Tuesday, December 25, 2007

White Christmas!!

For years, I've lived in such a climate that the chances of seeing snow fall on Christmas Day are almost impossible. I recall one year that it snowed in Texas in mid December, but had all melted by the 25th. Last year it snowed right after the new year (on the second day of school, in fact, which considerably increased my new school anxiety), but in all my memory, I cannot ever recall seeing snow on the ground, much less fall from the sky, on Christmas.

It snowed today.

Squee! We woke up relatively later than usual to full stockings and gifts huddling happily around the base of our diminutive tree. James loves surprises and was happy with the things I got him. I, who dislike surprises and gave James a list weeks ago, was pleasantly surprised to be pleasantly surprised by a few gifts that he took a gamble in getting me without consulting me first. :) And Hamlet was ecstatic with his live catnip plant but has yet to figure out that the birdfeeder on the back porch was a gift to amuse him when the birds find it (he can't get out, so the birds are safe).

I had just finished hanging the birdfeeder and James was working on installing our new 42" plasma TV (a combination new job/Christmas gift to ourselves) when we looked out the window and saw big white snowflakes falling from the sky. It was a White Christmas! Not only did it snow, but it stuck to the ground on our back porch and covered our car! But the best miracle is that is stopped short of making the roads hazardous to drive, so we could go see a movie, which happened in the form of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Although not necessarily an uplifting Christmas movie by any stretch of the imagination, it was a fabulous specimen of the artistic cinema, and Johnny Depp is a fabulous as ever.

So we left the theater with our minds turned to food, but all of our tried-and-true restaurants between the theater and home were closed for the holiday (the nerve!). So we took a gamble and went to a Thai place that we had often passed on our way to another Thai place (that mailed out coupons on occasion, but was closed). Thai Rose turned out to be a wonderful place, with clean bathrooms and good, affordable food, a winning combination.

Now if only the Blazers win against Seattle, this Christmas will be perfect.
Well, perfect for James. It's already perfect for me.

Monday, December 24, 2007

Baking Madness

So, each year since James and I have been together (except for the year we flew to Texas for Christmas) we've made something edible and yummy for Christmas presents. My theory is that if a gift is edible, it doesn't obligate the reciever to reciprocate, but is also adequate as a return gift in the event that the reciever does indeed present a gift. Safe. The year we were engaged, we made fudge. We had to stick to the marshmallow cream type, because the one attempt I made at the authentic version ended up more like thick frosting than anything solid. Last year it was truffles. Except for a minor meltdown when I spilled chocolate all over the kitchen rug, it was a success.

This year was bread. I waited until after our Class Cookie Party and made lemon-cranberry-walnut bread, pumpkin-gingerbread, eggnog bread, apple-cinnamon-oat bread, and lemon-poppyseed tea bread in mini loaves for gifts to family and friends, as well as two loaves of German stollen bread (like fruitcake) for Christmas Eve breakfast. We turned one of the loaves (the one I subsitituted the fruitcake mixture for raisins, cranberries and walnuts) into yummy bread pudding for Christmas morning breakfast.

But the piece de resistance was the Buche de Noel, a chocolate jellyroll frosted to resemble a Yule Log, complete with rosemary garnish and merengue mushrooms. I was so impressed with myself that I had James ask our photography-savvy neighbor Will over to take some "food porn" pictures of it, posted below. We took the cake to my parent's Christmas Eve gathering, and I felt appropriately lauded on my pastry chef aptitude. And it tasted good, too! A pound of butter in the frosting alone will do that, in my experience.




So I think I'm baked out for the year. No more pastry work until 2008.

Monday, December 17, 2007

Busy season!

On spacers:

So I'm getting braces in the near future to complete the orthodontia my parents started when I was in gradeschool. Because of the almost-twenty-year hiatus, I get to have four teeth pulled before the application of the hardware, but more on that later. The event that has eclipsed my entire weekend has been the SPACERS that I was instructed to put between my teeth prior to getting other teeth pulled. For those of you fortunate enough to be happy with the teeth you grew naturally, I shall explain. Spacers (at least my generation of spacers, James had a different kind as a kid) are llittle plastic donuts that sit between your molars and your molar and pre-molar, to make room for the caps that will later serve as anchors for the braces. They seem so small, but have managed to become a source of almost-invisible torture for the last three days. It hurts to chew, it hurts to sit and hold my teeth slightly apart, it hurts to press my teeth together (although I think I'm clenching at night due to the new sensation), and I find myself relying on carefully doled out half tablets of Vicodin left over from a dimly remembered back spasm. I keep thinking to myself, "this, too, shall pass...probably about the time I get four teeth pulled out of my head and really have an excuse for Vicodin...and then I get braces put on and tightened every 4-6 weeks...well, at least I'll lose some weight since I can only eat applesauce painlessly, which is fat free..." And I exaggerate. I can also eat ice cream and pancakes painlessly, which are not fat free. And due to the super-busy social nature of this last weekend, I have suffered the pain of firmer foods for the gustatory pleasure they impart. Viva la Vicodin!

Speaking of the busy weekend...

This is the first December that James hasn't worked at the hotel, and therefore the first December that he has weekends off. So of course, we've managed to fill every second of every day that he has off this Christmas Season with stuff to do. This last weekend was the epitome of busy Christmas weekends:

Birthday Party #1:
We started by planning and coordinating a surprise 60th birthday party for Dad on Friday night. We all met at the Italian restaurant near their house, complete with balloons and a joint gift of a fancy saw/drill that Dustin claims is "the best" from all of the local kids (didn't have time or energy to pull the Texas kids in on the deal). Dad was delighted, especially when the roaming accordian player (oh yes, that kind of Italian restaurant!) played him Happy Birthday in English and Italian, as well as several other Italian songs and The Beatles "When I'm Sixty-Four." Mom fed Oscar a whole scoop of ice cream and he went ape-crazy with the sugar high.

Shopping, shopping, shopping:
Saturday morning, James cleaned the house while I did some errands, including getting the oil changed in the car and the final stuff for our Sunday School Christmas Cookie Party (more on that later). I had just enough time to run downtown to Powell's book store (Non-Portlanders: a must-see when you visit, wonderful place) to get an EKG textbook for next term and mom's Christmas present (tsk-tsk, no peeking!), but underestimated the meter time, so I had to run to get to my car before the approaching meter-man got there (I could see him coming!). And I tripped and did a face plant right there on the sidewalk. I also scraped the corners of my two books, which is sad because they don't heal as well as I do. But I didn't get a parking ticket!!

Christmas Party #1:
So we decided to throw an end-of-the-year Cookie Party for our 5-6 year-old Sunday School kids, since they'll be getting a new teacher next year, and we'll be getting new kids (they look so young!). All five showed up and good-natured chaos ensued. With myself at the rolling-pin-helm, we rolled out the sugar cookie dough, cut shapes, put slightly misshapen/finger-smudged cookies on trays and baked them. Then out came the frosting, in seven toothpaste-tube-like vessels, and the real fun began. I manned the kitchen at this point, keeping up the blank cookie demand, and James helped direct the artistic side at the table. Soon everyone had enough cookies to share with their family, after eating some on the way. Since we still had 45 minutes of our two hour window before parents came back, we pulled out the glitter and glue sticks and make Christmas Cards and a big glitter mess, but it was fun. We rounded off the party with more cookies for some and a game of Uno for others. They're great kids, and James and I will miss having them in our class.

Birthday Party #2:
We got the glitter and cookie crumbs vacuumed up. This was the last straw for poor Hamlet, who had already put up with a morning vacuuming pre-party and then five curious children, and we had to spend several minutes reassuring him that the house was once more safe for kitty-kind. After a short rest, we made our way over to Aubrey's house for Oscar's 1st birthday party. We came, we ate, we sang, and we left. It was a short jaunt to show familial support and love, but we reallllllly wanted to see the Christmas Revels, which James's friend Nathan was assistant director of this year.

Christmas Performance #2 (after last weekend's Coats concert)
So we dashed downtown and met Nathan outside the buiding. He directed us to the floor manager ("Attacus, in the banana-yellow jacket") who scored us primo seats on the aisle, row G. Apparently, the Christmas Revels is an organized production put on in several cities across the country, which revives the music and Christmas/Winter Solstice tratitions of the Middle Ages. Just like last year, when Nathan was in a starring role, the performance was wonderful. There was singing, audience participation and singing, beautiful dancing, and a plot, which is apparently unique to Portland's Christmas Revels. We got to sing along to a few songs, including one famililar song, the 12 Days of Christmas, in which James was invited to act out the role of "Seven Swans a Swimming." We went home exhausted, but filled with Christmas cheer.

Christmas Party #2:
Sunday morning dawned and we relaxed for the first half of the day, watching the Steelers lose to the Jacksonville Jaguars (much to James's dismay), and planning our lesson for Sunday School (The Golden Rule). Then we got dressed up and made an appearance at James's work Christmas Party. I got to meet his boss, his boss's boss, and their wives, as well as some of his coworkers and eat some scrumptious food (I even braved the crunchy chips because the dip was so tasty). We dashed out before people started getting drunk (now I'll never know) to make it to church on time. The lesson was a success, and we went home to change for...

Birthday Party #3:
yet another family gathering, this time the re-scheduled celebration of Jared's graduation/birthday (he had the flu for the original time slot). There was plenty of fruit and cheescake to satisfy my aching teeth (and aching belly), and lots of good conversation and socialization. Jared felt very celebrated. James and I got him a Bar Mitzvah card (when else will we ever be able to give one of those?) and mom's card sand "Kung Fu Fighting," much to Oscar's fascination.

After a weekend like that, I have to admit that I love Christmas time, but I can really only hadle it once a year!

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas

So I've been a Grinch this year. Every commercial I saw, every window advertisement, and every radio blip about "get him/her the Perfect Gift this Holiday Season..." sent me off on a muttering tirade about greedy, over-commercialized, consumer whores, trade deficit, crap from China, etc, etc, etc.

I was getting cranky.

Then James took me Christmas tree shopping. We were planning on repeating our cone-shaped rosemary bush from last year (which sadly died before we got it out to the back porch, but we still left the withered corpse out there until late spring), but then we saw some 3-4' nobles that were oh so cute, cheaper, and smelled like Christmas! I got all Christmas-giddy, and now we have a little mini-tree in our front room. Like I told James after we decorated our diminuitive tree,

Now it feels like Christmas!

Then, last week, James treated me to one of my presents early, in the form of a Christmas Coats concert!!! The Coats are a local (Seattle) a cappela band, and I am oh so fond of them (www.thecoats.net), so I was practially gushing when James surprised me by kidnapping me (he had to warn me so I could study around the interruption) down to Salem for the concert. They always put on such a great show, and I got their latest Christmas album to remember it. As I sat gushing in my seat (row L), I told James

Now it feels like Christmas!

So after finals are done (this week!), we're hosting our Primary class in a cookie party to celebrate, since many of them will be moving on to the next age group. We'll decorate sugar cookies, play games, and listen to Christmas tunes. Ah what fun! More on that after the event, but

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!