Rain. Glorious, cold, shivery rain. Not the hundredth of an inch of a few weeks ago but an actual soaking that promises to continue on into the next week. It’s about two months overdue but better late than never.

Jimmy Fallon was laughing about it, because what else can you do, so I had to check it out and it’s true.

One person in my family loves Yankee Candles so I went to a crowded mall some years ago, something I rarely do this time of year (or any other, to be fair), and bought her one in a jar for Christmas. Or was it two. Vanilla scented, and even just sitting there unlit it was like having baked cookies in the room.

But it’s true. This year the company got slammed with a fair number of bad reviews: people complaining they’d been sent candles with no or almost no smell at all, wanting to know what had gone wrong with their manufacturing this year? It was just not up to snuff.

My husband grew up making spritz cookies with his mom and siblings every Christmas: most often done with the Christmas tree mold, green food coloring in the dough for that certain parched-pine look and red hots for stars. Add sugar glitter.

It was a wonder to him that my family had done no such thing. I didn’t even know, when we got married, what a spritz cookie was. Oh, that’s the name for those. Oh okay.

Food coloring and kids was enough of a potential and a few times actual disaster (on the bathroom cabinet! On the outside wall! It’s paint on wood!) that–yeah, and so most of the time when he wanted his Christmas spritz he got them because he went out and bought that food coloring and he made them with the kids himself. Me, I’m more the chocolate chips in oatmeal or cranberry-pecan pie bar type. I did at least pitch in occasionally, but most years they did it all.

We went through at least three different spritz makers, including a battery powered one to shoot them out of at one point so they could mass-produce them faster to take to the neighbors, but getting them not to come out too thick was hard and the more easily controlled hand-press type was just the way you do it and the imposter was abandoned.

But the best part, always, always, was making paper plates of them and ringing the neighbors’ doorbells and seeing their faces light up that the kids had done that for them.

The next generation has now taken on the task and declared it good. You put the stars just so.

Remodeling goof number one: twenty-seven years ago, the latest fad from Thermidor was to put a pop-up vent behind the cooktop. Someone we knew had that and she liked it. What sold us was the contractor saying that it would be far quieter than your standard hood because the motor for it would be on the roof and far away, and with my hearing, a lack of background noise is something to be highly sought after.

What he didn’t know is that the sound would reverberate all down that shaft, making it a lot louder than a standard one would have been. And when the part down at stove level refused to retract and close anymore it became a source of very cold air in the winter.

Goof number two: the architect’s specs called for a 30″ stove, but Richard wanted five burners. Okay, so, 36″. It wasn’t till the contractor installed the cabinets that he realized that he hadn’t changed them to match.

Meaning, our cabinets have overhung the stove from both sides all these years, which is great for the finish. Not.

And you can’t put in an overhead vent now because it would have to hang from below the cabinets and that would not leave room for the pots, much less stirring or seeing into them.

Unless you can put in a 30″ vent for a 36″ stove and I imagine the county would not be real happy with that idea.

So then the choices are to find another cooktop that shallow or look in the back of the yarn closet to see if we still have the leftover Corian piece (I’m not sure we do) and try to find someone to seam it when it’s 27 years old and make it still look good so we could have that 30″er. Or just replace the entire countertop, vent, cooktop, and did I mention the fridge is that old too and has been fixed several times and is leaking and just needs to go?

Nobody seems to make cooktops that shallow because they don’t make those vents anymore. With good reason: by pushing the stove forward the way it does, I have caught my sweaters on fire twice. You know how they say wool extinguishes flames? Let me tell you, it does. Angora got shaved close so it’s your friend too and that sweater looked like it had had a major procedure done at the vet’s but in both cases the fire went out before it got up to my chin and it didn’t take hold in the sweater, just blackened and shriveled the fuzzies on the surface.

Yeah. Fun times.

Apparently you can get a better, longer lasting finish on the wood of the cabinetry now than we were allowed then. With ours, you can see where the sun came through the skylight directly.

Lots of end-of-year sales, and a hubby going, One more month at least. We have to have the vaccine first before we let people work in here.

We really don’t want to re-remodel the kitchen. We just want a working stove.

We’re going to have to replace our gas cooktop. Like, asap.

We remodeled our kitchen 27 years ago with high-end Thermidor appliances and they were a disaster: the low-cycling burners were designed so that they fused shut and never worked again if you were ever to turn them to high (as explained afterward by the repairman, who was sympathetic, with the warranty getting us nowhere with the dealer) and both ovens’ motherboards fried just outside of warranty, with a quote of $850 plus labor for each. Same quote as the stove. We replaced the double oven and kept the half-dead stove. The other half actually outlived the average stove by a dozen years.

Another repairman later noted that self-clean ovens tend to fry their motherboards and that one should not use that feature.

So. I’m suddenly trying to learn everything I can about 36″ cooktops.

A Thermidor will never come in our house again–he felt as strongly about that as I do.

My problem is, scrolling around, there was one and only one whose looks stopped me in my tracks–I LIKE that one. Bluestar? What’s a Bluestar?

So I went looking for the price, rolled my eyes, said well of course it is, but still: more expensive than Viking? Yow.

I would dearly love to hear anything anybody loves or hates about theirs, any size or brand. Consumer Reports in my experience has become less reliable than some of the appliances they describe, other than obliquely by letting people publish reviews on their site.

For reliability, I’d be going with Bosch, whose appliances I’ve actually been consistently happy with–except that they don’t make one. (EDIT: Lowe’s has one! And for $1200 less than the Bluestar!)

Anyone?

Hoping the paywall doesn’t get in the way, please go read this: an essay by a Jewish doctor tending to a man with severe covid who was covered in tattoos that conveyed that his new ER patient would be happy to see that doctor and the black and Asian nurses tending to him dead.

In that moment, though, the only thing he wanted was to survive and he begged breathlessly for help.

I am grateful for the doctor’s honesty in saying that, internally, it took him a moment to deal with it.

I kept wanting to tell him, it’s okay to be human.

It is clear that the experience left a good man even more determined to be more compassionate towards all. He didn’t get to hear what happened to the guy after that; ER doctors pretty much never do. All he could do was silently wish him well wherever he was now, and hope.

I want to throw in a little of my Mormon faith here: in the life to come, when we come into the presence of the immensity of the Love there, if we have always tried to follow it, whatever we may call it, however we may think of it, every time even someone who doesn’t believe in God at all Thinks Good Thoughts towards the well-being of someone who needs it, we have served that Love.

We will recognize it and belong to it and it will claim us for its own.

Because we always did, by our own choices. No matter what we called ourselves or it here.

Thank heavens for the good examples along the way that help us see how we want to be like when we grow up, all our lives long, like this man.

I wonder if his patient had ever experienced selfless love like that before. I sure hope it changed him for the better.

We’ve all heard about how Dutch Elm Disease wiped out elms across North America.

Turns out, that’s why pollen season is so bad now.

There were so many dead trees and so much replanting.

And I quote:

“1949 USDA Yearbook of Agriculture. The book advised: “When used for street plantings, only male trees should be selected, to avoid the nuisance from the seed.”

And that became How It Is Done. In species that have male and female trees, males were planted in urban landscapes everywhere and that became what was available in nurseries, since they grow new specimens from cuttings, not seeds, and it was just how it was till nobody knew or noticed anymore.

Until the guy in that article. Who is campaigning to get cities to pay attention to what they’ve got and diversify.

Another quote:

“Where human sperm each have a single tail, or flagellum, gingko sperm have around a thousand. “Once the pollen gets in your nose, it will germinate and start swimming up there to get to where it’s going,” Ogren says. “It’s pretty invasive.”

Mercifully, he only described the one tree as being that way.

And now climate change, I presume because it’s mismatching the temperature cycle from the sunlight cycle, is inducing all these poor lonely males to throw even more pollen in the air.

Whereas had they planted all female trees in the first place there would be no nuisance seeds and no pollen.

Who knew?

There were three people being helped and one ahead of me in line at the post office. Even this early, I’ve never seen so few there in December.

But the stuff I ordered for the grands to come here first so I could wrap it–those haven’t come yet. So much for bypassing Big South American River. Turns out Monday we go on total lockdown for three weeks, and I don’t think going out to ship presents to young children counts as an essential trip under the new guidelines.

2020 is almost over.

We’ll figure it out.

Legos came in plain squares and rectangles of mostly red and blue and the occasional green or yellow when I was a kid, one or two sizes each and plain and hard and uninviting and I remember my grandmother wanting me to go play with the ones in her basket and me feeling like, Are you kidding me? How old do you think I am? Toddlers build towers!

As they got far more sophisticated I didn’t see for the longest time why a kid should just assemble from a directions sheet whatever someone else had dreamed up. Why not use their own imagination?

As if I ever did with them, so never mind.

But yarn! I remember watching my mother’s hands assembling plain straight string into beautiful, warm, cabled sweaters. Her projects always got my attention and the firmest determination that someday I was going to be able to do that, too. I remember studying the puzzle of her motions, the steady, accumulative loop-over-loop.

My husband’s family has always loved puzzles.

Watching my seven and nine year old grandsons showing off their Lego creations over FaceTime, I finally really got it: they’re putting together not just a puzzle but a 3-D one that helps develop fine motor coordination and their ability to envision what comes next and to check and correct and not be satisfied till it’s right and when they’re done, it’s not just a bunch of plastic bricks that fall right back apart but an actual toy that they play with with pride.

It teaches them about taking care of things that have unseen fragility.

Of things falling apart, of resilience when they do if they get a bit too exuberant flying their planes and that if work must be done to repair it, it means something to you, then you sit down and you spend the time and you repair it.

A frog/reknit, if you will: the resources remain, all it requires is you.

If their baby brother plays bam smash crash at them you forgive him, because, he doesn’t know, and they’re old enough that they get that.

But soon enough he will and it will be his turn.

Their sister’s already there.

But for her sixth birthday, and to be as different from Christmas the next day as possible, I decided she’s ready for the tactility of making her own fabric, too.

The old-fashioned metal loom from my childhood, with that bit of a loop shape at the top of each little bar to help hold your work in place. Cotton loops: you can make an actually useful (if small) potholder, unlike acrylic which could melt in high heat. Harrisville did it right.

That present, at least, is being sent straight there.

Re all that Christmas shopping stuff, there was one thing I hadn’t actually done yet. It just seemed like I needed to know more about it first, if for no other reason than that the one on the wishlist was discontinued and Amazon was suggesting something that sounded like the latest version, but it wasn’t something I knew anything about. Best to check.

So Christmas present or no, I asked that child’s spouse last night whether this type of fishing reel was a good substitute for that one. Same weight and length and apparent strength, anyway.

Text in return: I don’t think this message was intended for me.

Me: It is, it’s from their wish list.

Stunned silence.

Return text in the morning: our toddler likes to bang on keyboard keys at any opportunity.

Concurrent return email from said spouse: I don’t know how that ended up on my list. I don’t know what it is! Thanks so much for checking.

And now there is something that person actually wants on its way to them from a list that’s been carefully gutted and cleaned.

You know, there are a few things in knitting that I admire greatly because the thing is gorgeous and it is a thing that I will never do.

The new Knitty (a free online knitting magazine) came out, and my friend Anne’s mittens are in there and those look like a ton of fun and if we ever needed mittens here I’d make a pair of those in a heartbeat.

But man. Those socks. Those knee socks. Wow.

I made me a list, checked it twice. And again. And again. If the shipping all goes smoothly the Christmas shopping looks just about finished, and I know how fortunate we are that we can do that this year.

One company doesn’t gift wrap and I wasn’t going to send four grandkids a jumble of unlabeled toys to let them duke it out over early, so I’m having the order sent here so I can wrap and reroute. That works if they ship promptly. They’re not Amazon and I’ve never dealt with them before, I don’t know. It’s too late now to say I should have paid individual shipping on each rather than accepting free shipping for the lot and a little work for me.

But then, wrapped up for Christmas for the kids is just so much better. So much more, this is from us, rather than, look what we paid for.

I wonder if the post office lines will be shorter this year?

The thought hits me: like how they said the voting lines were going to be?

Studying butterfly wings to figure out how to transfer color structurally rather than with dyes is fascinating–and needed. There have been reports of a river running blue in India from all the synthetic denim processed for clothing factories.

And I quote: “Not only are we removing the need for pigments and dyes, we’re taking out the need for all of the stuff around it to stabilize it.”

But then what would that do to the whole hand-dyed yarn industry? The new company says their colors self-assemble. How do you keep them from mixing across sections of a hank? Can you even apply it to wool? I have so many questions.

He said he didn’t mind having turkey again, so I decided to try to be creative about it.

I had bought a single jar of cherry fig savory jam from Cherry Republic in Michigan to try out–kind of a token purchase for the year towards keeping the Michigan farmers in business, as one does in 2020 if one can. I opened it: it was lumpy but really not jam-sweet. Spices. Hmm.

I diced up a bunch of turkey, cut some seedless green grapes into quarters so they would cook faster, scooped out less than half that jar of jam into a separate bowl and whisked it with maybe a quarter cup of leftover plain cream, there you go.

I used one of Mel and Kris’s ceramic cake pans, which always take just a little longer to bake with but always seem to improve the texture of whatever I put in them over anything else. In with the turkey/grapes, mix in the lumpy attempt at a sauce, then I grated some fresh Gouda cheese from Milk Pail on top.

It looked pretty but it didn’t feel done.

So I took a heaping spoonful of their fresh grated parmesan and sprinkled that around on top of the whole shebang and called it good.

Now, it must be said that theirs is nothing like the room-temperature supermarket stuff in the tall green cans: fresh authentic parmesan totally rocks.

Oven, 350, shooting for 20 minutes since all I really needed to do was melt the cheese, checked it a few minutes late…

I’d had no idea. This was glorious. This is like, like, my MOM’s cooking, which is the highest compliment you could ask for. It was good, and it came out with a deep red rich sauce pooling at the bottom that you’d want to serve to company, and the turkey (thank you ceramic pan) had not come out overbaked nor tough from its second go-round of cooking.

Richard wanted a generous helping of seconds. So did I.

So I’m writing it down here, because it’s the one place I know I’ll be able to find it next year when I’m trying to figure out what on earth I did.

Suddenly realizing that–thinking of yesterday’s post–yes, yes, it would be good over pinto beans, too.

The problem with buying pie crusts and liking yours really thin so that you really only use half of a one is that then you have to do something with the other half.

In other words, Thanksgiving was two days ago and with no company to serve it to, today’s when I felt like baking pies.

The cherry one: I told Richard its heart didn’t break, rather, it was waving an oven mitt, saying, Get me out of here before I overbake!

The date/pecan one, done in part because I bought a five pound box of dates for $12 and now I have to use them up: both in appearance and texture it takes me straight back to our grad school days, when a friend from southern Virginia shared a version of pecan pie she said everybody made around the area where she grew up. She wondered if it was specific to there, though, because since coming to college she hadn’t found anyone else who’d ever heard of it.

Instead of the usual corn syrup, it had…

…are you ready for this?

…A drained large can of pinto beans run through the blender for some time and two sticks (!) of butter.

Enough sugar and butter and just about anything tastes good. I even made it a second time, but pecans were expensive and I really felt I should use them on something more universally celebrated at our house.

So, this pie: two tablespoons of butter is a lot easier on the guilt. Ground dates/corn syrup/eggs/pecans–I think we can justify having that for breakfast for a few days.

And then it will fade into history with those pinto pecans.

—-

Ohmygoodness. Judy’s recipe and name are forever written in the back of the 1952 Betty Crocker I bought at a garage sale when I was a senior in high school in anticipation of college. It was THE college cookbook for me. I wrote this post wondering where life had taken her over all these years, and then went over to Facebook–and found her! That was worth baking a date pie for, for sure!

Now that we’re officially between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I don’t think I’ve told this story here before, and it’s worth telling again if I have. With thanks to Anne for sending me a video of someone playing an intense organ piece and prompting this; my son Richard minored in organ performance.

My grandmother was a concert pianist. I inherited her musical talent but my hands did not–they’re the one dyslexic part of me, wanting to reverse notes at random until I practice and practice to the point of forcing muscle memory on them.

My son Richard is all Gram. He’s good. Hum a tune, he’ll embellish it at the piano with all ten fingers going at once and improvise it into a whole new thing, any style you want.

In college he had to go to a practice room on campus in order to play. Those are reserved for music majors at all times–in four years on that campus I found an open piano room twice. He *needs* his keyboard time in a way that I didn’t quite.

Coming home at Christmas meant the piano was right there and all his. It’s an old one of Gram’s; she bought it for their DC apartment when her husband was elected to the Senate before I was born, a very good upright, but it just wouldn’t do and she had to have her grand. She gave the upright to my folks and it got passed down to me.

One holiday season when Richard was in college, the guy I’d hired to tune it ever since we’d moved here just didn’t have time to fit me in–right around Thanksgiving he gets booked up fast because everybody wants to be ready for get-togethers.

And then, bless him, Neil decided he would squeeze me in anyway. It would be a quick tune-and-run, though, no time to catch up on life.

That was fine, and thank you!

So he came. He tuned. I thanked him, we wished each other the best and he was off.

A few days later my son flew home, finals done, the house ready for Christmas, and sat down at that piano and let’er rip in loud, exuberantly happy music all over the keyboard.

About a minute into it (and having him in on this with me) I dialed the phone and when the call was answered, said, This is Alison–and held the phone towards the piano as Richard grinned and really let’er rip. That piano had never sounded so good.

Neil, listening, said with great emotion, “I can’t tell you how much this means to me!”

The music got just a little softer (because the kid knew his mom needed the help hearing on the phone), I wished Neil and his a Merry Christmas and he me and then we let each other go back to our families, the moment never to be forgotten. I was and am so grateful for his kindness.