’tis the season. Merry Christmas, and all that.
What have I been up to? well… this is a bad time of year. Ever since that pathetic pile of wrapped presents for Christmas of 2020 – the one where Deck was supposed to be home for that but wasn’t and never did come home again, all the presents that were waiting for him which he never even saw – I kind of stopped “doing Christmas”. I haven’t wrapped a present since (nor unwrapped one). I sometimes get something new to wear on the first day of the New Year (it’s a cultural thing, we always used to get something – a pair of socks, a pair of gloves, a hat, a sweater, something new to wear as the year turned…) but I don’t wrap it – what would be the point? I would wrap it, I would be the one unwrapping it, and I already knew what was in it so there’s no Christmas morning surprise or anything. So now Christmas is just another day. Another day into which I wake up and rise into a sense of wobbly purpose, knowing that cats need feeding but that being the only certainty. The rest of the time… I just live through the hours.
Occasionally I try to kickstart myself into something different. The other day I was leafing through a cookbook that comes to me from my grandmother – i.e. over 75 years old – and I picked up on a recipe. Making it was an adventure because of the measurents (old recipe, from the old country, measured in precise grams) and odd ingredients (it called for yeast – but grandma’s yeast was very different from my active dry yeast and I basically had to guess). The item being reciped, as it were, could be summarised as butter rolls – and given the fact that I more or less had to reinvent the whole recipe to buly it into the 21st century the end result was actually not too bad. And for one day, at least, I could wrap my head around a problem that I could solve – taking on an ancient recipe and making it into something that worked in this day and age – and it turned out successful (thankfully because it would have been rather depressing if it had not, which was not the idea at all – it was supposed to engage me and make me feel better, not spiral me into feeling worse if it had failed on me…) Now I suppose I am going to try another recipe or two from the past and see if the lucky streak holds. I lost my gran more than 30 years ago, but her recipes (some of them written in her hand, in pencil, now faded too badly for me to make out properly) make me remember her puttering around her kitchen – maybe I will bite the bullet and try doing the thing that worked for many years until one year suddenly it stopped working and began to crumble as soon as you looked at it (it wasn’t SUPPOSED to).
Well. Anyway. I made butter rolls from a recipe nearly a century old. Go me.
Merry Christmas.