I’ve received quite a few nice presents this year including a number of cute videos (About A Boy, While You Were Sleeping, Miss Congeniality), several articles of clothing with Samoyed dogs or polar bears on them, and one book.

Every year some dear friends of ours give me a copy of The Supreme Court Review. This year’s has articles on a number of interesting cases: Grutter v. Bollinger, Lawrence v. Texas, and an article by Richard Posner on the constitutionality of the Copright Term Extension Act. I’m looking forward to reading all of these articles and will no doubt be commenting on them in the course of time.

In much of the Western tradition of Christianity December 25 is celebrated as the birthday of Jesus of Nazareth. He’s not the only notable with this birthday. Others include:

• Isaac Newton
• Clara Barton (founder of the American Red Cross)
• Maurice Utrillo, artist
• Humphrey Bogart
• Cab Calloway
• Anwar Sadat
• Rod Serling
• Carlos Castaneda
• Nellie Fox
• Jimmie Buffett

and many, many more including Your Obedient Servant.

I’m a daily grocery shopper. Every day, seven days a week, I go to the grocery store to purchase whatever I need for the evening meal, the next day’s breakfast and lunch, and any staples we happen to need.

There are lots of advantages to this approach. It’s easy in and easy out. I come out with only one or two sacks of groceries. I’m always buying what’s fresh and what’s on sale. And, of course, the folks who work at the grocery store recognize me sometimes knowing me by name. But I try not to shop on Christmas day.

So, although my Christmas shopping had been completed earlier, I was out and about today doing my grocery shopping for Christmas Eve dinner and the Christmas Day meals and watching the crazed last-minute shoppers perform their feats of daring on the expressways, surface streets, and parking lots.

As I performed my regular grocery shopping rounds I passed several shopping malls. And as I did I noticed that all of them had lots of parking available. Now this might mean that everybody has done all of their shopping early. Or it might mean that this won’t be a great year for retailers many of whom have historically done half of their total annual business at Christmas time.

Has anyone else noticed something similar?

Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• There are a pair of interesting posts on the electoral process: Balloon Juice
  on stealing an election; Captain’s Quarters
  on ending the electoral college.
• Chicago Boyz has a thought-provoking discussion of Thomas Barnett’s Pentagon’s New Map
  hypothesis.
• The Daily Demarche has a revolutionary Christmas manifesto: peace on earth, goodwill toward men.
• A very Jewish Christmas from the far abroad over at The Diplomad.
• A unique Christmas wish from Little Miss Attila.
• Shrinkette posts on
  murder in a psych ward.
• The meaning of Christmas from The Llama Butchers. I’ve been
  looking at this one all week. Seems like a good time to link it.

That’s the lot. I will post tomorrow. Merry Christmas to all!

The pre-Christmas Carnival of the Recipes is up! This week the Carnival is being hosted by Trudy of Food Basics. Everything from oatmeal to Pecan and Maple Sweet Potato Pie. Check it out!

Mrs. Beeton’s Christmas Pudding First published in 1861, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management was the Bible of cooking and proper management of the home for generations of conscientious English women. Its recipes vary from very simple to very elaborate. Some are still great. Some are simply impossible.

1½ lb. of raisins
½ lb. of currants
&frac12 lb. of mixed peel
¾ lb. of bread crumbs
¾ lb. of suet
8 eggs
1 wineglassful of brandy

“Stone and cut the raisins in halves, but do not chop them; wash, pick, and dry the currants, and mine the suet finely; cut the candied peel into thin slices, and grate down the bread into fine crumbs. When all these dry ingredients are prepared, mix them well together; then moisten the mixture with the eggs, which should be well beaten, and the brandy; stir well, that everything may be very thoroughly blended, and press the pudding into a buttered mould; tie it down tightly with a floured cloth, and boil for 5 or 6 hours. It may be boiled in a cloth without a mould, and will require the same time allowed for cooking. As Christmas pudding are usually made a few days before they are required for table, when the pudding is taken out of the pot, hang it up immediately, and put a plate or saucer underneath to catch the water that may drain from it. The day it is to be eaten, plunge it into boiling water, and keep it boiling for at least 2 hours; then turn it out of the mould, and serve with brandy-sauce. On Christmas-day a sprig of holly is usually placed in the middle of the pudding, and about a wineglassful of brandy poured round it, which, at the moment of serving, is lighted, and the pudding thus brought to table encircled in flame.”

Mrs. Beeton continues with advice on the total time required for preparation, the cost, and where you can buy a pudding mold. I wonder if Messrs. R. & J. Slack are still in business? They don’t seem to have a web site.

Spinach, white beans, and potatoes

In Christmas celebrations past and present are intertwined. New presents are given. Old customs are remembered and, perhaps, revived for a day. This dish was a Christmas Eve custom of the family of a dear friend of ours. It’s become a frequent part of our Christmas Eve now. Whenever I make it I think about the blessings of the past year and of our dear friends Michael and Virginia who are now far away.

2 Tbsp. olive oil
1 medium onion, peeled, and chopped
2 cloves of garlic, peeled, crushed, and minced (optional)
2 medium potatoes, peeled, and cut into ½ inch dice, pat dry
1 12 oz. can of cannellini (white kidney) beans (you may substitute navy beans), drained
12 oz. fresh spinach, washed, stems removed
Salt and pepper to taste
Grated parmesan cheese

1. Saute the onions in the olive oil in a pan large enough to hold the entire dish over medium heat three or four minutes until the onions are transparent.
2. Add the potatoes and saute until the potatoes are lightly browned and very nearly completely cooked.
3. Add the optional garlic and saute an additional minute.
4. Stir in the cannellini (or navy) beans.
5. Add the spinach, lower the heat, cover, and cook an additional 7 or 8 minutes.
6. Stir the cooked spinach into the dish.
7. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Parmesan may be grated onto the dish at table. I typically add a few flakes of dried hot red pepper when adding the beans but that’s just me. It was traditional in our friend’s family to serve this dish on Christmas Eve with sardines or anchovies. These quantities should serve four especially with good fresh Italian bread and a nice Pinot Grigio.

Over the years I’ve found many variations on this recipe. Some of the variations use cabbage, Savoy cabbage, kale, or rapini. Some variations include tomato or tomato paste. This is the only version of the recipe I’ve ever seen that contains potatoes. I’m sure this recipe has an Italian name but I don’t know what it is. Buon natale.

Recipes to come

We don’t really have any idea of what recipes people will be making or what foods people will be eating in the years to come. Human beings are remarkably conservative about food and there are recipes that are being prepared for foods that are being eaten right now that have been handed down over hundreds or thousands of years. But things do change, as well. Here’s a link to a web conference on Foods of the Future. As our dear departed Julia Child used to say, “Bon appetit”!

This has been an extremely stressful 24 hours dealing with a family medical emergency. I’m okay. My wife’s okay. The dogs are okay. In fact everybody’s okay. But there was a medical emergency and we’re dealing with it. Not quite the way we’d planned on spending the holidays.

Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• Callimachus of Done With Mirrors writes an excellent post on the
  practice and ethics of corrections in blogs and legacy journalism.
• Francis Porretto of Eternity Road congratulates us: We Made It.
• John of Iberian Notes translates an article from Catalan, “Francis Fukuyama is right: the militant anti-Americanism of Zapatero and his Islamist friends”:
  

  That which condemns a Nigerian woman to be stoned to death, which teaches Palestinian children of eight years to love martyrdom and death, which can kill a child from Ossetia in the name of a cause, which prays to Allah while it crashes an airplane into a tower, which fills the burning ruins of a train with death, or writes books which teach how to beat your wife, all this has one origin, the political will of certain regimes and leaders to traumatize Islam and convert it into the transmissor of a totalitarian ideology while sustaining the chain of social privilege.

  Read the whole thing.

• Joanne Jacobs on a truce in the math wars.
• Matsu of mediagirl.org does a Tarot reading for GWB for the last week of 2004. Really.
• Quite a few people have been talking about this article by Micheal Lind from The Prospect.
  Dale Franks of Q&O Blog has an excellent commentary.
• Roger L. Simon is pitching the books, etc. of his commenters. I just got my copy of Animals in Translation yesterday.

That’s the lot.

The Diplomad has an excellent post on anti-globalization—it’s Not Your Father’s Marxism…:

The USSR’s end forced the envious, resentful, and fearful and their leaders to adapt, transform, fracture and downgrade a belief system that had “explained” everything into less-satisfying sub-sets, each focused on a particular topic: most prominently, feminism, environmentalism and the rapidly growing one of “international law.” Despite their seemingly different concerns, all these sub-sets shared much in common, to wit, at their core lay anti-capitalist, anti-American and increasingly anti-Semitic emotions disguised as analytical constructs. Over the past fifteen or so years, we have seen these different strands re-meld into what we now call the Anti-Globalization Movement (AGM). While it doesn’t have the military force behind it of the old Marxism, nor has it yet formulated a clear vision of the world with which it seeks to replace the current world (there is no AGM Das Kapital), it shares with old-time Marxism a reliance on pseudo-science and a vanguard elite. Also from Marxism come much of its language and tactics, as well as the goals of disrupting economic development of the capitalist kind and bringing down the United States and the global order it dominates.

Well worth a read. And there’s more to come.