whole lot of things that I’ve been lucky enough to skip out on. Usually, I come home from school and find the house already decorated, but now I’ll be present and accounted for during the entire procedure. Or maybe I’ll step out for a few weeks and return on Christmas Eve.

What was so humorous about my Dad’s Grinching every year was that the more Grinchy he got, the tighter the knot of the lights was. Like everyone else, I still don’t understand how lights can go from perfectly wound and separated strands to a blinking knot of bulbs the size of a medicine ball in only 335 days or so of sitting in an unmoving box. But in any case, his Grinchiness has subsided in the last few years, and not only has he voluntarily purchased a tree time and again, but the lights aren’t as tangled when he pulls them out. I’m uncertain whether that his anal engineer side shining or whether there’s really a cause-effect relationship between my father, Ebeneezer Scrooge, and the shipworthiness of the Christmas tree light knots.

I guess I should save some of my Christmas thought for other days, as I have a whole month to write about how I see Christmas. And I’m sure that as the decorations come out, so will the stories. There’s a decoration here at my Mom’s that I’m dreading seeing again, but in the same spirit of never living anything down, I know that it’s sitting in a box, waiting to see the light of day again. It might accidently fall into the fireplace one of these years, because hey–accidents do happen.

As for me, things here are about the same. I took a walk today depsite a few pangs from my knee, but it’s feeling surprisingly nimble now. I know I’m eventually going to have to see a doctor about it, but it’s fine for now as long as I don’t run any marathons longer than about a half-mile. But that’s another issue altogether. For now, I’m going to retire to my room and clean things up a bit for the housecleaners coming in the morning, maybe put in a load of laundry. The fun never stops. Happy December, everyone.

Basking in the glow of a computer monitor isn’t quite like the moon reflecting of newly-fallen snow.

Posted in Geekery, General