After a couple fleeting and insipid attempts, the skies finally let loose and doused us with about three inches of snow over the weekend. We're told there's probably more on the way this week.
I was out there in the stuff before dawn and just after Peg trudged up the hill to her pre-warmed truck for the drive to work. The trash truck will get here in about an hour, and for reasons unknown I tend to put off dragging the cans down to the street until the morning. This time around my slippers and flannel pajama bottoms, even if topped with a heavy coat, seemed inadequate in the frozen darkness.
The snow and the end of the Thanksgiving weekend led to a flurry of yuletide activity. After walking down to church in the snow yesterday and coming back to a gourmet brunch (this is Peg we're talking about, after all), we ventured out in search of a tree. With the state of emergency declared this past Friday over Omicron, we're thinking that when I go back to Florida this Thursday and stay for the better part of the month, P probably will as well. Hence, it didn't make any sense to buy a tree for Tara.
But what if we buy one in a pot, and plant it in the spring?
Armed with this bit of delusional thinking, we headed off to Home Depot in search of a potted tree.
Unfortunately for us, the inventory was puny and overpriced. Disappointed, we headed over to Erwin and the Empire Christmas Tree Farm. They not only sell cut trees, but trees with bagged root balls so you can plant them yourself. We had a plan.
See all those trees behind P? That's maybe ten percent of what's out there. We watched families drag a toboggan and a saw down the rows, small children scampering ahead, all looking for the perfect tree.
Then we found the trees with root balls. It's not so much that they were kind of expensive--and they were. Rather, we couldn't get the frozen sixty pound ball of dirt and roots off the ground. I suggested that if P wanted a tree, even if it's only for four days, then by God we needed simply to buy a tree.
So we did, a beautiful Concolor fir, with long needles and maybe six feet tall.
Soon it was bagged and in the back of the Honda, and off we went to Wegman's to buy the fixings for our decorating day feast.
Traditionally, Peg has always served stone crab claws and oysters, washed down with champagne, when it's time to decorate the tree. Good luck finding stone crab claws up here, however. I suggested king crab claws, but with our budget we couldn't stomach $45 for a small bag of frozen ones, and neither of us was very excited about substituting the pressed pollock Krab product. Peg bought some wild-caught shrimp, and I suggested maybe we (meaning "she") could create something wonderful out of a can of Chesapeake Bay oysters we spotted nearby. Soon the menu had shifted to boiled shrimp followed by homemade oyster stew, with mulled wine while we're decorating and champagne thereafter. We assembled the ingredients and raced home, expecting the delivery of a rug within the next few minutes.
P had been playing footsie with someone in Ithaca over the purchase of a rug for a week or two by now. Finally the seller let us know she planned to be in Corning on Sunday, and asked if we'd like for her to deliver it here. The rug is a monster--a little bigger than eleven by thirteen, and we hoped it would give a warmer, but more formal feel to the master bedroom. Around the time we were beginning to string lights on the tree Laura the rug seller arrived in her Volvo station wagon. She was 35 or so, with sort of an Andie McDowell vibe, married to a chemistry professor at Cornell. As it turned out the two of them also lived in a Greek revival home, theirs built over a decade before ours, and she could barely contain her curiosity about Tara.
So P gave her the grand tour, as both commiserated about the challenges of owning a home this old. I tagged along behind for the most part.
Finally Laura exchanged phone numbers with us, we promised to get together one day for supper up there or down here, I handed her a bolus of cash, and she was on her way as we contemplated moving all that heavy, antique furniture out of the bedroom to unroll this massive new rug. The work actually went faster and better than I anticipated, and soon we had a rug that covered about 95 percent of the floor.
Then we returned to decorating the tree, sipping on the mulled wine we'd created in the kitchen. We bought the mix at a shop on Portsmouth last Friday (perhaps more on that trip later in the week), but Peg dolled it up with spices, blood orange slices, and a little sherry, creating a really wonderful concoction that fit in well with Christmas trees and Johnny Mathis singing Winter Wonderland in our living room as it lightly snowed outside.
Considering that a chunk of our decorations are still somewhere on the farm, it doesn't look half bad.
From there P turned her attention to the boiled shrimp and the oyster stew, washed down with a bottle of Mum's. I think we have a new Christmas tradition in the Dickey household. It was the best oyster stew I've ever had. The company of my dining companion helped.
As we were sitting down to eat I dialed up Peg's favorite Christmas movie, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.
This movie has always baffled me a little, left me wondering if there's something missing in my soul that makes me cringe when I should be laughing. To me the movie tries too hard, plus I'm never quite able to get past the second act of the movie when Julia Marie Dreyfus, one of my favorite actresses, pulls into the driveway next door to the Griswold house at night, wearing sunglasses. Why? And why, when she and her significant other are in bed getting ready for a little romance, is he wearing leather slippers? Is this a fetish?
At the same time, I've always enjoyed a little slapstick, and there are some great physical comedy moments in the movie. Plus, whoever wrote Cousin Eddie's lines nailed it.
This is my third holiday season watching Christmas Vacation with P, and I have to admit it's growing on me. Or maybe it's just that three years into this ride with P, the sound of Clark Griswold forcing his family to sing Christmas carols in the car is a harbinger of a happy season with someone whose complete love of Christmas makes it special. She's Clark with better taste.
Toward the end of the movie our guests from Detroit, Anne Marie's parents, arrived from a day with their grandkids and plopped down with a cocktail to watch the show's finale. As the credits rolled we took our leave while Joe dialed up the Browns-Ravens game. Peg decided the house was too hot from the fireplace, and dialed the thermostat all the way down to 62, a decision that led to a chilly awakening when the alarm went off at 5:50.
It's all amazingly good, although getting back into a work rhythm this morning feels like a challenge. I have a big multiparty mediation today, then a light couple days before crawling into the Columbia with P and the cats to fly to Florida on Thursday. Maybe we'll decorate there, as well.
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