A Blue Day in the Royal Gorge

For me, Sherry's Christmas begins on the Friday of the weekend before December 25. Now, if December 25 actually falls on a Saturday, this does not mean that Sherry's Christmas begins on the 24th. Oh, no. In that event, the period of eating and drinking that defines Sherry's Christmas begins a whole eight days before the Actual Day. This year, the 25th fell on a Friday, so Sherry's Christmas had almost the maximum ramp-up period, a whole week. And this year, Sherry's Christmas began with the arrival of a splendid winter storm (pictures here). As I settled into the ritual of the season's First Friday, I watched the snow, floating down from the heavens.

Eventually, watching the storm from the window proved insufficient. Despite the latish hour and the cold, Jesse and I simply had to go for a walk in the 'hood. So we put on our coats and new boots -- thickly-soled and fur-lined and absolutely essential in this climate -- and stepped out into a wonderfully muted world. The snow swallowed every sound, except for the crunching beneath our feet. And the light! There aren't many street lights in our neighborhood and Long Islanders being the type to get to bed at a decent hour, there were few lights from the windows. But the snow scattered and amplified what light there was. Every tree, shrub, and stretch of road seemed to have its own silvery glow. We walked for a few blocks, greeted our neighbors and their border collie also out for a stroll, and returned home.

And my plans all went pear-shaped after that. I had planned to spend two weeks just knitting by the fire and listening to Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows on my Iphone. Every Christmas season, the Universal Heart-Mind issues me with a new set of memories, a set that usefully omits all recollection of just how much bloody work a Christmas involves. So though I had done all the shopping, there was still much to do: cleaning, chopping, washing, cooking, last minute forays to the store, long waits in line to pick up pies, ducks, wine. And now, four days after Christmas, which means 11 days into Sherry's Christmas, I've had exactly six hours of doing what I'd intended. This is not much progress when you consider that the Harry Potter book CD occupies 17 disks. Since pandering to a 14 year old is one of the things that majorly occupies my time, I've decided to extend Sherry's Christmas by a week, when the young one has gone back to school. Who knows if I'll stick to this plan?

So, you may ask, why am I still so preoccupied with keeping Jesse occupied? Because, despite the fact that there's a group of young ladies she's friendly with at her new school, nothing has emerged that even begins to rival the friendships she had back home (yes, I still think of Austin as home, though it could never be my year-round home again). The phone doesn't ring for her. It simply doesn't. I don't know why this is, but it breaks my heart. We take her to movies and watch DVDs at home with her, but it's not enough. We play table-tennis with her and talk over Stuff with her. When we're not entertaining her, she texts her friends back in Austin, or calls them, or makes friendship bracelets for them. On some level, she doesn't even live in New York, not yet anyway. I wonder if she'll manage to get through her entire high school career without ever really taking up mental residency in the state.

Given the fact that when she's sad, I'm sad, I should not have been surprised by the fact that Christmas Day, when it finally came, found me almost speechless with depression. I soldiered on and didn't divulge how I was feeling. Which was a good thing, because there was far too much work to do to permit a good wallowing in black despair. I know people who would upbraid me for not telling my family honestly what I'm feeling and maybe those people are right. But I think I've unlocked the great secret as to why so many people remember their dads as happy, cheerful, easy-going chaps they were always glad to see and yet remember their mums as chronic downers who were moody and joyless. The secret: their dads behaved like happy and cheerful souls while their mums always had an Emotional Agenda behind everything they did. I don't want Jesse to remember me as That Downer Woman. So I got up, opened presents, cooked, ate, laid splat in front of the TV afterwards, went to bed. The next day was better.

It's annoying me greatly that I can't find the little journal I kept last year, which would have recorded what I actually cooked on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. So that I won't be annoyed next year, I'd better record what I cooked this year and how it went.

On Christmas Eve, I made our traditional Moules Mariniere, this time with Long Island mussels, which are a little small but still wondrously flavorful. We ate them with the typical accompaniment for mussel soup: Great Mounds of Crusty Bread. Instead of making a boule this year, I bought a beautiful couronne, a ring of brown-gold heaven, crackling on the outside and cloud-like on the inside. On Long Island, I've eaten bread that rivals anything I ever had in France. There are no great mysteries as to how I've gained eight pounds since moving here.

Dessert was provided by Northport's Copenhagen Bakery and by my own efforts. Mike had his apple crumble, Jesse her fruit tart. I'd made a chocolate sponge and ganache for myself, eating my dish warm with ice-cream. Obviously, I think that I had the best deal but the tart from Copenhagen was the best fruit tart I'd ever had. The fruit, the usual and beautiful assortment of berries and kiwi slices, rested on a pastry cream that was truly creamy, very unlike the French patisserie custard which Austin's beloved Central Market used to specialize in and which I actually never liked very much. Next year, I'm having the fruit tart.

The last few years, I've roasted racks of lamb at Christmas, since it's so easy to scale up for additional diners. But, since we were only three this year, I reverted to our old favorite: roast duck. Following on the advice of my new goddess, Nigella Lawson, I par-boiled the duck for a half-hour the day before. This reduced the roasting time to just an hour, the same amount of time needed for the English Roast Potatoes. Having test driven the recipe about 6 weeks before, I knew to apply the glaze of soy-sauce and bitter orange marmalade in the last 15 minutes of cooking. The skin came out perfectly. I now have an approach to duck that never fails; in the past, the methods I'd used were all hit or miss. Sometimes the skin was crackling and beautiful and other times it was just blah. True to type, Jesse refused even to try the duck. I wanted to roast a chicken breast for her, but oven real-estate being scarce, I ended up just braising one for her on the stove-top. She didn't seem to mind.

The sides and trimmings were nothing surprising, though everything turned out well. The traditional sauce of duck stock and duck livers, with a bit of soy and marmalade, perfectly paired the pistachio and apricot stuffing I have made many times over. The roast potatoes, which I now do the Nigella way, with a dusting of semolina flour rather than white flour, came out fit only for gods. So we announced ourselves divine and tucked in. We also had, for the first time, the very English accompaniment of chipolata sausages wrapped in bacon. These little treats really suit a dryer meat, like turkey, but Mike found himself particularly willing to over-look this error in menu design.

This year, the Christmas pudding had been home-made by me for the first time. Following the recipe of a good friend who lives in the north of England, I had assembled and put the puddings away in the basement some six weeks before, using vegetarian suet I had bought at the wonderful Myers of Keswick in Manhattan. On Christmas Day, I brought one of the puddings up from the depths and steamed it for four hours. I would later discover that I should also have steamed the puddings on the morning after they were first assembled. I would discover this the next day and would wonder if we were all going to be retching later with salmonella. But the pudding, bathed first in blue flames of ignited brandy and then gobbled down (Mike had seconds), was gorgeous to eat and caused no later regrets. I guess the alcohol the puddings swam in for six weeks was more than enough to kill any bacteria that dared to emerge; the lengthy steaming must have helped, too.

Yes, after the traditional engorgement, came the very traditional nap in front of the TV, in which I at least try to watch whatever DVD some family member has received for Christmas and now wants to enjoy. This year, we watched Local Hero and The Little Mermaid. These days, Jesse frequently burrows into a DVD from her childhood: Mulan, Hercules, Beauty and the Beast. I almost cried watching The Little Mermaid again, because so many of these Princess movies remind me of sitting in the hospital with my niece Blythe, when she was not even two years old yet, trying to entertain her, week after week, as the rounds of chemotherapy progressed. We watched those Disneys on a continuous loop, it seems. It was because Blythe relapsed a year or so later that I finally buckled down and started the project of trying to have a kid of my own. At 38 years of age. Today, both young ladies are the delight of my life.

Gratitude is one way to combat the blues of Christmas, that simple thankfulness that so many of the people I love are still here. I just wish I could have been with all of them.