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.

The need for speed

As  I changed into my 14th outfit possibility for the night I tried to give myself perspective that I was spending the evening at a nursing home fundraiser, and not a hot date. But I knew it wasn’t going to make a difference and changed again.

It’s actually a pretty spectacular event. A gala type fundraiser at the nursing home my grandmother goes to for an adult day program. I started going a couple of years ago with my grandparents and one of my aunts. They have local vendors with food to try. I love eating and I love finding new restaurants, or coffee shops. But this was the first year my grandma brought her walker with her.

First of all, the thing comes with attachments! A tray that fits over the top complete with cup holders. I asked if it came with a beer hat attachment, but my aunt didn’t think so. Now unfortunately the tray wasn’t leveled out so the food had a tendency to slide towards my grandmother as she zipped around. And I mean zipped. I have never seen my grandmother go so fast! As the mother of 7 kids I have to assume she did zip around in her younger days. But I bet she wished she had this walker back then! Every time I turned around she would be halfway across the room. All of my 37 outfit tries had encompassed heels and I was seriously regretting this decision as Grandma zipped away. Part of the problem for me was the crowd, but it turns out if you have a walker you can part a crowd. AND nobody minds! At least not at a nursing home event. People would trip over themselves to get out of the way. Even as she had a family pressed up against a catering table and I thought surely they would be angry, they only admonished themselves in a joking manner for getting in the way of a woman with a walker. Cool trick. I gave up on trying to get people out of the way-I was never fast enough and rolling over their toes worked much quicker. I just took up stashing food on her tray and apologizing afterwards.

Fill your lungs with this.

In an effort to experience some more local touristy sites this weekend I checked out Celtic Fest in Bethlehem, PA. I saw the most talented musician I have ever seen in my life: I saw a man smoking a cigarette while playing the flute. We used to laugh about a fellow orchestra member who was a heavy smoker and a bassoonist. We could never figure out how/why he was destroying his lungs while being so dedicated to a wind instrument. But this was on a whole new level-and underneath a “NO SMOKING” sign. I mean how did he get this skill? Which came first? The smoking or the flute?

Did he just realize one day that he couldn’t take the time off from smoking to play with the band: “Should I quit the band? or quit smoking? If only I could think of a solution…eureka! I will learn to smoke while playing the flute.”

Or maybe he auditioned for the band while smoking and playing the flute. “You know our band could use another member, what could fill this hole? Why a smoking flautist! It’s genius!”

It was not a metal flute, but a wooden one, more like a recorder. But that means it was made of wood-which increases the fire risk! I mean just think, every deep breath he took he inhaled smoke! I didn’t see smoke rings coming out of the flute, but I wish I had. With that kind of lung power, just think what he could do! I was hoping play the bag pipe, but maybe he’s still working up to it.

Oh yeah, he was also wearing a kilt.

Are those smoke rings I see?

Smokey rocks out