One-Double Christmas

The news said 7 out of 10 women expect family drama before dessert on Thanksgiving. I don’t know about drama, but certainly some of our favorite family traditions made an appearance this year:

1. Dessert for breakfast. The rule in my house for major holidays is if a pie or cake had at least one slice taken out of it at dinner the night before it is fair game for breakfast food. This led to my cousin Maddie sleepily asking “what’s for dessert” when she stumbled downstairs Thanksgiving morning.

2. One Double Xmas. This is a new tradition in the past year, but one we’ve all rapidly embraced. It all started from my sister’s boyfriend mis-hearing the lyrics to “Simply having a wonderful Christmas time” as “A Very Happy One-double Christmas time” which he interpreted as some sort of alcoholic Christmas beverage. Obviously we had to come up with something appropriate for this new-found drinking song: Hot chocolate with peppermint schnapps. And this year we discovered peppermint whip cream and add toasted coconut sprinkled on top.

3. Made for TV Christmas movies. Lifetime and Hallmark are the best at these. You’ve seen them before, the movies that are so cheesy you can’t stop watching them. Perfect with a One-double Christmas. My brother-in-law has even gotten good at predicting scene by scene what will happen next.

4. Alcohol soaked brie. Brought to you by today’s taboo word: Cognac. This started a few years ago after an interesting lunch I had with my Grandfather. When I arrived there was a bottle of cognac on the table that my Grandmother had apparently discovered in their cabinet and started lacing his food with… “We should be drinking this more!” She told him. Apparently his old friend (a priest, actually) had been sending him a bottle every year for Christmas and my Grandmother had just re-discovered the stash. Since my Grandfather was on some medication that did not mix well with spiked-lunches he asked me to sneak the stash out of his house and to mine and I ended up taking about 10 bottles home with me. Naturally I needed to find something better to do with them than spike my own lunches and soaking them in brie seemed like a natural solution that is the perfect aperitif to any meal.

5. Interrogating new comers with family flashcards. A few years ago my cousin Maddie actually made flashcards with all our faces and names and connections on them to help the extraneous guests of our family function. When my sister’s father-in-law met the extended family for the first time he was jokingly told he had to have all 20+ members memorized if he wanted dinner. The joke was on us when even though English wasn’t his first language he went ahead and named everyone before eating his dinner.

You might be surprised a football game is not on our list. But with 9 out of 11 grandchildren being girls I don’t think football ever occurred to us.

As for drama? Well my Grandmother managed to steal some of my pie crust off my plate, and my uncles had battles over cranberries. And with 10 people staying in the house not everyone had warm showers. But there was plenty of pie for breakfast and many happy One Double Christmases.