Deck The Halls

Last year, I shared a video of a flash mob performing Handel's Messiah. That is still one of my favorite clips, but the other day, I came across this one. It is well-choreographed, well-filmed, captures the delight of onlookers and the enthusiasm of the performers, and simply makes me smile.

Merry Christmas!

Have Yourself a Farkleberry Christmas (!)

I was listening to Christmas music on the radio the other day, and heard this familiar carol.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
Let your heart be light
From now on,
our troubles will be out of sight

This song was originally sung by Judy Garland, in the movie Meet Me in St. Louis (which is a delightful little film, although it really has little to do with the Christmas holiday). The words have changed over time, with this being the version generally sung today, and my favorite.  They offer cheer and hope, the promise of togetherness and belonging, sentiments quite in keeping with the season.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas,
Make the Yuletide gay,
From now on,
our troubles will be miles away.

Having lived in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the 70's, this carol always reminds me of farkleberries.

I grew up listening to KDKA radio. Jack Bogut hosted the morning show for 15 years, and was much of the impetus behind the Children's Hospital Fundraiser. Each year, for three weeks before Christmas, his show was broadcast from a display window at Hornes Department Store. (The broadcast may actually have rotated between the three downtown department stores - Horne's, Kaufmann's, and Gimbels - but my memory is fuzzy on that detail.)

There is a great article here that talks about Jack Bogut and his connection to the hospital fundraiser. His personality and humor created a link with Pittsburghers. We would line up to chat with him on the air, receiving farkleberry tarts or farkleberry cookies in exchange for our contributions. And one year, there was even a song, "Have yourself a farkleberry Christmas." I can't remember more than that, and haven't found any additional lyrics on the internet...

Here we are as in olden days,
Happy golden days of yore.
Faithful friends who are dear to us
Gather near to us once more.

We remember Christmases past, and gather with friends and family to celebrate Christmas present. Jim and I really do look forward to Christmas cards and letters, with updates (and pictures!) of the folks we can''t be with.

Through the years
We all will be together,
If the Fates allow

I played this music for a young adult choir back in 1981 or 82. Young Emily and her family were visiting, and she listened while I practiced, and asked "what are the Fates?" I think she was about 6 years old, and I have no idea how I explained the Fates to her! ("The Goddesses in charge of our destiny" - would she have understood that?!?)

Hang a shining star upon the highest bough.
And have yourself A merry little Christmas now. 

What's your favorite carol?

Christmas Baking III and A Bit of Knitting

 

These are your basic chocolate chip cookies, using the recipe you can find on any bag of chocolate chips. For some reason, I cannot successfully bake these - they just aren't very tasty. But Jim knows the secret, and this batch is yet another in a long line of his successful ventures. He mixes them by hand, just like his mom did. I think this is his secret ingredient: the love a boy has for his mother. Add that to any recipe, and it will be perfect.

This is your basic fudge, using the recipe you can find on any jar of marshmallow creme. It is not very sophisticated, and nothing like what you'll find up on Mackinac Island, but it is what my mom always made - and you know how we feel about our moms!

Don't try this at home: When I was in college, my roommate was making this fudge. When it was all mixed together, she picked up the saucepan to start pouring the fudge into the dish, where it would cool. At that moment, she wondered if she had forgotten to butter the dish. So, with her free hand, she picked up the dish to look more closely - while, with her other hand, she continued pouring the hot fudge onto the table!

I haven't found a lot of knitting time lately, but I've managed to make some progress on Echo since I last posted a photo. And tonight (after taking this photo), I finished her body. Next step: legs!

Christmas Baking II

Another of our Christmas favorites is baklava. We don't make this every year, because, frankly, it is a lot of work. And, let's admit it: it is also a lot of calories!

But they are tasty calories.

 

Back in Pittsburgh, our church had an international dinner one year, and Mom was in charge of the Greek table. Somewhere, she came up with a recipe for baklava, and we adopted it as our own. (Altho' there are a number of nationalities in our lineage, I don't believe Greek is one of them.)

This recipe makes a pastry that is astonishingly sweet and rich. (I suspect it is sweeter and nuttier than other recipes you'll find; we Beers tend toward a sweet tooth...) We generally cut it in small pieces, hoping to stave off overload. When you bite into it, there are so many tastes and sensations: nuts and sugar; crunchy pastry and gooey syrup; delicious and decadent and memorable.

We used to sit around the table, eating cookies and baklava and playing games. One Christmas sticks out in my mind, when we took a batch with us to Dave & Joyce's apartment in Chicago, and ate it late into the night, playing Risk and Mastermind. The late hour and the baklava overload didn't really improve our playing skills, but we didn't seem to care.

The first time my sister & I made baklava, it was a painfully slow process. The phyllo dough dries out quickly, and becomes brittle. It took Lori & me so long to make, the dough was totally falling apart. We pieced it together like a puzzle, and pasted it down with melted butter. This doesn't hurt the taste at all, and is always a good technique for bringing a stray corner into line.

BTW, I use a small paint brush to spread the butter - it works great. Rest assured, this paint brush has never seen paint! To help keep the dough from drying out, I unroll the layers on the table, and cover them with a damp towel. I retrieve one layer of dough, then recover the stack while Jim spreads the butter and the nut mixture.

Some recipes only call for butter every few layers. We spread butter on every single layer, and use the nut mixture every fourth layer (another nod to the Beer sweet tooth). I try to end with at least two layers (four is better) after the last nut layer.

I recently read that baklava will freeze well. We're going to try freezing some this year, so that tasty baklava will be available through the holidays.

Here's our recipe:

For pastry:
40 pastry sheets (fillo or phyllo)
1 pound butter (melted)
1 pound walnuts (chopped)
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
2 Tbsp cinnamon
Cloves

For syrup:
1 and 1/2 cups sugar
3/4 cup water
1 tsp lemon juice
1/2 cup honey

1. Melt butter.
2. Chop walnuts. Combine with sugar and cinnamon.
3. Layer pastry in pan. Brush first, second, & third layer with butter. Brush fourth layer with butter and also sprinkle with nut mixture. 
4. Repeat, using all sheets (end with 2 - 4 buttered layers, rather than a nut layer).
5. Score with sharp knife, almost to bottom, in diamond shapes. Insert whole cloves at corners of pieces.
6. Bake 1/2 hour at 350 degrees
7. Reduce heat & bake 3/4 hour at 300 degrees.

Meanwhile, prepare syrup:

1. Combine sugar, water, and lemon juice. 
2. Heat to boiling. 
3. Add honey.
4. Pour hot syrup over baklava immediately as it comes from the oven.

Our original recipe was pretty sketchy, with no specific measurements. We often had to melt more butter, or chop more nuts, in the middle of the assembly process. When I made the baklava by myself, this was a bit problematic, so one year I kept track of the ingredients I used. The above recipe is fairly reliable, although we still tweak it somewhat.

For instance, this time I only bought a 12 oz bag of walnuts (remembering that we had leftovers last year). When I was adding the sugar, I should have decreased a bit, but I was talking to Jim on the phone, and realized I was paying no attention to how much sugar I added. When I taste-tested, the mixture seemed way too sugary (even for Beers). So we found some pecans, chopped them up, and added them. That made for a good mixture, but of course we had way too much then...!

One year we weren't paying close attention while making the syrup, and it boiled over on the stove. Honey everywhere - what a mess. Happily, we didn't have that problem this year!

More pictures, from our latest baklava adventure:

Getting ready

Robin scoring the dough, before baking

Jim adding the cloves

Just out of the oven, and pouring the syrup

Bonnie recovering from the stress of baking

Christmas Baking

I think my favorite cookies are peanut butter blossoms. I just finished baking a double batch. Don't they look yummy?

Peanut Butter Blossoms

I got this recipe years ago. I was home on Christmas break from MSU, and Mom & I went to visit a friend of Mom's, from church. She gave us this recipe, but what I really remember is her son. He was a little guy - maybe 4 or 5 years old - and the night before, had watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas on TV (the original animated version, narrated by Boris Karloff).

He informed us, with a mixture of solemnity and enthusiasm, that the Grinch was PITCH GREEN!

And that is what I think of, whenever I bake these cookies: a pitch green Grinch.

Here's the recipe:

1 3/4 cup flour (that's one-and-three quarters cup; the numbers look weird...)
1 tsp soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup margarine (softened)
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar (packed)
1/2 cup peanut butter
1 egg
2 Tbsp milk
1 tsp vanilla
Hershey chocolate kisses
Sugar, for rolling the cookies in

Mix flour, soda, & salt; set aside
Cream margarine, sugar, and brown sugar.
Add peanut butter & blend
Add egg & blend
Add milk & vanilla & blend
Add flour mixture, in portions, and blend well

Roll the dough in small balls (approx 1 inch). Roll each ball in sugar, and place on ungreased cookie sheet. Bake at 375 degrees for 7-8 minutes. Remove when cookies are cracked and just barely starting to brown. Top each with a kiss.

Makes 4-5 dozen cookies

Here are a few more photos (because you can't have too many pictures of baked goods!)

Ready for the oven. They tend to slide around on the tray if you're not careful;  think "ice skating."

You want to put the kisses on the cookies as soon as they come out of the oven, so it's important to have them unwrapped and at the ready. A helper comes in handy at this point, as long as you can keep them from eating the kisses...

The front cookie shows the cracking that you look for, and in the back are cookies with their added kisses.

Yummy!

Handel's Messiah: A Christmas Tradition

This flash mob performance of Handel's Messiah is extraordinary. Watch it. Watch the expressions of the surprised audience, and the joy on the faces of the performers. Listen to the inspiried music, and listen for your own stirrings of emotion.



When I was growing up, my parents had an RCA Victor recording of Messiah, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham: four records, plus a book containing the libretto, illustrated with paintings by Botticelli, Durer, Van Eyck, El Greco, and others. I have their recording now; in this day of CD's and DVD's and iPods and YouTube, we don't play the LP's, but the set reminds me of my parents.

The family story is that my parents bought a stereo system before they bought a bed, and slept on a mattress on the floor. That stereo system consisted of two large cabinets, containing the turntable and the speakers. By 'large' I mean waist high, and 2 or 3 feet long (is that right? or is that the memory of a small child?). Anyway, my parents' recording, via this stereo system, was how I first heard Messiah.

I suspect that most people are introduced to Messiah via the Hallelujah Chorus. Certainly that was the piece I initially recognized and enjoyed. From there, I grew to know For Unto Us a Child is Born. This was my mother's particular favorite; she always claimed to have worn out that section of the record.

Over the years, I listened to Messiah in various settings, with different performers, and the more I listened, the more I grew to love all of it. The Trumpet Shall Sound became one of my favorite pieces, and always made me think of my Uncle John (although I never actually heard him perform it, and could only imagine his music).

I attended performances of the Mendelssohn Choir with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and performances with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Sometimes, I was able to attend sing-along performances, where the crowd made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in skill. Here in Kalamazoo, I attended a performance of Messiah in beautiful Stetson Chapel at Kalamazoo College (one of my favorite settings). And in Chicago, I watched my brother Dave perform Messiah with the Apollo Chorus, in Symphony Hall.

I love this music. It has become a year-round favorite, and an essential part of my Christmas celebration. Spencer J Condie wrote in his article Handel and the Gift of Messiah, 

Upon completing his composition, he [Handel] humbly acknowledged, “God has visited me.” Those who feel the touch of the Holy Spirit as they experience the overpowering testimony of Handel’s Messiah would agree.

Are you looking for a new Christmas tradition? I recommend Handel's Messiah, for the spirit it will bring. And frankly, if you're new to Messiah, that flash mob video is as good a place to start as any.