Christmas Eve - Past and Present
Today is Christmas Eve. When I was young, it was a day spent at home. My mother no matter how poor we were would cook up a feast that took all day to prepare. The morning was attended by the smells and sights of the preparation of the delicacies that would be consumed that afternoon and evening. From the time I was old enough to help, I would beat cream cheese, hold down the cutting board on which she'd mounted a meat grinder that all sat atop my former high chair while she ground out pork butt. I would later beat butter till it was sufficiently soft to be then mixed with sugar, vanilla and semi-sweet chocolate chips along with fresh Mississippi pecans that I'd ground earlier. Finally I would place a tablespoon of a mixture of ground pork, shrimp, water chestnuts or bamboo shoots, green onion with a touch of soy sauce into little squares of chinese pastry and fold them into a fancy shape that were laid in rows on waxed paper on cookie sheets two or three layers deep. These would be magically transformed into my mom's celebrated clam dip, fried wonton and toll house cookies that would comprise the appetizers for the main course that would either be a duck cooked in Chinese style, roasted and stuffed with a mixture of pearl barley, duck giblets, bamboo shoots and water chestnuts that complemented the duck that had been roasted first then quickly dipped in boiling oil to crisp the skin that had been patted dry and rubbed with a combination of star anise and other herbs or my father's favorite, a standing rib roast. This would be served with steamed choy sam and rice. Desert usually consisted of an apple pie and a pumpkin chiffon pie. On occasion when my aunts from Hanapepe on the island of Kauai came to town, we'd have a lilikoi (passion fruit) chiffon pie covered in a fluffy egg white meringue. They were memorable feasts strictly for the immediate family but also shared with one of the people my mom had 'adopted' over the years from her various public health nursing districts.
It's hard to believe that it was in 1968 on Christmas Eve just before we sat down to dinner Hawaiian time that the TV station began to broadcast the transmission from lunar orbit. It was the first broadcast ever by mankind as we orbited another celestial body. I was transfixed before our brand new color TV watching and listening as Commander Jim Borman read from the book of Genesis that historic Christmas Eve. I remember being very moved. almost to tears by the reading and by the very real possibility that perhaps soon, a manned station might be established on the moon.
Not as many years but seemingly a lifetime later a new tradition began. Andie, Ben and I celebrated only four Christmases/Chanukahs together in twelve years of marriage. The other eight were celebrated by the sharing of tIrving Berlin's Christmas carol White Christmas as sung either by the family member who was away from home or on an old Firestone record that had Bing Crosby's rendition of that song. But when I was home, we would keep the tradition of the celebration of the miracle of the olive oil and light a candle for each day of Chanukah. Our Christmas feasts weren't as elaborate as the one's at my mom's. Andie was a vegetarian/vegan (she would eat eggs, diary and seafood) while Ben and I ate just about anything that didn't move. So we would have a large group of friends over and an eclectic meal that sometimes consisted of fresh fish and lobster I'd gotten while diving, one year I made Morrocan food and another we had a Hawaiian style luau complete with poi, kalua pig, lomi lomi salmon, aku and tako poke, fresh limu salad, laulau, fresh pipikaula (sp?) brought in by a friend from Parker Ranch and ahi sashimi from an ahi that durn near drowned me because I missed his brain and spine when I speared him. It wasn't really the meals although they were mighty good if I say so myself. It was the amusement that Andie got watching her 'mad Mongol' running about the kitchen preparing the food. The special bond of a crowd of friends talking and after dinner gathering in the great room amidst the remnants of the feast to talk some more and break into bouts of Christmas carols, Hawaiian and popular songs sung by all and sundry including a professional musician every once and awhile. Mostly, it was the fact that being able to spend the time was special to everyone. Those parties would last well into the wee hours and oft times we had guests wrapped up under the Christmas tree/Chanukah bush in the morning when I would awaken for the traditional (ok only four times in Hawaii) Christmas Day dive.
Fast forward nearly twenty years. Today was a work day although most of the campus was deserted there still isn't a Christmas decoration to be found anywhere. I spent the day working on documentation, troubleshooting an application component that has found a 'ghost' that causes it to look for servers and databases that were physically removed from the environment but not apparently after resetting the application so that it would know it was being partially dismantled and one of its database servers re-tasked. At the same time I was training a support technician on how to install the software in the TEST environment taking a page from the Army's training methodolgy of 'see one. do one. teach one.' After all, my lords and masters have reasoned having seen a couple of these done and having just done one (despite the odd issue) I'm an 'expert'. When i explained SSG Beckwith's operating definition of an expert to one of my lords and master's peers as "a former drop of water under pressure (ex and spurt)" he laughed and told me that by the company's lights I should be a master at infrastructure and network admininstration. Anyway, after a full day in the salt mines. I came home and found that Winston had found a way to open the door to his kennel. I don't konw how he did it but he didn't injure himself but managed to unseat the springs in the latching mechanism without breaking the latch housing allowing him to get the top locking bar to retract and partially retracting the lower locking bar which he bent as he pulled the door into the kennel and snake himself out. He then went on a counter surfing spree that scattered the mail and papers I'd removed from my briefcase from the breakfast bar to the dining room floor. The GP first aid kit in the kitchen was dismounted from the wall and ended up on the counter. the lunch bag that I used for his dogfood when he was being boarded ended up on the kitchen floor, A book on data warehouse design ended up in the, thankfully dry, sink. He removed a box of Wheat Thins tearing the box to shreds all over the living room and then rolling on the package of crackers before tearing it open and spreading it across the living room by dragging the opened bag from one end to the other in a long diagonal trail of cracker bits that ended where the torn bag was discarded. He took a heavy 12" cast iron skillet from the stove top to the floor and brought it into the middle of the living room but left the greasy spatula that I'd used to cook the roast beef that went into my lunch today in the kitchen after licking it clean. So after a long and mostly frustrating day at the office looking through thousands of lines of javascript and teaching a relative neophyte the architecture of the software as well as the technical details of installing it. I opened the door to be greeted by a grinning boxer who sat at the door looking up at me with his little stub tail wagging a mile a minute. Ever so proud of himslf.
He did not end up as furry slippers. In retrospect, it took an awful lot of intelligence to figure out how to break that lock (it's designed to not be accessible to the animal in the kennel) and then pull the door inwards without hurting himself. Still, I wish he hadn't . The coming paychecks are going to be for less than 80 hours and I'm paying movers next month to bring my stuff out of storage all over the country. So the $267 it will cost for a new kennel will come out of our grocery budget or from the money budgeted to buy a kennel for the boxer I hope to adopt soon..