I'm not a regular Chris Rea fan but I just love this song. In addition, Chris Rea always reminds me of Dad. Chris Rea, Dire Straits, Mike Oldfield - these are his kind of music.
I was planning to write about our Christmas traditions, though these aren't really traditions, rather the way things happen. I'm not sure if anyone's interested in this topic but I don't have to work for a couple of days more, which makes me linger in this happy Christmas and New Year mood a bit longer than usual.
We usually get up at around 9, so not early like those who want to get things done in time. There's no special Christmas lunch, perhaps some leftovers from the previous day. The special thing is the dinner, which is usually some kind of turkey. Mom usually wants to make something special, e.g. chestnut soup. For some reason, these inventions don't always turn out well. For example, this year she cooked a whole lime in the ragout soup with estragon. True, it gave a peculiar taste to the soup, but I'm not sure I'd like to add this recipe to my repertoire.
The other thing is, she gets overexcited over dessert. She makes like three kinds of desserts, which would be enough for a troop. Each year she wants to make some kind of vanilla cupcake, which is pie dough baked in tiny forms, filled with buttery vanilla cream (vaníliás kosárka). Usually the day starts with everyone hunting madly for the recipe, which for some reason gets lost every year. It cannot be found on the Net because the ones up there are different from what we're looking for. It's not in our recipe books, either. It's scribbled on a piece of paper hiding between more of the kind in a drawer. The thing I don't like about this dessert is that it's so much bother to butter the forms, and then to get the cakes out of the forms. In addition, Mom doesn't put beans or anything on the dough to keep it flat, so it comes up and there's not enough space for the cream, so either we have to carve out the cakes to make some room for the cream or we pour the cream on the bumpy surface, which then keeps flowing and dropping on the plate.
This year the big deal was making cheese rolls; that is, flaky pastry filled with cheesy mascarpone cream (sajtos roló). The problem was that we couldn't find proper metallic tubes to put the dough around. In her final despair Mom bought three metallic hangers, though nobody has an idea how she wanted to cut them up. In the end, we didn't have cheese rolls at all, and the hangers were added to our neverending collection of hangers under the condition that we don't use them in humid places.
In short, the day goes by with everyone getting annoyed and tired. If I'm lucky, I can get by with decorating the tree, which is my favorite part indeed. We usually have a small, plump tree, which we stand on a table. We don't put garlands or boas on it, nobody likes them. Mom prefers the combination of two colors like red and gold, but on my own tree I'd put all kinds of happy colors, I think.
We have dinner at around 7. Everyone has a bath and dresses in nice clothes before coming to dinner, to celebrate. Then, after dinner, we hand out the presents. Finally, I stay downstairs with my sister, and we watch TV.
This year it was a bit different because we felt too tired even for dressing up. Only after dinner did we change into nice clothes. Then we waited for about one and a half hours for Mom to wrap the presents and get ready. When we finally got down to presentgiving it was around 9.30 but it was good fun. I love Christmas because that's when Mom does her best (despite our telling her each year that she needn't).
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