Moot Thoughts & Musings

Marley was dead to begin with....

For some reason, even though I have not picked up a copy of A Christmas Carol nor have I seen a film version of it this year, this phrase has been stuck in my head all week, unwittingly persistant like the lyrics "Jingle Bells, Batman smells..".

We had a lovely Christmas. I had a difficult shift at Banana on Tuesday, 8 hours of utter frenzy, ending at 10 pm. At 10 am Christmas Eve morning I was back for another stint and feeling exhausted and miserable. Cookies lay unfrosted, snowflakes and paper chains conspicuously absent. This job has been taking up all my Christmas prep time and I was seriously pissed off as Chris drove me to Banana Christmas Eve morning. Not to mention the fact that Christmas Eve is my family's big holiday and I was totally missing it. Missing the pine garlands gleaned from the yard, the poinsettas, singing and music with various family members, my parent's fireplace. The whole time I was at Banana on Wednesday I felt like I was going to cry any minute. When I did get home, I finally did. But then I felt better. And I no longer had to face Banana anymore, so life looked a lot better.

In fact, we had a blast Christmas Eve evening. I rested a little then got up to make our Christmas Eve feast. This was my first attempt at a traditional Italian Christmas Eve dinner. Only I only had three fishes instead of seven. Italians eat a pure seafood dinner on Christmas Eve...usually seven fishes ranging from the always present baccala (cod) to calamari (squid). I passed on the squid, but had a big fillet of cod that I fried up. I always made crab ravioli and some pasta for which I made a clam tomato sauce. It was all fab. For the crab ravioli I made a cream sauce to serve over it with Brussel sprouts on the side. And I served the fried cod with the clam sauce and pasta. This was all accompanied by a nice French rose (sorry, I just prefer French wine). Then for dessert we had hot chocolate with panettone (an Italian bread that is sort of a cross between fruit cake and brioche) while we watched The Grinch (blockbuster only had the Jim Carrey version, wh. we like...so it was fun).

Christmas morning we opened our presents. It was so fun! Just CHris and me!! It was so nice to just be together and not distracted by so many people, wh. is fun when they're there, but it was nice just being hte two of us, too. We got each other lots of little presents. And there were some from his parents under our tree, too. So we had a nice little haul for just the two of us. We both got each other two cd's (he got me a new Baltimore Consort CD..yay!!), and I got him some sci fi books and a special cheese grater (we have a thing about grating cheese). He also got me dominoes, wh. i've been wanting, a matching hat and scarf, and some special cookie cutters.

We had church at 10 am, wh. was a nice, simple lessons and carols. And then we spent the day at the Hamilton's (our pastor), where they pulled out their traditional Brit delights, like flaming pudding. After a soporific turkey dinner, we came home and played with my dominoes and watched Freaky Friday, wh. I need to return NOW before noon. All in all, we had a fabulous Christmas together.