Froehliche weihnachten

Since I’m ethically opposed to contributing to the post-Thanksgiving shopping excess of my fellow Americans, I thought I’d do a bit more exploring of the Evergreen State this weekend.

I’d wanted to spend a week in Berlin, partly because I love a good Weihnachtsmarkt; but also to finally see the place. However, for the second year in a row (last year it was installing new windows in the house) even I could see that my finances wouldn’t sustain the expenditure.

(Although, damn, I so miss walking around in the cold, wearing so many layers I look like the Michelin Man™, a mug of Glühwein in one hand & a bratwurst in the other, being utterly dazzled by the displays of, well, everything from really gorgeous ornaments to complete schlock. For some reason I don’t even go ballistic at the crowds; they just seem right in that setting.)

Well, so, no trip auf Deutschland, again, but it turns out that there’s a town on the other side of the Cascades called Leavenworth, which has been an honest-to-Gott ersatz Bavarian village since 1962. In addition to their annual Oktoberfest blowout they advertise a Christkindlmarkt & I thought, well, why not, & schlepped out today.

I was so intent that I even braved the Stevens Pass (elev. 4057 ft.). I say “brave” because, being a fourth-generation Californian, I don’t do snow. My first experience driving it it resulted in rolling my car. (Not spinning, a 360° roll.) It was, of course, raining, & I kept a close watch on the outside temperature. It got down to 35°F, & I didn’t like all that snow piled up at the side of Route 2, but I persevered.

Took me a skosh over two hours to get there. I parked the car & prepared to get into the holiday spirit.

Imagine my disappointment, then, to discover that the “Christkindlmarkt” consisted of about 15 booths in the town Festhalle (like a community center with Alpine murals painted outside). Quite the folkloric focus, too: the traditional kettlecorn, Silpada jewelry—made you feel absolutely gemütlich.

Not.

Well, after whizzing through that offering (considerably less interesting than the craft fair at the Methodist Church I went to a couple of weeks ago), I thought I might as well go through the surrounding faux Bavarian central tourist district.





Meinen Damen und Herren, what a bummer. The town’s primary industry appears to be kitschy shoppes & kitchier hotels. (There was one called the Bavarian Ritz. & a Bavarian-themed Howard Johnson.)

Everything in fake Alpine architecture & mock Gothic lettering. Even the Chinese & Mexican restaurants conform. It’s all relentlessly suddeutsche.

The shops seem to sell nothing but schlock—including the Australian one. (Why Australia & not Austria? Austria has Alps. & great coffee. You’d have thought that would have counted for more than “Gator Crossing” signs. &, BTW, there are no gators in Oz, there are crocs.)

I went into one shop, Kris Kringle, because I thought I might find something to add to my 12,673 Christmas ornaments (many bought at Christkindlmärkte in Nuremberg, Munich & Cologne). Alas, not a thing spoke to me.

So I left the town after a total of 50 minutes there. There were restaurants that advertised brats, but nowhere did I see Glühwein listed, so it wouldn’t have been right.

Well, next weekend the wineries of Woodinville have a Saint Nicholas Day deal going on, so perhaps I’ll pick up some Christmas spirit there.

Or at least a nice bottle of Pinot Gris.

T plus one

You know, every December since, well, since I can remember, the retail industry has wrung its collective hands and lamented that this year the cash registers will be empty except for the occasional raggedy moth flittering out... And every year has been better (sometimes much, much better) than the last.

There were even a few when rabid parents haven't put one another in hospital while fighting for the toy must-have (remember Tickle-me-Elmo? How about Cabbage Patch Kids?).

But I wondered how things will be this year, what with even the children of banking and auto CEOs having to cut back on their expectations (probably from 3-carat D, F1 princess cut studs to 2-carat F IF marquise cut; or only two weeks at Gstaad instead of four).

So, since I live within walking distance of a mall, I took a stroll down to Bellevue Square this morning, around 0800. Now, keeping in mind that Macy's had been going strong for three hours at this point, and the rest of the mall was opening up at a speed of knots, the mall didn't seem that full to me.

There were people, of course; and plenty of them. Just not cheek-by-jowl, which is what you expect on Black Friday. (Not that I've been in a mall on the day after Thanksgiving for, well, since the 80s; but I have watched the occasional news report in that time. And reporters at the airport the day before and reporters at the mall the day after Thanksgiving are as predictable as the sun rising in the East.)

I was pondering this as I left through the parking garage (it had started to rain, quelle surprise, so I wanted to stay covered as much as possible before hitting the open streets). And there the folks in SUVs and Lexus sedans restored my confidence: there was a lot of honking and fist-pounding on steering wheels.

Ah, the holidays are indeed upon us.

Sidebar:
I went to brine my chicken yesterday and realized that all of my big pots are packed away in the shed. Along with the file folders with my brining recipes. (Trying to find the carton that contains them is just a non-starter. The packers marked boxes "bags" when the contents might have been shopping bags, purses or gift containers. God only knows which of the approximately 80 unopened cartons might hold those folders.)

Fortunately, it was a small chicken and I managed to get it into a four-quart pot with the brine.

And thank God for the Internet, because all I had to do was Google "Chez Panisse brine" and up popped about 47,173 references.

But, um: those file folders? They also contain all my candy recipes. So those of you who are expecting the 17 types of candies I gave last year are going to have to recalibrate your expectations.

I'm just sayin'...

I see dead turkeys

Okay, I guess this comes under the rubric of Thanksgiving-related events. I’m sure by now you’ve heard about how the ’Pubs’ darling, La Palin, was fulfilling her gubernatorial duties by pardoning a turkey for the holiday.

Only as she gushed on with the cameras running, a turkey-farm worker was slaughtering birds right behind her. (You can view that gruesome video here.)

Because she’s not proved a genius at coming up with rationales for her shortcomings, Dave Letterman has helpfully stepped in to help out.

As a friend of mine from the old country says, you just can't make this stuff up.

Thanksgiving thoughts

Things are winding down in the halls of high-tech Seattle in preparation for Thanksgiving. Yesterday there was a flurry of “what grandiose menu are you preparing for the hordes on Thursday?” emails on a couple of the distribution groups I subscribe to. Let me just say that, while I’m no slouch in the kitchen, I just felt very small in the face of some of these displays.

This year it’ll just be the Stealth Cat & myself, so a roasted chicken, a bottle of Roederer & some other stuff. But I got to thinking about some recent Thanksgivings, & even though I haven’t yet opened the bubbly I’m still going to write up a couple.

One was in Britain—the American Church in London puts on a Thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s. I went my third year there. These days you have to pass through security, which just seems wrong, but it’s worth the tsuris to join other ex-pats to attend a service dedicated to the quintessentially American holiday, to hear those hymns echoing through the marble sanctuary.

It did seem appropriate that such a service be held in that cathedral. Following World War II the Brits dedicated the rebuilt east side to the US forces who joined the fight against Nazism. Don’t know how many others thought about it, but it wasn’t lost on me that, but for American blood & treasure, services there might have been held auf Deutsch.

The chaplain (Navy) from the U.S. Embassy gave the sermon—if you can call it that—the year I went. I say that because I don’t recall a lot of thankfulness stuff; he was guiding new ex-pats through the upcoming Christmas season in Britain. The part that stands out was him warning them that they should expect to be offered several dozen mince pies (really little tarts—maybe three inches in diameter) through the end of December, “none of them accompanied by a fork.”

& he was right. The Brits have a different idea of “pie” than we do. Theirs are small & hand-held. (Wonder what they make of “pie charts”?)

With that in mind, a couple of years ago an English friend of mine came over in early November. I decided, instead of the usual get-together I throw for her visits, that this time I’d introduce her to Thanksgiving. I invited a few other friends, so there would be the requisite critical mass of humans, noise & confusion, & planned out the Traditional Thanksgiving Menu.

There was roasted turkey (brined), with my great-grandmother’s marjoram stuffing, garlic mashed potatoes, squash, cranberry relish (not that nasty jellied abomination; homemade in my little Cuisinart), rolls & red & white wine—after the Roederer to start. (I’m guessing you’re seeing a pattern here.)

I don’t eat or make gravy, so one of the guests took that on. I did make both pumpkin & pecan pies even though I don’t eat those either (pecan pie sends me into insulin shock & don’t even get me started on pumpkin pie). I know that for the true Amurrican experience I should have had Cool-Whip with the pies, & should have included the infamous green bean casserole with the mains. However, I never had that casserole until I had Christmas with a gentleman caller’s family about 15 years ago (his mother was a Russified Armenian who grew up in Teheran, but she really bought into the Better Homes & Gardens ideals of middle class cookery when she got here), so my story is that if it’s not part of MY heritage, I don’t have to make it.

Dunno why that casserole isn’t part of my upbringing; my mother was a huge proponent of that whole post-war convenience phenomenon that went up through about the 70s. When people reminisce about wonderful meals & Mom’s cookery, I just have nothing at all to say. I realized about a year ago that throughout my childhood I’d never seen at our table a vegetable on the hoof that hadn’t come from either a can or a frozen food package. There was actually an incident in a grocery store with my grandmother where she was about to get some dark green, well, greens, & I demanded to know what that stuff was. She informed me it was spinach. & I swear this is what I said, in my ten-year-old certitude about the world, “No that’s not! I know what spinach is like—it’s frozen, in blocks!”

So I’m not getting why that casserole didn’t come into play, as it’s nothing but canned beans, condensed cream of mushroom soup (both of which abounded in our pantry) & canned fried onion rings. But I only ever had it that one time in Tinton Falls, NJ, & I assure you I never have to have it again.

Well—back to the Thanksgiving in question. It was great. Meal came out terrific. Sink stopped up, so there was the traditional holiday plumbing emergency & I had to stack dishes up on the counter for a couple of days until I could get professional help.

But it was the epitome of this holiday: gathering with those you care about, sharing food & stories, listening to the 30th Anniversary Bob Dylan concert, forming a nucleus of affection that sustains you when you have to go back out into the world. (In this case—all that shopping.) It was, in fact, one of the best I can remember.

So tomorrow—if you’re in London, do try to make it to St. Paul’s. Service is at 1100; best be there by 1000. You're in for a truly memorable experience.

If not—I hope you have as happy a Thanksgiving as my friends & I did, no matter what your tradition.

A modern major general

For those who are interested, there’s a new account of the action in 1918 that laid the foundation of the Douglas MacArthur’s reputation as a heroic combat leader. The WSJ published a review yesterday.

If I can find it in the King County Library System, I might venture a read, but I won’t be ordering it from Amazon. (For one thing, since moving to metro Seattle, I now have to pay the extortionate 9% sales tax on my Amazon purchases; I’ve thought a whole lot more before hitting that Submit Order button since coming here.) This sort of thing just boils my blood, so I don’t need to have the account in my permanent collection.

(Similarly, I own no biographies of George B. McClellan or Bernard Montgomery, generals whose greatest skills involved self-promotion and whining about how it was the fault of everyone else but themselves that their campaigns failed. Over and over.)

Frankly, it should come as no surprise that MacArthur’s glory-hounding and hot-dogging began by taking credit for the true heroics of subordinates at the Côte de Châtillon a month before the end of the Great War. This was a guy who had personal aggrandizement at the forefront of all his command decisions, as was obvious throughout the Second World War.

What’s interesting is that it took 90 years for someone to look at the anomalies in the accounts of the action and point out that the imperial commander really had no clothes. MacArthur’s self-promotion was so polished and so consistent, everyone apparently just swallowed it. (It continues today in the form of the MacArthur Memorial Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, founded by MacArthur’s second wife. It’s a kind of low-rent militaristic hagiography.)

It took a pragmatic, hardnosed, unpolished public servant from Missouri to finally put an end to this man’s career. MacArthur continued his public posturing, but at least he wasn’t paying for it with the blood and bodies of a conscripted army.

Anyway—I put this out here for you. You might find the book interesting. And kudos to Ferrell for finally discovering and publishing the truth.

Thanks for bubblies

Continuing even further with my theme of Thanksgiving and its culinary manifestation, I share with you this from the Journal’s wine reporters to guide you in your choices of libation to accompany the feast.

As many of you know, champagne is my substance of choice. At our department’s holiday party Saturday (yes, 22 November, Christmas trees and all) at a swank downtown Seattle hotel, they were passing trays of Mumm Cuvée Napa, augmenting several bars around the floor supplying still wines and beers. I stalked the servers and doubled down on the half-glasses they were allocating partygoers.

(About ten years ago I was at a fundraising party at the French Embassy in DC, where the open bar was pouring really primo liquors—Stoli, Jack, single malts—and at table were first class wines. But once I realized they were serving Cordon Rouge—the brand on which I cut my champagne-drinking teeth—not only did I focus completely on that during the pre-dinner mixing, I kept trotting back to the bar for more from the table. I’ve gotta say, that was one fab party, for several reasons.)

Well, but enough about my past. Take a look at what Gaiter and Brecher recommend, and if you feel flush enough to pop for a $90-$200 bottle of bubbly, well, I say—go to.

I’d just steer clear of the Pol Roger. Notwithstanding the fact that it was Winnie’s favorite and that the champagne house shipped cases to him throughout WWII, the times I’ve had it it just tasted skunky. (My theory is that Churchill couldn’t taste anything after chomping all those cigars; but the wine’s had this cachet ever since.)

Regardless of your choice—or whether you have anything alcoholic to drink on the day—may your meal truly be a feast shared with those you love.

A toast to the roast

Following on the Thanksgiving theme, I give you Eric Felten’s cocktail offering for Thursday.

Not having tasted any of the ingredients, I have no clue what the Bella Ruffina tastes like. I do know I’m not going to find any of them (except possibly the orange bitters) in the great state of Washington, so I’m unlikely to be making it in a few days.

Frankly, I wonder how Felten reaches his recommendation decision—there are only about eleventy-six thousand cocktails he could have chosen; why something sweet, fizzy & Italian?

Well, regardless, if you can find the components, knock yourself out.

Me? Possibly a couple of fingers of Oban & Roederer thereafter. Now that’s something to be thankful for.