Sylvia's Journal

Most of yesterday was centered on food, the Big Christmas Meal. Axel and I got up early, after only a few hours of sleep. You know when you have recovered when everyone else in the house thinks that is perfectly OK. Axel had to set the alarm. I woke up half an hour earlier. We had slept for four hours, just like during our hospital days when the length of our sleep was measured by the potency of the pain pills.

We rubbed the turkey with chili powder. Try rubbing an eightteen pound turkey with not quite four fully functional hands (fifteen fingers). Axel then covered the bird with maple smoked bacon, as per Tessa’s instructions, and put it in the oven.

Somehow there was enough to do between this and when the rest of the house started to wake up that we never made it back to bed, as intended. The unwrapping of gifts that happened just before dinner is for me always a bit of an anti-climax after Christerklaas with its poems and gifts that need to be found elsewhere in the house. This part of the Christmas ritual never quite gets the attention it deserves. Tessa was trying to herd everyone to the living room but unsuccesfully so; Axel was too busy with doing, as usual, last minute stuff and I was happily playing with my new blog site. I categorized each entry. I can now call up the archive of Sita’s entries, Tessa’s entries and Axel’s entries. I like putting things in categories and I this new clean slate was very appealing. The categories are now visible on the front page.

In the process of categorizing I could not help to re-read entries as far back as July and I am grateful for the detailed descriptions. This journey will not be forgotten. I now read some of those entries, with the distance of time between my two selves, and see how anyone, even from a great distance, could ‘suffer with’ us as is the true meaning of the word sympathize.

We had a few visitors. Ted and Charles from next door showed up and brought us chocolates and nuts. We had coffee and talked about shit, or rather, the averted sewage disaster, including memories from the earlier time when things did not end that well.

In the afternoon our dinner guests arrived, Chuck and Anne. By then all the side dishes had been completed: turban squash, mixed with carrot puree, served inside the turban part of the squash with the other part as a cover. The drawing by Sita of a little Turkish man with moustache, under the turban was still visible albeit upside down. We had the very traditional creamed onions, mashed potatoes, and cranberry jelly. Tessa had added a green dish for color: green beans lightly cooked in ginger and sprinkled with almonds. And then there was the piece de resistance: our bacon bird, the stuffing inside it and gravy.

It was one of the most magnificent Christmas dinners we have ever had. It was traditional with a twist; with people near and dear to us around the table. Only Steve was missing. He was with his family in Kitchener (ON) and eating Elk. His people actually shoot their own Christmas dinner. Steve will be getting on a bus sometime today to arrive in Boston on Thursday.

Axel stood up and made a little speech; he could not imagine a happier Christmas. And I could only nod as a little voice deep inside my head whispered, “This could have been a Christmas without him.” This realization is coloring some of my usual impatience with Axel not being ready and forgetting about time. We might have been much more regimented about time, the way I like it, but without Axel, what satisfaction could I possibly derive from that?

Desert was another Tessa concoction; not of the lean cuisine sort. Only I knew that because I had seen it prepared. For everyone else it was a glorious pumpkin cheescake, served with eggnog whipped cream. We served it with coffee made in our Cona coffee maker. It looks like a piece of chemistry lab equipment that happens to use coffee grinds and converts the grinds and water in coffee. I inherited it from my parents. I remember fondly being allowed to wait until the coffee experiment at the end of my parents’ dinner parties, to see the water first bubble up into the grinds and then whoosh down as coffee into the beaker. It’s a clever way to combine learning and enjoyment.

After dinner we watched Chuck and Anne’s pictures from their trip to Hawai on Tessa’s big computer screen, hundreds of them. After that they had to watch Tessa’s new puppy. It was not much different from seeing someone’s newborn baby pictures. Lot’s of ‘oh how cute’s.

Sita and Jim left for another Christmas party at his mom’s. By the time everyone left we had little energy left and retired to bed before 9 PM.