I Prologue

To some of us, this land is still a land of Saturdays

and I am making my way
as best as I can,
just like the rest, all across the fields
all amber and vermouth,
slyly smiling, tired and retiring for the day,
under a windswept sky.

It’s an end to party-hopping, a farewell to great huzzahs,
you can hear the torrent slowly fade
to chattering, the chips grown stale and old,
becomes a mumble as the rubber of your soles sticks on the floor,
down to a whisper, the creak and hard knock of a door closing then shut.

There is the voiceless tap and shuffle, followed by the sounds
that still remain: the sharp and sudden pop of bone and sinew
as we toss and turn, trying to settle down. What a Saturday.
What a lovely shuffle, ending an aimless carefree day.

Through my window at night come the lights and sounds
of quiet city streets. Amber vermouth slow fades to blue
as the night ends and I sleep until another lovely Saturday
begins.

II Passage

You miss it, moment by moment.
Like a background hiss on a tape of a tape
or a tape of a tape of a tape.
You can’t see it, whipping your line of sight

quick to one side, trying to catch
the faintest glimpse of the back
of your head.

That’s when your glasses go flying.

Green to blue to violet.
This is how our Saturdays became Sundays.
The watch that I was wearing lost five seconds every hour.
All our clocks, as it turns out, slowed two minutes every day.
That is how our Saturday became, one day, Sunday.

III

I never minded the smell of death in there.
It’s not that I can’t care, but I won’t.
I understood from the first that Wilbur had to die for my ham sandwich.

A red and black and blue of downcast eyes and misspent youth
has come at last to stake his claim;
down here it’s our time.
It’s our time down here.

Our Saturday is Sunday now. Our Saturday is why it’s Sunday now.
The green and black were violet inside. They built the blue and red.
It’s Sunday now, so put the bottle down.
This is a war; a war you have to be sober to win.

The sense of violation [is not the smell of death]

(and there is a sense of violation)
is the disjoint, fracture,
a total lack of order

It’s that I can’t stop them taking my children’s toys and their children’s
clothes away. And I can’t understand this. And I can understand everything.

Today’s the day we finally used up all our Saturdays.

My birthday is November 2. It’s also St Crispin’s day.

Two of the things I’ve always been interested in are closely related — desirelessness and effortlessness. It wasn’t until recently that I was able to articulate their connection, in my mind, and why I think it can be so advantageous to cultivate both senses.

I have essentially two goals in life: to be happy and to make the world a better place. You can think of these as products. The first is creating my own happiness and the second is creating, fostering, supporting happiness in everyone else.

IYI: Defining “happiness” is pretty tough, but kind of important. I don’t mean contentment and I don’t mean short-term pleasure. The best definition I’ve come across for what I mean is more properly referred to as “eudaimonia” or “doing and living well.” Economists might refer to it as “utility,” although revealed preference makes the definition of utility endogenous, and I definitely don’t mean “whatever the underlying thing is that I’m evidently optimizing for,” because one of the things I’m trying to do is transform my utility function so that it becomes an eudaimonia-maximization function. As noted in the little part in the Wikipedia page that discusses Elizabeth Anscombe, this has the advantage of “ground[ing]  morality in the interests and well being of human moral agents …without appealing to any questionable metaphysics.” = Yay! IYI²: My personal morality differs from my prescriptive morality, so this is more a benchmark for me, rather than a standard to which I hold other people, about which more later, perhaps.

These seem reasonable enough that I’d like to teach Violet what I’ve discovered vis-a-vis happiness-production technologies when she begins to start thinking about how to produce happiness in herself and others.

If you’re someone who has ever struggled with motivation, then I find one of the easiest ways to be productive is to do things of value that don’t feel like work. One of the best ways to be happy is to want the things you have, and to extract as much enjoyment from them as possible. These approaches use desirelessness and effortlessness as inputs to production. I think of them as expanding on the intensive margin.

And this is why effortlessness and desirelessness are so useful and important on a personal level: A. they’re cheap, B. they’re sustainable, and C. they’re investments in human capital–improvements in production technology–so expenditure on them isn’t burned, it’s stored and reused. Like everything else, they’re subject to diminishing marginal returns, but when you think of the emotional depth and maturity of the average human being, I think we still have some pretty low-hanging fruit here.

For a parent, they’re great as well. They encourage your kid to seek internal validation rather than measuring her success by the amount of stuff she has or the amount of money she earns. They teach your kid to naturally follow a course to find interests that feel consonant with a coherent worldview, ethic, aesthetic, and eventually choice of career and lifestyle. Finally, for parent and child, they make it so you never get panicky or string yourself too thin, so you have untapped emotional reserves to ride out the vicissitudes of life.

At the same time, I think it’s important that these aren’t confused with laziness and self-abnegation. They sure are a nice alternative to solipsism or materialism or consumerism, though. One way to solve this problem, I guess is to want the things I will have, and to enjoy the wait.

So yeah: work to want the things I have and to want to do the things I must, and live my best life. More on my experience with this later.

It’s hard to know.

The more I look around, though, the more I’m convinced that it’s neither apathy nor denial. Allow me to justify my sangfroid, or moreover, let me evangelize to you. It’s especially important for parents, because if your kid is anything like mine, there are fan blades and there is excretory matter and sometimes things go flying. Keeping it together is how we get from here to the other side—and, for me at least, a foundation that I can rely upon for why I should just let it go, well, it’s a source of strength in dark and dangerous times.

So. To econ it up a little bit, let me motivate it thusly: Let’s say you face a choice. You can either have a fifty-fifty chance of winning $1.60 or $2.00 or a fifty-fifty chance of winning $3.85 or $0.10. If you’re like most of the subjects in the now seminal Holt and Laury 2002 paper, Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects, you’d go with the “safe bet”, even though you’ll earn less in expectation; roughly 2/3 of their subjects made such a decision.

Why? Why the heck do people leave 7 cents on the table every time they make this decision? There’s very little out there that critiques this decision. This particular field of economics is justifiably concerned primarily with documenting and describing human decisions—positive economics—and not so much with how people ought to make decisions—normative economics. This is all good and well.

The take-home I’d like to present is this: please, please, PLEASE take the risky, high-payoff bet when the stakes are this low. If you want to remain contented with your lot, this is almost impossible without some groundwork first, because people don’t like to walk away with ten measly cents.

To illustrate what I’m talking about, I drew up a quick Excel table with random numbers and what-have-you, and recalculated it five times. In the first drawing, the safe bet outperformed the risky bet in 2 of 5 recalculations. Once, choosing always-safe outperformed always-risky over 100 independent drawings, earning $5.95 more than always-risky. But in all the other sets of drawings, risky beat out safe. The five outcomes were (π(risky) – π(safe) )= (-$5.95, $20.85, $7.45, $37.60, $30.90).

I’m not saying you should take big risks. I’m not even necessarily advocating that you take on more small risks. Mostly what I’m trying to say is: it hurts to go home with a dime, but it’s best not to put too much weight on any one event. You barely miss the train one day and just make it another day. A crappy waiter at a restaurant? It happens. A bad interview can hurt, but over the course of a lifetime, these events even out, and the brainpower we spend on them is almost certainly wasted.

By the same token, so your kid is brilliant and polite at age 2? Might not last to age 3. The baby lets you sleep through the night at 4 months? Enjoy it while it lasts.

Paying attention to the long view can make you more confident, more humble, and more grateful; more emotionally and financially stable; and better at handling momentary crises. If that’s not a recipe for a good tactical parenting, I’m not sure what is.

http://bit.ly/tpmoR (on YouTube)

(stolen from a blog post from last year at Mange Merde)

And numerous indeed are the hearts to which Christmas
brings a brief season of happiness and enjoyment. How many families, whose members have been dispersed and scattered far and wide, in the restless struggles of life, are then reunited, and meet once again in that happy state of companionship and mutual goodwill, which is a source of such pure and unalloyed delight; and one so incompatible with the cares and sorrows of the world, that the religious belief of the most civilised nations, and the rude traditions of the roughest savages, alike number it among the first joys of a future condition of existence, provided for the blessed and happy! How many old recollections, and how many dormant sympathies, does Christmas time awaken!

We write these words now, many miles distant from the spot at which, year after year, we met on that day, a merry and joyous circle. Many of the hearts that throbbed so gaily then, have ceased to beat; many of the looks that shone so brightly then, have ceased to glow; the hands we grasped, have grown cold; the eyes we sought, have hid their lustre in the grave; and yet the old house, the room, the merry voices and smiling faces, the jest, the laugh, the most minute and trivial circumstances connected with those happy meetings, crowd upon our mind at each recurrence of the season, as if the last assemblage had been but yesterday! Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childish days; that can recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth; that can transport the sailor and the traveller, thousands of miles away, back to his own fireside and his quiet home!

—

Cheryl and I watched Love Actually again last night. It’s a winsome movie, perfect for this time of the year. My parents got here today. They’re exhausted and temporarily without luggage, but glad to be here, glad to see Violet.

Cheryl made a wonderful bacon-mushroom quiche and I helped out with a delicious roasted-potato-and-mustard-vinaigrette salad. Dessert was molasses spice cookies and tea.

All are sleeping and snoring around me. It’s a lovely night.

This movie seriously vies for best Christmas movie; just one man’s opinion, but it should probably be taken seriously. It’s hard to pick a scene that carries the movie within it, but this one was as close as I could come.

Yippee-ki-yay M***er f***ers, and god bless us, every one.

…
FRANK:        It’s a night you’ve gotta party hearty, Marty.
Check this out. Whoa-ho! Don’t be so mean. Ugh!
Look!
[points to mistletoe]

There’s a rule, a tradition which says…
I have to kiss this girl.
She’s just upholding the law. It’s a federal law, actually.
Boy, that was very good. But you know what?
It wasn’t great. There’s only been one “great”.
There is a girl…
that I wish I were with tonight.
It’s a girl that I loved a long time ago.
A girl that I still love.
It’s not too late, is it?
Claire, you remember the Kama Sutra, page   ?
Our legs are like this. You circle me, chanting, before we begin?
It was practically impossible.
Tonight, we could do this without serious physical damage.

CLAIRE:        I need to get to lBC in 5 minutes.
CABBIE GHOST:    Which floor?

FRANK:        Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Tis the season to be jolly
Don we now our gay apparel
Troll the ancient yuletide carol
We should be taping this.
How did that happen?
That happened because it’s Christmas Eve.
I’m not crazy. It’s Christmas Eve.
It’s the one night when we all act a little nicer.
We…we smile a little easier. We…we…share a little more.
For a couple of hours we are the people we always hoped we would be.
It’s really a miracle because it happens every Christmas Eve.
And if you waste that miracle, you’re gonna burn for it. I know.
You have to do something. You have to take a chance and get involved.
There are people that don’t have enough to eat and who are cold.
You can go and greet these people.
Take an old blanket out to them or make a sandwich and say, “Here.”
“I get it now.”
And if you give, then it can happen, the miracle can happen to you.
Not just the poor and hungry, Everybody’s gotta have this miracle!
It can happen tonight for you all!
If you believe in this pure thing,
the miracle will happen and you’ll want it again tomorrow!
You won’t say, “Christmas is once a year and it’s a fraud.” It’s not!
It can happen every day! You’ve just got to want that feeling!
You’ll want it every day! It can happen to you!
I believe in it now.
I believe it’s gonna happen to me, now. I’m ready for it!
And it’s great. It’s a good feeling.
It’s better than I’ve felt in a long time.
I’m ready.
Have a Merry Christmas. Everybody.
Calvin!
Did I forget something, big man?

CALVIN:        God bless us, every one.

CLAIRE:        Lumpy! Lumpy, no!

FRANK:        Oh! Feels like boating a marlin.
Claire, the whole world. The whole world, Claire.
And they lived happily ever after.
Think of your fellow man
Lend him a helping hand
Put a little love in your heart
You see it’s getting late, so please don’t hesitate
Put a little love in your heart
And the world…
Will be a better place
And the world will be a better place for you…
And me
Just wait and see…
Another day goes by…
And still the children cry
Put a little love in your heart
And your world will be a better place
And the world…
Will be a better place…
For you and me
So just you wait and see…
Another day goes by and still the children cry
Put a little love in your heart
Put a little love in your heart
Put a little love in your heart…
Feed me, Seymour. Feed me!
Let’s hear it from all you out there.
You know the words, come on!
Let’s hear it from this side.
That’s no good. Let’s try the other side.
How about just the men? Come on.
All right. The real men.
All right. The women this time.
No, the real women. You know who you are.
OK, you! YOU making all the noise!
My brother, the King of Christmas…

—

We watched this again the day after Thanksgiving. It has such fantastic slapstick…

The story’s an oldie but a goodie, and the idea of stapling antlers on a mouse…anyway, just see it; you’ll be glad you did.

Amber called her uncle, said “We’re up here for the holiday
Jane and I were having Solstice, now we need a place to stay”
And her Christ-loving uncle watched his wife hang Mary on a tree
He watched his son hang candy canes all made with red dye number three
He told his niece, “It’s Christmas eve, I know our life is not your style”
She said, “Christmas is like Solstice, and we miss you and it’s been awhile”

/ G C Am D / / Em C Am D / / G C Am D / /

So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table
Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able
And just before the meal was served, hands were held and prayers were said
Sending hope for peace on earth to all their gods and goddesses

/ G C Em D / / Em C Am D / Em C Am D G – /

The food was great, the tree plugged in, the meal had gone without a hitch
Till Timmy turned to Amber and said, “Is it true that you’re a witch?”
His mom jumped up and said, “The pies are burning,” and she hit the kitchen
And it was Jane who spoke, she said, “It’s true, your cousin’s not a Christian”
“But we love trees, we love the snow, the friends we have, the world we share
And you find magic from your God, and we find magic everywhere”

So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table
Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able
And where does magic come from, I think magic’s in the learning
Cause now when Christians sit with Pagans only pumpkin pies are burning

When Amber tried to do the dishes, her aunt said, “Really, no, don’t bother”
Amber’s uncle saw how Amber looked like Tim and like her father
He thought about his brother, how they hadn’t spoken in a year
He thought he’d call him up and say, “It’s Christmas and your daughter’s here”
He thought of fathers, sons and brothers, saw his own son tug his sleeve saying
“Can I be a Pagan?” Dad said, “We’ll discuss it when they leave”

So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table
Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able
Lighting trees in darkness, learning new ways from the old, and
Making sense of history and drawing warmth out of the cold.

—

Neither a Christian nor a Pagan am I, but I think that’s a nice tune. And nice to sit at the same table and enjoy a good meal.

COOKIE the name used in N. America for a small, flat, sweet confection, which approximates to a sweet BISCUIT as eaten in England, although cookies tend to be richer and have a softer, chewy texture. The name first appeared in print as long ago as 1703.

Generations of immigrants from all over Europe have contributed to the American tradition of cookies. Early Dutch settlers introduced their recipes for various types of koekje, Dutch for “little cake” (see BANKETBAKKERI), the name which needed only slight adaptation to become cookie. English, Scandinavian, German, and E. European settlers introduced numerous types of biscuit, including many which could be classed as cookies, and maintained their connection with feast days. Cookies were originally associated, in the USA, with New Year’s Day; references cited by Craigie and Hulbert (1938) from the early part of the 19th century show that cookies and cherry bounce (a cherry cordial) were the correct fare with which to greet visitors on that occasion, although already threatened “by plum-cake and outlandish liqueurs”, as one author put it.

The American habit of making up rolls of cookie dough and keeping them in the refrigerator or freezer may have come from Germany; the doughs for some German biscuits such as Heidesand are made into rolls and chilled before slicing. Pieces are sliced off and baked as required. These are often known as “icebox” cookies, and usually made from a rich creamed mixture. A type of icebox cookie has spread to the Chinese community; made from an almond-flavored creamed mixture, it is known as hsing jen ping. Fortune cookies, twists of plain dough which enclose slips of paper carrying prophecies, are a commercial invention of the Chinese community in N. America.

An alternative to recipes based on creamed doughs is provided by soft mixtures of a dropping consistency, used to make “drop cookies.”

Of the numerous recipes which have evolved in America, one of the best known is that for the chocolate chip, or Toll House cookie, which according to Mariani (1994) did not appear in recipe books until the 1930s; it was created by Mrs. Ruth Wakefield who owned the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts.

In Scotland the term “cookie” has been in use since around 1700, but the original meaning is uncertain. It now refers to a lightly enriched bread bun, which may be split and filled with cream, or ornamented with icing.

CANDY a term derived from the Arabic qandi, meaning a sugar confection. In the USA it is a general term for all SWEETS of all kinds; in Britain it is used in a more restricted range of meanings, notably to indicate sweetmeats coated or glazed with sugar. For candied fruit, peel, and vegetables, see under CANDIED FRUIT etc. There is a separate entry for SUGAR CANDY.

[The entry on CHOCOLATE is far too long to type up.]

CHRISTMAS FOODS [This one's a long one] include in virtually all Christian countries or communities provision for a main meal on Christmas Day, or Christmas Eve, which in turn incorporates a main dish which is symbolic of Christmas. This main dish is liable to change, the only constant factor being that it is perceived as “special.” Thus, the TURKEY which has during the 20th century provided the main dish for most families in England does not represent an antique tradition, for it was only in the 19th century that it began to replace the GOOSE; and there are signs that the reverse process may now be under way. There is a similar question mark over the traditional CHRISTMAS PUDDING, whose ancestry (as plum POTTAGE or plum PUDDING) can be traced back for many centuries but which in its present configuration and status can also be counted as mainly a product of the 19th century, and which may also yield ground in the coming millennium to lighter alternatives. In other countries it is possible to observe similar gradual evolutions, although what is subject to change may be quite different: a carp, for example, rather than a bird.

What is, however, relatively common ground and relatively unchanging is the seasonal frenzy of baking in most European countries, as households (one used to say housewives, but patterns of activity change) make a stock of special foods for the Christmas period.

Mention of the Christmas period is highly relevant because, although Christmas is often taken to mean Christmas Day plus perhaps Christmas Eve and what is called Boxing Day in England, its more extensive meaning covers a long period, beginning with Advent in early December and continuing to Twelfth Night on 6 January. It is this longer timespan for which the baking frenzy caters.

Many of the bakery products, such as English MINCE PIES, Scandinavian GINGER BISCUITS, and German LEBKUCHEN, are indeed consumed throughout the season. Others are kept for specific days, which vary from country to country. In the Netherlands, Germany, and C. Europe 6 December (St. Nicholas’s Day) is important; as is 13 December (St. Lucy) in Sweden; Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in Britain, the USA, France, and S. Europe; New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day in Scotland; and 6 January (Epiphany) in France, Spain, and Portugal.

Although Christmas is supposed to commemorate the birth of Christ, a number of important pagan festival which took place at midwinter have been incorporated. Their echoes still persist in the feasting, especially in the shapes of foods baked for this time of year.

All special breads made for Christmas involve doughs mixed with quantities of butter, eggs, and sugar. Many are spiced, or flavoured with lemon zest, and further embellished with nuts and dried or candied fruit.

In Switzerland and Germany on St. Nicholas’s Day the saint is thought to reward good children with sweets but punish bad ones with a switch. In the Netherlands his role is to deliver presents to children. For this day Swiss bakers make Weihnachtsmanner, Father Christmases, and Grittibanzen, dough men. Shaped from lightly enriched dough, they range from simple figures with currant eyes to ones carefully dressed in fringed scarves and jackets, carrying walking sticks. Gingerbread and honey cake mixtures are also made into men for autumn and midwinter festivals over most of N. Europe, including Britain. There are no records of these having been made in the Middle Ages, but Bachmann (1955) conjectures that they represent a winter god, and refers to gods modelled in dough, mentioned in the Norse sagas.

On the day of the Immaculate Conception (8 December) the inhabitants of Madeira bake their bolo de mel for the coming Christmas. This honey cake (now sweetened with molasses), heavy with walnuts, almonds, and candied peel, is leavened by a piece of dough from bread-baking. Any honey cakes left from the previous year are eaten up on this day.

In Sweden St Lucy’s Day is celebrated with rich saffron flavored buns. The dough is mixed with fruit, candied peel, and almonds, and shaped into plaits, crosses, and buns called Lussekatter, St. Lucy’s cats. Traditionally, one of the daughters of the house gets up to prepare a breakfast of these buns, and dresses in a long white robe with a crown of lingonberry twigs and lighted candles on her head to serve them.

As the season progresses other breads make their appearance especially on Christmas Day. In England, the “traditional” Christmas cake, a rich FRUIT CAKE, has largely usurped the place of sweet spiced and decorated fruit breads. These cakes, round and covered in marzipan and a thick layer of royal icing, are made well in advance.

Breads have also been replaced by rich cakes in France, where the bûche de Nöel, a roll of light SPONGE CAKE, is covered in chocolate or coffee buttercream textured to resemble bark. The conceit is carried further by mounding the cream over small pieces of cake stuck to the main roll, to represent the trimmed branches. The ends of the roll and the cut faces of the “branches” are finished with a vanilla cream, imitating pale newly cut wood, and the whole is decorated with leaves made from icing, or meringue mushrooms.

Christmas breads are part of the celebrations of Scandinavia. The Danish jukelage is a Christmas fruit loaf, lightly enriched, kneaded with candied fruit, and flavoured with lemon peel and cardamom, and candied fruit; julbröd is the Swedish name for a similar loaf. Various kinds of coffee bread and Wienerbrød (DANISH PASTRIES) are baked in special Christmas shapes such as stars. These share the table with a plethora of Christmas biscuits such as pepperkaker (ginger snaps) and peppernotter (ginger nuts). The Norwegian kransekake (garland cake) is made from a marzipan-like mixture of ground almonds, icing sugar, and egg white, gently heated, and made into rings in graduated sizes; up to 14 rings may be made, for which special tins are available.

C. Europe provides a wealth of breads. Some, such as KUGELHOPF (an Austrian favourite), are made throughout the year. Hutzelbrot, a heavily fruited and spiced bread, is sold at all the Advent markets which are a popular feature of Christmas in Germany. Swiss Christmas Birnbrot includes kirsch in its spiced pear filling, which is encased in a lightly sweetened and enriched dough. Tannenzapfen, “pine cone cake,” a Swiss Christmas speciality, is made from thin layers of sponge built up into the shape of a pine cone lying on its side, covered in coffee-flavoured buttercream, and stuck all over with split toasted almonds to resemble the scales on the cone. Dresden STOLLEN is one of the most famous German Christmas breads; plainer Stollen are also made, some aniseed flavoured, as are SPRINGERLE biscuits. German and Swiss bakers make lightly enriched doughs into intricate plaited shapes such as the Weinachtszopf, a straight plait with dried fruit; or crowns, wreaths, and stars for Christmas and New Year displays. The plaits are said originally to represent women’s hair cut off in sacrifice as part of mourning ritual (a custom observed through much of ancient Europe by the inhabitants of Greece and Rome, as well as the Germanic tribes). They are also very decorative shapes which show off a baker’s skill.

Baking is somewhat less important in Mediterranean countries, where nut and sugar confections such as nougat sustain the sweet toothed. However, the principal Italian festive bread, PANETTONE, is on sale everywhere at Christmas. Christopsomo, Greek Christmas bread, is rich, sweet, aniseed flavoured, and marked with a Greek (equal-armed) cross.

The Church celebrates 6 January as Epiphany, the day on which the Christ child was shown to the three Kings. This date is also Twelfth Night, the last of the twelve days of Christmas. It has inherited some of the pagan customs associated with Roman Saturnalia, and its cakes are of such interest that they have separate entries; see TWELFTH NIGHT CAKE and (for France and other Latin countries) galette des rois, see GALETTE.

—

So I hand-typed that. And it was a lot of typing. This is roughly one page worth of a roughly 900-page book, all of which is fantastic. I couldn’t recommend it more highly. I tend to bust it out when we have company over, to read the entry on FENNEL, or BRAISE, but it’s fun to just sit and read.

Really, it’s fantastic. And reading about all these spiced breads makes me hungry.  Mmmm.

Snow fell on our garden in December, leaving the dried corn stalks and withered tomato vines standing black on white like a pen-and-ink drawing titled Rest. I postponed looking at seed catalogs for awhile. Those of us who give body and soul to projects that never seem to end–child rearing, housecleaning, gardening–know the value of the occasional closed door. We need our moments of declared truce.

The farmers’ market closed for the year. We paid our last call to the vendors there, taking phone numbers and promising to keep in touch for all kinds of reasons: we would miss our regular chats; we would need advice about the Icelandic sheep we were getting in the spring; we might drive out sometimes to get winter greens from their cold frames. We stocked up on enough frozen meat to see us through winter, including a hefty leg of lamb for one of our holiday dinners.

The tunnel of winter had settled over our lives, ushered in by that great official Hoodwink, the end of daylight saving time. Personally I would vote for one more hour of light on winter evenings instead of the sudden extra-early blackout. Whose idea was it to jilt us in this way, leaving us in cold November with our unsaved remnants of daylight petering out before the workday ends? In my childhood, as early as that, I remember observing the same despair every autumn: the feeling that sunshine, summertime, and probably life itself had passed me by before I’d even finished a halfway decent tree fort. But mine is not to question those who command the springing forward and the falling back. I only vow each winter to try harder to live like a potato, with its tacit understanding that time is time, no matter what any clock might say. I get through the hibernation months by hovering as close as possible to the woodstove without actual self-immolation, and catching up on my reading, cheered at regular intervals by the excess of holidays that collect in a festive logjam at the outflow end of our calendar.

We are a household of mixed spiritual backgrounds, and some of the major holidays are not ours, including any that commands its faithful to buy stuff nobody needs. But we celebrate plenty. We give away our salsas and chutneys as gifts, and make special meals for family and friends: turkey and stuffing. Leg of lamb with mint jelly and roasted root vegetables tossed with rosemary and olive oil. For New Year’s Day, the traditional southern black-eyed peas and rice, for good luck. Always in the background, not waiting for a special occasion, is the businesslike whir of the bread-machine paddles followed by the aroma of Steven’s bread-of-the-day filling the whole house. We have our ways of making these indoor months a more agreeable internment.

—

This book was good, and a hard one for me to pick up. I love food, and increasingly I love books that challenge the way I approach food, and this book definitely did that. My life is better now for it.

To be completely honest, I should acknowledge that I don’t totally agree with Kingsolver’s approach to food (who agrees with anyone totally about anything, though, right?), and even if I did, I’m too much of a born-and-raised suburbanite to really forgo a whole world of long-distance produce (clementines at Christmastime?). All that said, this is a phenomenal read, with as much to say about how to live well and value life as it does about food and the eating of it.

All that and it’s fun, to boot. I love the way she treats Thanksgiving:

Wake up now, look alive, for here is a day off work just to praise Creation: the turkey, the squash, and the corn, these things that ate and drank sunshine, grass, mud, and rain, and then in the shortening days laid down their lives for our welfare and onward resolve. There’s the miracle for you, the absolute sacrifice that still holds back seeds: a germ of promise to do the whole thing again, another time.

Isn’t that just fantastic?

Anyway, I’ve been veering off course with my last bunch of entries, focusing more on what I think a lectionary should be than what I actually feel like reading this time of year (although those dictionary entries were spot on. damn, i love that stuff).

So here’s to keeping the faith with the rest of the series. Next up: Oxford Guide to Food on delicious goodies.