For Unto Us a Child is Born!
Joyful music from Handel’s Messiah 🙂
Shepherd’s Pipe Carol
Not in the least traditional – and a very difficult song to master, and really really fun to sing, once you have caught all the nuances:
“. . . Come to bring us peace on earth and he’s lying . . . cradled there in Bethlehem!”
Merry Christmas, Kuwait!
It is seven in the morning, and AdventureMan is sleeping in a little, giving me a chance to catch up with YOU.
We have always waited until morning to open our gifts. Last night, after our guests left, we said “No children! We could open our presents tonight!” and then . . . we laughed. It was late and we were tired and we needed our sleep. (I never thought I would see the day, so old that I would want to go to bed more than to open presents.)
Christmas Eve was so special, spent with dear friends, reminiscing over times together, past Christmases. There is one great thing about being an older adult, and that is you are no longer involved in the frenzy of school and church and after-school youth activities. At nine at night, I am not busy trying to get my son’s acolyte robe ironed, ready for the midnight service, I am not frantically putting together the last few plates of cookies that I am required to provide for a million events I don’t really even want to attend. Christmas is much more peaceful, more measured, less frantic now, and I love being able to enjoy the holiday at a more measured pace. Isn’t life full of delicious ironies, that I can enjoy Christmas more in a Moslem country?
One Christian friend told me years ago that Satan tries to distract us during the holiest days. (I would have imagined that to be true for my Moslem friends, too, but I think I remember that Satan is jailed during the month of Ramadan, and cannot tempt you; that if temptation comes, it is coming from your own heart and shows you where you need to work on your character.) Yesterday, as I was working on the Christmas Eve dinner, my kitchen faucet broke – simply would not shut off. Anytime I wanted to use water, I had to go under the sink and turn two knobs, or water would just continue to run.
My friend called and asked if she could use my oven, which, fortunately, I had just turned on, but wasn’t planning to use immediately, so she came for about half an hour and we had an unexpected and delightful visit while I worked on vegetables and she baked her Christmas cake.
If that was Satan, well, he inconvenienced us, but he certainly didn’t get in the way of our enjoying Christmas. Ha Ha on you, Satan!
I intended to take a bunch of photos showing you our Christmas Eve dinner, but it’s like you get on this track, and then the track takes over, and I only have a few images to show you, and nothing really from the meal.
This is my oldest cookbook, I think I even had it before I was married. The glue has started to fail, pages are falling out, there are drops and stains throughout the book, but I don’t want to replace it because it has so many memories. This is my go-to book when I need an overview on how things work, and a basic, tried and true recipe.
Yesterday was a relatively easy day, pulling things out and putting them together. The harder days were before – creating the menu, figuring out what I needed from the store and getting it (AdventureMan helped) and “prepping”, i.e. getting all the walnuts chopped, the onions, the parsley, the cheese grated, etc. That’s the really hard work, I think.
One thing required a little extra preparation – I wanted to make peppermint candy ice cream, something I have made before. but a long time ago. It requires peppermint candy. Once I saw peppermint candy here, but it was a long time ago, in like February – I guess it hadn’t gotten here in time for Christmas. I brought back some from my recent trip to the US.
The ingredients for peppermint candy ice cream are wonderfully easy:
3 cups cream
2 cups crushed peppermint candy
You add one cup to the cream, put it in the refrigerator overnight. The next day, you stir it, and put it in the ice cream making machine to process. When it is nearly finished (it is thickened and the machine starts to labor) you put the remaining one cup of crushed peppermint candy in through the tube where you can make additions, allow it to process maybe 30 seconds, then – it is finished.
No, there was no added sugar, there is enough in the candy to make it sweet enough. Because it is pure cream and no additives, it is very very fattening and very very delicious.
How will we spend Christmas Day? When AdventureMan gets up, I will heat him up a cup of Christmas punch and we will open the presents in our stockings:
Here is what the rule is – laid down in my family many many uncountable years ago – as long as you believe in Santa Claus, Santa Claus will come. To this day, we believe in Santa Claus, so when we wake up on Christmas morning, we have stockings with little gifts. (I think maybe one of mine sparkles 😉 )
We also open gifts from family – and the gifts from our son and his wife arrived just in time, yesterday, and are under the tree!
Then, we will get ready for church, and go and greet all our church friends – Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!
That is . . . unless the plumber comes to fix the faucet. Yes, for my friends who do not live in Kuwait, for the rest of the world, this is just any old day, and plumbers come on Christmas day. They do NOT come on Fridays, the Moslem world Sunday, so if the plumber comes – and we just never know when that might be – I would have to miss church.
We will gather again tonight with friends for Christmas dinner. Unless the plumber comes.
(No, Satan, I can roll with this. You are NOT going to ruin my Christmas!)
I wish you all a great day, a wonderful, sweet day.
PS. The Qatteri Cat celebrated by eating three Kuwaiti shrimp. For some reason, they are not so good for him, so he only gets them on special occasions. He would live on only shrimp if he had his way.
Mary, Did You Know?
A totally different sound, contemporary, jazzy, and full of joyful spirit. The sound on this version is muddy, but I just totally love the Christmas pageant. Done in many many churches at this time of the year, all the characters played mostly by the children (costumes usually made by proud Moms), there are often moments of unexpected mirth as the actors replay the manger scene in Bethlehem. But watch – you’ll see what I mean.
Once In Royal David’s City
My absolute favorite of all the beautiful Christmas music:
The Coventry Carole
In the midst of this miraculous birth, a tragedy. The wise men warn the family that they must flee, and King Herod issues an edict that all babies 2 and under will be slain. Mary tries to keep her baby quiet and hidden as they escape to Egypt:
The Angel Gabriel From Heaven Came Down
What would you say if you were a 14 year old unmarried virgin, and God asked you to have a baby? Mary said “yes.”
“I’ll be home for Christmas – if only in my dreams”
This is a nightmare year for people trying to get home for Christmas in the United States – weeks of storms have caused snarled schedules and cancelled trains and planes, stranding passengers eager to be home with family for Christmas.
Worse – my friends tell me – many groceries have not been resupplied, but that’s OK because many of their customers can’t get to the stores anyway. It’s hit merchants hard in what is already thought to be one of the most dismal selling seasons in a long, long time.
Here’s a write up from National Public Radio:
Winter Storms Frustrate Holiday Travel Nationwide
by Scott Neuman
NPR.org, December 23, 2008 · Bitter cold temperatures and snow have placed the northern half of the nation in a deep freeze, affecting travel in planes, trains and automobiles just as the holiday season gets under way.
Some of the worst winter storms on record have cut a swath from the Pacific Northwest to New England. Across the country, tens of thousands of people are without power after freezing rain and strong winds caused transmission lines to come down.
Heavy snowfall in western Oregon has caused traffic to come to a near standstill along Interstate 5, and state highways through the northern edge of the Coast Range are closed.
Amtrak’s Cascades passenger train service between Eugene, Ore., and Vancouver, British Columbia, was halted, but officials said they expected it to resume on Tuesday. Greyhound bus service in Portland and Seattle was also shut down.
At the Seattle-Tacoma airport, thousands of people have been waiting in hours-long lines to re-book canceled flights.
“There’s no flights going into [Las] Vegas that has any available seating,” Air Force Airman Alex James told NPR’s Morning Edition.
James said he and three other Air Force buddies hope to avoid driving from Seattle to Las Vegas, where their families are preparing for the holidays.
“We leave on our deployment on the first of January,” James said. “So, however long it takes us to get back from here is how much reduced our time at home is.”
Alaska and Horizon airlines, the West Coast’s principal carriers, resumed limited service Monday and the carriers said they hoped to resume near-normal schedules Tuesday at Seattle-Tacoma and have things normal flights by Wednesday.
In the East, the town of Eustis, Maine, got nearly 3 1/2 feet of snow. Snow and sleet — but no additional accumulation — are expected Tuesday in the Northeast.
In the nation’s midsection, the situation is just as bad.
In Illinois, which has experienced subzero conditions and wind chills as low as minus 35 degrees in recent days, temperatures are expected to rise into the 20s Tuesday. But with the reprieve will come several inches of snow, according to the forecast.
More snow is expected across the upper Midwest. Michigan could get as much as a foot of snow, while ice, snow and sleet are in the forecast for Indiana, where many people have been without electricity.
Travelers have been stranded in airports as they wait for flights to resume so they can make their way to friends and families for the holidays. Routes to much of the Pacific Northwest have been canceled, and flights to the East Coast, including New York and New Jersey, have been delayed by hours.
You can read the entire article by clicking HERE.
The Year of the Secret Santa
One year AdventureMan was attending school in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, a special school to train men who aspired to the highest ranks of the military. There were lots and lots of families, all approximately the same age group, and there were lots of family activities. For many of us, it was one of the few times we were stationed in the United States. It was also a high-testosterone, highly competitive environment.
We lived on a small, unique street, about half students and half permanent party – teachers, instructors, people who were not part of the huge student cadre. The “old-timers” organized us into a neighborhood. We had block parties, we babysat one another’s kids, we went to auctions together, and we kept each other’s secrets. Best of all – they introduced us to Secret Santa.
Just before Thanksgiving, we had a potluck and drew names. Each family drew the name of another family, and until the Christmas party, when you revealed whose name you had, you acted as Secret Santa to that family.
It’s funny – I can’t remember all the things that were done for us or things we did for our family; all I can remember is that we had a LOT of fun, and not a single one of us knew who our Secret Santa was. I remember that one of the guest speakers at the school was an old friend of my husband’s. He came to dinner at our house, and after dinner, we asked him to move his car to our Secret Santa family, and then deliver a breakfast bread to them. He was sort-of famous, and when he showed up at the Secret Santa family with the bread, we were hiding upstairs in a darkened bedroom, watching, and we could see the amazement on their faces when this revered gentleman delivered the bread. They were astounded he would be delivering their Secret Santa gift, and they could not imagine whose friend he might be. Oh, what fun!
Baked goods, toys, snow shoveled off the walks, handmade Christmas ornaments – it was all so much fun. At the Christmas dinner, when we all revealed who we had been Santa to, there were shouts of joy and whoops of laughter. Best of all, it really knit us together as a neighborhood, doing good to one another. It was one of the very best Christmas times I can remember.
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