grinchy mcscrooge

What is up with kids these days???

Yes, I've become one of those stodgy old geezers that says things like that.  Hear me out, though - in the "olden days," stodgy old geezers were called by a different name - Elders - and people showed them reverence and respect simply because they had managed to live long enough to get gray hairs.

I work with a bunch of people who are, on average, 10 years younger than me.  While this is usually something we don't notice, I can't help but wonder if it is a generational difference that allows me to love Christmas in all its trimmings - the music, the food, the scents, the decorations - and that causes them to adopt an attitude of apathy at best and downright mean-spirited, steal-your-sunshine hatred at worst.  I don't know when this happened since I was too busy to enjoy Christmas the last two years, but it seems that without exception, my colleagues display a total bah humbug attitude toward the holiday season: while I look forward to the isolated 4 weeks each year that I get to listen to Christmas music, they hate it and complain relentlessly about having to listen to it.

I've had it.

What happened to holiday cheer?  Where is the "most wonderful time of the year"?  Why doesn't anyone "buy into" that anymore?

I think most people are quick to blame the heinous over-commercialization of the holiday for all this Anti-Christmas sentiment.  I can understand how it must feel like Toys-R-Us opening at 9pm on Thanksgiving and the ads for holiday shopping season starting right after Halloween can take away the charm and sentimentality of Christmases past.

I think that's only part of a much bigger picture.  I've been thinking a lot about this because to me, Christmas is a joyful time of year - I love Christmas.  I look forward to it the way a child does, but not in anticipation of presents - rather, I linger on every sight and scent, I enjoy every single day.  I smile when I see the first snowflake decorations tied to the lampposts in Philadelphia and the sight of Headhouse Shambles and Rittenhouse Square all lit up for Christmas makes my heart swell.  I feel joy when I walk past a tree or window display of a storefront.  I actually love Christmas shopping because I know that I have all the excuses I need to "spoil" the people I love.  The only thing I really don't like about Christmas is the time that I have to wait between buying a gift and giving it because I love the joy a small token of love and friendship can bring to a person.

Why don't other people have that joy?

From looking around me and doing some serious thinking (who, me?), I think that a bigger part of this new "bah humbug" trend is the deterioration of relationships - relationships with your family, possibly your colleagues or friends, but yes, relationships.  Whether people admit it or not, I think that is why so many young people hate Christmas.  I know people who hate Christmas just because it means they have to see their family and deal with all the drama - when your family is built around dysfunctional relationships, it doesn't feel good to spend time together.  When we place all our worth on being in a romantic relationship, it "ruins" Christmas if that person dumps us before or around the holiday season.

Honestly, friends, what it comes down to is this: a lack of connection to, respect for, and relationship with the Savior whose birth Christmas celebrates removes any last vestige of holiday joy. [Before anyone reading feels the need to bring this up, I am very well aware that the Church strategically selected December 25th due to the celebration of a popular pagan holiday and that December 25th is not actually when Christ was born.  None of that changes the fact that this is the designated holiday to symbolically celebrate the miracle.]

This time of year you hear ads on the television and on the radio, reminding you to "keep Christ in Christmas" or remember the "Reason for the Season" and it's easy to roll your eyes and say it's hokey, but if we refocused the holiday and remembered why we celebrate it, we might find a joy that transcends holiday shopping madness (I freely admit to hating mall shopping during December, despite my love of buying gifts), gives us strength to put aside differences and hurt feelings and gather with our families at the table, and most importantly, gives us a worth that will never be matched by another human being's love.

So what's wrong with kids these days?  They were not raised in a Christian society, so Christmas has never been anything but a secular, universally celebrated, shopping holiday and another excuse for their family to make them miserable.  The songs that I love to listen to remind me of the incredible love God showed by allowing himself to be born as a human infant to poor, unwed parents so that he could live among us, as one of us, and ultimately give his life so that we would no longer be separated from him.  They remind me of the traditions my family has kept and the new ones I have adopted with the family I married into.  They evoke warmth and love and golden images of happy people being nice to each other.

The songs they hate have no meaning apart from reminding them how useless Christmas is now that they aren't children looking for something special under the tree.  As we [as a secular society] have successfully removed God from every facet of society that is not the cloistered halls of a church, we have lost our holiday traditions and the little things that can touch our hearts and make us remember that we have a lot of love to give.

I have a lot of love to give.  Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones from me and mine.

Thursday's the new Friday

I've reached the "weekend," so to speak.  Despite being very happy at my new job, it is still a welcome break.  I would like to say [just one more time] how much my quality of life has improved with this job change.  I came home, stopped at Superfresh, CVS, and the wine store before getting home and spending at least a half hour talking to Mister before starting dinner.  We ate dinner and everything was cleared and cleaned by 9 and I've just spent the last hour or so "surfing the web," a luxury I usually reserve for one Sunday every two months or so.  I have so much time!  I'm just really happy.  Finally.

Despite my early start and euphoria, tonight was still not going to be the night for spanakopita, so I made Chana Masala from Vegan Express while the tomatoes were in that delicate place between perfectly ripe and rotting.  Cooking with fresh tomatoes is both a rewarding and stressful experience.  For one thing, nothing beats the flavor of lightly sauteed, summer-fresh tomatoes, or the sweet explosion of flavor from a raw grape tomato at the peak of ripeness.  On the other hand, I really do get seriously grossed out from the seeds.  I don't know what it is, but it's enough to turn my stomach sour if I look too long.  If only I could buy pre-seeded tomatoes.  But that leads to the last point - there is really only one or two days that they are truly, incredibly edible and if you miss those days, you're either coaxing flavor from a hard, yellow-green, overly-acidic tomato, or begging the one you're trying to cut to refrain from rotting for just one more minute while you try to dice the grainy, falling-apart flesh while it separates itself from its skin (but never its stupid seeds...).

Anyway, tomato-induced trauma aside, dinner was light and tasty:

I can't tolerate Indian-influenced recipes served on brown rice, so I used white Jasmine and it was perfect.  I would have preferred basmati, but until I have my huge chef's kitchen when Mister's solo album goes gold, there's only room for two rices.  The tomato curry sauce clung very lightly to the creamy chickpeas, with a very subtle hint of What-is-that-Oh!-it's-lemon lying just beneath the garam masala and turmeric.  As a contrasting but perfectly intense side dish, I roasted some asparagus with salt and pepper.  I thought about adding some garlic, but decided to let the simple spices of my childhood draw out the naturally perfect flavor of these right-sized stalks before they go missing (or obscenely over-priced) for the winter.

In case you can't tell, I was as satisfied with our dinner as I am by my new urban-centric life.

On that note, I'm off to celebrate with red wine, dark chocolate, and a book about NOLA witches.

pale september

Pale September... I wore the time like a dress that year.  The autumn days swung soft around me, like cotton on my skin.  But as embers of the summer lost their breath and disappeared, ....all my armor falling down in a pile at my feet,and my winter giving way to warm...

Yes, it is finally September.  As the nighttime temps seem to be habitually landing in the mid- to low 60s, I turn my face happily toward Autumn - my favorite season.  A season when Mister's allergies finally get a small bit of reprieve, a season full of beautiful colors, incredible scents (they already have the cinnamon pine cones at Superfresh!) and shorter days through which to squint.  A season when the spiders in my basement, theoretically anyway, should leave me to do my laundry in peace, rather than sending Mister down to make sure they're not waiting to eat me and then freaking out halfway through loading the second load into the washer because a new, not-dead, spindly spider is creeping up the wall only a couple of vulnerable feet away.  If you'll wait a moment, I need to go ask Mister to switch the loads now...

Anyway, to celebrate the new month, we met up with my parents for lunch today.  Okay, actually, it was completely coincidental that they were in town today and it just happened to be the first of September.  Regardless, we met them at Cooperage, outside the Curtis Center, and I finally got to sit at the wood veneer tables in those neat black wicker booth benches with orange cushions.  Normally, the orange and black combination makes me think of Halloween, but for some reason, with this place it just makes me think of manly men who drink bourbon and how masculine I fancy myself sometimes.  I'm probably going to regret writing that.

I got a veggie burger with sweet potato fries - yes, sweet potato fries!  This was a very exciting moment for me.  Unfortunately, they were not nearly as tasty as the ones I've had out west.  At this point, it may be a power of suggestion kind of thing.  The veggie patty was okay, but since Mister's squooshed out in every direction, I just ate mine with a fork.  Not very manly of me, I'll admit.  Then again, neither is this drink:

That's my Bumboo Punch and it had something like 5 different fruit nectars in it.  It was strong, though - despite the many competing fruit juices, I could taste the rum quite distinctly.  It was a fun lunch - our water was served in mason jars with handles and our sandwiches came in shallow metal pails.  I'm not totally sure what that was about, but it definitely added to the whole Early 20th Century vibe the place had going on (which was exactly why I chose it).

Nevertheless, after sitting in the sun for about an hour and drinking that tall, fruity, rummy drink, I was ready for a serious nap when we got home.  Instead, Mister and I had a pot of coffee.

Isn't that pretty?  Mister bought me that tea-cup a few years ago and his mom got me the saucer for my bridal shower.  Normally, I just display all of my antique tea-cups (and saucers, of course!) on my china cabinet shelves, but I thought to myself today, "What's the use in having pretty things if I don't occasionally use them?"  So I pulled that pair off the shelf, rinsed them off and had my coffee in pretty china.  That made Mister smile at me.

This makes me smile.  Actually, it makes me smile and giggle a little, too.  It never stops being funny to me how I can make Leftover Molds.  I told Mister I didn't want to make Lasagna tonight because we still had so much Jambalaya leftover, so I heated up the three pounds of leftovers for dinner tonight.  It didn't taste any different than the first time, but it sure was more amusing, slipping out of the Gladware and holding its shape like a little Cajun Bundt cake made with rice, vegetables, and seitan.

2 ways to pre-game Friday

Today is kind of like Friday Part One.  I took tomorrow off from work because Mister and I have big plans.  Well, actually, Mister's and my big plans could have been accomplished by taking a half day, but I decided to take advantage of the fact that PIFA is still going on and avail myself on some free arts stuff.

Some women go to a salon/spa to pamper themselves.  I go to museums and live music with food carts.

Today was also an interesting food day.  It was Hot Dog Day at work.  It never fails to completely astonish me how much crappy food we serve our employees at a weight loss company.  This year's Hot Dog Day was only more civilized than last year's in two small ways:

1. We managed to avoid polluting Earth Day with our little tubes of nitrates and leftover skin.
2. We managed to avoid the novelty of a fat and toothless man serving hot dogs from his little cart.

Apart from that, it served as a reminder of two more things:

1. Just because we work for a company trying to establish itself as a total wellness solution and just because we aim to teach overweight and obese people how to establish healthy eating habits while losing weight on our program does not mean we feed our employees healthy food.

2. If there is something novel available, like, say, veggie dogs, people will choose that over their pink tubes of manipulated meat out of pure curiosity.  Unfortunately, this can end with no food for the people who can only eat the veggie dogs...people like me.

I'm trying to "be the bigger person" (not literally, obviously) and look at this from a generous and enlightened perspective, but there are two points at war within me:

1. I really, really want to focus on how awesome it was that so many meat-eaters voluntarily chose to eat something that was not dead.  I want to be happy for their excellent choice of a [albeit processed] vegetarian protein over their usual choice of rotting, preserved flesh.  I want to believe that running out of veggie dogs before the event was half over will indicate to management that there is a larger interest in good, non-meat options than they originally thought and that this revelation will result in more veggie choices in future events.

2. I wish they had "reserved" at least enough for the known vegetarians, and allowed omnis to eat "extras."  I mean, really.  I, like everyone else, had believed the company was feeding me today, so I did not bring lunch.  Them running out of veggie dogs resulted in me having to buy my lunch at the cafe, who, fortunately, had vegetarian lentil soup for me to dunk my naked hot dog rolls in.

In any case, I was happy to head home at the end of a very busy and hungry day and find that Mister was actually awake and alert.  I had nothing to say last night because when I got home, Mister was passed out in the dark in the bedroom, got up for about an hour and a half before giving up and going back to bed.  In the absence of a formal, cooked dinner, I had a grilled peanut butter sandwich and a plate of strawberries.  It was a nice little dinner, but nothing to blog about, especially since the strawberries could have been a lot closer to in season.  Speaking of seasons, I know Mister and I are quite ready to wave Allergy Season goodbye.

So, despite Mister's ambivalent hunger, I set about making Mediterranean Chickpeas and Vegetables, from the July 1998 Cooking Light magazine.  Click the meal name for the recipe - and you should - it's tasty and very easy.  If you have precooked rice, or use a faster cooking rice like Basmati or Jasmine, or even a fast-cooking grain like bulgur or couscous, you can easily get this on the table in 30 minutes, which was exactly what I was aiming to do.

It has been such a long time since we've had this that I'm pretty sure I've never served it in those bowls...which we got the first Christmas after we were married (2007).  See, it took me quite a long time to find my cooking "wings" so for the first several years of our vegetarian lives together, I just kind of made the same things in an ever-widening rotation.  I was always trying to learn new recipes, I just hadn't become confident enough in my ability to cook to take as many chances as I do now.  So, before I learned how fun it is to be adventurous in your menu selection, even if it leads to disaster from time to time, we would generally do a rotation of pizza, pasta, veggie burgers w/fries, pizza, rice and beans, my own weak version of veggie lo mein, pizza, and rice cooked in vegetable broth with whatever vegetables I found palatable that day sauteed in some olive oil with not quite enough garlic.  And pizza - did I mention that?  Yeah, Mister and I ate a lot of pizza when we stopped eating animals.

Anyway, this had a high priority in our rotation because it was the first time I thought to combine canned tomatoes with the sauteed veggies and definitely the first time I realized you could have beans (chickpeas) and rice AND veggies - I know, it blew my mind at the time, too.  So, I probably overdid it a bit, so when I started building my cookbook collection, it fell away.

I'm glad I made it and I'll probably try to remember to make it a little more frequently than once every 3 years or so, because it's really good and simple.  I always enjoy the recipes that involve bay leaves because they lend such a bizarre flavor to dishes; smoky, like I mentioned.

Anyway, I have some French wine to drink in preparation for my day of French fun tomorrow.  I'm so glad I decided to take the day off - I so enjoyed the PIFA gala and I've wanted to attend far more than I have, but alas... that whole pesky working-6-days-a-week thing gets in the way of a lot of things I want to do.  I plan to enjoy every moment of tomorrow and hope to capture as much as I can on film so we can have a little picture party tomorrow night in preparation for Real Friday.

Bonne nuit et Beaux rêves, mes amis, à demain!