Start of Christmas Memories:
I’ll sit down and go over the Presidents Thang in a day or so. Right now, I’m busy fishing the big Digital Organization, to be followed up with more organizing tricks tomorrow. So I’m Really Busy As Heck with that stuff.
Meredith had a good deal from Sinterklaas, with lots of pepernoten / kruidnootjes and the usual Big Dark Chocolate Letters. She got a copy of Prince Caspian, which she watched on Saturday, and everyone else got fair goodies of a similar sort from Sinterklaas. It’s getting harder and harder to make sure that old Saint Nick is left in place, as heightened intelligence levels have made this trickier with sucessive advanced periods of time passing. Two and two are making four as an ‘h’m, maaaaybe‘ more and more, and some mistakes of the local elders are adding to the pile of materials in the clue bank. (As you scan this, add no more to the bank in your own missives, yea and verily, not to mention forsoothly.)
The ‘pepernoten‘ are a sort of gingerbread holiday cookie; I can’t describe this too well beyond it. The family thing of this was called ‘pepper and ginger cookies’ (though I couldn’t get an answer as to where the ‘pepper’ part came from, and nobody would tell me. Mom stopped making the things when I was 13 or so, and never started up again. She talked about that and other Germanish Christmas cookies, and kept saying she’d like to do them, but never quite got around to it. (She kept saying that she needed special equipment, wooden molds and rollers and such, and quite frankly, I don’t remember those, but I remember that when she was baking such things, she did a wonderful job.) Ditto with the olliebollen and the ebelskeever stuff. Long on talk, short on actually making the damn things up again.
My Mom’s maternal family (Alsatian and Westphalian) was where she got most of this, with a big dose back again from Dad’s family, which was very culturally German in a lot of ways. The name is anglicized Dutch, of course, but basically, if you go over to Westphalia, there’s a lot of similarities to the Dutch culturally, or so I understand. Lots of holiday traditions. If there’s one thing I miss the most about my family passing by, it’s the death of those traditions; I struggle to keep them going for Meredith. Susan’s family have largely lost what traditions they have had over time.