Santa: Naughty or Nice?

Yikes.

Well, the blinking lights and blackout sales have made it impossible to ignore; the holiday season is upon us! Get out the ginger snaps to be inhaled whole and the candy canes to be looked at but never eaten because it's time to celebrate! We're getting into the holiday spirit by turning the TV to the Sounds of the Seasons music channel while we arrange assorted creepy Santa heads around the house. (Don't get me wrong, my mom's Christmas decorating is lovely and relatively reserved, but it does include Santa heads. Can't get around that.)

Sounds of the Season plays various holiday songs and flips through Christmas trivia and weird images of snow and presents and stuff. The other day, this little fact popped up:

"Poinsettias are the most popular Christmas plant and the No. 1 potted flowering plant in the U.S."

Like, hold on, are they saying more popular than Christmas trees? Or does that not count as a plant? Do they mean more popular than mistletoe? Either way, I am so happy to have this information. Now I'll be the life of all the ugly Christmas sweater parties in the land, both mock hipster version and authentic old lady version.

But in all seriousness, I did hear a statistic the other day that made me squint a tad more suspiciously yet at the creepy Santa heads that represent the most genius media creation in the history of mass consumerism. Last year, Americans spent a grand total of $450 billion on Christmas. Compare this number to the $10 billion it would take to solve the world's lack of clean water for good. This information comes from the Advent Conspiracy, a Christian group that urges people to spend a little less money on material gifts and a little more to help people in need. Now, I'm not religious, but this is something I can get behind. 

With similar do-goodness in mind, my mom instituted a new rule that all gifts exchanged in our family this year have to be either used, recycled, vintage, or handmade (and not by Indonesian children). In other words, nothing mass produced. With the leftover money, we'll select a charity to contribute to. Just a nice way to mix things up and feel a tad less guilty about all the excess at the same time.

There are also things that can be done to lessen the blow on the environment during all the Christmas cheer. In light of the UN climate conference going on in Copenhagen right now, we ought to do our share as they try to save the world in two short weeks. There are a few tips on how to have a more green Christmas here. As for us, we'll be wrapping our gifts with brown paper grocery bags and perhaps newspaper (with pretty ribbons, of course). We've done it in the past and I can say that it is quite stylin'.

Anyway, I don't want to seem like one of those people who stand outside Target ringing a bell and making you put on your best starting-at-something-really-important-on-the-ground routine. I'm just saying, it wouldn't hurt any of us to be a little less wasteful this year, and a little more in touch with the suffering going on in the world beyond our crackling fires and spiked nog.

Gimme S'more

I hope you all had a great long Labor Day weekend! I missed 4th of July this year, and I've been out of the country for the last two Thanksgivings, but dammit! I was here for Labor Day. And with the heat we're having this week, it doesn't feel like the end of summer to me. Though, I guess that's also probably because I don't have a job and don't go to school and am, all things considered, a feckless vagabond contributing nothing to society.
Happy Labor Day!

Anyway, on the topic of the good ol' U.S. of A., there are things I'm not too thrilled to be back for, but I won't get into that now. What I am thrilled to be back for is the food. The food you just can't get in Europe and that I've unsuccessfully tried explaining to my European friends far too often than they cared for, I'm sure. I'm talking about Mexican food, burgers (real burgers), big giant salads with names like 'Wiqui Waqui BBQ Chicken' or 'Quesadilla Explosion.'

I can't tell you how difficult it was for me to explain s'mores to the four Dutch people and one Danish person I went camping with in the Netherlands in the spring. They don't have graham crackers in Holland, of course, and nothing really resembling them (aside from maybe speculaas, a kind of cinnamon cookie), so from the get go it was a challenge. They're like, "you eat burnt marshmallows with crackers?"

What they came up with were the cheapest cookies they could find (being Dutch) and multicolored marshmallows that were at least the right size. The cookies were plain, round, with one side coated in chocolate. So not the idea. And instead of roasting the marshmallows on the long sticks that I meticulously selected from the firewood and then placing the hot gooey puff in between two cookies, they used little wooden grill skewers, basically like big toothpicks, and stuck them through both cookies and the marshmallow and held the whole sloppy thing over the fire. This, of course, failed. At one point they were using empty Heineken cans to prop the ridiculous cookie sandwiches up near the fire, because the tiny skewers they tried using were of course too small and didn't allow enough distance between hand and flame for proper roasting. Essentially, it was a disaster.

One of these amateur Dutchmen will be arriving in California in a matter of days, and I can't wait to show him how it's really done. As for me, I'll go on enjoying my favorite American fare until the next time I go abroad. Like yesterday, when my mom made ribs, corn on the cob, and this delicious apple pie:

It's good to be home. And now, hungry readers, I'm going out with my brother to get a legit steak burrito the size of my arm from a cockroach-infested hole, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Lekker!