Happy Christmas

Thank God for technology. I'm so glad that I can buy all of my Christmas presents online through Amazon, download any music I like from iTunes, any time of day, and keep all of my friends up to date via Facebook every time my mood changes.

Unfortunately, all is not wine and roses. For example, it was via an automated system that British Airways informed us that our flight back to the US was cancelled for tomorrow. 'We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused' said the mail. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a pretty difficult time locating any degree of 'sincere' in an automated email. OK, I understand the need - BA (or anyone else) wouldn't be in business long if they didn't capitalize on the efficiencies afforded by automation, but a human had to actually author the text (or at least the boilerplate) for the mail. Did this unknown author really think that anyone would feel better if the mail included a 'sincere' apology? Hey, BA, here's an idea. If you want to 'sincerely' apologize, how about giving me a discount on my next flight? Or crediting my frequent flyer account (and Michele's and the kids' accounts, too) with 50,000 air miles. How's that for sincerity?

Anyway, we now have an extra day to prepare for our journey. This also means we have an extra day to feed the kids. There's a sort of famine mentality that sets in around here at Christmas time. Everyone knows the stores will only be open on an occasional and apparently random basis for the next week or so, so they clear absolutely everything out of the food stores in an effort to ensure that no one goes hungry between Christmas and New Year's. It's the British equivalent of the rush on food stores that happens every time The Weather Channel predicts another "Storm of the Century". This also means that, even if we CAN find an open shop on Boxing Day (that's tomorrow, the 26th), chances are we'll only find some leftover prunes and a fruitcake or two.

Speaking of fruitcake, this fine tradition in alive and well here, except that people here actually eat them, unlike in the US where everyone just passes the same fruitcake around to each other year after year (I've even known some to be handed down from generation to generation). They are also iced, with some sort of stiff white icing vaguely reminiscent of the layer of fat around a pork roast. Most unsettling.

There are a great many culinary traditions here which I can't fully appreciate or simply don't understand. Blood sausage. Runny eggs. Haggis. But the most wonderfully oddity by a furlong that I've yet come across has to be the stuffed goose. Mind you, there's nothing unusual about stuffing a goose per se; what's unusual is that they stuff the goose with a turkey. And they stuff the turkey with a duck, and the duck with a chicken, and the chicken with a game hen, or possibly a pigeon or some other smallish bird. The net result is sort of a Matryoshka doll of fowl. Apparently, the butchers can bone the things while keeping the carcass intact, thereby allowing for a pretty solidly packed and easily sliceable bird(s). I understand it's delicious, though I've yet to find a recipie for it, partly because I've no idea what it's called, and cookbooks tend to be indexed by such mundane terms as 'turkey' and 'chicken', and not by 'guinea fowl-stuffed-chicken-stuffed-duck-stuffed-turkey-stuffed-goose'.

Well, my Christmas cheer (such as it was) has now worn off, and so I bid you all a Merry Christmas, and to all a good night.