Coffee Crone: Taming Coffee Blog

December 25 2006

Killing Time Christmas Morning

Whilst I sit here, waiting for the release of The Royal Podcast, with the Queen's Christmas message to the empire, I might as well share with you the lessons I learned yesterday as I got ready for the holiday.

One of the biggies (listen-up Limine), is that with a few drops of green food dye, you too can make Christmas Jell-O. without any scary day-glow lime stuff. I expect the family to ooh and ahh over this accomplishment.
People have a right to be proud of their Jell-O creations. After all, how many people would spend an hour cutting canned pears into just the right shape for the ridges and valleys at the top of a (forest green) Jell-O mountain.
No matter how many times one has made pumpkin bread, it is still possible to burn a batch to ashes. I suspect this only happens when starting over requires a trip to the store for eggs.
If that favourite family recipe just doesn't taste the same these days, you can blame it on the food industry, which quietly downsized one pound cans of various ingredients to 14.5 ounces. They should have bought kitchen scales, or calculators, for us all.
It is a very bad idea to let slip the fact that you are going to have a Christmas dinner without turkey ahead of time. Although RT knows that I have no control over the menu at our niece's house, he may never forgive me. I'm pretty sure he somehow expected a magical solution involving the 20 pound bird in our freezer. Poor RT.
It is a very good idea to repeatedly tell your spouse well in advance how hard it is to find that must-have thing you are hoping to get for Christmas. It's not just that you really, really want it, but if you are married to a guy like RT, it almost guarantees that there will be a little wrapped box with a "surprise" as well.
Christmas is a whole lot more difficult than Chanukah, but a plate full of latkes will never take the place of a turkey in Tamingville.