What was one of your favorite childhood gifts that you gave?
It has to be a warm nightgown I gave my mother. Daddy gave me the money, but I picked it out myself, for the first time. I think I was seven or eight. Mom loved it.
What is one of your favorite Christmas recipes? Bonus points if you share the recipe with us.
Buche de Noel. A chocolate Yule Log cake made like a jellyroll, with delicate chocolate sponge cake surrounding either whipped cream or mocha ganache (rich chocolate and espresso buttercream), frosted with dark chocolate ganache. You slice a bit off the end at an angle, and attach it to the side of the main log to make a branch. You use the tines of a fork to make a bark pattern on the frosting. My kids always called it "Log" after the faux ad on "Ren and Stimpy" - remember the song? "It's log, it's log, it's better than bad, it's good!"
What is a tradition that your family can't do without? (And by family, I mean family of origin, family of adulthood, or that bunch of cool people that just feel like family.)
This is one from PH's Swedish family - it's a Christmas smorgasbord, with sil (pickled herring), potato salad, korv (a pork and potato sausage), crispbread, pickles, rice pudding with lingonberries, limpa (Swedish rye bread)...an amazing feast.
Pastors and other church folk often have very strange traditions dictated by the "work" of the holidays. What happens at your place?
Because our big Christmas services are the night before (including a service that finishes at midnight), we usually come home, have a drink of some suitable libation, and open one present. The other gifts are opened after the Christmas morning service.
If you could just ditch all the traditions and do something unexpected... what would it be?
One of my friends from seminary will be winging his way to a January term in South Africa at Christmastime, so he is flying to Paris for Christmas Eve, staying at a lovely hotel, having a fine dinner, going to Notre Dame for midnight Mass, and spending part of the next day relaxing and walking around Paris before he heads to the airport and his flight to Johannesburg. Sounds like a wonderful trip, doesn't it?
Potato sausage! Yummy! I haven't had any in ages.
ReplyDeleteMy mother says that she was always glad she had a Swedish grandma. That way there was sausage to compete with the lutefisk from the Norwegian side of the family.
I haven't had Buche de Noel in ages. But I remember that rich filling & frosting. Yummy.
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