Dan Q
Except to children, I don’t really give Christmas presents to (or expect to receive them from) others any more.
But that didn’t stop my buying myself a gift of a particularly fun Lego set to build over the festive period (with a little help from the eldest child!).
This evening I used leftover cocktail sausages to make teeny-tiny toads-in-the-hole (my kids say they should be called frogs-in-the-dip).
It worked out pretty well.
Micro-recipe:
1. Bake cocktail sausages (or veggie sausages, pictured) until barely done.
2. Meanwhile, make a batter (per every 6 sausages: use 50ml milk, 50g plain flour, 1 egg, pinch of salt).
3. Remove sausages from oven, then turn up to 220C.
4. Put a teaspoon of a high-temperature oil (e.g. vegetable, sunflower) into each pit of a cake/muffin tin, return to oven until almost at smoke point.
5. Add a sausage or two to each pit and return to the oven for a couple of minutes to come back up to temperature.
6. Add batter to each pit. It ought to sizzle when it hits the oil, if it’s hot enough. Return to the oven.
7. Remove when puffed-up and crisp. Serve with gravy and your favourite comfort food accompaniments.
Got the ratio of chipolatas to bacon wrong for your Christmas pigs-in-blankets and now have more cocktail sausages than you know what to do with? No, just me?
Here’s my planned solution, anyway – teeny tiny toads-in-the-hole! (Toad-in-the-holes?) Let’s see how it works out…
The fifth day of Christmas, and perhaps my last opportunity of the season to justify having trifle… for breakfast.
Our family Christmas Eve tradition, which we absolutely stole from Icelandic traditions (cultural appropriation? I’m not sure…) via some newspaper article we saw years ago, is a book exchange.
verybody gives each other person a book,then we sit around and read until people retire to bed (first the kids, then – eventually – the adults).
We love it.
Christmas Jumper Day at school, and I’m continuing my never-ending effort never to rest on my laurels, proving myself time and again worthy of my title of Most Embarrassing Parent.
At first I thought “Christmas post” had something to do with letters and parcels, but then I found one in the wild.
Today I put 550 Christmas cards into envelopes, sealed them, put address labels on them, and stamped them.
Because these were the “lick and stick” kind of envelopes rather than a self-sealing variety, I’ve been unable to taste anything except glue ever since.
Even when you’re not remotely ready to think about Christmas yet and yet it keeps getting closer every second.
Even when the house is an absolute shambles and trying to rectify that is one step forward/one step sideways/three steps back/now put your hands on your hips and wait, what was I supposed to be tidying again?
Even when the electricity keeps yo-yoing every few minutes as the country continues to be battered by a storm.
Even when you spent most of the evening in the hospital with your injured child and then most of the night habitually getting up just to reassure yourself he’s still breathing (he’s fine, by the way!).
Even then, there’s still the comfort of a bacon sarnie for breakfast. 😋
For a long time now, every year we’ve encouraged our two children (now 10 and 8 years old) to each select one new bauble for our Christmas tree1. They get to do this at the shop adjoining the place from which we buy the tree, and it’s become a part of our annual Christmas traditions.
This approach to decoration: ad-hoc, at the whims of growing children, and spread across many years without any common theme or pattern, means that our tree is decorated in a way that
might be generously described as eclectic. Or might less-generously be described as malcoordinated!
But there’s something beautiful about a deliberately-constructed collection of disparate and disconnected parts.
I’m friends with a couple, for example, who’ve made a collection of the corks from the wine bottles from each of their anniversary celebrations, housed together into a strange showcase. There might be little to connect one bottle to the next, and to an outsider a collection of used stoppers might pass as junk, but for them – as for us – the meaning comes as a consequence of the very act of collecting.
Each ornament is an untold story. A story of a child wandering around the shelves of a Christmas-themed store, poking fingerprints onto every piece of glass they can find as they weigh
up which of the many options available to them is the most special to them this year.
And every year, at about this time, they get to relive their past tastes and fascinations as we pull out the old cardboard box and once again decorate our family’s strangely beautiful but mismatched tree.
It’s pretty great.
1 Sometimes each has made a bauble or similar decoration at their school or nursery, too. “One a year” isn’t a hard rule. But the key thing is, we’ve never since their births bought a set of baubles.
…
if [the option of a balance bike] isn’t available, you can convert a normal bike into a balance bike by removing the pedals and lowering the seat. Once the kids has learned how to balance as they roll, add the pedals, raise the seat, and watch them go.
…
An excellent suggestion from fellow RSS Club member Sean McP (he’s been full of those lately; I’ve been enjoying encouraging drivers through our village to slow down by smiling and waving, too).
Like Sean, I learned to ride a bike using training wheels (“stabilisers” on this side of the pond). Unlike him, I didn’t have any trouble with them, and so when I came to hear about balance bikes as an alternative learning approach I figured they were just two different approaches to the same thing.
But when our eldest learned using stabilisers, she really struggled, and only eventually “got it” with an un-stabilised bike and lots and lots of practice. It’s true what Sean says: for most children, learning to balance atop a bicycle is harder than learning to pedal and/or steer, so that’s the bit we should be focussing on.
Our youngest is (finally) ready and keen to learn to cycle, and so I’m thinking that when I get him his first bike (maybe for Christmas!) I’ll get him one that, were I to put the seat into its lowest position and remove the pedals, he could use as a balance bike for a day or two to get the feel of the thing before re-attaching them and letting him try the full experience.
There are video games that I’ve spent many years playing (sometimes on-and-off) before finally beating them for the first time. I spent three years playing Dune II before I finally beat it as every house. It took twice that to reach the end of Ultima Underworld II. But today, I can add a new contender1 to that list.
Today, over thirty-five years after I first played it, I finally completed Wonder Boy.
My first experience of the game, in the 1980s, was on a coin-op machine where I’d discovered I could get away with trading the 20p piece I’d been given by my parents to use as a deposit on a locker that week for two games on the machine. I wasn’t very good at it, but something about the cutesy graphics and catchy chip-tune music grabbed my attention and it became my favourite arcade game.
I played it once or twice more when I found it in arcades, as an older child. I played various console ports of it and found them disappointing. I tried it a couple of times in MAME. But I didn’t really put any effort into it until a hotel we stayed at during a family holiday to Paris in October had a bank of free-to-play arcade machines rigged with Pandora’s Box clones so they could be used to play a few thousand different arcade classics. Including Wonder Boy.
Off the back of all the fun the kids had, it’s perhaps no surprise that I arranged for a similar machine to be delivered to us as a gift “to the family”2 this Christmas.
And so my interest in the game was awakened and I threw easily a hundred pounds worth of free-play games of Wonder Boy3 over the last few days. Until…
…today, I finally defeated the seventh ogre4, saved the kingdom, etc. It was a hell of a battle. I can’t count how many times I pressed the “insert coin” button on that final section, how many little axes I’d throw into the beast’s head while dodging his fireballs, etc.
So yeah, that’s done, now. I guess I can get back to finishing Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap, the 2017 remake of a 1989 game I adored!5 It’s aged amazingly well!
1 This may be the final record for time spent playing a video game before beating it, unless someday I ever achieve a (non-cheating) NetHack ascension.
2 The kids have had plenty of enjoyment out of it so far, but their time on the machine is somewhat eclipsed by Owen playing Street Fighter II Turbo and Streets of Rage on it and, of course, by my rediscovered obsession with Wonder Boy.
3 The arcade cabinet still hasn’t quite paid for itself in tenpences-saved, despite my grinding of Wonder Boy. Yet.
4 I took to calling the end-of-world bosses “ogres” when my friends and I swapped tips for the game back in the late 80s, and I refuse to learn any different name for them.6, saved Tina7Apparently the love interest has a name. Who knew?
5 I completed the original Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap on a Sega Master System borrowed from my friend Daniel back in around 1990, so it’s not a contender for the list either.
Christmas Jumper Day at the kids’ school. Because I’m the “embarrassing parent”, I joined in for the school run too.
(Also for my meetings today, obviously.)
I’m probably not going to get you a Christmas present. You probably shouldn’t get me one either.
If you’re one of my kids and you’ve decided that maybe my blog isn’t just “boring grown-up stuff” and have come by, then you’re one of the exceptions. Lucky you.
Children get Christmas gifts from me. But if you’re an adult, all you’re likely to get from me is a hug, a glass of wine, and more food than you can possibly eat in a single sitting.
I’ve come to the conclusion – much later than my mother and my sisters, who were clearly ahead of the curve – that Christmas presents are for kids.
Maybe, once, Christmas presents were for adults too, but by now the Internet has broken gift-giving to the extent it’s almost certainly preferable for me and the adults in my life if they just, y’know, order the thing they want than hoping that I’ll pick it out for them. Especially as so many of us are at a point where we already have a plethora of “stuff”, and don’t want to add to it unnecessarily at a time of year when, frankly, we’ve got better things to spend our time and money on.
Birthdays are still open season, because they aren’t hampered by the immediate expectation of reciprocity that Christmas carries. And I reserve the right to buy groups of (or containing) adults gifts at Christmas. But individual adults aren’t getting one this year, and they certainly shouldn’t feel like they need to get me anything either.1
I don’t know to what extent, if at all, Ruth and JTA will be following me in this idea, so if you’re somebody who might have expected a gift from or wanted to give a gift to one of them… you’re on your own; you work it out!
Here’s to a Merry Christmas full of presents for children, only!
1 If you’ve already bought me a gift for Christmas this year… firstly, that’s way too organised: you know it’s only October, right? And secondly: my birthday’s only a couple of weeks later…
