European Christmas

Would you take advice from this guy?

This was the first year that we didn’t see any family for Christmas. Therefore, we decided it was time to take a dump all over our families’ traditions and blaze a new trail. That new trail involved copying everything from Rick Steves’ European Christmas book wholesale. Despite not being even remotely European, this heartwarming tale of reduced commercialism spoke to our cheapness, and celebrating the whole season rather than just Christmas day spoke to our desire to party more frequently than Baby Finntastico typically permits. We observed St. Nicholas’ Day by buying Godiva chocolates and Santa Lucia Day by going to the Garden D’Light. As the Storm to End all Storms rolled in and our parties got cancelled, we mostly just baked stuff. And by “we”, I mean “me” since someone had to keep Baby Finntastico from wandering into the oven. The Littlest Wife is only qualified to make brownies from a box, so she corralled the baby while gender role confusion settled on our home.

Mincemeat Pies

Topless pies are such tarts!

This traditional English treat does not contain a single drop of meat, a fact I did not learn until the Littlest Wife brought home a jar labeled “Mincemeat” which contained nothing but apples. The English have lied to her people for the last time and they can expect a stern letter in the mail soon, on paper made from potatoes. I ended up making three batches of these due to the Littlest Wife’s appetite for portable apple pies. It was also the only food we made that anyone would eat at our one party that wasn’t canceled due to Snowmageddon ’08. They’re a pain to make since you have to roll dough, but are by far the best thing I made. You might say everything else was a letdown after this. You might say that, if you wanted to make me cry.

Gingerbread…Things

The gingerbread didn’t turn out so well.

There was a gingerbread recipe in the book from Germany, which is nice since the Polish recipe suddenly disappeared one night. This gingerbread recipe did not make men or houses, but cakes. I had to leave it out overnight to dry for some reason (the secret ingredient is patience!), but it was not worth the wait. The result was a mushy cookie thing that tasted like gingerbread wrapped around a gumdrop. This isn’t a bad thing per se, and it’s the first German food I’ve seen that didn’t involve sausage or beer, but it just wasn’t good. This recipe introduced me to the recurring theme of putting candied peel in European desserts. They’re obsessed with it. Well guess what, Europe? It’s just a crappy gumdrop.

Plum/Figgy/English/Christmas Pudding

Not pictured: it on fire.

Like most things, such as mincemeat, my ancestors completely misnamed this food item. If I was to make a list of food ranked by similarity to pudding, Christmas Pudding would appear roughly 187th, right between “ham” and “Tostitos Hint of Lime Flavored Tortilla Chips.” It involves mixing stuff together, steaming it for eight hours, and storing it in your goat pen for a year. My first attempt ended in something that was less “steamed until plump” and more “burnt beyond recognition and ability to clean the pan.” I ditched the book’s plan and trusted the Internet’s plan for steaming a pudding. There was a video with an English accent and everything. Authentic! Even when properly made, Christmas Pudding is just raisin/candied peel bread, but super dense. And here we have the other European Christmas dessert tradition: when it doubt, put in a cup of raisins.

Panettone di Milano

Rise! No? Okay.

This is also just raisin/candied peel bread, but less dense. Not much less dense, granted, since I followed the Littlest Wife’s advice on how to make bread rise which killed all the yeast.

Norwegian Christmas Cake

Raisins and candied peel not enough? Add cherries!

This is also raisin/candied peel bread, but it’s even less dense because I actually got it to rise. Seriously, the people in Europe put raisins and candied peel in everything as a substitute for things that actually taste good in a dessert. This is the best of the raisin/candied peel foods, which is kind of like being the best chef at Arby’s. In the plus column, its name in Norwegian is Julekaka, which is awesome to say every time you remember the bread exists, regardless of where you are. Target, for example.

We made some other stuff, including spiced wine, chestnuts roasted in a closed oven, and Panforte di Siena. It was fun to make my own bread, pies, and then watch the Littlest Wife eat it all regardless of quality, but after a Christmas full of nutmeg, cloves, and damned candied peel, I just wanted some damn American chocolate. No more rolling, kneading, and baking until some arbitrary Swedish metric is reached. So invented the greatest Christmas dessert ever. Behold, The Pudding Brownie, made from the Littlest Wife’s Boxed Brownies^TM:

The white stuff makes it Christmas-y.

Merry Christmas, Future Son. We tried.

Snowpocalypse Now

Mr. Awesome forgot to mention that the city’s great plan that allows only special vehicles to travel on the streets doesn’t take into account the fact that its own emergency vehicles are rear-wheel drive. The police can’t drive, so they’re going out on foot to fight crime. It’s a shame that the police have to prove how hardcore they are by fighting the city’s own poor planning. Where’s Batman when you need him?

Snowpocalypse

This is not normal.

This is getting silly.

My first few years out here, Seattle’s attitude towards snow was cute, nay, adorable. It would snow an inch, the entire city would shut down, cars would fly off the road, and there would be flaming barrels of trash in downtown Bellevue because that is the sort of thing a dystopian present requires. I’d get the day off work, try to make a snowman but run out of snow, it would melt, and then life would go on.

After a week with incessant snowfall accumulating amounts that could only be described as notable, I’m concerned that Seattle’s hands-off approach to dealing with snow may not be scalable to actual snowfall. Strangely, shrugging and saying,”Well, it’ll melt, right?” isn’t doing the trick this time. To be fair, they have deployed all 27 snowplows they have (I had heard that it was 30, but some may have been lost in action) to clear major streets. By which they mean pack it down so that people with chains may be able to travel of some flat roads with only a couple of buses flying off an overpass. But what can they, the lowly Department of Transportation do?

Future Son is handling this well.

Salt is bad for the environment, so that’s right out. Sand is also bad for the environment, but it’s effective for as much as thrity seconds, so tons of that have been dropped. There’s also been some chemicals dumped to de-ice the roads, which is great for the environment no doubt, but only works on windshields I think. They even use childproof snowplows with rubber edges so that they won’t hurt streets, or remove ice. At least the purported windstorm that was going to destroy us all apparently had its flight cancelled due to weather and is somewhere it Atlanta, watching CNN on a tiny TV and blowing quietly to itself.

The amount of snow that Seattle receives has been steadily increasing each year I’ve lived here, as shown on this handy chart (chart not shown, I make enough of those at work). By my projections, in 2021, around the time Future Son is really getting into meth because I have failed as a parent, we’ll have 37 feet of snow and also polar bears will wander through the vast tundra that was Seattle, climbing down chimneys looking for warmth and picnic baskets like an anti-Santa. But, hey, I’m not in charge of a major city, so what do I know about keeping the city running smoothly in the face of such adversity as six inches of snow over a few days.

Where’s she going? To Crazytown.

So I stay home and watch my dwindling supply of Honey Nut Cheerios. I ventured out at 4 am on Thursday morning to take the mother-in-law and some other guy to the airport and nearly died (my car skidded a little). I went in to work the next day for a cameo appearance that involved opening office doors randomly and saying something clever to thunderous applause. Since then, I’ve stayed home and tried to convince the Littlest Wife that this is the wrong time to begin running again. Generally, I just work on my Netflix queue. That is going well, though I am concerned that if Baby Finntastico sees any more black and white movies, his first words will be “dollface” or “Ay, whatchoo tryin’ ta pull, mistah?”