Day 2 Day radishes

December 30 Holiday Health

On line this morning I read about how Britain is suffering from the “Winter Vomiting Bug”. Apparently if you get it, and everyone is, be prepared to have it for a while.

I have had the “Holiday Vomiting Bug” twice, once immediately after Thanksgiving, and the other two days after Christmas. Aside from my husband, the whole family had it in between the holidays.

I stayed on the living room couch sort of out of the way because it had the least amount of carpet to the bathroom and I did not think I could make it up the stairs to the bed room. My family assured me that it was a short term 24 hour flu, but the oldest of them is 40 and I am seventy. I think it is 24 for them, and 48 and more for me.

I would say that four out of five Christmases of my adult life have had some sickness by me or by a major participant, including Santa Claus. This is very disheartening. I have had people leave the dinner table to go straight to the hospital although it was not because of my dinner. I think it was Christmas when the EMTs came to deal with my choking mother in law. (Daughters if I am wrong about the exact day, don’t ruin a good story). I have gone to bed and had to have a house guest cook the dinner. And of all times the entrée was a strip filet.

What is it about Christmas and health? This year it was the Holiday vomit bug, in town, and we had snow. People say that there has been more snow than what we had, and we have had colder weather than what we had, but we have never had this cold and snow for so long. We were a lot of people cooped up inside with all these germs recycling round and round. You’re it. You’re it.

What to do? It is thought that Jesus was actually born in May or at least in the Spring. We could move Christmas to when the weather was good in May. Then we could put on a mild celebration of the solstice. In addition, we could open wide the windows from two to four in the afternoon to let the germs out no matter the weather. Or we could get rid of the dog, which everyone petted and was, believe me, a common denominator. The one idea that can be dismissed is that if you have had the vomit bug once, you can’t get it again.

January 7/ Twelfth night

Last night was the Twelfth night of Christmas. Meredith put on the family party. We all left the new year resolutions on the diet front to resume the following day. Lots of wine, mushroom ragout over pasta, and speedy Tiramisu. Little gifts, puzzles and chewing gum, hand lotion, and a left over Christmas present for an excited kid. A young friend arrived, and the women sat down to the juicy bits of her new relationship with a man who is as tall as she. We talked about the niece who had gone to Italy, to do we are not sure what. We sent best wishes to the niece, who as we spoke, had gone to the mid west to pick up a baby girl for hopefully for adoption. We regretted the other niece not getting a baby, like her sister. Our Seattle Seahawks won their playoff game. The men watched the second play-off game on television. The kids entertained themselves except for the toddler who needed parental cuddles. There was nothing fancy. Presents came out of shopping bags. The dress code was what you wore. One person made the salad. Two people put the first round of dishes in the dishwasher. We bemoaned that we did not like our choice of Presidential candidates but decided we had to suck it up, and get out there and vote. The evening unfolded like an accordion in sound and shape. It was the end of the Christmas season, the Wise Men had come. A feast day of love, happiness, and mirth.

December 28/ Christmas tantrum

I wanted one stinking cookbook for Christmas. I had asked my husband for a cookbook holder that fitted under the kitchen cabinets,which then held the cookbook at eye level. He mail ordered one and it looks like it will be a dandy. Because I love to collapse on the couch on Christmas with a good cookbook, even a bad cookbook. Over the years I had gathered that this was universally understood. I thought that if you requested a cookbook holder, a cookbook was implied. A cookbook was in the bag.

I have a huge number of cookbooks, and ones that will never be resold on e-bay or Amazon, because besides reading them like novels, I actually cook with cookbooks and I also write in them. For example, my Pie books have a lot of flour in them. My braising book has stew meat. Or I write, “Molly & Ed came to dinner, v. good week night meal, no radicchio, subbed asparagus. MDC liked, served with the purple , brown wine label .05/02/07” . A food journal would be too easy.

In addition to thinking, no one would give a cook book holder without a cookbook, just to be sure, I told my daughter that you could find out what cookbook I wanted on my Amazon wish list. She thanked me for telling her, and said that was very helpful. In truth it is nearly impossible to pick a cookbook for me that I do not have or want. But I thought I had arrived at the perfect solution. Several days later I was reviewing cookbooks on line, and I wanted to add to my wish list, so I clicked on My Wish List. My past list was gone. What does this mean? It must mean that some one bought me the books! Fabulous. That worked out well.

Imagine my surprise when I went through Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and there was not one stinking cookbook. How long would the gifter withhold the Amazon order? I am embarrassed to say that I made my daughter take me down to Barnes and Noble the 26th. Call it a Christmas tantrum.

The cookbooks were all picked over, except for piles of Rachel Ray and Paula Dean stacked on the floor. I did find a hidden gem: The Kitchen Diaries, by Nigel Slater. I was healed. Here is last night’s Onion soup recipe. For four, roast at 400 about five cubed, peeled, onions in about three tablespoons of butter. This could take 45 minutes. Stir now and again. The onions should caramelize somewhat. Put in a pot, with a half a cup of white wine, scrapping the roasting pan to include juices in the soup. Add broth, naturally from your freezer, and simmer 20 minutes. Pour over a piece of Italian bread toast in a bowl, with a little shredded Gruyere.

December 24/ Mirth

Mirth

laughter: happiness or enjoyment, especially accompanied by laughter 

[Old English myrgÞ . Ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic word meaning “pleasant, joyful,” which is also the ancestor of English merry.]
Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Christmas is the season for Mirth.  Please remember that Christmas Day is the first of twelve days.  The season lasts up until the sixth of January.  Put your feet up, forget housecleaning (that is for you, not for me).  Go to movies, read a book.  Invite some one over for dinner.  Merry Christmas.

                                           

Here is my Christmas card which reads:  Come out Christmas, come out. 

Thanks for being friends, Keep your spirits up, Protect your body, Say Merry Christmas often, Count your blessing. 

Love Radish

December 22/ Ice cubes

Happy Solstice. This is great. It is storming here. Winter has arrived. The tree is up, and my husband did the lights. That won him lots of points. He did it very efficiently and although there has been no real sunshine to observe thoroughly, he did a great job.

The last part of the story of the Christmas of ‘64 is that I lived through it with out my family. A Christmas of my husband and baby together was oddly satisfying. We were invited to John Stokes‘ house for Christmas dinner. My husband’s boss was a wonderful host. He had five screaming teenagers running around the house. His wife despised cooking, but together John and Edith put on a fabulous meal. Manhattans were Edith’s and my drink of choice then. John, I must mention here, was shot down twice during WWII over the Atlantic, somewhere between London and Brazil. Once he was in a life raft for two weeks.

You can imagine during the flood that the water from the tap was muddy. In those times we did not have the aisles of bottled water that me now do. The bottled water in town had to go to those whose actually had no water. John got up at 7:00 am Christmas day and drew water from the tap, he would let it settle, siphoned off the top, let it settle again, and again until there was no discoloration. And then he made ice cubes. We had clear ice cubes for our Christmas Manhattans. It was a Christmas gift I shall never forget. Merry Christmas to you John, over the white cliffs of Dover.

December/ 21 I think it was the Solstice

In 1964 we moved to a town in Northern California. We might as well have moved to Alaska, which we almost did, as to such an isolated place. Arcata, a town of 7,000, was on the coast, and the locals referred to it as “behind the Redwood Curtain”, where the women were still wearing beehives. Time had left this town alone.

Four weeks after I moved there, I had my first child. My mother did not come, as she wanted my husband and myself, and the baby to get acquainted with each other better. I was nursing the sweet baby girl, when for some reason I decided to stop after eight weeks. I was tired of not sleeping. My idea was that she would sleep better through the night if she could get all she wanted of real milk. Hum.

We planned to travel back to my home for Christmas. My dad would call and say, I hope you make it, the weather is bad. But the weather had been bad since the day I stepped into the county. This town’s middle name was Rain. I told my father that we always traveled in bad weather, there would not be a problem. But I was ignorant of the 100 year flood. For weeks it had snowed in the surrounding mountains, and then the Pineapple Express from Hawaii arrived, melting all the snow. The rivers rose, and bridges broke, and there was really no highway left to San Francisco.

This was the day that I stopped nursing. But I had forgotten that, if you stop nursing, you had to sterilize bottles. It was 100 percent humidity outside, with the bottles boiling, it was 100 percent humidity in the house. The sliding glass doors to the deck were open in the hopes of some humidity movement.

My husband was away in Sacramento with our own state senator. Not only was I not going to my family home for Christmas, but I might be having Christmas with only my baby. I had never celebrated Christmas without my family, let alone without a husband. But, praise be to God, Michael came safely home, he and the senator the last men over the last open country road.

The moral of this story is travel with people in high places, and don’t give up nursing in a storm.

December 19/ Christmas tree

Yesterday we went to buy our tree. We have to be very careful with our choice as , we hope to keep the tree up until January 6, Epiphany. (When, tra-la, we can have more presents. Just kidding Michael.) Our tree has to be short as it is going on the kitchen counter. Already the trees at the grocery store are old and are shedding.

I talked to one woman who bought a tree the day before yesterday, and when she decorated it, all the needles fell off. She asked if it had ever happened to me, and yes, unfortunately, it had. She was going to have buy a new one. I and the people listening, told her to get her money back. She asked who had ever asked for money back for a Christmas tree?

The Christmas tree farms have all closed up as everyone has already purchased. This is the first year that my husband was not ready for the tree hunt passage of Christmas. We like to buy an unsheared tree. I like the hapless design of a branch here, a branch there, the imperfections giving character. We are a hard sell for a fake tree. The weather was miserable, only 45degrees, but rainy and windy. Hats on, and jackets zipped to the neck, we drove right over to a vegetable stand which was selling trees, and a very agreeably the young woman sawed off the top of a $30.00 tree, said, “that will be $20.00 and Merry Christmas.”

December 17/ Christmas then

I have a friend who yearly went through the Christmas season with me. By that I mean, we cooked Christmas Eve dinner of enchiladas, tortellini, Swedish meatballs, or what ever was the dish.  We froze these three weeks ahead of time.  We discussed gifts for our family.  She worked so she had more money, so purchasing was a little easier for her. But she always had great ideas. One year she brought her husband a cherry picker. We had a joint holiday dinner with friends. We thumbed through magazines together and mused over our ideas.  We thought about how to make the season  spiritual without alienating our families. 

Our husbands could never understand what all the hype was about. Just like kids who think food comes from McDonalds, we felt our husbands thought you opened the front door, and Christmas was just there. Christmas was our problem, money for Christmas was theirs.  All our meals, all the wrapping, all the shopping, all the decorating, getting the lights on the fricken tree, sending the Christmas cards, dealing with scrabbling kids, entertaining our mother-in-laws.  That last, bonded us forever. Our husbands had the holiday spirit and wanted us to entertain them, while we  doing all this stuff.  Stuff is the nice word. Christmas was our yearly final.  But that was then, and now is now, and now my girls husbands are helping them with everything, alleviating all  pressure. 

PS. Weddings were our PhDs.   Ah, but that is another story. 

Decemsber 31/And the winner is

My vote for the best Christmas decorations, oh sorry, Season decorations this year is Target.  Reluctantly I announce this ,as I think, it was last year  they canceled the Salvation Army in front of their stores.   (I made an special effort to donate to the ringing bells this year.)
These ceiling hangings reminded me of portrait silhouette cuts done in first grade or second grade for Valentine's Day for my mother. I thought these decorations lovely.   

December 27/

This is something that I meant to say before Christmas.  At my sister's birthday party her husband made a disk of photos he had taken of her from the time they married until her birthday. It was very nice for the family to watch.  Admitedly my sister is attractive, but I realized what a fine thing for any husband to to do, and  enourage more  husbands to do likewise.   Usually, it is only one of the the married partners who takes the pictures. I do not know how it happened , but about halfway through our marriage,I became the photographer.

That means that there are not that many pictures of me. But I got even, This year I gave my husband a huge self portrait with smaller ones to my daughters.  One daughter said that she would put it upstairs in her photo gallery to be.  But I said, "not so fast.  I want a prominent place in the living room.

This week I am staying with her, so she can go to work while the boys are on vacation.  While I am here, I am scanning hundreds of old family photos into my computer. I will then touch them up, and sort them.  It is a real pleasure to me to revisit these photos which have been stashed for years.  The trouble is that young people do not care, nor do they have the time to do all this fiddling.  But if you wait until my age, there is a giant mess.  Do the best you can as you go along. 

The above picture is of me and the naughty daughter who wanted to put my picture in the gallery to be.

Regardless of your age or waistline, be gracious about having your picture taken.