Here I Go...

Okay, so here’s the thing. I hate Christmas. I KNOW! I KNOW! What Christian can hate Christmas? I mean, if we can get all jazzed up for the day Jesus died, you’d think the unassisted birth of this awesome radical could get me, the future midwife, excited. Every year, I REALLY try to get excited about the holidays. It’s not fun being Scrooge! This year I even went out and picked some evergreen and holly branches and hung them in bunches around the house. I strung lights on our staircase and and planned holiday meals for weeks. I witnessed every advent candle being lit and forced myself to smile rather than roll my eyes when I listened to adults tell the children in our church that the cookies they made those prisoners brought them peace and hope and delight (know what would be a better Christmas present? LIBERATION!). I tried to center myself and prepare my heart and all that stuff you’re supposed to do during advent. Still, there’s nothing like a tacky jazzed-up rendition of commercialized Christmas carols to get my blood boiling.

Here’s the other thing, my family was never HUGE on Christmas. There was no feast, no giant family get-togethers. No drunken uncles or in law debates. No football wars or any of that stuff. I actually really liked my family’s Christmas traditions growing up. When we put of the tree, we drank white russians. Christmas Eve was Chinese food and A Christmas Story taped from TBS with old clips of M&M and 7-up commercials (bottle caps with sunglasses and santa caps anyone?). Christmas day we opened presents and ate Pilsbury biscuits. The last Christmas I spent at home was in 2006. Here is what that looked like:

Dad getting goofy with the tree

Spontaneous father-daughter(s) dance parties

(note white russian in that pint glass)

I moved to Atlanta when I was 19 years old and found myself 1086 miles away from my immediate family for every holiday, which never seemed like that big of a deal… until Christmas day would come around and every one I knew had somewhere to be… and I didn’t. Last year was the first year since 2006 that I spent Christmas with other people. Hillary and I spent Christmas with her father and his wife in Alabama (a big deal for other reasons). But this year is the first year I’ve spent Christmas in my home with my partner. This is the first year that we had the opportunity to create traditions for OUR family (of two) and I realized that that is actually a lot of pressure. Christmas time dredges up a lot of feelings about childhood, family dynamics and traditions. We yearn for the joy and and anticipation that laced the Christmas season when we were little, before we were old enough to have serious family conflicts. We want to be nostalgic, but that nostalgia is so often wrapped up in emotional trauma that is impossible to pick apart.

So, after the initial excitement of realizing that Hillary and I would get Christmas to ourselves this year, there was a little nagging anxiety. I think we pulled it off nicely, though. It was quiet, which was good. It was sweet and lazy and mostly focused on food. Food is hard for the two of us when it comes to the holidays. Hillary was raised in Alabama where vegetables necessarily mean “covered with cheese and cream-of-something soup”. I hate most cheese… and cream-of-anything soup and even though Hillary and I both reject the processed, unhealthy food culture in which our generation was generally raised, the holidays come around and she’s craving green bean casserole (Campbell’s style). There is no good Chinese food to speak of in the south (many people from the south will disagree with me, but it’s only because they have never been to New York or Boston), so my family’s tradition has to be abandoned. I still love white russians, but my digestive tract is no longer a fan of pasteurized, homogenized milk. Biscuits in a can might still stroke that guilty pleasure in us both, but we both prefer homemade baked goods to the scary scary preservatives that keep that store-bought dough fresh.

So here is what we did for Christmas Eve:

Garlic Chicken Stew with Rosemary Dumplings that I had prepared late that afternoon. The recipe calls for breasts, but we used thighs (cheaper!) and we traded peas for carrots and turnips.

 and we made a version of wassail  in lieu of the traditional white russians. There are about as many recipes for wassail as there are people who drink it and their bases range from beer to wine to champagne all the way to fruit juice. I like beer over fruity drinks any day, so we read several recipes and this is what we came up with:

Beer (brown, porter… something smooth and sweet. definitely not an IPA or pale ale. Hops are bitter and more bitter with cooking), cinnamon, ginger, apple and maple syrup (not pictured).

Slice half the apple, coarsely chop up about a tablespoon of ginger and select two handsome looking cinnamon sticks.

throw it all in a crock pot, pour one (only one!) of those big bottles of beer over it, pour in what looks like a reasonable amount of maple syrup to you and turn it on low. Then turn it on high because you’re getting impatient. Then turn it back to low because you realize that heating it too fast means less apple flavor. Then turn it back to high because you think maybe more heat will break down the apple better. Then turn it back to low because you think it’s getting too hot. Continue this back and forth until you decide to taste it… and realize that it tastes HORRIBLE. Like something you might find at the general store back in the 1800s (a tonic to restore VITALITY! Also, cures 27 common ailments!).

Slice up the other half of that apple and an orange. Add some more maple syrup. Turn it back to low and leave the room. Some residual anxiety is normal.

Eat your chicken stew and drink the beer that you didn’t waste turn into wassail.

Next time: (Christmas morning! Plus: what happened to that wassail?)