I just wanted to say that I fell out of my chair laughing at number 10!!! I didn’t like that girl either… For more reasons than mentioned!! Love Life in Pencil, brightens my day

LA

from Time-Life’s “Foods of the World: The Cooking of the British Isles”—

“…to every table in the land comes one holiday dish: the Christmas pudding, mystic, dark,and wreathed in flames. Today the Christmas pudding is a fruity, brandy-soused offering.” The book then goes on to explain how it has evolved from Shakespeare’s day to our own. I’ll spare you.

Charles Dickens describes the Cratchits’ Christmas pudding: “Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like washing day. That was the cloth.” (I disagree with him there…) “A smell like an eating-house and a pastry-cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’ next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute, Mrs. Cratchit entered–flushed but smiling proudly–with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of a half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.”

So, what’s not to like? Smells like a laundry and hard as a cannonball, BUT: soaked in brandy. A good Christmas pudding (fruitcake) has lots and lots of butter, chopped candied fruits, raisins, currants, flour, dark brown sugar, nuts, eggs and sherry, rum and/or brandy.
It is not hard and doesn’t smell like laundry. It’s soft and rich and yummy, and served with “hard sauce,” which is simply butter, sugar, and brandy or rum.

Actually, when I was 14, I made one for Christmas dinner. I carried it into the dining room, blazing, with holly stuck in the top.

Then I went back to bed because I had the flu, but I’d been anticipating my big moment for weeks…which is what it takes to “season” a good fruitcake or plum pudding.

Happy Christmas!

2.I think Christmas gifts are for the kids, and could really care less if I get any.

3.Love the fact that I married a man who loves Christmas as much as I do although when trying to make desicions it can get hard, like when he wants a 9 ft pinon tree.

4. I am more excited to see my Daughter at Christmas this year than I was at her first. There is something magic about a child starting to understand that there is magic in the season.

1. A Christmas Carol totally scares me, and especially this new animated one. Those commercials are CREEPY!!

2. I also have to confess I really don’t like A Christmas Story–it also kinda creeps me out.

3. O, Holy Night makes me cry every time I hear it.

4. I hate blue Christmas lights. DEPRESSING.

5. Christmas Eve is my favorite day of the holidays. Always something magical about it.

I love giving gifts more than receiving them. (I go into debt every year because of it.)

In 1997 I watched the Christmas story 100 TIMES!
I started in October and watched it every day till Christmas. I sometimes had to watch it more than once a day in December. (I still watch it at least 20 times a season.)

I’m so excited that my daughter is now old enough to learn about and appreciate Santa Claus this year. And I get to teach her!

1. All the other classics are well and good, but “Christmas Vacation” is probably my favorite. I laugh just thinking about the Jelly of the Month tirade. (I’m laughing right now!)

2. Does the thoughtfulness of the gift count if its purchase was aided by the convenience of, say, the internet? Cause I’ve done a LOT of that this year…

3. I love Christmas dinner MUCH more than Thanksgiving dinner. Standing rib roast, Yorkshire pudding, brussels sprouts braised in beef drippings. It just doesn’t get any better.

4. I love Christmas afternoon almost as much as Christmas morning. The laziness, the quiet, the naps.