Christmas Eve is coming to a close. It was a lot sunnier and warmer than I thought it was going to be from the forecasts a week or two ago. It felt a bit like November, to be honest. But I spent the day cleaning and cooking and wrapping presents and drinking wine, so yeah. I guess it feels like Christmas. I'd like to share profound thoughts, but at the end of a long day, all I am is relaxed. This has been too rough a year for me to let myself get worked up over one more holiday, although I like this one a lot. I like presents, even though giving and receiving them gives me a little anxiety. I adore the music, as corny as it all is. I like the heavy, rich main course foods and sticky, sweet desserts. I love that I'm getting better about altering recipes so that those foods don't hurt me. I think that fairy lights and evergreen boughs and ribbons and gaudy paper are the most beautiful sights I can imagine. It makes me happy that ugly sweater parties and contests are a thing. I appreciate that centuries of traditions from different cultures spanning multiple continents have blended to become a unified experience that we all call Christmas.
I had several massive successes translating traditional wheat-containing recipes into safer versions for myself and others. I winged banana bread this morning by mixing multiple non-grain flours until it just looked right, and threw in some whole cranberries and pecans for good measure. The result was so good that I only got two slices of it before it vanished out of sight. My dad's side of the family always had gallons of homemade Chex party mix at Christmas, and now I can't have any part of it except the nuts, so that's what I made. I roasted pecans in the classic sauce, some to give away, some to keep for myself. For the last several years I've made a big beef dinner for this night, but tonight I eschewed the full standing rib roast for a single bone-in steak that we split. To go with it I baked macaroni and cheese with corn and quinoa pasta (I know, corn, but it was a special night), and after years of not having it in any form, I nearly cried it was so good. And at the end of the night, we are trying to make our own jello for the first time with fruit juice and gelatin packets, and if I have energy tomorrow, I'm going to try to make marshmallows with no corn syrup or cornstarch in the powdered sugar (so that my niece can partake, if she so chooses) to throw on top of it. None of this feels like sacrifice. I have found ways to make almost every rich holiday food I wanted without problematic ingredients. I'm even doing it in such a way that family members with regular digestive systems aren't complaining about missing the gluten.
We drove our small cache of presents out to Boulder, and picked up a trove to take back. While we were out, I begged to drive around a little and look at the lights. You can really tell the difference in the houses where they paid people to decorate, versus the ones where it was one guy out on a ladder by himself. I don't think I preferred one style over the other. The professional ones were well-balanced with colors and fully covered the houses and landscaping. But they were almost too precise and perfect. The homespun ones were sometimes sloppy, sometimes overwhelming (like being held captive in the War on Christmas POW camp, as Mr X quoted), sometimes underwhelming (like the strand of white lights tossed carelessly across the front of an old van in a driveway that I saw in Boulder). I really did like everything. The whole ride, my head was whipping back and forth, as my eyes danced from one lit house to another. I even loved that the chicken house down the street (a property nearly an acre big, with the legal limit of chickens allowed in town in a big pen) was neatly outlined with warm, incandescent lights on every building, even the smallest of the chicken coops. From the mansions on Mapleton Hill to the little house down the block with a strand of lights along his chainlink fence, I love all of these decorations. This is my favorite part of the season. Hands down. It's the lights.
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