The Christmas Report

The Christmas Eve dinner went very well… all courses timed well… (this is an art not understood by those who do not cook) all food good… (ok, great, bow, bow.) A quite evening around the fire with food, drink and talk…

The next morning was slow, Steph off to work (at the home for temporally abandoned dogs and cats), I got up with coffee, the paper and some time alone… She, Steph, called and said she was coming home, the que to start breakfast… Then food, stockings and presents… Then off to Erik and Mia’s house for Christmas Dinner… Erik is Tina’s (aka the wife) brother, Mia, his wife…

Christmas Dinner guests included her Dad, her two brothers, two sisters and their families… 25+ folks in all… the menu included turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes (baked after mashing) Pongas (their family name for mashed rutabagas) as well as a selection of pies and most important, Danish rice pudding…

The rice pudding is important… very important… there is a competition involved… in the white goodness which is rice pudding (basically white rice cooked in milk, folded into whipped cream… as a sister in law says, it is an excuse for eating whipped cream….) back to the white goodness… there is a blanched almond (“am-amd” in the dialect of Northern California) hidden in the pudding… the blanched almond is white, the pudding is white, the rice glissens in the pudding and simulates an almond (“am-amd”). The person who finds the almond (“am-amd”) gets a prize…

The only way to improve your odds of winning are to eat lots of rice pudding… The only rule is you have to eat all you take… I ate a lot… late in the third very large bowl I found it… and won… I am the champion…

I think the brother in law is still mad…
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So, Santa and his associates did well by me this year… I got a couple of books, one on railroads on the Eastern Sierra… of little interest to the readers of this blog, the other, a surprise, “Who Would Buy This, The Archie McPhee Story” … a history of THAT store which specializes in absurdities like devil ducks, rubber chickens and donkeys which dispense cigarettes out their ass… We have talked about Archie McPhee before… We likely will again, I am not proud…

The book is great, with descriptions of product, their origin stories, their catalog cuts… it is an orgy of useless wonderful stuff…

From the book, a quote, for at least today, our quote of the day….

“As the world became more practical, I decided to fight that tendency with the impractical, the useless and the just plain strange. It was a futile and absurd strategy, however, it turned out very, very well for me.”

Mark Pahlow, founder, Archie McPhee

It sounds like a sound stratagy to me... bye for now,

Randy