It’s been a quiet Christmas and Boxing Day here. Lots of sugar was consumed, lots of wrapping paper torn off packages. Many squeals of joy.
The Husband was up early on Christmas morning cleaning up after my late night frenzied tornado of baking. We then had cinnamon rolls for breakfast (as was tradition) and “went” to church. Usually we attend Christmas Eve service, but for some reason the live stream wasn’t working that night so we skipped it and instead went to Christmas morning mass.
All told, it was after 10am when we got to presents. A lesson in patience for the children, I suppose.
The Husband had, the day before, brought up his work monitor to the dining room so that we could watch the Met’s opera stream while we decorated cookies and did our general Christmas Eve puttering. It was the Bartlett Sher production of The Barber of Seville starring Isobel Leonard, Lawrence Brownlee and Christopher Maltman. It was delightful and funny and heartfelt. I once heard someone say that Isobel Leonard seems physically incapable of “ugly singing face” – you know that thing when opera singers contort their faces to make the more heavenly/ awesome/ glorious sounds. Anyhow, I mentioned that to the Husband and he spent much of the afternoon watching her to see if it was true. It was. She is as constantly radiant of face as she is of voice.
One of my late night discoveries while baking was BBC Sounds and the wide variety of music mixes they have. I discovered mix named “A Peaceful Christmas” that combined calming new age-y music with a reading of Shackleton’s 1902 Expedition Diary and the Shipping Forecast. It was kind of the Husband’s catnip and I couldn’t wait to introduce him to it. We listened to it twice in one day. The Husband even put up a screen saver of snow falling on a cabin in the woods and on another screen, a fire in a fireplace, just to get us in the appropriate hunkering winter mood.
After presents we had some family Zoom followed by the kids playing with their new presents then I got to work cooking dinner. The Husband and kids played Mario Kart and had a great time.
Christmas Day menu:
-Charred Brussel Sprout Salad from How to Cook Everything Fast (again!). This was yet another recipe that took advantage of the broiler for quick cooking.
-Roasted Carrots (primarily for the baby, but the kids like these too – super simple: salt, pepper, olive oil and roast at 425 for about 15-20 mins)
– cut up raw carrots (some people don’t like cooked carrots)
-Stuffed pork roast. This was from Saveur magazine. It called for stuffing with pork with dried fruit and apples which had been marinated in bourbon and citrus zest. I might have let the fruit sit in the bourbon for a might too long because the filling definitely tasted more boozy than I had anticipated. Oops.
– no specific dessert, but the house is overflowing with cookies and candy – there is not shortage of sugar.
The pork was slightly overcooked, but I was pretty happy with the meal overall. I do want to try the pork roast again. It was my first attempt butterflying and stuffing a roast and I didn’t get it as tightly rolled as I wanted to. But being able to broil in one oven and roast in the other felt pretty awesome.
After dinner we went on a walk to see the lights in our neighborhood. It being dark, we attached some battery operated Halloween lights to the stroller, and it turned out to be both practical and festive.
“You should keep the lights on that stroller even after Christmas!” a fellow neighbor out on an evening constitutional told us.
There were some really fun light displays to see. Since we go out rarely in the evenings these days, I hadn’t realized how many people put lights up this year. I would be happy to make the post Christmas dinner light constitutional a new tradition.
We capped the day off with watching Meet me in St. Louis while drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows. Truth to tell, I may have fallen asleep after “Ding Ding Ding Went the Trolley” and woken up just in time for “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
Christmas often feels like the true end of the year. There is so much leading up to it – excitement, anticipation, planning… it is An EVENT. Kind of like opening night. The message of Advent being a season of active waiting came up frequently in church this year, and I took it to heart more so than in past years. Something about the limbo of pandemic living really made that message resonate. So we have this season where we wait for something. And then it arrives in a flurry of activity and emotion.
Then we get up the next day and still have a week more to get through until we get to turn the fresh page of the new year. That week feels somewhat anticlimactic. Perhaps because I very rarely work that entire week, I like to think of the week between Christmas and New Years as kind of a bonus week – a time to gather and reflect and organize for the next year. Of course New Years as new beginnings is somewhat arbitrary, despite being convenient. New resolutions and re-assessments and soul searching can (and should) happen as needed, I think.
But even as I peer into the murky future, I reflect on the past – a post mortem of the season, say. To do better: start the cinnamon buns Christmas Eve afternoon and go to bed earlier. More cookie drops to friends. More time outside. And there were for sure things this Christmas that I hope we carry to next year. The neighborhood walk to see lights, new matching pjs, lots of hot chocolate. Thank you pictures texted immediately (with accompanying flood of emojis chosen by the kids). Dumplings on Boxing Day. BBC Sounds Music Mixes. Time with family.