25 December 1998: Christmas

Approximation of cover matter (with actual salient "fact") from video of the recent BBC cinematization of Emma: "Jane Austen's romantic novels have delighted readers for over 200 years." Austen's first published novel, Sense and Sensibility, appeared in 1811. You do the math.

Am I the only one who noticed that no one worried about the medical and ethical problems of humans hatching litters during the hype over the 1997 white septuplets, but now in 1998 with the birth of eight black babies, suddenly, if tardily, this repellent stupidity is being examined? Also, has anyone noticed that few news programs utter the given Ibo names of the children but instead opt either to utter the nicknames or to show a still of the full names? Except CNN, which makes an effort to pronounce foreign words with the correct accent. Beyond Jason and Jennifer, indeed.

We received a holiday letter from the complex manager yesterday. The usual blather summed with this closing, punctuation and capitalization intact:

HAPY HOLIDAY'S TO YOU AND, ALL OF YOUR FAMILIE'S.

We have got to get out of this place.

Wednesday as I walked home from work I saw a man wheeling homeward a shopping carriage filled with as heavy a load as a packer could fit into two plastic grocery bags. Ooo. If someone has no car, fine, maybe he'd like his own wheeled cart. But to appropriate a shopping cart and steal it home--we have got to leave this neighborhood.

Yesterday I finally succeeded with cookie-cutter cookies. I think I've tried shortbread before. Well, I don't know what recipe I tried, but anything that requires me to flour a surface to work dough on is fairly certain to be a failure. The kitchen gets filthy (and you know Martha never makes a mess) and my cookies turn out arid with flour or my pie crust shrivels in its place. So today I was pleased.

I would like to find a recipe for butter cookies, the kind that achieve that lovely crisp brown border as they bake, but since dessert is pointless without chocolate, this recipe (which, let me repeat, succeeded) will do. I don't remember where I got it:

I have two cookie cutters not very Christmassy but entirely lisa: a moose and an apple. So I iced "Cicely" onto one moose and "Roslyn" onto the other. I know that in "The Importance of Being Earnest" the girl's name is "Cecily," and the name is usually "Cecilia," but I think the town in "Northern Exposure" was Cicely. The moose in the credits had a name (it died), but I've no idea what it is.

Also I made two Macintoshes with the apple cookie cutter. I had tubes of boughten decorator's icing and I figured that was Just Fine, since the icing is mostly to look at. Nobody enjoys eating it, do they? <excuse> The cookies are just regular brown without it </excuse>. I had the primary colors, green, and white. The orange stripe of the Macintosh was easy, 'cause I just moved the tip from the yellow tube to the red, but the purple one was harder. Red and blue makes clay, as anyone knows who has tried to make a violet Easter egg with blue and of red food coloring. I mixed the icing on a plate, adding some white (which you can't do dyeing eggs) to achieve purple. Macintosh. I'd like to find a penguin cutter--except I've no idea how to make black icing--to make a Linux cookie.

Last night at 9:00 we settled in for "ER" to discover, with little surprise, that it was a rerun. Of course: Christmas Eve. Which means next week likely will be a rerun also, which will put me into withdrawal. So I began skipping round the dial--15 years since I've used a dial to turn stations yet still that phrase comes to me--and found "Miracle on 34th Street," which for some unreasonable reason we don't own on video yet. At 9:04 it had only just begun. Hooray! So we watched.

RDC noticed the little girl, Susan Walker.* "Is she anyone?" he asked. "Did she do anything else?"
I made my voice appropriately mournful. "Yeah, she drowned."
That pretty little girl drowned, RDC thought. How sad. "She drowned? How old was she?"
I could barely restrain myself. "Oh, I think about 40."
"Is that Natalie Wood?" he demanded. I cracked up and then so did he. I was so pleased. I amused him with my Macintoshes, but I can seldom startle or surprise him into laughter.

* I just realized her hardcore commonsensical nature is quite like that of Susan Walker, first mate of the Swallow in Swallows and Amazons et al. Hmm.

Christmas was extravagant this year. BJWL (and BDL) gave us binoculars, something she thought of all by herself. I'm proud of her for that--not for the expense, let me clarify, but for thinking of such a good present. CLH and I gave them a gift certificate to a bed-and-breakfast in the Berkshires.

RSH's girlfriend sent us a package we haven't received yet. I can't wait to meet her. We have that wanting-to-be-friends thing in common, of course, but just because you both want to be friends doesn't always mean you can have pleasant giggling phone conversations. RSH gave her a spice rack and she hopes he will like her culinary experiments. "Well you know that whether he likes anything doesn't matter, because he does the same with everything. Catsup."
"Yes!" she giggled. "On everything."
I gave RSH A Monk Swimming, since CLH gave him Angela's Ashes two years ago. Amazon's customer reviews weren't as flattering for the later book; apparently Malachy isn't the writer brother Frank is. Pity, since Malachy McCourt is such a better name for an Irish writer.

And since I always rag on Oklahoma, HAO gave me a book, which she annotated, of lovely photographs of her northeastern corner. I made her a penguin catalog, but evidently I'll have to find a similar book of southeastern Connecticut.

CLH realized partway through her shoppng that my presents had a theme. She gave us Christmas ornaments, which we do usually exchange. Three plain glass balls of a lovely blue-violet shimmer and two gorgeous blown glass ones with translucent violet bands and cut glass details. Also a sled, not violet. A purple Pottery Barn photograph frame and a rosy-purple chenille throw. I thought it was a shawl because I've been telling her how much I enjoyed a shawl she gave me a few years ago and finally have worn. She said no, it's a throw. Tassels, don't you know. Oh. I thought it was fringe.

RDC seems to have sidestepped that inability in the generic male human to select perfect gifts. I had pouted that there was nothing in the box from CLH for my stocking--I had not received the second box from CLH at that point--so RDC sought out a few treasures. He told me proudly, "I bet I found something that no one has ever put in your stocking before." It's true: no one has ever given me my own jar of capers before.

Also I wondered about the jewelry-sized box under the tree. I have looked for a cuff to replace my current one, which closes with a knot that assails RDC in his sleep, and I wondered if RDC bought one. Something shiny instead of brushed that wouldn't pick up that patina I so enjoy in silver. Something with a doohickey on it, as I wrote to CLH of short overalls:

And my short overalls are wearing out. I bought them after I saw the picture of you in yours in the calla lilies. I love my overalls. I should have bought twenty pair instead of the one because I should have known that all future available overalls would have weird denim, visible logos, stupid pockets, geegaws, or otherwise be in some minuscule but conspicuous way wholly unacceptable.

So I figured a cuff or earrings. Earrings might have been okay. I have enough clippings in my Catalog of Lust Objects and an earring board displaying all of them that someone should be able to get a general idea of what I like.

In fact NCS wanted to buy me earrings once and I demurred: only my sister might buy me earrings. He protested this and defended himself: "You like dangling earrings, silver, about an inch, maybe an inch and a half long, generally a little wider at the bottom than the top, with maybe a stone?" My jaw dropped. I gave permission. He gave me a pair of earrings with a tapered column of silver and a spherical amethyst bead at the bottom.

So anyway, as I began to unwrap the package, I told RDC that I wondered whether earrings or cuff. He was grinning. "You're way off." He bought me a Christmas tree ornament of William, the Met's unofficial mascot, who in his original form was faience and who in our form is enamel. I have a blue hippopatamus ornament. My life is complete.

And something from my Catalog: Charles Kurault reading Winnie-the-Pooh. Whenever RDC is from home overnight, I usually listen to Roxy Music's Avalon. Now I might listen to Charles Kurault read me Winnie-the-Pooh.

Here I mount my soapbox to announce my extreme displeasure that the post-Natalie Merchant 10,000 Maniacs has presumed to cover "More Than This"--poorly.

Besides Avalon, friends have read me to sleep over the phone with A.A. Milne. That tends to be a college thing, like the ski-accident victim whose friends read him Tolkien round the clock until he emerged from his coma. Now I have Charles Kurault.

When I saw the box from Gart Sports I knew a twinge of fear, soon to be dispelled. Understand I hate to buy stuff I don't love but do need, like socks and shoes and gym clothes. So I pillage RDC's sock drawer when we ski and hike and otherwise kind of make do. And I hate my shoes. And so on. RDC gave me a pair of fleece-lined trousers: now I can walk in the winter comfortably (and fashionably!) in cozy warm pants. And they're an alternative to thermals under ski pants. Plus the buses have bike racks on them now. Maybe my bike and I can bus to work and ride home, bike shorts under fleece.

So this afternoon we went for a walk, me in my new leggings and RDC with the new binocular case threaded through his belt. I took a picture of RDC examining the foothills with the 'nocs and I was toasty in fleece pants, turtleneck and my new UConn sweatshirt. We saw several dogs, of course, including one lucky family with a springer and a cocker spaniel and a golden retriever; and a woman with a German shepherd and a Lab mix; plus a couple with two dogs, another Lab mix and a great dog who was part Akita and part--they thought, given its build and its spots--Australian cattle dog.

You'd think I'd be drawn to Lab mixes, but to me such dogs seem like a waste of good genetic material. Any other mongrel is fine and in fact I prefer them, morally, to "purebreds" whose lives are a misery because they're popular thus overbred.

RDC and I ooo'd and ah'd over Harley, the Akita+. He was charming, smart, playful, responsive, and with interesting markings. "We're looking for a home for him," encouraged the man. "If we had a house," I began, "then someday we'd have a dog," RDC finished. So it could have been a perfect--i.e., dogful--Christmas, but we did not do anything so foolish as to adopt a dog on ten minutes' acquaintance.

"Akita plus" is a phrase adapted from a "Planet of the Apes" movie, which is, for me, a seasonally appropriate allusion (see below). Cornelius and Zira somehow arrive in present-day Earth and, in the course of human events, Zira is introduced to wine, which the humans deceitfully call "grape juice plus."

I just looked to confirm the movie's and the female ape's names. "Escape from the Planet of the Apes" and "Zira." I've seen the first countless times, many of those in my aunt's basement during interminable Christmas parties (which is why such an allusion is appropriate to make today). Of the sequels, Charlton Heston said he wanted no part because the first one was the movie, and anything else was just playing with the monkeys. Waxing the monkeys, perhaps? He appeared ("acted" being too strong a word) in maybe five minutes of the second, scenes of which I remembered when prompted. And of course the third, the source of my reference, "Escape." But "Battle for the Planet of the Apes"? and "Conquest of the Planet of the Apes"?

Three years ago, right after my annual Yuletide reminiscence for things Ape-like, I was delighted that the Sci-Fi Channel announced it would run all five movies on successive nights in one week. I remember being so overcome by cheesiness round about Wednesday, however, that I guess I didn't watch the fourth and fifth (and final! whew!) on Thursday and Friday nights.