While the shepherd watched
This is a tribute to the post-modern Christmas, in which the family remains important but the festivities are spread across a wider time period than my own culture provided. Not exactly twelve days (I hope) which requires a great deal of time and money, but rather that which a small family might aspire to.
The day before, the eve, the lead up to was spent assuring that we wouldn’t need to go out on the big day and purchase any of the essentials like milk or cheese or frozen chocolate cake. I left with son #1 in early afternoon, just as the store was filling with others of my neigbourhood. Try to imagine a supermarket where every available shopping cart was either in use or parked beside a lightpost. We found some suitable cheeses, some milk and vegetable juice and a huge bag of grapes. How huge, you wonder? Well, at $14.00 the checkout girl wanted to reassure me that there was no error (other than in my judgement). The dog likes grapes…
Home to finish off a couple of paperback books and thaw some shrimp. If I lived closer to the ocean and had a fishing boat, we could enjoy fresh seafood. Hereabouts, the frozen fools foods section will suffice. There were also frozen eggrolls and spring rolls, to provide access to another culture: dim sum is a culture, I think.
We also managed to clear off the kitchen table; first time in a long time, so that the first course of tourtiere could be served before midnight. Well, actually 22h45, but it felt really late to me. No, I did not harvest any caribou for the traditional meat pie. Maybe another time.
After we had enough calories in our bellies, we joined in a circle in the living room for an impromptu concert by the in-house trombone and euphonium duo. I had forgotten that sh*t was a musical term used by sightreaders to add emphasis to unfamiliar passages on the page. In my time we used Italian words such as fortepiano (maybe that was the instrument; it was a long time ago in a distant land).
This was followed by the unwrapping of the gifts before midnight (again, totally unknown in the culture of my youth) with the dog happily leaping in and out of the Christmas tree with joyous barking as she tried to taste all the new socks and slippers at once.
I must pause here; it’s Christmas now.
