The Beviad–musings, mutterings and myths

So, here we are at Christmas Eve, at last.

It doesn’t look much like it, of course. It looks like March. Rain is pouring down. The temperature is predicted to go to plus 4 degrees. The grass is green. There are even green things coming up in the garden under the piles of rotting, brown, Autumn leaves. Buds on branches are looking green. And not surprisingly, since the temperatures have been above zero Celcius, at times at 10, when the usual temperature here around this time of year is about -6 downward.

We have already celebrated “Christmas”. By which I mean, we celebrated Yule. Wednesday night we had a dinner of carrot-apple soup, tourtierre and baked beans with a Yule log for dessert. Before it, for about an hour, we had a mock-ritual that involved a blessing of the garden, with words of remembrance said over the graves of the four cats we have buried in the garden; lighting of the fireplace with song, holding of candles with song, etcetera.

From the start, it seemed jinxed. Devon was fine last year, at age 3 1/2, but this year she was forever saying “When’s dinner?” In the garden she rode her horse. She nearly set her hair on fire several times inside. Then she proceeded to eat nothing at the table, fixating only on the ‘turtles’ candy I had unwisely given as a little Yule gift. John usually makes wonderful Wassail, with brandy and sherry and beaten eggs, but this time it curdled and was undrinkable. The soup had been made incorrectly because I read the recipe wrong; then John added more vinegar. The result was a tart mess that nobody could eat. The tourtierre was luckily not of my baking, having come from Quinn’s Farm, which we visited earlier this month off the island of Montreal. I thought it was too dry. I missed the juicy chicken I usually cook for this meal. Only the Yule log, which came from a french patisserie, was delicious, with chocolate and pears.

However, after Devon had been put to bed, we redeemed the night by a family watching of “Close Encounters”, which always seems Christmasy, even though it has nothing to do with that event. Must be the Mother ship, which looks like a cross between a fancy ceiling fixture and a Christmas ornament.

The next morning’s gift opening went well, but as usual Devon got way too many gifts. Even she remarked that she had gotten ‘hundreds of gifts”. Well, not really, but still too many. Pasley had feared that given Devon’s recent moods she might just look at the gifts and say, “Is that all there is?”, but she was her usual sweet self, exclaiming over each gift and playing with each as it was unwrapped.

To give a ‘wow!” factor to Paze and Jeff’s Xmas, I had bought them a cheap camcorder, so Jeff was able to take some movie clips of the opening of gifts. The pjs I got Paze fitted her, and she said she loved the necklace I had bought from Pat’s bead sale; the Fair Trade t-shirt I got Jeff fitted, and he seemed to like his handheld electronic crossword puzzle. John liked the shirt and sweater I gave him, mainly because he had picked them out and bought them himself. Meanwhile, I got the book and CD I had asked for from Paze and Jeff, and the raspberry-colored robe and nightshirt I had bought and given to John to give me. So all was well.

Then Paze and Jeff left Friday night for Willow Place Inn for a romantic getaway, while we watched Devon. That apparently went well, too, and they bought me a birthday gift in Hudson.

Now we have only Christmas dinner to live through. And there lies another tale. In order to make meal preparation easier, I decided last week to get some side dishes from the little caterer at the end of our street. I especially wanted something vegetarian for Joan, our vegetarian neighbor, who will be joining us this year. So I ordered two dishes of Ratatouille, and two of carmelized onions and scalloped potatoes.

When I went to pick them up and pay for them on Friday, I was dismayed to see how small the packages were. Somehow I had imagined casserole dishes, but no, these were small tinfoil containers, each the size of a stuffed wallet. I ended up buying more of them. When defrosted and re-potted, so to speak, the Ratatouille at least filled a casserole dish. The potato dish, however, not only had turned almost black as it defrosted, but barely covered the bottom of a lasagna dish. So yesterday I made–or tried to make–mashed potatoes. Somehow, my cooking curse continued, and the potatoes, which had seemed cooked through, left darkish lumps after being mashed. And my addition of sour cream, cream cheese, onions and beaten egg whites, to fill a recipe I had found on the Internet, did not leave it any better (just higher in calories.) Worse, I now have two potato dishes, but only the Ratatouille and green beans as vegetables.

My sister in law, Edith, always does Xmas dinner so well: lots of colorful veggies, light-as-air mashed spuds, etcetera. But John and I hate cooked carrots, and John insists that peas will not be good if we already have beans. And I now recall that I don’t have tinned cranberry sauce, although I do have fresh cranberries. Given my cooking jinx, I wonder if I dare to try to make even a simple cranberry sauce from scratch. At least Edith will be making the Trifle, so there’s no chance of disaster there. And we can only hope that John’s turkey will roast itself properly, as it has done most of the time in the past, although there have been strange anomolies at times, when it was dried out. ARRRG!

Still, I shouldn’t be worrying, I know. I should be–and am–bloody grateful to have good food and a family to help celebrate the occasion. Even if Paze, Jeff and Devon will be in Ottawa with his brother and family, rather than with us, we will still have David, Edith, Zoe and Emma, not to mention Joan, at our table. Although my legs are killing me, my health isn’t too bad: certainly my breathing is better than it was last year, thanks to improved asthma medication. And John’s recent worries of having cancer seem to have been baseless, since his doctor hasn’t contacted him since the blood tests–and that was well over two weeks ago. Jeff has a job to start Jan. 3 that will involve animation and offer benefits such as EI. And I will be working at the Provincial Exit Essay Marking Session from Jan.3 to 15, making money to put into my maxed out credit card.

All in all, we are very fortunate.

Merry Xmas to everyone. May you be even half as lucky.

Since I will be turning 65 in 8 days, I thought this poem (not written by me) was interesting:

“At 65″ by Richard Howard

The tragedy, Colette said, is that one

does not age. Everyone else does, of course

(as Marcel was so shocked to discover),

and, upon one’s mask, odd disfigurements

are imposed; but that garrulous presence

we sometimes call the self, sometimes deny

monologue–it is the same as when we stole

the pears, spied on mother in the bath, ran

away from home. What has altered is what

Kant called Categories: the shape of time

changes altogether! Days, weeks, months,

and especially years are reassigned.

Famous for her timing, a Broadway wit

told me her “method”: asked to do something,

anything, she would acquiesce next year —

“I’ll commit suicide, provided it’s

next year.” But after sixty-five, next year

is now. Hours? there are none, only a few

reckless postponements before it is time …

When was it you “last” saw Jimmy — last spring?

last winter? That scribbled arbiter

your calendar reveals — betrays — the date:

over a year ago. Come again? No

time like the present, endlessly deferred.

Which makes a difference: once upon a time

there was only time (… as the day is long)

between the wanting self and what it wants.

Wanting still, you have no dimension where

fulfillment or frustration can occur.

Of course you have, but you must cease waiting

upon it: simply turn around and look back. Like Orpheus, like Mrs. Lot, you

will be petrified — astonished — to learn

memory is endless, life very long,

and you — you are immortal after all.

A review of Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” in today’s paper finally cleared up something I had been wondering about vis a vis Mel’s latest project. I had wondered why on earth he picked the Mayans to focus on. There seemed to be so little that was nice about them, seeing as they practiced human sacrifice and so on. I couldn’t see why the man who had spent millions on The Passion of Christ, which was explicable by virtue of his being a fundamentalist Catholic, would bother recreating the Mayan world.

I thought maybe it had to do with an ‘end of times’ theme. You know, here was the mighty Mayan Empire, so rich and powerful, with their large impressive cities, and then, almost over night—they’re gone. The title, Apocalypto, suggested this, too. This, I thought, might be Mel’s way of warning the godless nations of today that Jesus is coming, and our world could as easily be gone tomorrow.

Mel has said in interviews that ‘apocalypse’ meant an ending, but also a new beginning, but somehow that just didn’t sink in for me.Today, in a horrified review in an American paper, someone not only renounced the film as unrealistic and defamatory for the ex-Mayans still living in Middle-America, but pointed out that the film’s conclusion, with the arrival of the Spanish Christians, wrongly indicated that there would be an improvement in the Mayans’ lives. what with the diseases the Europeans would give them inadvertently, and the conscious genicide that would follow as the Conquistadors stripped the Mayans of everything, she pointed out, this can only be seen as fundamentalist Christian propaganda. Apparently the film suggests that with the Catholic Europeans, not only would all this butchery be over, but everything would be much more civilized for the natives. (Well, I suppose there was at least no more human sacrifice, but isn’t everyone pretty clear on the matter of what harm Europeans did to the natives?)

So, we have to assume that Mel meant that as part of his idea of a ‘new beginning’. Yet the reviewer said she hated the film, because when it wasn’t being gratuitously violent, it was showing the natives (the ones in the villages down-stream from the cities, at least) as simple, silly people giggling at each other’s farts. In other words, even the ones who aren’t sacrificing humans are shown as far from being noble savages. Yet At the Movies, the tv show where two reviewers assess the movies (they used to be Sisko and Ebert until Sisko died), gave the film two enthusiastic thumbs up and said it kept them on the edges of their chairs.

Will I go to see it out of curiosity, just to see what it’s like? No. I gave up on Gibson after “Braveheart”, with its gratuitous violent death at the end of William Wallace. I swear that Mel enjoys torture in itself. Perhaps, growing up in his rather odd Catholic sect, he was shown the paintings of the Stations of the Cross, the kind I’ve heard of, with horrid pictures of the torture of Christ. Since he must have learned that Jesus gained even more nobility by such a death than he had earned by his miracles and teachings, he may now believe that torture in and of itself is enobling. Or that it leads to good box office results, and is a good forum for couching one’s philosophical beliefs. Get their attention, then slip in the message; that kind of thing. All I know is that it all seems sick to me, and is certainly not what I would want to see at Christmas, in any case. What was he thinking? Would anyone want to see this at Christmas? And yet the film made $14 million last weekend.