A Meal for Thanks

Thanksgiving marks the start of the holiday cooking season for me, and much like Christmas, means an entire day spent in the kitchen--but with rewards well worth it when all the loads of dishes have been done and the leftovers stowed away in the fridge.  And Thanksgiving truly makes for a meal of thanks when shared with family.

This year's menu included several new dishes along with traditional favorites; without further ado, here's what we served at Chateau Papillon for Thanksgiving 2010:

Home-baked garlic, herb, and cheese bread--the first dish I prepared, as I fired up the oven at 8:30am to warm and proof the dough, with the loaves going in around noon.  Other than needing to measure the ingredients by weight, this is an easy bread for any kitchen, and one which can be tinkered with to no end (for example, I change the herbs, add cheese, and replace some of the flour with whole wheat flour)

Fresh green beans, blanched and served in olive oil and salt.  This was the quickest dish to prepare; just snap the ends off the beans, dump in boiling water for 5 minutes, strain, and drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt (kosher salt's big flakes work best).

Sweet potato casserole.  This was one of my "experimental" dishes for the year, despite the traditional theme: in addition to the mashed sweet potatoes, I added a banana, a half pound of cream cheese, a beaten egg, brown sugar, a bit of flour, and seasoned with vanilla, curry powder, garam masala, cinnamon, freshly-ground nutmeg, and allspice... all topped with some marshmallows.  I have to say that it came out fantastically well--the banana and the curry really worked.

Stuffing: the only mostly-store-bought course, as I used a blend of dried cornmeal croutons and cranberry stuffing mix, with the added flavor of a splash of chicken broth and Irish whiskey.  (Everything is better with a little Irish whiskey.)

Baked apples: layers of butter alternated with Granny Smith apple slices, each topped with cinnamon, allspice, Chinese five spice powder, and a dash of cayenne pepper--and with ample brown sugar to keep it sweet, and just a splash of Meyer lemon juice to keep the apples from browning.

Skin-on mashed garlic and goat cheese red potatoes.  Nothing else to be said, really--just good eats.

Brined roasted turkey.  I only get real, homemade oven-roasted turkey twice a year, and look forward to Thanksgiving for the eleven long months after Christmas.  This year, I brined in a mixture of apple cider, kosher salt, brown sugar, candied ginger, black mustard seed, cloves, allspice berries, and peppercorns, then stuffed the turkey with apples, onion, cinnamon, along with some rosemary and sage straight from the garden and a bit of thyme from the supermarket--and a few springs of our curry plant.

The turkey drippings went straight into the saucier my mother-in-law P.A.T. gave me earlier this year, stirred into a butter-and-flour roux with a bit of salt, pepper, thyme, and a splash of Irish whiskey (remember what I said about Irish whiskey a minute ago?).  This was hands-down the best gravy I've ever made.  Let me share a secret to gravy making: start with a roux--melt 2-3 tablespoons of butter and whisk in 2 tablespoons of flour, then cook the resulting paste briefly.  The darker the roux, the more the flavor... but the less the thickening power, so for something with a lot of flavor to begin with like turkey gravy, cook only until the butter develops a nutty aroma.  Then, gradually whisk in the turkey drippings, season, and keep whisking until thickened--you'll let it come to a boil and cook on for a few minutes, then cool.  No canned gravy at Chateau Papillon, and no broth needed with such fantastic turkey drippings.

Chubb Mom made a course of her grandmother's rolls--yes, we already had bread, but rolls are a tradition, and I insisted.

For our resident fish-eating-vegetarian, I baked some Chilean Sea Bass--a course we've had three times in the past week (!!) but nonetheless an absolutely fantastic dish, and one of the simpler ones to make.  Put the fish, skin-side down, into a baking dish, top with mango sea salt and a few pats of butter, and roast at 390 degrees for 35 minutes or so until nice and golden on top.  Voila!

Finally, for dessert, I took advantage of Costco having both Meyer lemons and Cara-cara blood oranges.  In one of the more involved dishes of the day, I  baked a homemade graham cracker crust: I used a package of stale, broken grahams, tossed in the blender with some vanilla sugar and an unhealthy bit of butter--then pressed into the pie pan and baked for 10 minutes or so.  Ten or twelve lemons juiced and zested went into the custard base, along with a half dozen eggs, a lot of vanilla sugar, cornstarch, and some butter for richness... all then put over the bain marie until thickened sufficiently to go into the crust and bake until set.  After it cooled, I topped with homemade whipped cream (heavy cream, vanilla sugar, and Grand Mariner liquor) and blood orange segments.  The orange wedges made a big difference and added a light, juicy texture to each otherwise-heavy bite.  In the end, the pie tasted a bit like a good key lime pie, taking advantage of the Meyer lemon's cross between lemons and tangerines.

My mom put together no-bake pumpkin turtle pie as well at my dad's request, using a store-bought (blasphemous!) graham cracker crust, canned pumpkin, Cool Whip (I offered to fold in my real whipped cream--to no avail), vanilla pudding, caramel sauce, and pecans.  I did, however, manage to slip in some extra seasoning, including Irish whiskey (!), allspice, and Chinese five spice powder.  I couldn't find the mace, or that would have gone in, too.

Overall, I used the better part of six sticks of butter and did five (soon to be six) loads of dishes as I cleaned up as I prepped and cooked throughout the day.  But it was worth it--Thanksgiving does come only once a year, after all.

Equipping a Young Padawan: Homemade Christmas Gifts for 3-Year-Olds

My three year old nephew Iain has embraced Star Wars rather eagerly: goose-stepping to "The Imperial March" and re-enacting Luke Skywalker's amputation scene from The Empire Strikes Back, and he's able to name any of the dozens of figures both vintage and modern at a glance.  And we make a lot of the gifts for family each year.  Put those together, and a natural Christmas present for this young Padawan was a hand-crafted Jedi outfit.

Several years ago, I re-taught myself how to sew when I made for myself a Jedi costume, and though it's been a couple of years since I last used either the serger or the sewing machine, I dug both out to put together Iain's gift.

I ran into a problem finding a pint-sized pattern and ended up going with an adult one, trimming an extra three or four inches from the dimensions of the extra-small size.  Back when I sewed much more often, I picked up a remnant of a nice Jedi-esque fabric, which though a bit difficult to work with, ended up looking great in the costume--and which emptied out one more bit of the many storage bins in our basement.

Using the serger made the costume something which will stand up to the many trips through the washing machine necessitated by the day-to-day wear and tear of a three-year-old, and I do have to say I did a fine job overall on the outfit: Iain's dad Wayne asked where I'd bought it.  I need to touch things up with a couple of darts in the back to take in a bit of excess size in the shoulders, and I didn't get the obi finished yet as I couldn't find my good loop-turner (the plastic belt Iain's wearing came from a Star Wars toy set I found when cleaning out our storage unit), but overall, I think the Padawan's ready to take up lessons in light saber and the ethics of the light side / dark side dichotomy, don't you?

Conjuring Some Happy Travel Memories: Biscoff Cookies Rule!

Given the frustrations of the knee-jerk security shenanigans going on in the United States at the moment amidst the attempted bombing of an airliner, I wanted to think some "happy travel thoughts." So I dug out a few items from my travel shoebox, like the United p.s. business class menu, 1K drink "chits," boarding passes, and my iPod and the Bose QC2 noise cancelling headphones Beth gave me several years ago for Christmas.

But perhaps the best happy travel memory is evoked by a gift from Beth's mom this year: several packages of Biscoff cookies.  Just about anyone who's flown has to have had one of these crispy, cinnamony crackers at some point, and for me they really put me in the mood for flying.  Thanks to P.A.T.'s thoughtful gift, I can enjoy that bit of travel nostalgia without having to go through the hassles of airport security and weather delays!

Christmas Day Is Here (and Cookies, Too!): The Many Days of Christmas, Day Four

Christmas Day is here at last--and to be honest, a few days too soon given the state of our holiday preparations (with decorations still unfinished, many a gift yet to be wrapped, and even some family presents sitting unmade and on the proverbial drawing board). But here nonetheless, and in-between visits from friends--Gina and Todd dropped off a bit of holiday cheer and had coffee--and trips over to a couple of the neighbors to deliver some edible gifts, we managed to unwrap a few more of our own presents.

We're very focused on the garden and landscape here at Chateau Papillon (a fact of which if you've read this blog from the springtime onward you're probably quite cognizant), so several of the items on my Amazon "wish list" had a garden theme to them. Books, yes, of course, and those already have Beth and I dreaming of warmer weather and the yard tasks ahead once Old Man Winter passes along his way, but also some practical tools, like the Fiskars hedge shears which filled that tall box I'm pictured with to the left, a gift from Beth's mom which will be put to great use.

I also opened another of the presents from Beth, which was beautifully wrapped in rice paper she'd been saving for years from her grandmother. Inside were many equally-beautiful gifts, all of them brassy little yard implements for the fairy-mansion-to-be, like a little picket fence; watering can; several miniature pots; and a birdhouse, bird bath, and planter all on little stakes to go around the fairies' yard.

We also finally got to the making of a batch of Christmas cookies, though using a box of vanilla sugar cookie mix via Costco instead of the scratch recipe in our family cookbook (the latter requires the dough chill for several hours before working). The Costco mix, though very tasty, isn't the best for cutting & baking shapes, but we did end up with several Papillon-shaped cookies (both dogs and butterflies), a Dachshund, Christmas trees, snowflakes, dog bones, and for the daydreams of a more tropical holiday, a palm tree and pink flamingo:

We also finally opened the gifts from Beth's brother, sister-in-law, and their kids, Ferris and Amelia, revealing two hand-decorated plates from the kids:

Also, we did at long last sit down to watch It's a Wonderful Life, a holiday tradition we both enjoy (and one which I introduced Beth to; growing up, we typically had it on while baking our cookies on Christmas Eve). I'll have to do a separate post about the film, which despite my non-religious perspective I find to be one of the most inspirational (and in fact, among the best overall) films made.

Christmas Eve & A Minor Camera Disaster: The Many Days of Christmas, Day Four

Christmas Eve is here at last, and that means a couple more presents to open for each of us as we draw out our holiday celebrations over a span of several days due to time constraints. On her lap (along with the Papillons and the blanket my parents gave her), in the photo above Beth holds up two more gifts from "her sweet Gibbie-goo." As usual, I tried to craft some interesting labels: I packaged LOST Season 1 on Blu-Ray (reusing wrapping paper and ribbon from earlier gifts!) with a label indicating it was from "philosophers and airlines"--references to the characters John Locke, Danielle Rousseau, Desmond Hume, and so forth, and of course the dramatic airline crash that started the entire series.

Continuing the theme she started with the fairy house book she gave me on our first day of Christmas, Beth gave me a set of fairy house windows--we're going to be busy in the springtime building a miniature fairy mansion out in the backyard, that's for sure! (This does make some sense, really; we're trying to build a "fairy path" in the garden, and Beth gave me a little planter and several alpine plants to create a "fairy garden" for our anniversary this past year, too.)

Amidst the Yuletide cheer, I did discover an unfortunately expensive habit from Mr. Parker, though. When I went to pick up my camera and flash, the power pack was no longer connected to the flash. That's right: Mr. Parker chewed through the cord that connects my Canon CP-E4 flash power pack to the flash, and unfortunately chewed through it right at the cord strain reliever on the side of the power pack (so no chance of soldering the cord back together for temporary use). That's a pricey piece of equipment even from big photo equipment wholesalers like Adorama and B&H, running in the neighborhood of $150 (the power pack was itself originally a Christmas gift two years ago from my mother-in-law).

The local camera shop, Penn Camera, fortunately had a replacement in stock and was open until 6:00pm despite it being Christmas Eve, but it set me back over $180 (ouch!). Problem is that I really needed that power pack to do my holiday photo shoots over the next few days, and there was no way it would get here from Amazon or any of the wholesalers in time. I'll probably order a replacement cord from Canon and repair the original, then e-Bay it to recoup some of the cost (I should be able to get $120 or so on e-Bay; used professional-grade camera gear sells for nearly the new cost most of the time--minus whatever Canon charges for the replacement cable, of course).

Mr. Parker has also apparently partially chewed through a couple of laptop power cords; he must like the low voltage shock on his gums or something (he's never tried to chew on a 120V cable, fortunately--and that's something we've got to nip in the bud right now!).

Good thing I got the replacement power pack, though, or I'd have missed this incredibly cute photo of Chance as he "breakdanced" on his pink bed with his "early," a small pink squeaky toy. I managed to get four or five photos in sequence, all of them keepers--without that flash power pack, I'd have gotten one, maybe two, as I'd have had to wait for the flash to recharge much longer between shots.

While I was out driving Beth to one of her petsitting appointments, I had time to pick up the flash power pack and even drop off a few holiday gifts for friends (Bon Bon du Papillon--I'll have to blog about those confections later...). Unfortunately, no time this evening to make Christmas cookies (sorry, Santa!), nor to watch our holiday favorite It's a Wonderful Life, but given we're spreading the holidays out, I suppose that's okay, too.

Enjoying the Gifts One At a Time: The Many Days of Christmas, Day Three

We're not yet even to Christmas Eve, but Beth and I have had three days now of opening a couple of gifts each night as we simply won't have much free time on Christmas itself. Don't get me wrong: it's not like we had truckloads of gifts which we're flaunting at the less-fortunate; we did have some overly-generous family members--you know who you are--but have been opening and savoring our gifts one at a time, rather than tearing through them all in a matter of minutes as children seem so wont to do.

Today's gifts brought a bluebird house from Beth, along with several CDs, books, and DVDs from our families. Not to mention the plush blanket from my parents to Beth, which the Papillons are certainly enjoying.

Green Is a Christmas Color: Recycling and Reusing the Wrapping

For those of us with an environmental bent, the Christmas season can pose something of a serious challenge: how to deal with the waste generated by all that pretty wrapping paper! According to this article, Americans generate 4 million tons of trash annually from shopping bags and wrapping paper. That's some serious trash! I can recall when growing up, the whole family would open gifts, and we'd fill up two large trash bags or more just with our wrapping cast-offs.

For someone like me who tries to recycle every scrap of paper--from reusing pages from the printer by virtue of the second side for things like printed coupons to tearing the plastic address windows out of junk mail and adding the envelopes to the recycling bin--all that gift wrapping does amount to a green conundrum. I love wrapping gifts, putting together just the right combination of color and accents to make the packaging as nice as the present itself--but I don't like waste, either.

We've kept ribbons and other decorations for several years now; in fact, we had two entire moving boxes full of saved (and at least once-used) ribbons in the basement, and I found another box when we cleaned out our storage unit. We also have saved away scraps of some of our favorite wrapping papers each year.

This holiday season, we've both put our saved paper and ribbon to good use, using it to wrap many of the gifts we're giving each other and our friends and families. I found several bins of decorative accoutrements like boughs of imitation holly and frost-rimed winter "berries" that we'd picked up at Boxing Day clearances at Michael's and other crafty shops--bins I want to empty out and be done with! (We've much better things to store away, after all.)

Too, spreading out our Christmas over a period of several days has allowed us to reuse the same wrapping paper on several gifts, as some are opened and others wrapped: for example, I reused the same metallic red paper (which would be tough to recycle in the bin, too) on three separate packages for Beth--a smaller one each time, yes. Scraps which are too small, are ripped, or which have too many creases end up wadded up as surrogate tissue paper to pad other presents.

Though it makes it easier to guess the contents of wrapped packages, we've also gone with more "direct wrapping," where the gift itself is wrapped without being placed into a larger box. Oddly-shaped items can be fun this way, like the Vanilla Bean Noel lotion from Bath & Body: directly wrapped, it looks a bit like a piece of cylindrical candy. For those items requiring a box, we've saved Amazon and other small cardboard boxes expressly for that purpose.

So, we're able to enjoy the holidays and keep them green; so far, I think we've filled less than 1/10th of a trash can despite unwrapping about a dozen gifts each.

Christmas Dinner (Three Days Early): The Many Days of Christmas, Day Two

Day Two of the Christmas cheer at Chateau Papillon kicked off with more presents and our traditional Christmas dinner, only three days ahead of schedule.

Since Beth is a vegetarian and I do most of the cooking at Chateau Papillon, it's not that often that I get to enjoy a holiday treat like turkey, stuffing, and gravy, so understandably I look forward to the holiday feast-days, and with them the scent of turkey in the air and dreams of days of turkey salad, turkey soup, reheated turkey and gravy, and so forth. I'm like the dad in A Christmas Story, and we even have our own "Bumpus Hounds," albeit pint-sized versions of them--Didi did manage to snag a chunk of turkey breast two years ago (she got to the turkey even though it was sitting at counter-height!).

When it comes to cooking at Chateau Papillon, Beth is my she's my sous-chef, if one who can't be trusted with typical sous-cheffery like prepping the vegetables due to my fears she'd lop off a fingertip with her knife "skills." Nonetheless, she's invaluable in providing an extra set of hands--don't let me sell her short.

Together, then, we prepared our feast. Actually, I started the day before, brining the turkey by a method based on Alton Brown's recipe. Believe me, brining makes for the absolute best turkey by far, much better (and safer) than methods like deep frying. After defrosting the bird, it goes in a cooler with a mixture of salt, vegetable broth, sugar, several seasonings (allspice, ginger, peppercorn, etc.), and this year, apple cider. This stands overnight (at a minimum!), kept well-refrigerated, then after rinsing off the brine, I stuff the turkey's cavity with apples, onions, rosemary, thyme, sage, and a cinnamon stick or two, and into the oven it goes.

After roasting, the turkey drippings come out and form the basis of a fantastic gravy--and if you know how, gravy is incredibly easy to make: you simply start with a roux of melted butter stirred and lightly cooked with an equal portion of sifted flour, then gradually whisk in the turkey drippings and cook until thickened. I like to finish the gravy with a splash of good cream sherry or perhaps some Irish whiskey, but the drippings themselves are so flavorful there's no need to add additional seasoning.

For Beth, I prepared a fillet of Chilean Sea Bass (MSC certified for the sustainable fishing folks amongst us) by pan-frying it after crusting with some panko and Parmesan cheese, then finishing it in the oven until cooked through. Yes, the vegetarian eats fish... though it took me years of wheedling and a Faustian bargain to myself eschew fois gras to accomplish that culinary upgrading. As sides, we had goat cheese and garlic mashed potatoes, fresh French-style green beans with a splash of olive oil and pepper, a sweet potato casserole I made up on the fly, and stove-top (not the brand, but the method) stuffing. Normally, I'd bake up some rolls from scratch, but due to time constraints, we went with a loaf of ciabatta from Whole Foods.

A nice muscadette from California (a fairly sweet white wine) finished things off.

Before I get into Round Two of presents, let me pause to point out the photo opening this post, which shows Beth enjoying the fimo clay owl figurine I brought back from Denver International Airport earlier this fall. Now, onto a second night of presents being unwrapped: above, you'll see me and Mr. Parker with a big, heavy package from Beth, which turned out to be a laptop stand--basically, a tray table designed for use with a laptop; quite a nice and very thoughtful gift indeed!

Beth's presents from me included an aged brass night light cut with a butterfly (or Papillon, if you will) design, which I picked up at the Elkhorn Slough gift shop out in the Monterey area earlier this year while birding. I also gave her a DVD of Point Break, a film Beth had mentioned as a favorite every time she watched Hot Fuzz (recall the many scenes where Nick Frost's character quotes American action-cop films, even reenacting the shooting-into-the-air scene from Point Break at one point...).

Onward the holidays march--what gifts might we unwrap next?

Ringing in the Yuletide: The Many Days of Christmas, Day One

For several years, we've toyed with the idea of juggling the holidays a bit and celebrating our Christmas on a date other than 12/25. When you have relatives living in three different states, that can make enjoying the holidays with each group--as well as having time for ourselves--a daunting bit of scheduling wizardry.

Because we have young nieces and nephews on each side of the family, too, that means we're almost certainly on the road come Christmas Day itself--and now that Beth is working her petsitting business, she's of course got many a booking for the most traditional of celebratory dates.

One date that always appealed to both of us was the Winter Solstice. Our wedding anniversary is exactly six months earlier, on the Summer Solstice (most years, anyway), and after all, the holiday season predates Christian times significantly: most civilizations throughout history have marked the longest night of the year and the coming of longer days with celebration. (Don't forget that based on the Bible, Jesus' birth would not have been remotely near December 25th--all Bill O'Reilly's protests aside, it's a historical fact that the Christian church set the date of Christmas deliberately to coincide with existing "pagan" celebrations like Yule and Saturnalia, so how about we put the Saturn back in Saturnalia for a change?)

So we made 12/21 our day of "Collation," which is a ritual Beth's family brought to the holidays based in some sort of Catholic tradition. Collation includes an evening (usually Christmas Eve) of feasting, for us usually hors d'oeuvres such as my Carta di Musica crispy flatbread and various cheeses accompanied by some wine and a few snackable sweets. Both my family and Beth's also have a practice of getting a Christmas Eve present (an "early" in the Foutz/Bottom family canon) or two, so we decided to exchange a few of our gifts on the Winter Solstice in addition to the meal.

Of course, the Papillons always love gifts and couldn't quite understand that the presents exchanged were for us and not them; they were understandably interested in each package we chose to open.

The evening's gifts included a new burr coffee grinder for Beth (the "coffee slut" if you believe the t-shirt I gave her a couple of Christmases ago), along with a beautiful handmade clay owl I bought from one of my favorite stores in the Denver airport, Colorado Collection--the latter in and of itself a holiday tradition going on five or six years now for me. (In fact, I made a trip connecting through Denver in November entirely so that I could visit the shop for this year's gifts!) Beth gave me a book on fairy houses for our garden, along with a more practical gift in the form of a pocket-lined bedskirt to get our shoes and the like in order.

We've left plenty more gifts for each other for the days to come, as we do indeed expect to celebrate the many days (if not twelve) of Christmas this year.

Decking the Halls, Part 2: The White Tree

Though the week after Thanksgiving kept both Beth and me pretty busy with the gifts we were making (one of which I'd sworn to finish early enough to avoid having to pay expedited processing and express shipping fees on...), we did get back into the holiday decorating mood come the weekend.

For our second Christmas tree, we pulled out one which we hadn't gotten a chance to use since either 2003 or 2004: the white tree. I'd picked this one up several years ago at Wal-Mart on Boxing Day (when I used to brave the crowds to snatch up deeply-discounted wrapping paper, light sets, and other leftover holiday goodies), and it's been a family favorite ever since. Even our kitties loved the tree; I have photos somewhere of Moon and Neptune both perched within its branches at my townhouse in Blacksburg.

Problem is, it's massive. Though "only" a 6.5' tall tree, it's really rather wide at the base, and in our pre-decluttered days at Chateau Papillon, we simply didn't have the space to put it up. We started to put this one in our library, where the colors would work well with the teal walls and natural-tone bookshelves, but after playing the game of matching branch tip colors to the sockets on the pole, it was pretty clear the tree just wouldn't fit in the Libris Lepidoptera. Even moving it up into one of the corners and thus blocking access to several shelves of books didn't do much good; the tree simply dominated the space, with its size seeming to halve the room.

We debated several alternate locations for the tree before settling on the dining room, where we'd placed an even older (and much more slender) tree last year in one corner. After rearranging the dining room table and cleaning up several boxes of junk that had been piled next to the china cupboard for an entire year, we had the space we needed.

A few years ago, I had picked up several sets of blue LED lights after Christmas, intended for this tree but used for the first time this year. Like the Hokie Tree, several sets of colored C7s and C9s gave way to energy-efficient LEDs, and personally, I like the intense blue and white colors better than the blue incandescents we'd used previously (though that leaves us with an entire box of blue lights in need of new homes... Goodwill or Freecycle, anyone?).

Next up: a tree for the library; I found a nice, skinny black tree on Wal-Mart's Web site which we're trying to track down in stores.

Decking the Halls, Part 1: Hokie Dreams

It's that time of year again, and the holiday season means decorations! We got a slightly later start than we'd have liked due to being so busy--I know as a kid that I gave my parents fits pleading to get the tree up earlier and earlier each year, as if somehow that might bring Christmas (and presents) sooner by so doing--but still managed to get the first of our several trees up in line with the family Thanksgiving-weekend tradition.

We started with our "Hokie Tree," a deep maroon tree decorated in orange. Several years ago, Hecht's (and other May's stores) offered a wide variety of funky colors for their Christmas trees. Pink tinsel trees have always been something of a fashionable kitsch, but May's took things to an entirely new level with their lime, lilac, teal, and burgundy lineup. We watched all the local Hecht's for sales (the sticker price of $400+ being more than we could justify), and though our search led us to every mall in northern Virginia, in the end it was my parents who scored the prize at the Kaufmann's in the Charleston Town Center mall. Yes, the normally-priced-$525, seven-and-a-half-foot, pre-lit tree could be had (floor model only) for the Boxing Day bargain of $150.

Our friend Meg Nugent got us a good start on orange ornaments with a selection of "old-world" shapes, and I already had quite a few Virginia Tech ornaments as well. Several years' worth of picking over the post-Christmas deals at Michael's, Target, and every mall department store we could tolerate brought in a bevy of several more orange decorations, and an All Souls' Day (that's November 2) find at Costco added orange LED lights to replace the energy-sucking incandescents on the prelit tree. The orange garland was actually the hardest to track down; eventually, eBay located the stuff as an import from the British Isles and a whopping $7 per 5' strand (ironically, the garland is actually made in the USA).

Putting up artificial trees has gotten significantly easier since the days when as a child I proudly erected my little four foot tree and decorated it with no less than eight strands of lights (I tried to buy a new set to add each year in the Boxing Day closeouts). No more do you have to match the branch colors to the base and assemble, jigsaw-style, the tree from the bottom up. Trees now come in sections with hinged, drop-down branches, and rather than an evening spent looking for that last yellow-tipped branch hastily stowed during take-downs the year before, the tree itself goes up in ten minutes or less.

Still, at seven and a half feet, the Hokie tree is still enough of a beast that it really takes two, and Beth (in her coordinating pink PJs) lent quite a helping hand. Decorating the tree did take several hours as we fit the different orange, VT, and our special ornaments (mostly pet-themed) on and around the many branches.

In-between seasons, the tree stows in a plastic tote (below), another innovating in holiday decorating technology which, for a display model tree which came with no box, is a necessity. But wow, that's one heavy, bulky tote to drag up the stairs each year, inevitably drawing the joke from one of us that there's a body or two stashed inside.

One tree down, several more to go... last year saw us "only" putting up two: the Hokie tree in the living room and my old green tree in the dining room clad in bird-themed ornaments. I've got a beautiful white tree I picked up years ago when I lived alone which we want to finally put up again, it having stayed in storage since 2005 or so.

'Tis the season, eh? Now, if we only have the time and energy to finish our decorations before January...

Putting the Wraps on a Mixed Year

2008 was, in retrospect, not all that great of a year for the Nolley household, so it comes as something of a relief to close the door on it tonight.

Last year's New Year's Eve, we celebrated a year without pet tragedy, after a very rough 2006 in which we saw the deaths of two of the "dingoes" (Beth's dachshunds, Ziggy and Agi), our cat Moon, Beth's rescue cat Belle, and several "bappies," or baby cockatiels.  Unfortunately, this year saw the loss of Geronimo, the last of the dingoes and my favorite of our dachshunds.

Too, we bade our home in Vienna, VA, behind as the owners and landlords returned from a three-year sojourn in Europe; we'd expected to buy a home in plenty of time to move, but first I encountered an awful time selling my townhome due to a bad buyer, then we discovered just how long a "short sale" can take.  And even when everything seemed lined up to reach the finish line, we had our share of last-minute hurdles.

Then we got the Christmas Eve "present" of finding that Beth would be losing her job.  (Couple this with the premature end of my primary contract at work--due to the politics of a new director at the government agency funding us--and though I still have good job security, it's a stressful time of transition!)

I think you can see why we're anxious to be putting the bookend onto this year!

But not everything has been so bad.  I did get to do a fair amount of birding and have enjoyed the wilds of nature; we did eventually purchase Chateau Papillon and are slowly unpacking and completing some of our renovations.  And, of course, we have our health, our love of each other, and our families.

FedEx: What Part of "Delivery by 10:30am" and "Priority Overnight" Do You NOT Understand?

As in each of the past three years, a Christmas gift for several family members was my annual "bird book," a labor of love that includes the best of my bird photography from the prior year along with narratives and facts about each of the birds and locations I visited.  And, despite the significant work on the book through the early fall, getting it wrapped up and finished came down to the absolute last minute, with my order going out on December 22rd--for which I paid a premium of $50 on top of the $54 FedEx Priority Overnight Express delivery charges to make sure it would arrive by Christmas Eve.


Everything looked good for an on-time delivery; printing house Lulu.com got the book printed and handed off to FedEx early on the 23rd, and FedEx then claimed a "by 10:30am" delivery on the 24th.  The package only had to go from Rochester, NY, to my house outside of Washington, D.C. (something a bit under 400 miles), after all.

On the morning of the 24th, I checked the tracking for my books and saw that they were "in transit" from Memphis as of about 7:00am.  Checking FlightAware for the day's scheduled FedEx flights to the Washington area, I figured it was on the second flight out that morning and would easily be delivered by 10:30am, as promised, and even printed out a copy of the flight path as "Santa's Sleigh."

Come that afternoon, my package still had not arrived, yet still said "in transit."  I called FedEx, waited on hold for a half an hour, and found out it was actually still in Memphis, having been "left on the ramp" and having missed that flight.  Fine; there were more flights to come on Christmas Eve, and the CSR thought I should still get it.

The next two flights were slightly delayed--not due to weather between MEM and WAS, but perhaps due to weather elsewhere delaying their arrival into MEM (though FlightAware didn't seem to think that to be the case).  And yet... my package missed both those flights, too.

I called FedEx back and waited even longer on hold and was told the package had, again, and inexplicably, had been left in Memphis.  "Somehow it didn't get loaded onto the flight," I was told, but the "helpful" CSR explained that they were operating the same schedule of flights the next day and several through the night, so it should make it by the 26th.

Now, note that the guarantee was for 10:30am on the 24th.  They couldn't even tell me it would reach Washington in time to be picked up at the FedEx counters which would be open on Christmas Day.  "I'm sorry," was the only apology I could get; no explanation as to how or why the package had been left behind so many times in Memphis.  Heck, in the 16 hours it had spent there, it could have made it to Washington on a truck; in the then-more-than-24 hours since it left Rochester, I could have driven to Rochester and back twice to pick it up in person!

I'll skip over the Christmas Day fiasco, where the package wasn't loaded onto the first truck to the local counter (and couldn't be picked up at the IAD facility, because it was "farther" away from my house)... and fast forward to today, when I had my request for a shipping refund denied by FedEx "with apologies for the inconvenience" due to the fact that FedEx's shipping terms and conditions allow them the cop-out that weather anywhere in the United States can allow them to skip out on a guaranteed delivery date.

Never mind that there was, according to the FAA, no appreciable weather delay between MEM and IAD (or DCA or BWI) all day on 12/24, and that according to FlightAware only a couple of FedEx flights to IAD had any significant delays--so FedEx can't seriously claim weather delayed the package.  No, they simply are using the excuse of bad weather in the Pacific Northwest (snow in Seattle and Portland, mostly) as the reason why my package got "left off the ramp" at MEM for several consecutive flights on Christmas Eve.

Next step: disputing the shipping charges with American Express.  I doubt that will succeed; FedEx will just play the "weather" cop-out with them as well.  However, this does go down as a huge black strike against FedEx in my opinion.  Though UPS seems to have more overall delivery issues in my experience, FedEx certainly has the more spectacular ones, from this Christmas fiasco to once leaving another Priority Overnight package off the fabled ramp in Memphis for five consecutive days.  Alas, DHL has been subsumed by UPS; though I used them least often, I always got shipments from Japan, Indonesia, and Hong Kong within 48 hours--and usually for less cost than a 2-day FedEx or UPS domestic package shipment!

Celebrating the Holidays Early--Gotta Make That the Plan!

Each year, the holiday season--Christmastime, to the vast majority of Americans, myself included--seems to arrive sooner. I'm never ready. No matter how much shopping for gifts I've done ahead of time, there's still those last few to find and wrap. The menu doesn't get planned out, so hopefully the pantry's well-stocked for those forgotten-but-critical items needed after even Wal-Mart closes its doors on Christmas Eve. Decorations still need to be put up. And for someone creative like myself, the deadline for completing those hand-made gifts looms like the proverbial freight train at the end of the tunnel. Don't forget, either, the visits to friends and family spread out across several states--even though both Beth and I enjoy spending Christmas at home together.

Beth and I came up with what we thought was a pretty good idea to help address these stress-inducing holiday problems a couple of years ago: celebrate on the Winter Solstice. That leaves us Christmas itself to spread out, round-robin, amongst the family we want to visit.

Too, for the pair of us atheists, it helps divorce our own celebrations from a Christian holiday. Not that we object at all to "Merry Christmas" or decorating our "Christmas tree," mind you (we're not soliders in the religious right's preceived "War on Christmas" at all, and we both absolutely love Christmas time!)--but we would like to have people realize our celebrations aren't so much for the birth of the central figure in their mythology but rather to enjoy the spirit of giving and of family and companionship that this time of year brings.

(To go off on a brief tangent, if the average Christian were honest with himself, he'd realize that "Christmas" as practiced by 99.99% of Americans is an absolutely secular holiday with but a passing nod to the birth of Jesus--who, if he existed at all, almost certainly wasn't born anywhere near December 25th, the date chosen by the Church to try winning over converts who observed the Roman Saturnalia or various other "pagan" celebrations set around the time of the Winter Solstice. Charlie Brown's decades-old lament about the commercialization of Christmas should be truer for Christian observants today than ever!)

Anyway, though we've talked up that notion before, we've yet to actually incorporate it into our holiday planning. As was the case the past two years, a major gift to several family members is going to be my bird book, which highlights the best of my bird photography for the past year.  Let me tell you something: putting that book together is NOT easy! I thought I'd made good progress this year well ahead of schedule, as I had done a good two-thirds of the layouts by September, leaving room for the inevitable photos I'd get on several fall business trips to the west coast. Alas, despite several late nights and a day taken off work, I still got the book off to the publishers about two hours past the cutoff for Christmas delivery (though there's still the chance they'll ship today, I guess). And there are gifts I've still to make for others: artwork to be done, cards to be designed, and photos to be presented.

Perhaps if we really set the Solstice as our deadline to celebrate, we'd not be running right up to Christmas. Next year?