My daughter turned 8 today. She had said, a little wistfully, that it would be nice if I didn't have to write any letters of recommendation on her birthday, so by gum I plowed through all the rest of them yesterday. Freedom! Oh! Delicious freedom!
You might remember that we have two late December birthdays at our house: Stella on the 23rd and Alex on the 30th. Their actual birthdays are always a mellow family event, and then their half-birthdays in the summer are when they can plan a more conventional birthday celebration.
On your birthday at our house you get to pick all the food. This morning Stella asked for chocolate chip pancakes, which were followed by a piano recital for the two youngest kids, after which we went for a birthday lunch at a Chinese(-ish) buffet place.
On the way home we stopped at the grocery store so I could get ground almonds to make a surprise cake. (This has turned into a thing lately, with the kids saying "Surprise me!" when I ask them what kind of birthday cake to make.) The grocery store on the afternoon of December 23rd was not what you'd call a haven of serenity. I was hanging in there with the crowds and the 4 kids going in different directions and the emptied shelves, but the Christmas music just about did me in. One of my boys turned to me when a particularly regrettable version of O Holy Night came over the speakers and said, "Mom, I think my soul is being sucked out through my ears." "Mine too," I told him.
I was looking for a goose. We love to have goose on Christmas, but I am a little too frugal to pay full price for goose. If you buy it at the last minute, sometimes you can find it marked way down. Or sometimes you can discover that all the geese are gone already. I was trying to determine which kind of a year this was going to be, but O Holy Night was so distracting that I actually could not figure it out. Wait, that sounds ridiculous, for me to confess that I could not decide whether there was or was not a goose in the frozen poultry case. But I'm telling you, it was an absolutely intolerable rendition of O Holy Night. All of the real estate in my brain that might ordinarily be devoted to the goose question was too busy recoiling in horror from the auditory onslaught.
So I put my fingers in my ears, just for a minute, in which I was able to see (finally) that the frozen poultry case was -- alas -- gooseless. Apparently in that minute another shopper in that aisle was saying "Excuse me" to me, only I couldn't hear him because I had my fingers in my ears. I guess most people don't plug their ears in the poultry aisle. Maybe that explains the look he gave me?
Phew, I am re-experiencing the relief of getting out of the grocery store and into the chilly rain where there was no O Holy Night playing. Home we went, to bake cookies and a surprise Bakewell cake and to make ribs and fat potato fat fat for a birthday dinner. We sat in the floor and played with the guinea pigs, and lingered over dinner to talk of shoes and ships and sealing wax, and cake was served with a small trombonist playing an enthusiastic Happy Birthday. Presents were opened and exclaimed over, and there was happy Lego-building in the dining room floor. Happy Lego-building led to a relaxation of the usual bedtime rules; let us hope that a 9pm bedtime for Stella tonight will not bite me in the butt tomorrow.
I am trying to decide if stelline d'oro are too weird to give away. The recipe I linked up above has a little mistake in it, I think. It looks like it was originally the same one I use, from Tomie de Paola's book Jingle the Christmas Clown, but that actual recipe calls for 1.5 tablespoons each of orange flower water and saffron steeping water in the icing. They make the most beautiful golden fragrant cookies and my kids love them and look forward to them-- but I'm afraid they might be weird to give to neighbors. I have iced a bunch of them with plain vanilla frosting, but there's still orange flower water in the cookie dough. What say you? Weird or pleasingly unexpected?
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