The Holidays - 5

For the first Christmas in a decade, my African violets are blooming. I finally found a place to live that has enough light to allow them to set buds. After such a long time, this seems like a miracle, even though light was the top item on my list when I went out searching for a new apartment early last spring.

The red blooming violet with the thin white edge has been blooming almost since we got here in May. I feel that the plant wanted to bloom, wanted so badly to bloom, and when it finally got some sunshine, it exploded in to bloom. Just when I think it must be finished, at least for now, I see that new buds have formed hidden down in the leaves.

The red and pink blooming violets came to me directly from a breeder. They were just one tiny leaf each, in a cell-sized pot, when I got them. After a couple of weeks, I up potted them to three inch pots. When they had multiple leaves, I up potted them to four inch pots. They stayed in the four inch pots for a year or so. When they reached their current size, I planted them in the pretty decorative pots they are now in which are antique pots similar to the kind of pots my grandmother's African violets grew in.

The blue blooming violet came from a garden center and is in a new pot too. I didn't get it for the bloom color but for the leaf variegation. I'm a sucker for variegated leaves on any plant, but it is so unusual for violets to be variegated that I saw it and had to have it before someone else bought it. Now I love the blue bloom too.

I love all my houseplants, since besides dreaming, they are how I garden in the winter, but the African violets are special because they remind me of my grandmother. She seems a little closer this Christmas because the violets are blooming.

The Holidays - 4

I have, in my garage, an artificial Christmas tree I purchased from my employer at the time, some five years ago. It was a back model and cost me about $75, having retailed for close to $400. Now I'd never buy it at any price, but at that time I was immersed in products from China, and hadn't put together any notions about American economic sustainability (that no one else had either is no excuse since I started to be very concerned even before the 2008 financial debacle). I figured that any damage from manufacturing plastic had already been done a few years earlier. My employer was insisting that all new trees would be prelit, and this one was light-free. Prelit trees weight three times what naked trees do and that was a big issue for me. I didn't want a tree I couldn't handle myself.

I've put up the tree and decorated it two times, the year I bought it, and the Christmas my granddaughter moved from Texas to Minnesota when I wanted to show her all my heirloom blown glass ornaments. Every other Christmas, I can't bring myself to deal with the disruption of a seven foot tall tree covered with small breakable objects taking over my living space.

Last year I went to my favorite consignment shop and got a whole bunch of cool and weird little Christmas trees--some made from sequins, some made of trees with the corky bark still attached, and some that are miniatures of the seven foot tree, but cemented in to pots, and several other fun trees. Last year that seemed quite festive and I was very pleased. This year the trees just disappear. But I still don't want to put up a seven foot tree, drape it in four strings of regular lights and three strings of bubble lights, coat it in blown glass ornaments shaped like birds and horns and Teddy bears and angels and snowmen and icicles and baubles.

I have an idea about framing my slider in fake pine roping and lights and hanging a selection of the heirloom ornaments in the roping. I love the ornaments. They are charming and festive and some belonged to my great-grandmother, the one born in Norway, though the ornaments are completely American in an Edwardian sort of way. Others were Grandma's and all of the oldest ones were part of my childhood. Then I started collecting my own and those go back to 1975, the first year I made my own Christmas for my own family the first time. Some of those were gifts from my mother and others ones I bought for myself. I now have hundreds of ornaments. I'm especially fond of the birds.

We'll see what I decide to do, if anything. But I do long to be at least a little festive.

The Holidays - 3

Most natural Christmas trees are a crop grown on tree farms by farmers who work very hard to grow superior products. I don't have any problem with the farming practices of tree farmers. They plant more new trees than they cut each year, and care for the trees until cutting as though each was a loved child.

But once the trees are cut, everything changes. The trees are tied up in nets and thousands of them are thrown unto trucks and transported hundreds if not thousands of miles to Christmas tree lots in parking lots and empty fields and the occasional garden center. The cutting usually takes place in late September or early October so by the time a customer comes to the lot to choose a tree, it has been dead for about two months. If the weather was cold during October and November, the trees might still be somewhat fresh. The branches might be quite flexible and the tree's needles might still mostly be on the tree and rubbery. The tree might still smell like an evergreen. But as soon as the tree comes in doors, in a room that's 65 to 75 degrees, keeping water in the tree stand reservoir will be too little, too late. The tree will immediately begin to behave like a dead tree, browning and dropping needles and whole branches.

And that is supposing that the tree was one selected my a customer to become a Christmas tree. Many, many trees are never purchased. Hundreds are shredded and chipped into compost or dumped in a landfill.

I used to take the kids to a tree farm where we would stomp through three feet of snow, feet turning to ice, running from one tree to another out in a woods, until we found one that everybody agreed was perfect--not too tall, not too fat, no big branchless holes, and a straight trunk. Then we'd cut it down with a cross saw we got at a yard sale, drag it back to the car, and pay the tree farm people who would help tie it on top of the car. At home, we would keep it in the garage for a day, its trunk in a pail of water.

After Christmas, the tree would be stuck into a pile of snow plowed from the street to be a bird tree with peanut butter pine cones and suet seed balls, until the trash collector took it. Sometimes that wouldn't be until spring when I'd drape the tree with string and threads and drier lint, things birds treasure for building nests.

Like children, I want all Christmas trees to be wanted. I don't want trees cut unless someone wants that tree. I hate the waste. I want all people to go to tree farms to cut their own tree if they must have a natural tree in their home during the holidays. And if they can't do that, let's find some other alternatives.

The Holidays - 2

Our traditional Christmas Morning breakfast was a bit unusual, consisting of a half grapefruit with a maraschino cherry in the center; Kellogg's Rice Krispies with half-and-half; and a platter of breads, always containing Julagaga and Lefse and banana bread, and sometimes having other breads, such as date-nut or cranberry-orange, as well.

Julagaga is a Norwegian-American yeast bread. I've seen many recipes over the years, but mine, which I made up years ago, has candied fruit peel and cherries, raisins, and lots of freshly ground black cardamom. I also frost the newly-baked round loaves and then sprinkle the frosting with red and green Christmas sugar and put a whole red candied cherry in the center with a green cherry cut into leaf shapes--a poinsettia, of sorts.

Lefsa is a Norwegian-American flat bread made of mashed potatoes, flour and water. It is white with brown spots and we slather it with butter, sprinkle on brown sugar and wrap it up into a tube. I do not make lefse though I still own a lefse rolling pin and the long flat stick used to flip a sheet of lefse from the first side to the second when it's being baked on a lefse griddle. I do not own a lefse griddle.

My banana bread is made a bit differently, too. The butter is melted and poured on the batter with the nuts at the end, just before filling the pans. My fruit bread pans were given to me by my mother early in the time when I was running a household and I'm not sure if I could find pans like them now. They are aluminum, 3 x 6 x 3" and accommodate perfectly the batter of one recipe-worth of fruit bread. The slices from bread baked in my pans are square, with a slight rounding on one side, the top of the loaf.

I am very fond of date-nut bread, but none of the kids liked it. Years ago, I was willing and happy to eat the whole loaf. Now I'd much perfer to have one slice here, and possibly another there, and then go on into the new year eating more usual, everyday food. So it is with Rice Krispies. They are a Christmas treat, eaten at no other time. My kids did not eat Fruit Loops and that sort of thing. When I was pregnant with Brian, my first son, I read that children crave sugar-laden things like candy and Fruit Loops because they don't get enough fruit. Whether or not that's true, I fed the kids great amounts of fruit and almost no candy. And Rice Krispies was the special cereal, served with the grapefruit and bread on Christmas morning.

Banana Nut Bread

1 cup mashed bananas
1 cup sugar
2 eggs, well beaten
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon soda
3 tablespoons milk
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 cups flour
1/2 cup melted butter
1/2 cup nutmeats, chopped
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Mix mashed bananas, sugar and beaten eggs together. Add sifted dry ingreients alternately with the milk. Add melted butter, nutmeats and vanilla. Pour into greased 9 x 5 x 3-inch loaf pan and bake at 325 degrees for 1 hour or until done.

The Holidays - 1

I don't remember what year it was when I discovered the recipe for lemon bars in my Farm Journal cookbook. Sometime in the years when I was running a household and raising four sons. The cook book called them lemon slices. They were in a section of the cookies chapter called either prize winners (meaning a blue ribbon at some state's fair) or heirlooms. There was a section of Christmas cookies too which is where I had discovered my cut-out sugar cookie recipe some years earlier. But I tried the lemon bar recipe that Christmas because in those days I tried new cookie recipes every holiday baking season. And until I made my first pan of lemon bars, I'd never had a lemon bar before, or heard of one, for that matter.

Lemon bars were a revelation. Lusciously rich, sweet and tart at the same time, and gooey and crisp at the same time too. Paradoxes are always interesting. These paradoxes were poetry in my mouth. If they weren't so rich I'd have eaten the whole pan, four dozen lemon bars!

The kids loved them too. Dennis especially loved them. He still asks for them. Last year I gave him a whole pan of lemon bars for Christmas, cut up, and stored one at a time in neat rows, then in neat stacks, with waxed paper between the layers, in a tin box. When I make them for me, I store them the same way, only in a plastic food container. They last into the new year usually, because I mostly serve them to guests, having one myself every now and again, but four dozen cookies is a lot of cookies.

Christmas isn't Christmas without lemon bars. Of course, I could go by Patrick's French Bakery and buy a small number--six, let's say. I now know that lemon bars are not the exclusive possession of Farm Journal and me. Bakeries even make them. But they're not quite the festive lemon bars I make for Christmas.

LEMON SLICES

Rich and lemony--these bars will become a "regular" with your family

2 c. sifted flour
1/2 c. sifted confectioners sugar
1 c. butter or margarine
4 eggs
2 c. sugar
1/2 tsp. salt
1/3 c. lemon juice

1 tsp. grated lemon rind
1/4 c. unsifted flour
2 tsp. confectioners sugar
Confectioners sugar

Combine 2 c. flour and 1/2 c. confectioners sugar in a bowl. Cut in butter until mixture is crumbly. Press mixture into ungreased 13 x 9 x 2" pan.

Bake in moderate oven (350o) 25 minutes or until golden.

Beat eggs until thick and lemon-colored. Slowly beat in sugar, salt, lemon juice and lemon rind. Combine 1/4 c. flour and 2 tsp. confectioners sugar. Stir into egg mixture. Pour over baked crust and return to oven and bake 25 minutes or until brown.

Cool in pan on rack. Cut into 2 x 1" bars. Roll bars in confectioners sugar. Makes about 4 dozen.