Canadian Christmas #2
We stayed in Calgary for another Christmas, talking to relatives and friends on the phone or using iChat or Skype. We had a few invitations to visit folks here in town so we "Christmas orphans" wouldn't be lonely. I found a new knitting partner (actually someone I've been acquainted with for months, but I never knew she was a serious knitter), played for the first time with a Wii, got to pet an albino snake, ate Korean seaweed and rice rolls, and met another woman from Germany.
At home on Christmas Eve before going to a late-night church service down the street, we ate my first attempt at making tourtiere, the French-Canadian meat pie traditionally eaten on Christmas Eve. I found out from my grandparents in Texas that they were eating the same thing that night, baked by a friend from Quebec who also winters in Texas. I made mine with turkey, an homage to the traditional filling, which was also a bird (tourtes, the now-extinct passenger pigeon -- I wonder if Christmas pies were a major reason for the extinction) and not today's typical pork and veal and beef filling. Here's a picture of my pie with the fleur-de-lis cut into the crust:
The original plan for Boxing Day was not to spend it Canadian-style by shopping till we dropped, but to leave town and try snowshoeing for the first time. I chickened out because of not wanting to spend three hours out in the cold (-20 Celsius, but felt colder w/the breeze), and we instead spent an hour walking around in Fish Creek Provincial Park in the south part of the city. We were enchanted by the twittering chickadees that zoomed around us and peeped at us from all the trees and bushes. I then spent the afternoon under a blanket until I had to go to work. We postponed the outing till today. We rented snowshoes from the Outdoor Centre at the University of Calgary for $10 a person and plowed our way through both trails and off-trail paths of our own near Kananaskis Village. Frolicking in the snow has never been so easy! We're all excited about going out on snowshoes again this winter. I want to show Andrew Chester Lake next time. Some photos from our trip today:
at the snack bar in the village centre
At home on Christmas Eve before going to a late-night church service down the street, we ate my first attempt at making tourtiere, the French-Canadian meat pie traditionally eaten on Christmas Eve. I found out from my grandparents in Texas that they were eating the same thing that night, baked by a friend from Quebec who also winters in Texas. I made mine with turkey, an homage to the traditional filling, which was also a bird (tourtes, the now-extinct passenger pigeon -- I wonder if Christmas pies were a major reason for the extinction) and not today's typical pork and veal and beef filling. Here's a picture of my pie with the fleur-de-lis cut into the crust:
The original plan for Boxing Day was not to spend it Canadian-style by shopping till we dropped, but to leave town and try snowshoeing for the first time. I chickened out because of not wanting to spend three hours out in the cold (-20 Celsius, but felt colder w/the breeze), and we instead spent an hour walking around in Fish Creek Provincial Park in the south part of the city. We were enchanted by the twittering chickadees that zoomed around us and peeped at us from all the trees and bushes. I then spent the afternoon under a blanket until I had to go to work. We postponed the outing till today. We rented snowshoes from the Outdoor Centre at the University of Calgary for $10 a person and plowed our way through both trails and off-trail paths of our own near Kananaskis Village. Frolicking in the snow has never been so easy! We're all excited about going out on snowshoes again this winter. I want to show Andrew Chester Lake next time. Some photos from our trip today:
at the snack bar in the village centre