Just The Caffeine Talking

Christmas and Hanukkah Dinner!

One last food post about our magnificent December 25 dinner, and then I'll get back to serious talk about space aliens. This year, since Christmas and the final night of Hanukkah happened on the same day, we decided to do a really big holiday dinner. Both of our kids would be home, and we invited two sets of neighbors for a grand total of eight people around the table.

The old table is infinitely expandable, but the dining room isn't, so we had to move all the furniture from the living room to the dining room, and put the table in the bigger space. Fortunately, our sofa is out for reupholstering, so most of the things we had to move were easily portable. 

Diane started making some of the dishes two days before, and of course I had started our Christmas Pudding at the beginning of November. On Christmas Eve we followed my family's tradition of eating out — eminently practical because the last thing you want is a sink full of dishes on Christmas morning. 

The meal was set for 4:00 p.m., so we started cooking at 11. The cooking ended just as (after) the first guests arrived, and then we spent the next three and a half hours eating.

The menu:

Oyster Patties — Roast Chestnuts — Chocolate Maccabees

Crémant de Bourgogne

Potage Crécy — Homemade rolls

Cold Steamed Salmon — Green Beans

Vouvray

Amuse-Bouche (Mushroom Puffs)

Beef Rib Roast — Oven-Baked Latke

Bordeaux

Apple Pie — Christmas Pudding Flambé

Coffee

Overall, an excellent dinner, and we're going to be eating beef and salmon until Valentine's Day. The pudding was more crumbly than last year's version, so I will go back to a six-month pudding or maybe even put one down in January for Christmas 2023. We lit the menorah, talked at length about things, and parted on a cold night feeling content.

Interview With the Scarab

If you want to see an interview with my character Solana Sina, one of the protagonists of The Scarab Mission, check out this Web site: The Protagonist Speaks. Her interview is here. You can find out something about her awful childhood, her colleagues on the mission to Safdaghar, and some of what went wrong. Then you can buy the book and read all about it for yourself!

 

Seasonal Music

Note: the Worldbuilding series will continue. I've been busy with other things over the past month but I haven't abandoned it.

It's December, and one of the local radio stations has gone over to an all-Christmas music format for the entire month. As it's one of my presets on the car radio, I wind up listening to that station a fair amount, especially during long commercial blocks on the other channels. Consequently I find myself paying more attention to Christmas songs than at any point in my life up to now.

An observation: most Christmas music is, of course, about Christmas. We have songs like "The Christmas Song" and "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." (Because it's an Oldies channel, I haven't heard "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" this year.)

However, there's a secret sub-genre of Christmas music which isn't actually about Christmas at all. I have provisionally named this sub-genre "Cold Weather Makeout Songs." The two greatest examples are "Let it Snow" and "Baby, It's Cold Outside." Neither one actually references Christmas at all, just cold weather and how nice it is to share body heat over a long winter night. Given the typical weather in February in North America, both could quite easily be Valentine's Day songs, but they're lumped in with Christmas all the same.

Adjacent to those two are songs about having more Platonic fun in wintertime. "Winter Wonderland" is best interpreted as a couple drunkenly staggering around in the snow before heading back to the chalet. And of course there's the grand-daddy of them all, the song which has become a synecdoche for the entire holiday season: "Jingle Bells." It isn't a Christmas song, it's about tearing around in a sleigh with your girlfriend and having hilarious slapstick accidents. Basically a 19th-Century snowmobile song. Canoodling by the fire afterward is implied but not stated outright.  

This touches on an issue which has bothered me since about the time I learned to talk: the weird New England chauvinism of American Christmas celebrations. Why the emphasis on snow, sleigh bells, pumpkin pie, et cetera? About two-thirds of the United States are snowless at Christmas — and a pretty big slice of the country is snow-free all winter. Now I realize it's more fun to sing about snow than about chilly rain or fog, but I'd love for someone to write a Christmas song about bonfires on the levees, or midnight Mass, or Christmas tamales. If anybody knows of some examples, let me know so I can pass the word to the local radio station programming manager.

Scarab Mission Ad!

Here's a great ad for The Scarab Mission, currently running in Library Journal:

Pre-order now!