It must be Christmas

Like a proud mommy who whips out pictures of her kids all the time, my dog has featured in many of the posts here. Let's face it, only parents get the kiddie stories and even dog people get tired of hearing dog stories, but you know, I love my hound. The feeling of well being engendered from running my fingers through his thick fur cannot be measured and having him waiting, tail wagging at the front door lifts my spirits after a tough day.

Today, instead of cleaning, or organising for the rest of the week I lit up the oven and put in some stuff to bake. It's been a while and if you don't practice, you lose the skill. I made a bunch of stuff that will distributed around the office tomorrow but really, it's nowhere as good as it used to be and for that I'm sorry.

And that's when you know you're an old geezer. When you start wistfully remembering all those Christmas' past and how much better they were. In this morning's paper there were all these stories from Trini ex-patriots living in a variety of countries and to a woman, because ALL the stories were from women, they were banging on and on about how much they missed "home" etc. Forgive me, if you miss it so much why in heck did you leave? I've never understood this phenomenon, you leave your country of origin by choice and then you cling relentlessly to the "old ways". Okay, familiarity is one thing, missing your family, wanting to preserve your traditions etc but to slavishly cling to this stuff? Like fruit cake, what's up with that? If you like it so much learn to bloody make it already, why am I lugging it up from here?

But then I suppose since I don't particularly LIKE Trini christmas food it matters not to me. You heard me right, no to the pastelles, ham and turkey (which is always way overcooked so it's dry and tough), no to the macaroni pie, callaloo and beans, definitely no to the table groaning under the weight of all that food. And there is always too much of it and everywhere you go, it's the same bloody menu with little variation. By the time Christmas day rolls around you are sooooo sick of seeing this stuff at every function you got invited to the six weeks prior. And then we repeat it on Christmas day without fail. So you can guess there will be none of that going on here. One year a friend did a huge prime rib and a goose and we who were lucky enough to be invited to dinner were so pathetically grateful that we showed up on Boxing Day to polish off the leftovers.

The one Christmas food I do like happens to be garlic pork which the X-man's sister used to make so we had it for breakfast. Garlic pork is just one of those things, either you like it or you don't. It's basically pork loin that has been trimmed and preserved in a mix of vinegar, garlic and french thyme. My former landlord with the Portuguese heritage makes some of the best I've ever had, it's one of those fond Christmas memories. This year for Christmas I decided that I didn't really want to do anything, that the day would be mine and the hound's. We're going to do some bonding before I go off to dinner at a friend's house in the evening...probably for the ubiquitous menu but her mother is a great cook so it will be lovely.

I'm going to go pet my dog now. Goodnight.