It’s being a windy, sunny Christmas Day here, and I wish all who celebrate it a Merry one wherever you are.\u00a0 For those with other traditions,\u00a0 the same sentiment of joy and peace and goodwill expressed in your way and toward your own traditions.\u00a0 Happy Holidays, best wishes for a joyful, peaceful, prosperous New Year.<\/p>\n
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The blustery wind is out of the SSW, freeing up all the pollen in every male Ashe juniper from a hundred miles around and blowing it up every “cedar-fever-sensitive” nose.\u00a0\u00a0 I’m not in that category yet, or only barely, but woke up with a splitting headache that a dose of decongestant helped–so my lifelong immunity to the annual cedar-fever blight may be weakening.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We had our traditional Christmas breakfast (a tradition re-started last year when I gave in to my own base desire for a waffle iron, a round one about like my mother used to have.)\u00a0\u00a0 Waffles and bacon.\u00a0 YES.\u00a0 Feels right.\u00a0 Dinner will be ham and boiled potatoes seasoned with butter\u00a0 and (I hope it’s big enough) parsley from the garden.\u00a0\u00a0 Christmas here has only two meals, because we don’t get home from the midnight service until around 1:30-2 am.\u00a0 Breakfast is late; supper is somewhere within an hour of 6, usually, though sometimes it’s split between the main meal at 4-5ish and dessert a couple of hours later. Grazing on carrot and celery sticks (and sometimes Christmas treats) occurs in between.\u00a0 I’m trying to stick to the raw veggies, myself.\u00a0 Nonetheless, some dark chocolate with espresso beans found its way into my mouth earlier.<\/p>\n
Today’s dessert is pumpkin pie, now in the oven.\u00a0 The ham, a pre-cooked object, will not take long after the pie comes out.\u00a0\u00a0 I’ll slather it with mustard, then top-glaze with homemade spiced pear jam that, this year, also included the last of the apple butter in one jar, a little honey, a little maple syrup, and a splash of Shiraz, along with the cinnamon, cloves, allspice, ginger that went in with the pears and brown sugar.\u00a0 I made enough at Thanksgiving to use again today.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s being a windy, sunny Christmas Day here, and I wish all who celebrate it a Merry one wherever you are.\u00a0 For those with other traditions,\u00a0 the same sentiment of joy and peace and goodwill expressed in your way and toward your own traditions.\u00a0 Happy Holidays, best wishes for a joyful, peaceful, prosperous New Year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[112],"class_list":["post-2394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2394"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2394"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2397,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2394\/revisions\/2397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}