Saturday, December 27, 2008

Christmas and Birthday Musings

Our Christmas dinner last night went very well, the better for the fact that my daughter Pasley and her family were able to share it with us this year. They were in Ottawa with Jeff’s family for the 25th, but we delayed our meal until Boxing Day to have them here at our table, too. After all, what’s Christmas without little kids around?


John’s brother David and his family arrived bearing gifts and champagne, which we drank immediately. The merriment that ensued was probably a direct result of that fact. I got a beautiful gift of one of Edith’s water colors for a birthday present. We had pate and the pretentiously-named ‘Paris toasts’ in front of the fire until it was dinner time, getting reacquainted, since David has been away in Calgary and Zoe in Toronto. Also, Edith, who looked great in a red sweater, has just recovered from an awful flu. Meanwhile, John toiled in the kitchen, with David popping in to keep him company, working like a wizard (in the half dark, since a lamp had come unplugged and we couldn’t replug it) on making gravy and finalizing the stuffing.


At dinner time, with everything keeping warm on my new warming tray (a gift from Paze and Jeff) on the sideboard, John was finally able to sit down while David and his daughters carved and served. John and I were amazed at how a rather limited menu managed to fill our plates: we had forgotten how cranberry sauce, and stuffing fill all the gaps between turkey, rice, peas and a green bean dish I had made earlier with beens, mushrooms, sou rcream, worchestershire sauce and a topping of Muslix and sliced almonds. We had planned earlier to have Yummy Taters as well, but that idea had been scrapped when Jeff went to Provigo for recipe supplies and found only two cashes open and over 40 shopping carts in line at each one. Luckily, we didn’t need his dish.


It was all very delicious, with the turkey quite moist and everything hot for once (which was amazing considering that before eating, we had to pull our XMas crackers, then put on our funny paper hats and then examine the cheap gifts inside the crackers, and that takes time with food on your plate going cold, usually, but not with the new warming tray.


Edith, who had a new part for her increasingly professional-looking camera for Xmas, circled us like a papperazza at first; Paze did much the same with her little digital. Even Devon took a few shots with her new, pink camera. But for the most part we ate very satisfyingly.

The Trifle was made by Edith’s family and had kiwi as well as other fruit, and rum at its base rather than the sherry we usually use. It was delicious, and there was a Xmas miracle attached to it: Devon was assigned to using the egg beater (we don’t have an electric beater any more) in the kitchen to turn whipping cream to whipped cream. I predicted that it wouldn’t work, since we used to try this every XMas, and found it impossible, even when I chilled bowl and electric beaters and went out on the back porch in the cold to do it. Yet the whipping cream turned to whipped cream for Devon!!


The meal was perfect. As we ate and drank and chatted, Little Tallis, up two hours past her usual bedtime but not a bit cranky, padded around the table barefoot in a Christmas dress made of patch-work velvet, looking very intent, now and then appearing holding a cat dish for our inspection. Devon, in a little misty-blue dress and silver sweater, played with the new toys her aunt and uncle had brought along, helped out at times. She was also full of funny questions and comments; D& E’s family were, I think, surprised to see how grown up she was, as they don’t see her often.


Today, my birthday, John and I have been lounging in front of the fire while sipping coffee and eating fresh bagels with cream cheese and sliced tomatoes, plus chocolates. Lord help me diet, but not yet, to rework something 
St. Augustine once said. I feel great–being on a prednisone regime that I call Club Pred for its wonderful ability to erase all my aches and pains and make me feel great. I do not feel my age, and I am not sad at being a year older. I am never depressed at a birthday; it is a landmark on an adventure that I am still in the midst of. Besides , it’s always better to have a birthday than not do so, I figure. And I am very lucky to have a considerate, loving family around me.

Posted by Beviant at 19:22:39 | Permalink | Comments (5)

Monday, December 22, 2008

Merry Yule!

We celebrated Yule over the weekend, and all went well, thanks to some crafty work by my daughter and son-in-law, who had to deal with a sick baby, and to my husband, who cooked a wonderful Yule Eve dinner, then a Yule Morning breakfast, and then did all the dishes by himself. A toast to them!

It started out with my making Carrot/ Apple Soup on Friday, then storing it in the foyer, which is so cold that it is used by us as a sort of cold room when the fridge is full, as it usually is. John then made up the Mashed Potatoes with Sour Cream recipe. I was  torn about whether to make a delightful-sounding
dessert called Chocolate Turtles Bread Pudding, which took French bread, caramel, chocolate chips, chocolate syrup, cocoa and chopped pecans, or make something called Chocolate Pudding that was to be served in ramekins. Both were dishes I had never made before, so I worried a bit about their not turning out. Finally, John convinced me to do neither, but stick to something simple: ice cream, chocolate sauce and fresh raspberries. That simplified the menu, and meant I had only to decorate the dining room table. 
 
So I did so, using my lace tablecloth over the crimson one, then putting on the black place mats with scenes of fox hunting, birch bark deer, two red glass globe lanterns, and my good silverware and plates. I love making the table look as beautiful as possible for holiday dinners; it’s one of the things that I can do to make the day seem less cold and the world less barren. I can never understand why or how people can sit down to Christmas dinner, for example, on a bare formica kitchen table with no sign of holiday trimmings of the non-culinary sort. If people are poor, okay, but if not? How can they stand it??? Even thinking about such a thing makes me feel like someone has just tried to put something under my fingernails, or has run their fingernails over a blackboard. I was spoiled, mind you, by a mother who always over-decorated the house for Christmas, and had a very red tablecloth and lace overcloth at the table. I seem to have passed this taste on to my daughter, who delights me when she invites us to dinner, especially on holidays, when her table also has little ornaments and colors of the season, whether it be Spring, Thanksgiving or Christmas.

My daughter and her family came over at about 4. Right away, we could see that the littlest one, Tallis, was sick, ironically despite the fact that she had just been to the pediatrician the day before and had been given a bill of good health. On the other hand, she had also got two shots that day, and may have been recovering from them. (My cleaning lady, Enid, who is from Jamaica, says that the best thing to do after a child has vaccinations is to put a warm, wet facecloth on the site of the shots and hold it there for a few minutes; for some reason, this helps and keeps the child from feeling sick, she says.)

Little Tallis just sat on my daughter’s lap and looked like a limp noodle. She fretted if any attempts were made to put her in a high chair or on the ground, but put her head into a ‘flop’ on Paze’s shoulder a lot. We were all calling her Flopsy Bunny by the end of the meal, when it was obvious that she need to go to bed early. Pasley left Devon, age 6, with us and went home with Jeff to nurse Tallis and put her to bed. Then John went to get her and bring her back so she could wrap presents and help him bring up from the basement the old doll house that used to be hers, when she was Devon’s age. They put it in a corner of the dining room, where Paze then put all the furniture in the proper places; then they wrapped it in paper and put a tag on it saying “John”. They had told Devon they were getting John a work bench for Xmas, so that Devon wouldn’t be surprised to see a big gift in the dining room.

Also, we were able to do a small ritual when she returned. (We had done only the minimum earlier, at the table, just a reading out of the Invocations of the Forces of Air, Water, Fire and Earth. Devon was pleased to be able to read out the words for Water this year.) But now, we lit a candle, I spoke briefly about its being Yule and what that meant, and then we acted out a brief pageant about the Bethlehem story. 

It worked well last year when Paze was holding the newborn Tallis, asleep, in her lap and playing Mary with Jesus. This year, it didn’t work that well. Jeff was missing (home with Tallis) so we were one short for Wise Men, the roles were all screwed up, and my computer had refused to print the pages we needed for carols like “In the Bleak Midwinter”, which we had incorporated into the pageant. However, Devon knew the words to the part she has sung, as the poor child who can only bring her heart as a gift to the Child. She sang her part, as she did last year, with one of those lovely, pure child voices that one hears on Christmas choir CDs. (Good thing she’s in the choir at school; she really is good, and very serious about it.)

Anyway, before she went to bed, I read Devon a story written by Margaret Lawrence called “The Olden Days Coat”, which is nicely spooky, dealing as it does with a child of 10 going back, briefly, in time to meet her grandmother age 10. Devon loved it (partially because she and Paze had just finished reading about Will Stanton’s going back in time on the day of his 11th birthday, in “The Dark is Rising”, that spooky but wonderful classic young adult novel about a war of Dark vs. Light at Christmas, or rather, at the Solstice), and was quick to pick up on the fact that the girl was in the past and what she needed to do to get back to her own time.

Next morning, Paze came back to our house around 6, crept into the house, went to Devon’s room and was with her to open their stockings. Then they woke me at 7. John was already up and brought in coffee for all of us (minus Jeff again, alas, since he was bringing Tallis over when she awoke. It worked out well; he arrived just as we finished looking at the contents of our stockings (mainly chocolates and windup toys, as usual, which always make for a fun time as John shows off his latest tiny robot or –this time–creepy metal bug).

There were, as usual, too many gifts. I don’t know why we overdo this, every year. We always say we will get only one gift for each person, then lose it at the mall. Luckily, Devon is the perfect gift recipient. She spends some time with each gift she receives, exclaims over it when she unwraps it (whether or not she likes it, I suspect), and never gets bored or complains, as some spoiled kids do, about not getting what she wanted for Christmas. She had asked for Paze’s doll house last year and didn’t get it because we figured she had enough toys without it; this year, it seemed at first as if she hadn’t gotten it once again, but she said nothing. She cheerily came to open John’s gift of a work bench for him, and was quite stunned to see it was really a doll house. And she was delighted with the doll house, remarking all day about how much she liked it and how she had been waiting for it ‘all her life’, and how surprised she had been when we fooled her. The rest of the day went well, and we were quite merry, despite Tallis’ Flopsy Bunny act; she cheered up a bit and walked around with a little smile on her face for a while. Paze thinks she’s probably cutting molars, too, poor litttle dear. 

So, now we only have to worry about the real Xmas dinner, when we’ll have nine people at the table and a more elaborate menu. But Merry Yule, at least! So far, so good! 


  
Posted by Beviant at 21:31:19 | Permalink | Comments (4)

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Marry Our Daughters Site is a Prank, Thank Goodness!

After ranting to all and anyone who’d listen about this site, which I felt strongly about and which some people I told about it refused to even look at on line in their disgust at the mere idea of girls of thirteen being sold by their parents to older men, I was delighted to read the following today:

Please Don’t Marry Our Daughters

By BRAD STONE

The parents of 15-year-old Rachel M. say that “being married is the only career” their daughter is interested in. They are seeking a man willing to pay $19,995 for her hand in marriage.

Kristin J., 16, has a wild streak but recently decided “it was time she settled down with a man who could meet her needs and help her fulfill her dreams of being an actor or singer.” Her parents are trying to sell their “fiery” daughter into matrimony for $49,995.

Or so go the personal ad listings on MarryOurDaughter.com, an outrageous Web site that purports to blithely sell underage girls to older husbands for large dowries.

The site is a prank. Thank goodness.

But not everyone is in on the joke. The site has gotten 20 million page views in the last two weeks and now elicits around a thousand, mostly angry, emails a day. In the last few days, the site’s “publicity director” has also appeared on at least half a dozen talk radio shows around the country, including on Las Vegas (MIX-FM), Houston (KRBE-FM) and Philadelphia (WYSP-FM) and mixed it up with belligerent on-air-personalities and hostile listeners, whom he neglected to let in on the ruse.

“People get angry so fast they don’t stop to question whether its real,” says the creator of MarryOurDaughter.com, John Ordover, who masqueraded as the site’s fictional publicity director, the unlikely surnamed Roger Mandervan.

Mr. Ordover is a science-fiction editor with a prankish history and an interest in urban nudism.

Contacted through MarryOurDaughter this morning, Mr. Ordover quickly conceded the page was a parody aimed at drawing attention to inconsistencies in state marriage laws. States consider it a crime for adults to have sex with minors, but they allow kids as young as 12 to get married with parental and sometime judicial permission.

“As far as I can tell, in every state but Oregon, parents can marry off their children,” Mr. Ordover said, pointing to this Cornell University Web site which tracks the various state marriage laws. Texas has a particularly ridiculous legal discrepancy, he says. Kids as young as 14 need parental permission to get married – unless, the law says, they have already been married before.

Mr. Ordover is no stranger to controversy, or to media attention. Mr. Ordover runs events for nudists and recently organized a Sheepshead Bay nude cruise, covered by the Times in July.

In 2000, he was also the co-creator of the now defunct humor site 

Technicalvirgin.com, in which a young actress described the creative ways in which she maintained her honor. Last year, when those videos enjoyed a resurgence on YouTube, the actress who appeared in them, Melanie Martinez, was fired from a job hosting “The Good Night Show” on the PBS KIDS Sprout network – another Mr. Ordover-inspired saga 

Mr. Ordover was planning on coming clean next week as the creator of the site and has a full slate of radio interviews scheduled this week. He said he avoided spinning his fiction to print journalists who might get fired for falling for the scheme, but reasoned that radio shock jocks had looser leashes.

“We were trying to get people a little stirred up about this,” Mr. Ordover said.

    

Posted by Beviant at 23:22:16 | Permalink | Comments (4)