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

Christmas is Over…

At least at Patterson House… the last tour is winding its way through as I write this… Of course the rest of the world thinks there are a few more days to go…
Here at Patterson House we will start to take it all down, every ornament, every bit of garland, all the wreaths, and bows, and try once again to stuff it in the attic…
I encountered this quote…

“Christmas is the Disneyfication of Christianity” - Don Cupitt.

Having just celebrated our Victorian Christmas it makes way too much sense… In 1857 when our house was built Santa Claus didn’t exist… they had Father Christmas, dressed in buckskins… The celebration would have looked a lot like our Thanksgiving dinner…

Artist Thomas Nast drew a series of pictures for Harper’s Magazine, creating the Santa (including a civil war era Santa in red white and blue…) we know and love… Coca Cola took those images and used them to market their products… The Christmas tree was unknown outside of Germany…

Queen Victoria brought a Christmas tree to Buckingham Palace, it was covered in Godey’s Ladies Book (a magazine) and everyone needed one from then on…

Today its an ongoing debate about how much Christmas we need at our historic house... Too much wins hands down... Thanks to Coke, Halmark, Macy’s and Gimballs, today Christmas is something else…

Its starting to rain… Its cold… I think I will put another log on the fire…

It’s raining….

Winter has finally arrived here in Northern California… We finally have rain, accompanied by occasional thunder. We stare at the sky looking for hail or snow… The snow level is down to maybe 2,000 feet… we may have snow on the hills on both sides of the bay. It must be winter just in time for Christmas. (an in time to really screw up the Santa Cruz to San Jose commute tomorrow morning….)

At the house, the historic house museum, there is a song about the house museum, or is it about Alice and her restaurant, no, there is a song about the house museum too… The house is full of smoke… every time we light the stove. Maybe something has climbed in one of our chimneys and died… at least that’s the best explanation I can think of for all the smoke when I light the fire in the stove (wood fire, wood burning stove.) That is tomorrow’s problem… Soot, wood smoke, sheet metal, ladders… I am getting excited.

Outside I am using Christmas lights to keep our orange from freezing. If it gets colder I will put sheets over the tree.

We are spoiled here near San Francisco Bay… The coldest EVER temperature is about 20 degrees, for a few hours… the hottest is just over 100 for a couple of days… We can do fine without air conditioning… While we complain, it’s never really that cold.

Until tomorrow...

Beer and Christmas Lights

Christmas won, instead of taking the Kayak out I am putting up the outside Christmas lights at home… This year I am trying all red and white (or clear) bulbs… This is a departure from my regular “if I find it in the box it goes on the house”

Of course, my tall step ladder is at work. Predictable… On the other hand at home I can drink beer while decorating… (Lagunitas Pale Ale, “New DogTown”)

From their web page… (http://www.lagunitas.com/beers/paleale.html)

"Here, Have a beer. It will make you right." Ernest said to Tarzan. Tarzan had never had the true beer before and Ernest knew this would not be his last. He Drank the beer quickly. It was cold, and Tarzan knew this too. He looked at the beer coolly. "Me Tarzan, you beer." Ernest looked at Tarzan and felt old. "Vas iz schviss vit da old schtuff?" Ernest and Tarzan turned to watch as Sigmund entered the room strangely. "Sigmund," Ernest said, "my old primitivo! Have a beer with us". Sigmund knew what Ernest meant and he could not bear it. They all had a beer and it was good. Ernest said "Do you remember how it was in Stinson with the running of the dogs and how we ate crullers and got drunk on the Lagunitas Pale and stole grunion from the from the young girls at the Cafe de Sand Shekel?" Sigmund thought of how Ernest could be cruel and he did not answer. He thought how only dogs were not cruel. And also how sometimes a cold beer was just a beer. Tarzan thought of nothing. They all ordered contuuzti corratzo and spoke not of their big cigars.

If you drink a couple of beers it starts to make sense…

The lights are calling my name…