David's Daily Diversions

Texas Christmas in England

While I'm sitting here blogging away, Mrs H is working hard on preparing a Texas Christmas. I didn't ask her to do this. I think she is dually motivated by our absence from the Lone Star State and a desire to create/incorporate some Christmas traditions into our nuclear family.

The only thing she hasn't been able to get ahold of is tamales. Growing up, we always had tamales for Christmas Eve. That's because growing up my mother always had tamales on Christmas Eve. We are having taco soup, which was incorporated into my family at some point, though I can't remember exactly when.

Christmas dinner will be turkey and cornbread dressing, giblet gravy (or gut gravy as we call it), olives stuffed with cream cheese, fruit salad, layered salad, and green bean casserole. The turkey, dressing, and olives are the most important bits. We are also having pumpkin pie and my favourite cherry pie. The cherry pie is a bakeless concoction of cherry pie filling, Cool Whip (or in our present situation, real double cream), sweetened condensed milk, and lemon juice (as a setting agent). In this country the crust is made of digestive biscuits and butter, as you can't get Graham cracker crust. It is a bit rich. I could eat the whole pie. In fact, when I was a bachelor I occasionally made this pie for myself and it would last a couple of days.

All of the chocolate chip peanut butter cookies and pecan tassies have been made. There are other traditional cookies that could be made, but I have discouraged Mrs H from making too many, as she is already doing a lot.

I should mention I'm not just leaving Mrs H to slave away in the kitchen. Besides watching the sprog, and trying to keep him out of trouble, I did offer to cut up the green onions, but Mrs H refused my offer of assistance.