My brother, wife and I started a tradition of just swapping charity donations for the past few years. My brother loves to surf so I’ll be donating to organizations that help teach people with disabilities. My wife is a speech-language pathologist so I’m funding cleft palate surgeries for kiddos in need.
Helps defend against useless clutter and makes the holidays a bit more meaningful for us.
My brother and I both have an interest in food, so we tend to get each other food & drink type gifts. Those don’t create useless clutter. Based on a rec from this board, I got him some charcuterie from Olympia Provisions. They seemed excited, but I haven’t heard a review from him yet.
Based on what we had talked about previously, I think he was considering sending a Dungeness crab my way, but the season opens too late for it to make it to me on Christmas. Maybe he’ll do one for my birthday.
If we were spending the holidays together, I’d probably be getting him a nice bourbon or Scotch.
Here’s a grievance - my daughter and I dropped off a loaf of cranberry raisin bread as a gift to her dancing instructor. We left it in her mailbox. But apparently the mail carrier thought it was for them, so they took it.
On the other hand, watched Elf tonight with the family, so things kind of balanced out.
The mail carrier didn’t eat your raisin bread, he was collecting it as evidence.
Expect the Postmaster General to be knocking on your door anyday now:
And btw, the General don’t play:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2020/08/20/postal-service-police-bannon/
Welp, I just texted my wife that it’s her fault that the bread is gone, because she compelled me to do something illegal. So that should initiate a fun conversation - thanks!
Sweet brag. You must stir a lot or something.
How many do you have? I have 2, one was my starter which I used for everything and then I upgraded to a much bigger size which is now my everything pot and the smaller one I use for Cobb bread.
Shaken?
You never stir anything you bake?
Oh ok, that makes sense.
I grew up in South America and after living for 20 years in the US I can confirm that our Christmas traditions are weird.
Even though it’s hot as hell at that time, there’s plenty of Santa Clauses dressed in very heavy clothing. Poor dudes, they must lose tons of weight from sweating so much. We also drink hot chocolate because… we need to warm up when it’s 30C outside??
As a kid I would be sent to sleep at 10pm on Christmas eve so that Santa could come over and deliver the presents. I would wake up at midnight (probably because of the fireworks) and then have a chance to open all my presents, while everybody would eat roasted turkey, mashed potatoes, and I don’t remember what else. Then we’d have more hot chocolate with panetone as dessert. Adults would then drink and dance to loud music until the sun would come up. Fun times!
Christmas Menu:
Cesaer Salad
Cheddar Biscuits
Crab Legs
Caramelized Banana Pudding
Drinks:
NEIPAS
Bourbon
Wine
Let’s go.
Normally we have two large get-togethers, one Christmas Eve at an aunt’s house and one Christmas Day at our house. I’ll be making a much much smaller roast for the wife and I compared to the normal 7-bone rib. They’ll be plenty of leftovers for sandwiches over the weekend though. Also going to try and make some Yorkshire Pudding while the roast is resting before I sear it.
Since we’re not going out for Christmas Eve, I jokingly suggested we bring back one of her childhood Christmas Eve traditions and get some Chinese food. She smiled and took my comment seriously, so we’ll be having General Tsos and pork fried rice for dinner Thursday night.
Christmas Eve dinner for us is traditionally delivery pizza.
For Thanksgiving, we purchased a meal from a local restaurant for the first time. That worked out so great that I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to go back to cooking ourselves. Ordering Christmas menu from the same place:
Country ham & swiss strata
Blueberry french toast casserole
Mimosa kit
Jumbo shrimp cocktail
Pigs in a blanket
Braised short ribs
Dinner rolls
Winter Greens Salad
I recently bought a 5 pound beef tenderloin from Costco, but I’m not sure when I’m going to make that or what exactly I’m going to do with it. Little bit scared to fuck up a $100 piece of meat.
As for drinks, I might have a mimosa or bloody mary early on, but will probably have lambic/geuze in the afternoon and evening. I have the tolerance of a 10-year old, so I will claim that I’m going to cap things off with a nice heavy stout, but that will almost certainly not happen.
This is true. I lived in South America until age 9 and I’ve celebrated xmas in South America and Panama quite a few times. Nothing quite like seeing Santas and snow flake decorations when it’s 95 degrees outside. One time I traveled during the holidays from Panama City, Panama to the Twin Cities in Minnesota. I departed Panama on a nearly 100 degree day, and arrived to -30 degrees in Minnesota still wearing shorts and sandals.
Took last Friday off and all of this week off. Not going anywhere for obvious reasons, which sounds sad but I’m not going to lie, sitting around the house all day alone watching TV shows and drinking scotch and cooking has been magical. Seriously amazing.
Yesterday’s project, smoked tomahawk ribeye. Might have overdone the smoke a bit, kind of tasted like bacon, which was good but odd.
Shit I left a few edibles in mine last night for my brother.
I bought a bottle of Baileys the other day. It’s normal in the office for someone on my floor to pick up a bottle this week and we all drink Irish Cream coffee all week. Working from home, the bottle lasted 2 days. F me. That stuff is deadly delicious.
Update:
Watched Love Actually tonight with the kids. We watched the censored AMC version, which was perfectly fine - it just blurred out a couple of images and completely deleted the porn-actor couple storyline with no loss in continuity.
Verdict:
It’s fine if you ignore how terrible it is.
