This was a good Christmas. There have been bad ones: The time we had to eat at a Chinese restaurant because our house was under construction, and we thought we had a private room but didn’t, and my toddler was so crazed and aggressive that people at the table next to us cried and left.
The time when there was a blizzard and, one at a time, people called to tell us they wouldn’t make it, and my mom stopped cooking, and my sister cried in the back hall because it didn’t feel like Christmas. And all those years where loved ones were sick or no longer with us (I prefer to block those out).
But this was a good one. Everything as it should be, magical and cozy with just the right amount of craziness. And artwork!
First, the artwork. I’ve had this idea lately about low-stakes artwork (and low-stakes other-stuff-in-life too). The gist is that when you’re feeling creatively challenged, you do something low-stakes to take the pressure off.
A painter friend of mine once referred to it as back yard work vs. front yard work. Your front yard (real or hypothetical) is what everyone sees from the street and judges you on, but in your back yard you can be messy and muddy and have fun because nobody’s looking.
After not having a studio for a while now, Shane recently set up some space to work in our basement. Our annual Christmas Lottery gift was the perfect low-stakes project for him to get back up and running.
In the week or so before Christmas Shane worked into the wee hours in his new studio creating cubes, each a distinct Shane Murray collage with a number on it.
At our dinner table, each place setting had a collage-cube on it, which was our gift to everyone, and also each guests’ opportunity to win either the big or the grand prize in the Christmas Lottery (more on Christmas Lottery below).
We had 26 for dinner this year with squash soup, followed by pork with apricot filling and crispy duck fat potatoes (with a crisco version for the vegetarians) by Shane, who was in the kitchen pretty much all day.
My mom planned ahead enough to outsource the carrot and cilantro salad, the orange, olive and fennel salad and the gravlax appetizer. There were two kinds of peas (sugar snap and minted) and epic proportions of aunt Gail’s addictive cheese bread.
In a break from tradition my sister did not make her yule log. My mom thinks everyone is too full after dinner to eat it, though I recall that it gets devoured so quickly that there’s never enough for stragglers who’ve wandered away from the table for a moment. Instead, we had ice cream and aunt Iris’ famous Kourabiedes cookies.
Notes:
In case you’re new or forgot, here’s a refresher on how our Christmas Lottery works: Christmas Lottery is not a Yankee Swap or a Secret Santa, like many think. It’s literally a lottery run by Shane, the kids and I.
There are two prizes, the Big Prize, which is the lesser prize, and the Grand Prize which is a big deal. Some of the Grand Prize gifts over the years have been: a whole entire prosciutto, a magnum of Jameson whiskey, an industrial bubble machine, Bacon of the Month Club, half a wheel of Parmesan cheese, you get the picture.
The Big Prize is a (much) lesser gift, that hints somehow (usually pretty vaguely) at what the Grand Prize will be. This year the Big Prize was a light-up LED Eiffel Tower figurine. The grand prize was the Harry & David Ultimate Supreme Tower of Treats. So Eiffel Tower / Tower of Treats, you get it.
Archives:
Christmas 2017
Christmas 2014
Christmas 2012
