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!
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