A Citadel Christmas #2

The excitement for Christmas Day to arrive was so high that Dalton, Ceilidh and Meighan went to bed at 8:30 pm. In fact the whole family was in bed by then. If a wager were made as to who would wake up first, I would have put my money on the long shot, Ceilidh, because it was she who heard the reindeer on the roof and the heavy feet of Santa inside of the house.

She woke her parents and siblings at 1 am. .

Their family has a triple present tradition: opening the gifts Santa leaves under the tree; opening the gifts from friends and family; enjoying the present game with the guests when the meal is done.

I missed part one. I tell the kids that they can call me anytime they know Santa has arrived. Making that call is not even on their agenda Christmas day. Getting up at 1 am may be something that happens in other families. Christmas Eve it is hard to sleep.

The Johnson kids have premiere parents who allowed them the gift opening at that time of the morning/night. And then back to bed for the Johnsons where again in whose house, it was the night before Xmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring.

Dalton, up again at 7 am when I got there. Doral and Anita watched the kids open the gifts. I had my camera out for my second annual Christmas Day photo shoot, an hour an a half that charms me. My technique is improved this year. I figure out more quickly that the reason I can’t see through the viewfinder is that I have not yet taken the cap off of the lens. I know about that slight delay after the snap of the picture, the one that gives me the image of someone running in front of the camera instead of capturing the moment I thought I was seeing through in the frame.

And I am faster with other people’s shots – taking advantage of the moments when Anita poses the kids for their own Christmas morning staged picture, wishing I could capture Dalton’s voice on the picture where he uses ventriloquism to tell her that he can’t keep this smile on his face any longer without his face cracking. I did get a better shot than this one, but this is my favorite, for there Meighan is, scrunched down, being leaned on, but she knows to smile for just this minute and then the whole thing will be over with. I can almost hear the sigh in her head from the look on her face.

Doral assigned Ceilidh and me the punch, saying that since I put the Holiday Punch recipe on the blog, he thought we might be interested in that assignment. Ceilidh gave everyone their choice of drinks: Sprite, Coke, mango juice or our holiday punch of equal parts pineapple, orange and cranberry juice topped up with a splash of Fresca and floating cranberries. Anita provided the personalized ornaments on the stemware – everyone with their own sticker on the base of their glass, a sticker out of the craft box, an idea she picked up from a friend.

Ceilidh and I practiced offering beverages – next year we will be as good as waitresses, add more choices, perhaps even a slice of lime in the Coke, or making the mango juice seem preferable , or at least a choice, for at the end of the evening, that lid hadn’t even been cracked on that bottle.

I had to ask Anita about the different shapes of my own stemware, why one seemed taller and and other more bowl shaped. She explained that we were drinking from a bowl shaped glass, know as a red wine glass and that the elongated shaped vessel was for white wine. That is the moment when the penny dropped for me: why I was so confused when the red wine glasses I purchased at London Drugs turned out to be clear.

Doral was reading the instructions on how to put the turkey in the portable roaster. “Use it only 3 times a year,” he said, “and you have to read the instructions every time. Shortly he had the ham in the oven, was mashing the potatoes and adding cream, butter and garlic to them. “Ten pounds of potatoes is too much for this small crowd,” Anita had told him, but it was hard for Doral to stop and peeling and mashing and adding the cream, butter and garlic. He finished by saying, “Next year I am really going to remember Duncan’s allergies and leave out the dairy.

“We are going to be meat eaters today,”articulated Steve.

I didn’t write about Duncan’s Christmas meal, since seeing a picture of his plate will be enough evidence for the reader of this blog. One sweet potato! Duncan and Dalton had not plated up when all of us were satiated and wishing we had eaten less.

“You didn’t call us,” they said. “We kept playing.”

There were olives stuffed with cheese, stove top dressing, salads, sweet potoatoes, soft buns, crusty buns and juice au turkey.

On the red cabbage salad topped with blue cheese and toasted pecans recipe, I must write that 4 cups of red cabbage might be enough for 100 people if it is served on Christmas day. I heard Doral saying he has something he must remember for next year as well. In the grand scheme of things, it may be next year when he remembers what it was that he was supposed to remember from last year. I, on the other hand, will have the note on my recipe, but will not be able to find the recipe again.

Snacks of Cheesies, chips, orange-chocolate, and bridge mix were on every table. Anita’s community cookie exchange was evident on the tray of assorted cookies: rum balls, Nanaimo squares, hermits, cherry-topped whipped shortbread, a shortbread Score-filled square and her own individual cherry-topped cheese cake.

I heard Ceilidh tell Rebecca, “My mom made these and they were a lot of work – she made them with love.”

Anita said that she started out to make four dozen but ended up with 7 dozen. The recipe is a Treleaven family treasure and on the phone Shirley told Anita the biscuit that forms the bottom of the cheesecake fits into the bottom of the small paper cup. Anita didn’t know until too late for her to return to the store, that she had purchased the mini-small paper cups, so the part Ceilidh described about the confection being a lot of work, was that Anita spent a lot of time cutting down the biscuit so that it would fit the bottom of the mini paper cup.

I ate seven of them – after finishing off my entrée which was spilling over the edges of my dinner plate.

I asked Kelve at what age he thinks it is that the meal on Christmas day, trumps the gift-getting. Food was the further topic of conversation at our table. We rehearsed the scene we all remember from Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, the place where Scrooge throws down a shilling to the boy who goes to fetch the turkey for the Cratchet family, for that is the scene where some of us get our first reference to Camden town which you might want to follow below.

'What's to-day, my fine fellow?' said Scrooge.

'To-day?' replied the boy. 'Why, Christmas Day.'

'It's Christmas Day!' said Scrooge to himself. 'I haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!'

'Hallo!' returned the boy.

'Do you know the Poulterer's, in the next street but one, at the corner?' Scrooge
inquired.

'I should hope I did,' replied the lad.

'An intelligent boy!' said Scrooge. 'A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they've sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there - Not the little prize Turkey: the big
one?'

'What, the one as big as me?' returned the boy.

'What a delightful boy!' said Scrooge. 'It's a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck.'

'It's hanging there now,' replied the boy.

'Is it?' said Scrooge. 'Go and buy it.'

'Walker!' exclaimed the boy.

'No, no,' said Scrooge, 'I am in earnest. Go and buy it, and tell them to bring it here, that I may give them the directionwhere to take it. Come back with the man, and I'll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than five minutes and I'll give you half-a-crown.'

The boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.

'I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's!' whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. 'He shan't know who sends it. It's twice the size of Tiny Tim. Joe Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob's will be!'

The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down-stairs to open the street door, ready for the coming of the
Poulterer's man. As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker caught his eye.

'I shall love it, as long as I live!' cried Scrooge, patting it with his hand. 'I scarcely ever looked at it before. What an honest expression it has in its face. It's a wonderful knocker. Here's the Turkey. Hallo! Whoop! How are you? Merry Christmas!'

It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped them short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.

'Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town,' said Scrooge. 'You must have a cab.'

The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried

Did anyone else play the present game at their house? Steve opened the first gift – a re-cycling of Mr. Krueger’s Christmas.

A new chamois “as-seen-on-TV” cycled around the room, the Carter-Johnson’s hoping that they would end up with it so that they would wipe Kiwi’s feet with it when she comes out of the shower.Lots of movies were in the game this year. And a super-warm fleece blanket. Among other gifts, I broke home a tool belt -- suede -- very nice to go with my new hobby, and a vegetable chopper, tried out right away by Duncan and Dalton.

Fourteen people present, sixteen gifts and a new opportunity. After the last of the fourteen of us opened our gifts and made our willing and unwilling exchanges, there were still 2 opportunities left for exchanges for the unknown gifts at the centre of the room.

I had a note from Martin Lingenauber, who reminded me that his favorite part of Christmas last year at Citadel Crest Heath was the family present game. We have been playing it for a long time, haven’t we?

My all-time favorite parlor game has no name. I got to play it again on Christmas day, since 4the Settlers Game crowd wasn’t there. I learned the loose rules of my game from Catherine and Eric Jarvis. Everyone writes on pieces of scrap paper, as many words as they can think of – ones their team are going to say, once they are coached with hints, clues or definitions of the word. So, it was the Carter-Johnsons (Steve, Rebecca and Alex) vs the Johnsons (Arta, Kelvin and Matiram Poon).

“We shall win,” I taunted the other side, “for I have a medical doctor and Dr. Dictionary on my side.

“We shall see,” said the other side.

Sometimes the words in the pot are so difficult that we have to find out afterwards, whose idea that word was. My personal favorite was Ceilidah’s entry “p,b & j”. She had missed the early part of the game where I explained, no acronyms, no proper nouns. I had no idea she might want to play, but she joined us half way through the game, so we began to print instead of use cursive style writing. Her mom coached here when the words were too hard. She rose to the task of being one of the top scorers.

Alex was right when he said that what was written on the paper didn’t make that much sense to him. His team called out to him, “Give us something it rhymes with, because that one-minute time frame to get as many definitions out of your mouth as possible, needs to be used up in productive ways. Alex could only think of his dog’s name as a rhyming word, so he shouted out, Kiwi. From that clue Rebecca guessed “peanut butter and jelly [sandwiches] “.

How is that for a family who works together to whip the other side with their good answers. Rebecca frames the talent as their family’s random OCD-ness.

To Alex’s a-typical clue, “Something that lives on the side of your head,” came the answer, an ear. Later in the game, a word that seemed impossible to get kept being tossed back into the bowl of words. Kelvin had tried to get at it with out team: “a period of time”, “time in the past” and whatever specific time period I tried to give him (the Renaissance, Medieval, the Romantics, the Puritans) , I could not get the right answer to his clue.

When Alex picked out the same word, he gave the clue again “something that lives on the side of your head”, which we all knew by that time was the signal for the word ear to be called out again. Still we could not get at the mystery word, which turned out to be era, the letters of ear scrambled.

Into the game was inserted the longest word in the English language which the Carter-Johnsons can all spell, pronounce and define. Do not take them on as a team unless you are prepared to face defeat. Oh yes, for next time, the longest non-technical word in the English language is … Floccinaucinihilipilification: Defined as "the act or habit of estimating as worthless" by the Oxford English Dictionary, this 29-letter mouthful is perhaps the longest non-technical word to appear in a dictionary. Read more about long words on Ciffsnotes.

When we took our early morning ride to Citadel Crest Heath, I drove along John Laurie, enjoying the Christmas-day beauty of Nose Hill, the low prairie grasses speckled with snow, dark lines in the snow where hikers had criss-crossed paths on the hills, the groups of sledders keeping their balance while pulling their new toboggans up steeper knolls.

On our way home we slipped down 14th Street passed the “The Lion’s Club Festival of Lights” where the lights are turned on from 7 to 10 pm every night from Nov 28th to the end of December. We used the sidewalk lane dedicated to slow driving vehicles. Some families were out of their cars and walking down through the coulee’s, getting up closer to the light displays: Christmas written in many languages, a cowboy Christmas by an open campfire, the skeletons of tee pee poles lit up, and a locomotive, representing the coming of the RR to Alberta.

When we were unpacking our boxes to come inside, I could hear carolers singing outside of the back door of the house next door.

On my wall is the Johnson Family 2010 magnetic calenda, a gift from Anitar: the picture of the wedding in one corner; Catherine’s genealogy tree in another and all of us in a picture at the bottom. A miracle, all together in the same spot on the same day. A look at the calendar reveals Xavier, hand in pocket, standing on one foot; Dalton with his arms around Tom and Duncan, the flower girls in mauve dresses, David in a purple shirt

A moment of happiness for all of us.

Arta