Okay, I’m off to finish my holiday prep (which include uncorking a bottle of wine much earlier than is considered decent. Whatever) but before I go, I want to direct you to this hilariously brillaint friend Ellen Meister — The Raving.

Listen, you know and I know that you are dying to know what I’ve been cooking up for the holidays. Well, wonder no more, my friends! Hot on the heels of my Thanksgiving success with The Bird, I’ve been cooking up a storm and today, I will treat you to an eye-stravaganza of tasty delights.

So these are the quiche I made for Allen Dean’s office “pot luck” yesterday. I have never made quiche before and I’ve never met anyone at his work. But did this stop me? Newp. I made one with fresh spinach and feta and the other with Grueyere, tomatoes and mushrooms.There was a bit left over last night and so I tested it. Not bad!

For some reason it was my mother’s tradition to make fish chowder for Christmas. Last week I made my first batch of the season (it’s already gone) and tomorrow I will make my second and final. Here are the various stages of chowder preparation.Not so appealing to look at, but tasty.

Cookies! I made a double batch of chocolate chip cookies using a recipe from The Joy of Cooking.
They are all gone. Why? Because Allen Dean and I oinked our way through them (actually, I gave some of them to some friends and some to my sister and her family–but we really did eat most of them).

This is not just any pie. It’s tortierre–a French Canadian meat pie. I cannot tell you the recipe because it was mother’s and top secret. I can tell you this, though, it has three different kinds of ground meat in it and I have spared you the photo I took of the meat boiling on the stove because it was gross and I feared you would think less of me and my pie. So I’m only offering the final product.

Okay, these final photos are of the orange rum cake with bittersweet chocolate glaze that I made last night. It is for Christmas dessert and I used more than the suggested amount of rum and so I figure that two days from now this stuff is going to be mighty potent.

Okay. So that’s it so far! I will be reporting back in on the rum cake and will have photos of Christmas dinner (Lamb!) and of Chef Bill‘s latkes from his Hanukkah party on Monday.

ooooh, read this please (it’s LOVELY): The Map, by Patry Francis.

My 2005 is ending with a lovely bang. I just found out that not only did I get 3rd place in the Night Train Yates Contest for my story “Freak Magnet” but I also got honorable mention for another story. Cool!

I am so happy! So very happy! Pour a glass of wine and celebrate with me please.

Thank you the wonderful people at Night Train and thank you Ed Falco, who judged the contest. You’ve made this writer extremely happy.

editing this: in my haste I forgot to congratulate the winner of the contest and the other finalists and mentions. Congratulations to all!

The Bat Segundo Show #16 is now live, featuring Aimee Bender:

Subjects Discussed: Attention to precision, Flann O’Brien, strange logic, Monty Python, first-person voice, Steve Erickson and The Black Clock, Jeffrey Eugenides, multiple personality disorder, grading papers, publishing short stories with dirty titles in literary journals, Prince, George Carlin’s seven words, sexual perversion, Mary Gaitskill, storming the gates of GQ, quotation marks, the visual quality of words, SAT words, the thematic components of three parts, literary Darwinism, evolutionary biology, playing God, setting limits, genetically based aesthetics, imagination vs. “hysterical realism,” verisimilitude, Robert Coover, mathematics, permission, fonts, and the short story vs. the novel.

Before I get too wrapped up in plans and company and cooking, here is something you must listen to/read. Click on this link and turn up your speakers if you’ve got them: A child’s Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas.

And now winter begins. I should feel bleak today. I should be thinking of death, the dead, but I don’t. I think of the bulbs below ground and the buds on the trees in just a few months (well, four or five months but let’s not quibble). My attempt at positivity. At believing that this is a day of rebirth instead of one of darkness. I need to hook into my Celtic roots and feel this.

I need to celebrate.

I didn’t take me long to find this web site with a bunch of cool solstice info (by the way, I should note that Summer Solstice is my favorite day of the year). Here’s my favorite bit:

You may have heard of apple wassailing, the medieval winter festival custom of blessing the apple trees with songs, dances, decorations and a drink of cider to ensure their fertility. Here’s another, more obscure tradition that most certainly predates Christmas, and was probably once a solstice ritual, because it is so linked to the themes of nature’s rebirth and fertility. In Romania, there’s a traditional Christmas confection called a turta. It is made of many layers of pastry dough, filled with melted sugar or honey, ground walnuts, or hemp seed. In this tradition, with the making of the cake families enact a lovely little ceremony to assure the fruitfulness of their orchard come spring. When the wife is in the midst of kneading the dough, she follows her husband into the wintry garden. The man goes from barren tree to tree, threatening to cut each one down. Each time, the wife urges that he spare the tree by saying:

“Oh no, I am sure that this tree will be as heavy with fruit next spring as my fingers are with dough this day.”

Happy solstice, everyone.

Two days ago I shoved my scale underneath the bathroom sink. It is unreachable and I have eaten three chocolate chip cookies so far this morning.

The temperatures are soaring into the mid-thirties and I’m thinking of spring, ground that it is not icy. Mud and tulips but it’s going to be winter in two more days.

Remember: once you get past that hump of the shortest day, then you get one more minute each evening (but still one less in the morning). Until somewhere around January 18th, when things even out and the day starts to expand. A minute less of dark in the morning, one minute more of light in the evening. The day stretches. There is light.

I can practically hear children screaming, laughing as they run through sprinklers.

Please pass the cookies.

Here’s the little tree we lit up at the end of our driveway. It looks a bit sad in this photo but it’s actually quite lovely to see against the dark woods at night. 

Got information about this literary travel business in email today and thought I’d share because it sounds like a cool idea for a trip: www.thewordtravels.com.

I would like to go on the Dylan Thomas Trail.

For the past several months, I’ve had the pleasure to work as the guest editor at my beloved SmokeLong Quarterly. Not only have I been fortunate enough to have been published in SmokeLong a couple of times but I count the editors there as artists I admire and as friends. My time working with them was delicious and I shall miss our interactions.

Today I am extremely proud to announce that the issue I worked on with the amazing SmokeLong staff is now live. Please allow me to present to you in all of its glory, SmokeLong Quarterly issue #11 and ask that you read each and every story along with their interviews. I promise you will not regret it.

Sorry I’ve been so quiet of late. I’d be seriously remiss, though, if I did not lead you in the direction of this amazing story: Electricity, by Mr. Jeff Landon, a writer whose great big heart inspires me.