CHRISTMAS BY THE SALT, SALT SEA...

Well, as you may well know by now, Tama got what she wanted for Christmas with the arrival of the golden grandchild... come all the way from Ideeho on the iron horse.

Since we were hosting inlanders here by the seaside we opted for an oceanic food theme for our holiday repast. A late afternoon visit to our neighborhood fishmonger yesterday got us the raw ingredients and this afternoon we "got to it" in earnest.

The four of us Talia & Rich and we'uns did some serious and nearly terminal damage to the following...

We came damn close to all being members of the clean plate club with just enough left over to make a nice seafood gumbo to go with tomorrow night's boneless country pork ribs in a chocolate BBQ sauce...

 We stuffed ourselves silly on the bounty of the sea and the bottled hint-o-heaven from Russian River Brewing Co. while the wee one slept near by.

Good food, good times and family close to hand... pretty much a tried and true formula for a Merrie Christmas.

AUTUMN IN VERMONTA CRUZ

Here ya go. This is as close to winter as we seem to get here along the bay.  The sky gets a wee bit darkish and one of the neighborhood trees gets all yellowy-orangey in it's leafy bits. Okay, there you go, it is officially the first day of winter. 

Once, a year or so ago, there was talk of local snow but that was a bunch of hooey in the end, and we were watching the news last night with the weather guy jabbering on about the mid-west being in the clutches of the massive winter storm.  they were showing footage of a freeway in Nebraska with about 6 inches of snow sticking to the ground and in the background you could hear the Anchorman chipping in saying, "boy, they are really getting a lot of snow..." 

we're dreaming of a wet, dark green Christmas...

TWINKIE, TWINKIE, LITTLE STAR...

Well, a year has slickered by and, mostly through personal neglect, our live-inna-bucket Christmas tree is still alive and well.  Longer of limb and taller beyond it’s bigger bucket, it needed only a quick pinch or three to remove the odd brown bits and a quick if somewhat weighty lift from the deck to the living room.

As I stated last year, I have concerns about a live tree casting me, willy-nilly, into that pit filled with a writhing bevy of suck ass white liberals.  I dedicated some time to my powers to circumvent this fate and finally found a happy solution.

It has been my habit for most of my adult life to decorate my tree with a changing theme each year… western, Cajun, fruit & veg, Mexican and the like.  This year, to distance myself from the Whole Foods crowd, I settled on a tribute to junk food.

Off to the stores in search of ornaments I was both pleased and surprised to discover glass baubles shaped like hot dogs, bottles of whiskey, cupcakes, popsicles, mugs of beer, ice cream cones, hamburgers and a big banana split.

Okay, enough of a cash outlay for this project. To fill in the rest of the tree I turned once more to my old friend Photoshop, Prince of the Dark Arts.  Faster than you could say Hostess ten times, I had created a nice selection of teeny Spam cans, miniature Velveeta cheese boxes, orders of fries and scaled down boxes of movie popcorn.

A quick swivel from art table to sewing machine and I had a lovely garland of small breakfast sausages.  

Start with a string of red chili pepper lights, add the decorations and some nice rubber doughnut chew toys, drape your sausages and top the whole affair with a memorial Twinkie star and you are ready for the fat man to make an appearance.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good bite…

HE'S BACK JUST IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

So my friends Lovely and Michelle tend to go “whole hog” on the Christmas decorations, and while there the other day I was casting about for something to read while in the bathroom. Luckily there was a lovely little, holiday themed thrift store tome from the classic series of Jokes for the John.  It offered the usual bits about greatest hits of the holidays, factoids about popular gifts, the origins of the Christmas card… and an odd little gem about the Catalan region of Spain.

And I mean to tell you that the operative word here is odd.

So odd that I researched its authenticity and then decided to pass it along here in it’s curious entirety…

In Catalonia, Spain, a region along the country’s border with France, it’s tradition to display a Nativity scene at Christmas. And like most Nativity scenes around the world, the ones in Catalonia include figurines of the standard Christmas story characters: Jesus, Mary, Joseph, the Three Wise Men, some shepherds, a few sheep and cows. But unlike other Nativity scenes, those in Catalonia feature one more character -  El Caganer.

Whoa…who?

You know, El Caganer… a shepherd with his pants around his ankles, taking a dump. He shows up most places year round and is usually found squatting behind a bush or bale of hay, wearing the traditional red Catalan hat and smoking a pipe. But ever since the late 17^th century the region’s Christmas Nativity scenes have always included El Caganer, which translates literally to “the great defecator”.

It’s unclear exactly how the tradition started, but the Catalan people have always been a mostly agricultural society, and defecation was a symbol of fertility and good crops.  Therefore the most commonly heard explanation is that El Caganer is there to bring fertile soil, good crop yields along with good luck and prosperity to people who “invite” him into their homes.

Originally made of clay, today’s El Caganer is usually made of plastic, and comes in a variety of characters beyond the traditional monk or shepherd – famous soccer players, a police officer, actors, rock stars, Santa Claus or political figures like President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and the U.S. President George W. Bush.

In December 2010, a 19-foot tall defecating giant at the Maremagnum Shopping Centre in Barcelona, Spain snagged the Guinness World Record for Largest Caganer.

Wanna learn more? Google him or go to caganer.com and buy yourself one.

And if that ain’t weird enough, the region’s children have their own special Yule log called the “Caga Tio” or “pooping log”. It seems that for two weeks before Christmas this loaf-sized wooden log, sporting a painted face and red hat, sits on a table in the family home and every day the children and adults “feed” him by offering food and wine.

Then on Christmas Day the children move the log to the fireplace hearth and cover it with a blanket. The children then hide while their parents put wrapped presents, candy and other treats under the cloth. The finale comes when the children return and beat the log with sticks and pull out the presents while chanting:

Poop log! Poop log!

Poop candy for Christmas!

If you don’t, we will whack you again!

And with that, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year…