Christmas 2021

 

A Merry and Blessed Christmas to all, and may the New Year be better for us all.

Merry Christmas!

 

EB White Christmas 

 "From this high midtown hall, undecked with boughs, unfortified with mistletoe, we send forth our tinselled greetings as of old, to friends, to readers, to strangers of many conditions in many places. Merry Christmas to uncertified accountants, to tellers who have made a mistake in addition, to girls who have made a mistake in judgment, to grounded airline passengers, and to all those who can't eat clams! We greet with particular warmth people who wake and smell smoke. To captains of river boats on snowy mornings we send an answering toot at this holiday time. Merry Christmas to intellectuals and other despised minorities! Merry Christmas to the musicians of Muzak and men whose shoes don't fit! Greetings of the season to unemployed actors and the blacklisted everywhere who suffer for sins uncommitted; a holly thorn in the thumb of compilers of lists! Greetings to wives who can't find their glasses and to poets who can't find their rhymes! Merry Christmas to the unloved, the misunderstood, the overweight. Joy to the authors of books whose titles begin with the word "How" (as though they knew!). Greetings to people with a ringing in their ears; greetings to growers of gourds, to shearers of sheep, and to makers of change in the lonely underground booths! Merry Christmas to old men asleep in libraries! Merry Christmas to people who can't stay in the same room with a cat! We greet, too, the boarders in boarding houses on 25 December, the duennas in Central Park in fair weather and foul, and young lovers who got nothing in the mail. Merry Christmas to people who plant trees in city streets; merry Christmas to people who save prairie chickens from extinction! Greetings of a purely mechanical sort to machines that think--plus a sprig of artificial holly. Joyous Yule to Cadillac owners whose conduct is unworthy of their car! Merry Christmas to the defeated, the forgotten, the inept; joy to all dandiprats and bunglers! We send, most particularly and most hopefully, our greetings and our prayers to soldiers and guardsmen on land and sea and in the air--the young men doing the hardest things at the hardest time of life. To all such, Merry Christmas, blessings, and good luck! We greet the Secretaries-designate, the President-elect; Merry Christmas to our new leaders, peace on earth, good will, and good management! Merry Christmas to couples unhappy in doorways! Merry Christmas to all who think they are in love but aren't sure! Greetings to people waiting for trains that will take them in the wrong direction, to people doing up a bundle and the string is too short, to children with sleds and no snow! We greet ministers who can't think of a moral, gagmen who can't think of a joke. Greetings, too, to the inhabitants of other planets; see you soon! And last, we greet all skaters on small natural ponds at the edge of woods toward the end of afternoon. Merry Christmas, skaters! Ring, steel! Grow red, sky! Die down, wind! Merry Christmas to all and to all a good morrow!" 

 --E.B. White, 12/20/52

Merry Christmas from New York!

 

Turner

JMW Turner, The Angel Standing In The Sun, 1846

 

Boston Cream Pie

 

My favorite dessert is the Boston Cream Pie, a cake I love to make myself for my birthday around Christmas.  Over the years it's been more of a biannual tradition than an annual one since Michael won't eat it.  This year, I don't have a working oven and I'm thinking about buying a ready made cake.  I dread the flavor of all the preservatives and packaging, but I don't have much choice this year.

In recent years I've made it all from scratch.  For the custard I substitute vanilla pudding because I've never attempted to make a custard before.  Even from scratch, vanilla pudding is very easy to make.  I've done the chocolate ganache before, but the last time I made a Boston Cream Pie (about 3 years ago now), I made a basic buttercream frosting.  I usually make very basic yellow cake.  Nothing using 8 separated egg yolks, just the discount recipe that usually works for me.

This is one of my early cakes from about 7 years ago with way too much ganache.  It looked like a train wreck, but it was good.  I was proud of this since it was the first one I made entirely from scratch.  So, I took a picture.

The Boston Cream Pie was invented at the Parker House Hotel in Boston where Charles Dickens allegedly wrote A Christmas Carol while living there.

Ho Chi Minh in 1921

From 1912 to 1913, a young Ho Chi Minh worked as a baker at the Parker House Hotel and probably baked hundreds of Boston Cream Pies.  Malcolm X also worked at the Parker House as a busboy.

Maybe next year I'll be able to make another Boston Cream Pie.

A Fond Wish

 

Abolish the US Senate.

Quebec's former senate chamber, now a legislative conference room.

The Upper House was one more concession to slave holders based on the ancient Roman idea that the wealthy and propertied are entitled to a veto over decisions by the assembled unwashed masses in their plebeian councils.   For a long time the US Senate was known as The South's Revenge For Gettysburg because of its enduring resistance to any civil rights legislation.  Southern senators long dominated all the committee chairs forcing FDR to segregate New Deal policies or see them defeated.

And now the Senate is more trouble than it's worth.  It threatens the very ideas of liberal democracy and the rule of law.  It can't even be described as a representative assembly any more.  Its members look nothing like the population at large.

Immaculate Conception Thoughts

 

I never liked the whole Immaculate Conception doctrine.  It's tangled up with a whole lot of other things I really don't believe such as Mary's perpetual virginity, Original Sin as inherited guilt and total depravity, the need for some kind of pure vessel for the Incarnation to happen.  

But today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in the Roman Church and so an excuse to post this magnificent painting of it by Jusepe de Ribera from 1635.

It still stands on the altar it was painted for in the Church of La Purisima in Salamanca in Spain.  

What a magnificent Baroque spectacle!  Ribera transforms a point of doctrine into a sweeping visionary cosmic drama.  Like all great religious works of art, it preaches to the choir.  Ribera is not out to convert anyone.  Nor did his patrons expect him to convert anyone with whatever vision he conjured.

A lot of people online are discussing Original Sin today since the Immaculate Conception depends on that idea to make any sense.  When people ask me if I believe in Original Sin, I ask them what they mean by it.  Tell me what you think it is, and I'll tell you if I believe in it.

I incline more to Cassian than to Augustine on these matters.  I did when I was very young, and I still do now that I'm a few days away from 64.  I never believed in inherited guilt or in total depravity.

As far as I can see, human nature is not much different from that of all other life from bacteria to blue whales.  We want to survive, to be safe, to have our needs met, and our desires gratified.  We're selfish and we're frightened.  Is that particularly good?  Certainly not.  Is that evil?  No, it's not.  It just is, and it is because we are carbon-based life forms that inevitably will die after a short run of life.  Awful things happen to us not because we are wicked, but because we are mortal and therefore vulnerable to misfortune and destruction.  As mortal prisoners of a single moment in time on a single spot in space, our vision is  limited and partial.  We can't help but trip over ourselves on our quest to find the Great Good Place.

As I get older, a certain agnosticism in spiritual matters looks less like indecision and more like humility in the face of things we can never understand clearly or perfectly.  What's always struck me about the Gospels is how little they really explain.  They say very little about the afterlife, and nothing at all about the mystery of the Resurrection at their heart.  That silence is itself a message I think.

One thing the Counter-Reformation mystics like Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross understood so well is the very fine line between spiritual desire and physical desire.  The flaming passion of love burns for both the flesh and the spirit and it's not always easy -- or possible -- to tell the difference.  I've never believed in spirit/flesh dualism, so these things get bound up together for better and for worse.

And by coincidence, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception is also the birthday of Jim Morrison who certainly does sing about the flaming passions of love, though it isn't mystical love.  

It's the thrill of being young and alive.  

One of Joel Brodsky's photos of Jim Morrison, 1967

All these years later he can still light my fire.