Some Christmas Wishes

Dear Friends:

It’s a Holiday Double Issue! N & I are traveling next week to what I call the Plains but he calls the Midwest. He’s the native, so we should probably listen to him, but how can the midwest be west of the Mississippi, is what this East Coast native wants to know.

What are your plans? Going to holiday parties? Throwing holiday parties? Seeing family? Avoiding family? My favorite thing about the holidays is the commercialism. I love YouTubes of old Christmas commercials. I love it when holiday songs come on the radio before you’re ready for them. Longtime readers of my blog will know that I love Hallmark Christmas movies, as formulaic as a sonnet.¹ I love how malls and churches look around this time, because of all that greenery they’ve paid good money for, and I love shopping in stores for things.

TV used to be free, and whatever privilege that was, we paid for by agreeing to sit and hear sales pitches. There’s something beautifully democratic about that; a big upfront cost of the TV set, but tuning in to what we all tuned into cost only your time. To say that TV and shopping and buying food to make/eat isn’t The True Meaning Of Christmas is to ascribe old meanings that don’t feel accurate to my 45 years of lived experience.

Which doesn’t mean I don’t also love giving, and goodwill toward all, and being with family. Hence this double-issue’s Main Matter, a few Christmas wishes. I’d love to hear yours in the comments.

Yours:
Dave

Endorsements: Holiday Edition

1. Peeing Above, and Not In Front Of, a Toilet
Here’s part of our powder room decorated for the holidays:²

What you can’t see are the matching floor mat in front of the sink (I’m standing on it to snap this photo) or the matching shower curtain in the upstairs full bathroom. N. found this inexpensive set online and we thought why not. The toilet mat is smaller than it may appear, just enough depth for two adult feet to stand. Is it icky, a toilet mat? I thought so too, because of all the urine it must catch, but standing on it to pee, I realized that not only were my socked feet well cushioned, but that its small size made me have to stand over the bowl, after a lifetime of standing in front of it. And to risk being icky, when you stand over a bowl, you’re far less likely to drip piss on the floor than when you stand in front of it to leave a sanitary distance. Not recommended at gas stations or airports or near college classrooms³, but a smart move at home (when, that is, you’re the person who cleans your own toilet).

2. A Brisk Cadence on Your Next ‘Little Drummer Boy’
Not two years in to Shenny and I’m already rehashing material, but something’s gotta be said. There are carols that improve by slowing them down—‘Silent Night’ obviously, ‘Jolly Old Saint Nicholas’ less so—and ‘Little Drummer Boy’ is not one of them. Some folks must get maudlin and weepy at the thought of a boy having just a middling drum solo to give the newborn king (while those wisemen bring all that gold and incense), but if our boy played his drum at the tempo they sang it at, it’d sound like Baby Jesus was being marched to the gallows. Next time you’re near a snare or tom, grab some sticks and give it a good pa-rum-pa-pum-pum and let what feels comfortable steer your holiday singalong. Anything below 80 bpm and you’re in dirge territory. Burl Ives’s version, despite the extraneous measure thrown in at the end of each line, is instructive:

3. ‘Jolly Old Saint Nicholas’
And while we’re on the subject, have you read the lyrics to the second and third verses of this, perhaps the saddest Christmas song ever written? Behold:

When the clock is striking twelve,
When I'm fast asleep,
Down the chimney broad and black
With your pack you'll creep;
All the stockings you will find
Hanging in a row;
Mine will be the shortest one;
You'll be sure to know.

Johnny wants a pair of skates;
Susy wants a dolly
Nellie wants a story book,
She thinks dolls are folly
As for me, my little brain
Isn't very bright;
Choose for me, dear Santa Claus,
What you think is right.

Is it because I’m the youngest of my siblings that my cold heart breaks every time I hear this song? What’s clear from the speaker’s lines (Wikipedia tells me her name is Lilly), is that she’s been handed a story about herself from all the older people in the house, and part of that story is that they know more about the world, and about Lilly, than she does. And yet here’s a young child conspiring solo with Santa, whom she understands as commutable with Saint Nicholas, and whom she trusts to know what’s in a child’s heart even when she doesn’t. What wisdom! Meanwhile, Susy wants a dolly? I hope what Santa brings Lilly is a teacher who sees what her family can’t. Except maybe Nellie. Give it up for literary queer kid Nellie!

4. Chocolate Crinkle Cookies that Actually Crinkle and Look Covered in Snow

Likely you’ve seen the cookies on the left on a recent holiday party cookie tray. I’m here to tell you how to make the cookie on the right, snapped in Pandemic Christmas 2020 when N & I combatted our first ever Christmas without family through orgiastic baking and pomander-making:

Then again, this is what we do every year. Anyway, there are three things you want in a crinkle cookie: (a) a dark, rich, chocolate flavor/color, (b) an opaque blanket of powdered sugar, and (c) many tiny crinkles to show off A without much disturbing B. The secret to A is to use cocoa powder and chocolate baking chips and instant espresso powder. The secret to B and C is to first roll your scooped cookies in granulated sugar then roll them in powdered sugar before baking. Giving credit where it’s due, these are America’s Test Kitchen’s tips we stole years ago. Steal them yourself at your upcoming holiday bakefest.

Chocolate Crinkle Cookies
yields about 24 cookies

5 oz all-purpose flour
1.5 oz unsweetened cocoa powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt 
4 tbsp butter
4 oz chocolate baking chips unsweetened
10.5 oz brown sugar
3 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
4 tsp instant espresso powder
3.5 oz granulated sugar
2 oz powdered sugar

1. Preheat oven to 325°F with the rack in the middle. Line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Set aside.
2. In a bowl, whisk flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder and salt.
3. In a separate bowl, microwave chocolate chips and butter (optionally pre-melted) in short intervals, stirring in between until the chocolate is melted smooth.
4. In yet another bowl, stir/beat brown sugar, eggs, espresso powder, and vanilla extract.
5. Add melted chocolate to sugar mixture and whisk until combined.
6. Fold in the flour-cocoa mixture just until no streaks of flour are seen. Let sit until the mixture thickens (it will be DENSE) and you're able to use an ice cream scoop to scoop rounds of cookie batter. You can refrigerate the cookie batter to speed up the process. (We chill it in a square cake pan with a removable bottom to easily cut the batter into cubes, or use a scoop as below.)
7. Set two bowls with granulated sugar in one and powdered sugar in another. Using a #30 Medium Cookie Scoop, scoop about 1.5-2 tablespoons of batter and drop it into the granulated sugar. Roll around in the sugar, then roll into a sphere using your hands. (They will get stickydirty.) Next drop into the powdered sugar until coated.
8. Place coated cookie balls onto your lined baking sheet, about 2 inches apart. Bake for 6 minutes, one sheet at a time, then rotate the sheet and bake for another 4-6 minutes (10-12 minutes total). Cookies should be set around the edges and *still soft* in the middle. Remove from the oven and allow to cool before serving.

Some Christmas Wishes

Christmas isn’t for everyone. And even for those who celebrate Christmas, Jesus isn’t for all of us. So take Christ out of Christmas all you want;⁴ holidays evolve to celebrate what’s important to us: hence Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

However it happened, I take meaning in the birth of a corporeal god sent to Earth to forgive our sins. And as much as I try not to make prayer a nightly form of blowing out my birthday candles (please help me win the lottery and sell my next book, oh and smite all my enemies?), I feel like on Jesus’ (dubious) birthday, wishes are okay. So here are mine, for 2024 and beyond:

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I wish for my country, and the representatives I elect, to stop funding Israel’s genocide. And I wish for the UN Security Council to find a way to take a stand against the US in our continued veto against a Gaza ceasefire.

I wish for more compassionate and more populist leadership on the political left.

I wish for San Francisco to get leaders whose ideas on how to make life in the city better for all don’t end at more cops on the streets and shooting laser beams over Market.

I wish for snow in South Dakota in the days we’ll be there, even just some flurries that don’t stick around. Just an hour of getting to see snowflakes float past a window, or land on my mustache as I gawk slack-jawed at the falling sky, would keep me going another two years.

I wish to see my family all together at the same time.

I wish to fall back in love with writing, both as a practitioner and a consumer of it. Weeks ago I was msging with a friend about my ‘writing career’ such as it exists, and the difficulties of just making art when Making Art is one of your salaried job duties. ‘Sounds like you need to reinvent your relationship to it maybe?’ he wrote, meaning to my writing, and I wish this Christmas to heed his call.

I wish for all my friends to get that thing they want but don’t have yet, that thing they can see coming closer, yet just out of reach. I wish to be the friend who helps it happen, as much as I can be.

I wish for a new diagnosis, an explanation, a treatment plan, to return me to the health I’ve enjoyed up until this dark year.

I wish that Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gives me as many hours of pleasure as Breath of the Wild did.

I wish for a bigger heart in 2024, and a more open mind. Not necessarily a more capacious mind, the sieve-holes of forgetting are getting wider each year, but a mind more nimble and flexible.

And selfishly, I wish to stay alive. Probably not a long-shot wish, but you never know when your time is coming, and I’m not ready. As hard as this world is, there’s too much more of it to see and love.

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Whatever wishes you have in your head and heart I hope you find a way to make real in the coming year. Or whatever forces work clandestinely on your life, I hope they deliver. Let everyone reading this have a gentle end to this rocky year.

Happy holidays.

This week’s thing I didn’t get at the antique store are these gay-ass holiday bulbs:

1. Last night the one we watched had not one but two perfectly placed shots of Daisy-brand cottage cheese, and yes I love product placements in Hallmark movies.

2. We rent, so no comments on the wallpaper, please.

3. If they ever let me be president of a university my first act would be to prevent any undergraduate from using a campus restroom until they’ve completed 10 hours of cleaning campus restrooms. Those kids are filthmonsters.

4. Incidentally, you’re not taking Christ out of Christmas when you write ‘Xmas’, because the ‘X’ is not a negation but rather a Greek chi, the first letter of Χριστός, which means Christ.