You are Reading the Holidays Category

Requiem for Dissent
December 25, 2007 | permalink

Merry Christmas, Gentle Readers. I hope that wherever you are, you are surrounded by friends, or family, or both, and are having a grand ol' time.

I am in Virginia, visiting my sister K. She and her husband have just had their first baby, an adorable little boy, and my Mother, Red, The Star, and The Rockette are here as well. It's nice and warmish and quiet, and I am simultaneously enjoying myself immensely and bored out of my skull, a combination that I think only can come about when you are with your family. Perhaps you know of which I speak? (Not that I am complaining, understand- I love them dearly. And the baby really is adorable...)

I hope you have a great day!

Posted in Holidays
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Good Thing
April 12, 2007 | permalink

I met my niece (pictured here with my Mother) for the first time over the Easter Weekend. Isn't she cute?

While she is not my first niece (I have several on The Old Man's side, the progeny of my older half-sister, his daughter from a previous marriage), she is the first child born to any of my siblings on my Mother's side, and as such is also Mom and Red's first Granddaughter. You can imagine, then, how she was doted on while she was here for the holiday.

The night before Easter, after dinner, we colored the eggs. It's something we do every year, whether there are going to be kids around or not. The idea is that everyone in the family ends up with an egg just for them, made by someone else (obviously, you can't make your own egg!), which we then eat as part of breakfast the next morning. It's a lot of fun- of course we all try to get artsy and out-do one another, and of course our ambitions usually exceed our talent. Most of them come out fine, but there are a couple of sad looking Easter Eggs, most years.

This year, since The Little One was here, we 'hid' some eggs for her to find. The first few she didn't get it, which is not surprising. But after a bit she got really into it, not least because of all the attention and applause she got whenever she found one. We tried to get her to put them into the basket after she found them, but of course they went right into her mouth, every time... She has a few teeth in, and by the end she was succeeding in gnawing her way past the shell, if we didn't relieve her of the egg fast enough.

Like I said, cute...

Posted in Family Matters & Holidays & Out of Town


Testify
January 2, 2007 | permalink

Happy New Year, Gentle Readers. I hope that this turn of the calendar finds you happy and healthy, and not too terribly hung over from any New Year's Eve libations you may have enjoyed. Furthermore, I hope that 2006 was a success for you, and at its closing you are filled with hope and excitement for the coming year.

Here, mostly for my amusement and because I like lists, is a brief, by the numbers recap of my year, as near as I can recall. Something light and fun to start the year with. Perhaps you will also find it amusing, or barring that, at least mildly interesting. Or at least not so boring that you leave before you even finish the post.

I wrote 86 posts in this venue last year, and published 84 of them for your perusal. Well, 85 but one I later took down. I'll buy a beer for anyone that knows which one!

I added 908 songs to my music library, from the 5, 6, 7, 8's to the Yeah Yeah Yeah's. According to iTunes, the ten artists I most listened to this past year are, in no particular order: Bob Dylan, The White Stripes, Johnny Cash, Gang of Four, Gym Class Heroes, Michael Penn, Rhinocerose, The Gorillaz, and LL Cool J.

I don't watch too much television, and there are only a couple of shows that I really care if I see or not. This year, for whatever reason, I was unlucky enough to get hooked on shows that air on channels I don't even get! (I don't have cable- I came across them while out of town on gigs, while I was in hotels, if you were wondering how that happened...) Battlestar Galactica and Robot Chicken have claimed little pieces of me for their very own, and I just. can't. get. enough. It's torture.

I saw 21 movies in the theatre last year, near as I can recall: King Kong, Munich, Brokeback Mountain, Underworld: Evolution, The Hills Have Eyes, V for Vendetta, Thank You for Smoking, Silent Hill, The Sentinel, Over the Hedge, X-Men: The Last Stand, Prairie Home Companion, Nacho Libre, Superman Returns, Miami Vice, Snakes on a Plane, Saw III, Borat, Casino Royale, For Your Consideration, and Pan's Labyrinth. I think the best of the bunch was Pan's Labyrinth.

I acquired somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 new books, though I confess I have only managed to read about half of them. I don't feel the need to list them all here, but the highlights were Fledgling by Octavia Butler, His Excellency by Joseph Ellis, a collection of Robert E. Howard's Conan short stories and novellas, Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers, Bear by Robert Bieder, and the Gastronomique, by Larousse.

I took 884 photographs.

I saw several dance pieces at the Ailey School, the Dada Exhibit at the Whitney, the Russian Portraiture and Spanish Paining exhibits at the Guggenheim, and The Magic Flute at the Met.

I drank a lot less alcohol than I did the year before, in general, and I stopped smoking cigarettes altogether. Not that I smoked a ton, but still...

I ate a lot of good food with Turtalia, and a lot of good chocolate. Max Brenner's, especially, was a big hit. I cooked a lot, and a year ago this week is when I started making my own bread instead of buying it from the store.

I was less social last year than I should have been, or wanted to be, for a whole slew of reasons that I won't lay out here. It's the one thing I want most to be better at in the coming year. That said, I did have the honor and pleasure of meeting three of my fellow bloggers last year: Jess at Blindcavefish, A Lover and a Fighter at Hobocamp, and Curly McDimple at Ham and Cheese on Wry. They are every bit as charming and delightful in person as they are on the page.

I was trying to avoid work talk, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that I ended eleven years of freelancing this year, and took a full time job, the second officially full time gig that I have ever had. (There was one that wasn't technically full time, but might has well have been).

And that, Gentle Readers, is my overview of the past year as I recollect it, standing here at its end.

Posted in Holidays & Musings & Random
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Cheap Motels
December 31, 2006 | permalink

A week ago Friday I went with my sisters up to The Old Man's place for his Solstice Feast. The Old Man, you see, has long since decided that he cannot countenance the commercialized, christian-centric, consumer Christmas of modern times, and so celebrates the solstice instead, preferring to focus on the company of family and friends and good food and drink rather than material things. There are gifts given, of course; I suspect it sounds much more radical here in words than it actually is in practice, and is not much different than Christmas at any of your houses. The Old Man always was a little bit of a pagan at heart.

The trip upstate was a little bit of an adventure. Not so much for me as for my sisters; they were returning from our brother's in California that day. On Thursday they left Fresno and drove the 220 miles to Los Angeles. Friday, the day we traveled, they got up at 6, went to the airport, caught their flight to Phoenix, waited for and caught their connection to JFK. They landed at JFK at 10:15, got their luggage, took a cab to Manhattan, picked up the rental car, went home, re-packed, and picked me up.

Now it's just about 1 am. The Palisades was wet and foggy, and we spent a good deal of time moving less than 20 mph with the hazards flashing because we couldn't see more than 15 feet in front of us. (Meanwhile people with apparently much better fog-vision than any of us had kept blowing past us at at least 40 mph. I am amazed that we didn't pass any of them wrecked further down the road). The upshot is that a trip that usually takes about an hour and fifteen minutes, give or take, took about two and a half. We were feeling bad, expecting to wake up half the house as we stumbled in and tried to sort out sleeping arrangements for ourselves, but half the house was up anyway, hanging out on the porch smoking and drinking (classy, right?). So that was kinda fun. When's the last time your folks were trying to entice you to throw back a couple of drinks and and all you wanted to do was go to bed?

The next day was the big feast. nothing organized, mind you- people cooked and brought and set out food all day long, and everyone just grazes as they feel the need. While my sisters were making their cross country trek, I was baking cookies for the masses; Oatmeal Chocolate Espresso, Sugar, and Old Fashioned Peanut Butter cookies (all of them very well received, thank you). It was quite a spread, all told, and in addition to the nine extra people staying at the house, another dozen came through at one point or another over the course of the day.

That night, those of us that were still at the house (that is, The Old Man and Step-Mother, me and my sisters, and Step-Mother's sister and her husband and children) hung around on the porch, played darts and drank and (well, the 'adults', anyway) smoked. It was a lot of fun. I felt closer to and more comfortable with The Old Man than I had in a very, very long time.

Posted in Family Matters & Holidays & Out of Town
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Giddy Up and Go
December 22, 2006 | permalink

I was browsing around some of your writings the other day, Gentle Readers, and Emily of Pretty Crabby and Brian of An Audience of One were writing about Christmases both imminent and long gone, respectively, and it got me thinking about Christmas when I was a kid, specifically Christmas at my Mother's.

My parents split when I was seven or so, and my Mother got together (and eventually married) Red, and we had a real Brady Bunch situation going on. There was me, The Star, and The Rockette, of course, and Red had his daughter Cat and his sons the C.O. and The Architect. Three boys, three girls, all of us just about a year apart. There is actually a small three day window every year between The Rockette's birthday and The C.O.'s birthday when the six of us are in consecutive chronological order. My Mother says that then we are In Alignment, and tries to get a photo of us during this time every year.

I've strayed from the point of my story. Which was Christmas.

The Christmases when the six of us were all there together (roughly every other one) were great, by far the best holidays of my childhood. Up until we were too old and self-conscious, we would all camp out in the girls' room (which was the larger) on Christmas Eve, too excited to sleep and excitedly speculating about what the next morning would bring. Eventually, of course, no matter how hard we tried to stay awake and catch Mom and Red putting out the presents, we would one by one drift off. I don't think we ever did manage to stay up late enough to find them out; my Mother insists to this day that Santa, and not her or Red, places the gifts under the tree. She's cute like that.

In the morning whichever of us woke up first would wake the others, and our excited chatter from the night before would continue. We usually were up well before dawn, and even though we weren't supposed to wake up Mom and Red until at least 6am, we discovered we could usually push it to 5:30 or even 5:15 if we made coffee for them and sent it in with whichever of us was most in their good graces. Which was usually Cat or The Star. The Rockette and I were too consistent to ever be especially in or out of favor, and The Architect and The C.O. fought too much to ever rise to 'Golden Child' status.

I'm hard pressed to actually remember anything I got on those Christmas mornings; its the camaraderie I felt with my brothers and sisters (well, this subset of them, anyway) that makes the memories so special to me. So I will leave you with that happy picture, Gentle Readers, whilst I head upstate to see The Old Man. Happy Holidays, and I will return next week, no doubt with tales of holiday mayhem.

Posted in Family Matters & Growing Up & Holidays & The Past
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Bear's Oatmeal Chocolate-Espresso Cookies
December 21, 2006 | permalink

I made these last night, to bring upstate with me for the holidays. In a feat of will and fortitude bordering on the super-human, I have only eaten one cookie. But that is enough, Gentle Readers, to make me want to share this recipe with you. Please trust me when I say you should make these for yourself as soon as possible, and not share them with anyone you are not extremely fond of.

Bear's Oatmeal Chocolate-Espresso Cookies

  • 1 Cup Butter
  • 1 Cup firmly packed Brown Sugar
  • 1/2 Cup Granulated Sugar
  • 2 Eggs
  • 1 Teaspoon Vanilla
  • 1 Cup Flour
  • 1Teaspoon Cinnamon
  • 1 Teaspoon salt
  • 1Teaspoon Baking Soda
  • 3 Cups uncooked Oatmeal
  • 8 Ounces of Milk or Dark Chocolate
  • 48 Chocolate Covered Espresso Beans

Heat oven to 350°. In large bowl, beat the butter, brown sugar, and granulated sugar together until creamy. Add egg and vanilla; beat well. Add combined flour, cinnamon, salt and baking soda; mix well. Stir in oats until evenly distributed and drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until edges are golden brown. Remove from oven.

While the cookies are baking, melt the chocolate in a double boiler. When the cookies come out of the oven and are still warm, dollop chocolate on each one and gently press an espresso bean into the soft chocolate, deep enough so that when it all cools the chocolate will hold the espresso bean in place.

Cool completely before storing tightly covered. Makes about 4 dozen.

Posted in Holidays & Recipes
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Music for When the Lights Go Out
November 22, 2006 | permalink

Gentle Readers, I'm off for lovely Upstate New York in mere moments. The fudge is made, the bread is baked, the car is rented and my work is as done as it's going to get. However, I couldn't leave without delivering one last missive before I go places where the internet is a luxury, and not a basic necessity. Like my Mother's house.

Actually, I'm very much looking forward to getting out of town for a few days, and to not having any real responsibility for anything. I'll play line cook for my Mother and chop vegetables and whatnot, and help out Red by splitting some firewood for him. Other than that, it's pretty much a life of leisure. I won't get to sleep late, because everyone else who will be at the house gets up at the crack of dawn every day (and I, unfortunately, will be sleeping in the living room); but I will have the place to myself after about 9:30 each night, because they all also go to bed ridiculously early.

I hope that you all have a lovely holiday, Gentle Readers. I hope that you eat too much (but not too too much), drink just enough, and have a great time with your families, friends, and loved ones. Thank you so much, all of you, for reading and for your comments. I feel immensely proud and at the same time immensely humbled that you keep coming back to read my words.

Posted in Holidays & Musings & Random
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If Things Were Perfect
November 17, 2006 | permalink

I can't believe that Thanksgiving is just next week. I swear it was six weeks away the last time I thought about it... and that only seems like a week ago, to me. I guess that's what happens when you get busy; the time just slips past. Though it seems to me that as I get older time slips past faster and faster. My theory is that this effect is a combination of encountering fewer new things (which catch your attention and break up the flow of routine), and the fact that each year is a smaller and smaller proportion of your life as you age, and so is allocated less and less of your brain power. That might all be a crock, but it makes sense to me.

Anyway, Thanksgiving-

I'm headed up to my Mother's place this year, with The Star and Rockette. We're leaving Wednesday afternoon, which is a little bit of a bummer, as it means I will miss the Wednesday Before Thanksgiving Gathering at the Edge Bar for the first time in years. The WBTG got started something like twelve years ago because The Director needed an event to take a date to. The girl is long gone, but the gathering still draws a good crowd. It's all people from our Off-Broadway days at the Public and the New York Theatre Workshop, people that I don't get to see very often anymore. Beer and darts- what could be more fun?

Despite missing the gathering, I'm looking forward to going upstate. My Mother makes a mean bird, and most of the family will be there. And of course, being a cook, I enjoy Thanksgiving on lots of levels. I had a conversation with my Mother yesterday, figuring out what I should make- I'll be making the bread for dinner, and a batch of fudge for dessert. Yum!

Never Fail Fudge

This recipe is not my original creation. However, it is so damn good and easy that I cannot, in good concience, keep it to myself. It was created by Durkee-Mower, Inc., the manufacturer of Marshmallow Fluff.
  • 5 Cups of Granulated Sugar
  • 1 12 oz. Can of Evaporated Milk
  • 1 Stick of Butter (or Margarine)
  • 12 oz. Marshmallow Fluff
  • 1 tsp. Salt
  • 1 tsp. Vanilla
  • 1 Cup Walnuts (if you like)
  • 2 12oz. Packages of Semi Sweet Chocolate Chips

Combine the first five ingreedients in a large saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly, until blended. Gradually increase heat, still stirring, until you are at a moderate flame. Bring the mixture to a boil.

NOTE: This mixture is ridiculously hot! Don't use plastic utensils! (I know this because I melted a rubber spatula once while making this) Don't stick your finger in for a taste! (I know this because I burned myself) Also, don't mistake escaping air bubbles (Fluff is mostly air, after all) for boiling.

Boil for five minutes, then remove the mixture from heat. Stir in the chocolate, vanilla, and nuts. The chocolate will melt (and use up most of the heat; NOW you can have a taste) fairly quickly. Once you are thoroughly blended, pour the mixture into two 9 x 9 buttered pans and cool. Yield: Approximately four pounds.

I'm telling you, this is the good stuff.

Posted in Food and Drink & Holidays & Musings & Recipes & The Home Front
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Drinking In the Festivities
December 27, 2005 | permalink

Deflated Christmas decorations.

A lot of people have Christmas Eve traditions. Some people decorate the tree, others go carolling or to services... at my Mom's place, we get drunk.

All day we have relations in and out; giving gifts, having coffee, coming early for dinner, staying late for supper (or both)... the usual holiday mayhem for any large family, I'm sure. So afterwards, we wind down. (We being me and my sisters, my Mother and Red, and my step-brothers The Architect and The CO, and my step-sister Cat.)

It starts with a couple of rounds of board games with drinks, and usually degenerates to just drinks after that. Sometimes it ends up as drinking games, even... Ever played Asshole with your parents on Christmas Eve? It's fun.

This year Christmas Eve was particularly hectic, so we all were looking forward to the drinks a little more than usual. Plus all six of us kids were there, which hasn't happened in years (The Architect lives in Fresno and Cat lives in Virginia), and Red's sister, Auntie Redneck, stayed to hang out with us after everyone else left.

It started out fine... some of us with beer, some of us with wine, some of us with The Star's concoction of Goldschlager and apple cider. Auntie Redneck started to get a little tipsy, and told us all in great length (and at great volume) about the bar brawl she got in this summer... aparently some 'trashy bitch' kept putting her paws on Uncle Redneck, and refused to heed Auntie's polite warnings. (Just to clarify, this is a fifty year old woman I'm talking about here.)

As she rolled on with her story, we got rowdier and rowdier. By the time it ended, the Goldschlager was making the rounds of the table, all of us taking slugs out of the bottle. After the second round, things started to get really ugly. My sisters and my parents bowed out of the heavy drinking, but stayed for the hillarity that ensued. Me, The CO, and Auntie Redneck kept passing the bottle. The Architect started making noises about going to bed. Bad idea.

Gentle Readers, I have seen peer pressure in action before, but it was nothing compared to the drunken baiting that Auntie Redneck (remember, fifty) laid onto The Architect. He was accused of losing his touch, of having no balls, of being California-pansified (my personal favorite) and a half dozen other things that I can't remember for having been laughing too hard. (My Mother, by the way, was laughing along with everyone else.) It degenerated to drinking by bargain- I'll have another if you have two, and Auntie Redneck has to pound her beer... and so on and so forth. It was a bad scene. I think we only stopped before we finished the bottle because The Star took back her Goldschlager so she could have more of her apple cider drinks the following day.

Anyway, that's how we roll at Mom's...

Posted in Family Matters & Holidays
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The Week in Review
December 23, 2005 | permalink

Let me catch you up, Gentle Readers, on what I would have been writing about were it not for my little surprise at the beginning of the week. Namely, the holiday craziness of my visiting my family.

Last weekend I went to my Father's for his annual Solstice Celebration. He doesn't do Christmas anymore- he say's it's too 'white man' for him. (This is the man whose decent is English and German... and believe me when I tell you that this is mild on Father's idiosyncrasy scale.) He had the Solstice Frog in the living room, wearing a Santa hat, with the presents all around, a fire in the hearth, and the bar stocked.

I haven't been to my Father's in quite a while. I have issues with him, as you may or may not have noticed. A lot of the things I am trying so hard to work through have their root in the way I was raised, and I confess that at the moment that I feel a bit resentful for this. I'm sure this is unfair, and yet there it is. So it was a little awkward. But mostly fun. My sisters were both there, as well as a couple of aunts and other sundry relations. There was liquor to drink and Star Wars on the television, and plenty of good food.

After two days, I headed back to the city, having some work and a long list of shopping and errands to finish. Not to mention the Sagittarian Party. Two very unproductive days later (the party and the accompanying drinking was all I managed to accomplish- thanks for the Subway Strike!) I got on the Metro North to my Mother's Very Full House.

My Mother and Red (my step-father) live in a small two story, three bedroom house upstate. My Grandfather moved in with them after Grandma died this summer and took one of the rooms, so now there is one spare room. Both of my sisters and two of my aunts are in there... we had to bust the bunkbeds out of the basement. I'm sleeping on the couch, and my cousin Spacey is sleeping on the recliner. Plus my aunt's pug is running around. And these are just the people sleeping here! I think something like thirty more people are showing up on Christmas day. Madness. My Mother is already cracking up.

Last night my sisters and I escaped for a while, playing drinking games with my step-brothers and their wives across town. Quite a welcome distraction.

Posted in Family Matters & Holidays
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