Santa-Lanterns

Just before Halloween I went a little bit mad - my local supermarket was selling Halloween pumpkins, I bought seven.
            We didn't carve them for Halloween, and miraculously, a month and half later, in this high summer heat, they are as hale and whole as the day I brought them home.
            So we carved Christmas lanterns. Santa-lanterns?  Ho. Ho. Ho.

Among Friends.

Daniela and Mike have a deep-pile shag rug on their living room floor.
            I was sitting on the rug.
            My earring fell off.
            My big, bright, sparkly, knuckle-dusting Christmas Eve earring - as hard to miss as a Christmas cracker.
            We found two almonds, three crackers, half a walnut and a raisin before we found that earring.
            Mike reckoned that if we expanded the search beyond the immediate area where I was sitting, we might have enough to serve up to his sister's new boyfriend when he came for Christmas day lunch.
            Mike is a composer and a singer. A very good singer. The boyfriend came into money five years ago, bought a guitar and collected a band of like-minded two-chord enthusiasts. As he layered raisins and cracker crumbs on a plate, Mike played us a recording of the boyfriend's latest, and it was a very special recording - like the last Karaoke song of the night before the bar closes and the microphone is pried away from the leftover lush.  We felt for him, and suggested a vacuum cleaner with a stocking tied over the hose. To dig up the good stuff.

Christmas Carols

For the past five hours  a bird has been sitting in a tree outside our window, singing. Since he began he has not stopped, or barely even paused for breath. He is singing his little heart out - he chirps, he chirrups, he warbles, he hopsup and down his branch, working up the most fantastic runs, tweeting and whistling and chortling, harder and louder and louder and faster until he chokes on his own whistle, and with only the slightest of pauses to clear his windpipe, he starts again -
            It is three o'clock in the morning, We can't sleep. The sound of this one small bird echoes off of the building to our left, and echoes off of the building to our right, and bounces up and down the parking alley between the two buildings across the street, and on its way back to us, meets the bird's next terpsichorean assault, and it grows and it grows and it grows-

We are afflicted with a lover. You know the guy, the one crouched below the window of his beloved and strumming furiously on his guitar - the guitar strings are smoking, his fingers have turned to rubber and his shoulders are on fire and the stem of the rose between his teeth has been crushed to a bloody pulp, but he will show her -
            He'll show everyone - 
            Beneath his love the world will give way -
            Ooooh, you just watch and see how deep is his love.
            Right above him, his senorita's daddy is out on the balcony, ready to dump a bucket of ice water over the edge.
            Or if we're back to talking birdies, he's got a cat.
            It might have been amusing, but an hour ago the lover from hell was joined by a second bird. They are not friends. Feather to feather, they are trilling their little beaks off. There's no quarter being given - this is war. If one pauses for breath the other finds it in his tiny diaphragm to double his volume and show of just what sort of deathless devotion he is made -
            The father is still upstairs on the balcony, but this time, the he's got the full complement of family retainers lined up on either side. Sleepless and grim, they've all got buckets, ready to go.  He's traded in his bucket for a shotgun. And the señorita is inside on a sofa, with an ice-pack on her head.
 
Merry chirping Christmas.

Christmas Season Gets Serious

Christmas in Santiago

Christmas Cats

Christmas Baking

Bah Hachoo Humbug.

I'm sure that flus come at worse times than between Christmas and new year, but this particular time is probably the least fun time of the lot.
Bah Hachoo Humbug.

Let's pretend that my sneezing sounds like this - and feel all holiday happy and fizz.


It's pretty much the reverse of inappropriately lugubrious holiday music, isn't it?

Post Prandial Phantasies. Burp.

"On the seventeenth day of Christmas
The Elephant said to me -
It's almost HALLOWEEN!"

Someone has a turkey-stuffing hangover...

Merry Christmas, You-All!

This morning's shower ditty:

"I don't want a lot for Christmas
That is one big honking fib!
I'm dreaming of buckets of gold and rubies
A necklace like a diamond bib
(Just like Maria Christina of the Two Sicilies in her seminal royal portrait of 1830)*

Oh, I just want you for my own
Just how much you're gonna know
When i throw you down, tear off your stockings
And smooch you beneath the mistletoe -"

At which point Mr Tabubil stuck his head into the shower, asked if I was quite done, and that he was going to be out on the terrace with a boiled egg. Did I want one? There was one for me if i wanted one.

*The line doesn't scan, but pedantic accuracy is important when it comes to Santa's Wish List. You can hum it in E sharp if you like.

Second-rate Holly Jollies.

I am trapped in customer service telephone hell.
            I wouldn't mind so much if the infinite roll of Christmas carols they're playing at me weren't buried in so much static.  Or if they chose versions that weren't maudlin and lugubrious.  
            Stop singing about holly jolly holidays with a catch in your throat.  And if you're going to hang a star upon the highest bough, remember that only Judy ever got away with quavering like that. Your quivers, semi-quivers, demi-quivers and little achey-breachy wibble-wobble-whoopses will not be supplanting Judy as doleful holiday queen anytime soon, alright? Go try a jolly little jingle bells.  Go ahead, try it. Throw in that perky decant about snowflakes if you want, but above all, sing it cheery!  
            I've got a long wait and an epic argument ahead of me and i want to be in a fighting spirit. Not curled up sobbing underneath my Christmas tree while a second-rate celebrity sings a mournful dirge about snowmen.
            Please.  Thank you.  Please.

Wooden Flowers on the Street

On the street yesterday, an old man was selling wooden roses.
"Mil pesos por flor!  Escoje tu favorita!"  (A thousand pesos (2 dollars) for a flower!  Pick your favorite!)
Painted all the colors that roses come in, they were nestled in a nest of real rose leaves, so cunningly, cleverly painted and tinted that they were indistinguishable from real flowers.
"Mil pesos por flor - they never fade!"

When we sailed into Pucon on our first trip into town for groceries, we found ourselves braking abruptly on the outskirts of town - enchanted by booths selling flowers-   flowers that should have been buds so early in the spring - on bushes just starting to green.  There were full-blown summer roses, daliahs in pink and peach and yellow and red and carnations the size of my open hand.

Climbing out of the car, we investigated.  The flowers were made from shaved wood, gathered and furled around long wooden stakes and sunk into the base of hothouse rose bushes, so that the flowers appeared to grow together out of greenery that appropriate to absolutely none of them.
The flowers are made from mimbre wood.  A plant of the wicker family, mimbre has a thick, whippy stem and grown along the banks of waterways - everywhere, then, in this part of the country. The wood is shaved in spirals, using a device that resembles a large pencil sharpener, and the shavings are glued in an outward-facing spiral around a daisy-like wooden base. 

At the back of the booths,  craftswoman  were painting the flowers – dabbing and tinting and splattering so cunningly and so cleverly that the wooden toys were indistinguishable from real flowers.  We wandered from booth to booth, becoming familiar with the different  flowers and techniques, noting the difference from worker to worker- this woman was masterful with dahlias, another crafted carnations that  could have stood undiscovered  in a bouquet of living flowers, that one had perfected the deep, gleaming tint of a blood-red rose -
 

We bought a bouquet of daliahs – mounted on 28 inch wooden stems - to bring home with us.
            "How are we going to get these home?"  Mr Tabubil said.  "They're so terribly delicate. They won't last the drive back to Temuco, let alone a plane flight."
The flower lady tugged the flower heads away from their stems, and sank them among exelsior and foam peanuts in a rather staggering array of boxes.
            "Secure." She said to us.  And sniffed.  "You think you're the first tourists to buy a flower?"
The rather-spear-like stems, she tied up  with a strip of masking tape around their middles and handed them to us, just like that.
            "Which leaves us with another problem."  Mr Tabubil said, under his breath.  "Four extra pieces of hand luggage and an armful of sharp pointy sticks.  We are never getting this lot onto the plane."
But to our surprise, we did.

Temuco airport was far too small and laid back to give any particular damn about what or how much of anything its passengers were bringing through the x-ray machine.  Cooler chests?  Pastry Boxes?  Armfuls of of gift-wrapped sausages?  A gross of nintendo platforms and bags of spare batteries?  It was Christmas day.  A few extra boxes and an armload of dangerously spikey sticks weren't worth raising an eyebrow over. We flew home to Santiago, comfortably squashed among the luggage of Temucan grandparents flying to the capital for Christmas dinner with their grandchildren, paper crinkling in their pockets, and coils of ribbon spilling out of the luggage compartments above our heads.  A box or two of flowers seemed just the right sort of extra luggage for that sort of day.  

Christmas Upside Down

Here it is hot as hot, which is just how a Christmas should be.  Mr Tabubil is is languishing and complains that he can't take the season seriously, but my earliest Christmas memories are of Dad taking my sister and I swimming in a jungle creek while Mum got Christmas dinner sorted without two overexcited children underfoot.  
            And what Christmas dinners!  Christmas was a hot and stodgy English dinner (roast chicken, creamed potatoes, doughy puddings and dense fruit cake) eaten on a hot and sticky verandah, with ceiling fans pushing the heat around and driving rich smells into your face, and afterwards, afternoons spent on the cool grass of the lawn, and children running around with sparklers in the long summer twilight. 
            Over the years we replaced the hot English food with a menu less colonial and more suited to the southern climate, but we embraced all of the other northern Christmas trimmings as a matter of course.  Our Christmas cards showed snowfalls and lantern-light, glittering with sugar frost.  Our dads Ho-Ho-Ho’d in full Santa fig – sweltering under polyester beards and sofa cushion bellies.  Our heads and ears dripped and clinked with tinkling jingle-bells – we, who had never seen a sleigh. We cut Eucalyptus trees and planted them in plastic buckets, raised trees of plastic tinsel, and sniffed the eucalyptus and plastic scents, and satisfied,  called them firs.  When I moved north, a northern Christmas was easy for me. I’d been mentally living one all my life. 
            Mr Tabubil never had the pop-culture guides to tell him what to do with seafood BBQs and carols that, like Australia and Chile, are upside down –
            “The North Wind is tossing the leaves             
            The red dust is over the town            
            The sparrows are under the eaves –“             
            “Red dust?” He shouts. “Red dust?  It’s blizzards! Blizzards and wooly sweaters and ice-skating and hot chocolate and fir-cones and fireplaces-”
            I try for something colder.
            “The tree-ferns in green gullies sway             
            The cool stream flows silently by             
            The joy bells are greeting the day            
             And the chimes are adrift in the sky-”
            Mr Tabubil stamps off into the kitchen to stuff his head into the freezer. And sighs. 
            Merry Christmas, you-all.

Christmas in Santiago

Bah Humbug.

It’s the evening of December the 23rd and right now, at this moment , my holiday spirit is pretty much a solid Bah-Humbug.  I have a new niece (Mr Tabubil’s sister's baby) and she is charming and precocious and clearly miles ahead of every other baby anywhere and I am making her a stuffed elephant for Christmas.  Every time I make a stuffed animal I buy the pattern off of Etsy - Why support some multinational corporation like Butterick or Simplicity when you can support a creative individual?  That's how the thinking goes, anyway - and every single time I do this, after I cut out the pattern pieces and have used up all my fabric, I remember that the reason one supports multinational corporations is because they have a history of actually testing the patterns.  One doesn't have to redesign the whole flaming animal on the fly. The picture on the pattern I picked out was pretty cute, so I gave the elephant a very long name, and even wrote a little story about why elephants have such long names, and how my Valentina Euphrasia Trumpet-toes McGonagall got hers -
            This blamed elephant only has four legs, but as of this evening I've sewn on seven feet and redesigned a trunk and a purple elephant posterior.  Mr Tabubil, my dear husband and helpmeet, thinks the situation’s hysterical.  I’ve no comment.  But my story has a brand new chapter.  It's called "Valentina the Elephant visits the La Brea Tar Pits."  It's very short and extremely educational.

Christmas Cake Requiem

For a lot of Australians, one of the best parts of the holiday season is the Christmas cake - a fruitcake of gargantuan proportions and grandiose preparation -

             I have written previously about the Christmas Cake  - the deep cultural resonance of butter by the brick, of sugar by the tonne, of eggs by the dozen, of apricot jam, nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, and above all of dried and glace fruit -

             It is the fruit that makes the cake.   In 2010 I wrote -

"In August or September you gather your fruit. A pound or two of raisins, the same of sultanas, another of currants, candied citrus peel, glace cherries, crystallized ginger and pineapple, glace apricots and peaches and pears and figs and oranges and kiwi-fruit and quangdongs and cantaloupe (if you can get it) all chopped into little pieces no larger than a raisin. When you have a lasagna pan overflowing with sweetly aromatic fruit, you begin to add the alcohol. Slowly, pouring and turning and stirring and resting, over the course of a week you pour in bottle of brandy - and then another. As the fruit swells, you move the overflow into another great bowl and tend to both. The house smell thick and alcoholic - 
            "Like a distillery" Mr Tabubil sniffs ardently, "but in a good way."

I baked a Christmas Cake last year, for our first Christmas in Chile, but Chile doesn't have much of a glace fruit tradition.  Chile's confectionery heritage runs mostly to German kuchen and dulce de leche, or manjar, as it is know locally - a thick, sweet, sticky mess of boiled evaporated milk and sugar cooked into in everything from wafer crackers (alfajores) to croissants (media luna) to layer cakes (torta mil hojas). 

             I began looking for fruit in October, just after we arrived in Chile.  Raisins and sultanas came easily, and diligent searching resulted in a single packet of glace apricots from a little Armenian import shop in the comuna (suburb) of Patronato, but as for the rest of it -

             Home-country traditions mean even more when you're an expatriate far from home.  I had the bit between my teeth now, and I wasn't stopping for anything. The Australian shops I'd worked with the previous year wouldn't ship internationally, European outfits would only ship wholesale, and North American offerings were slim. Calling in favors from anyone I knew to be traveling up and down from Canada and the USA,  I shipped myself tubs of glace cherries and candied orange peel and pineapple -

             Christmas had passed by, but that was no matter. This Cake was going to happen.  By mid-January I had collected all the fruits I could, and by mid February they 'd been boozed up till they sweated out an alcoholic haze and the flies that blundered through the window into our flat fell insensible in the kitchen doorway and never rose again, but it was a scant and simple cake that I loaded into our oven -

             And because I was still learning its tricks and temprament, that dearly bought cake came out over-baked: a cinnamon, nutmeg and alcohol soaked charcoal briquette.

I didn't make a cake, this year.  All in all, it didn't really seem worth the fuss.  You can make glace fruit yourself if you're so inclined, but it's a process that takes days of boiling and ends in a perpetually sticky kitchen that sort of leaks into your other living spaces, and I have quite enough of that with Mr Tabubil when he decides he needs home-made marshmallows.  A mixing bowl full of unset marshmallow tends to work its way out of the kitchen into every single room in the house - like silly string, only rather more tenacious, and I've washed the stuff out of my hair often enough this past year that I'm not taking on any more sticky -

           This post, then, is requiem of sorts - the story of the last time we didn't have a fruitcake for Christmas.  That was the year that I was thirteen, the year when the icing on the Christmas cake went wrong. The year we were living in California, and couldn’t find the traditional white royal icing in the local shops.  The year of our really big Christmas party, when all of our expatriate Australian big-talk and honor was on the line.

             You can make white royal icing yourself, if you've sufficient time and masochism. The day before the party, Mum and I set to work. It was a tremendous job; tenting the kitchen in old sheets, we kneaded sugar and egg whites and glycerin until the room was coated in a glistening sheen and we were just unspeakable.

             Nibbling hugely the whole time, we stirred and shaped and molded, and four hours later, we had one fine looking cake  - complete with a little silver mirror on top for a lake and a couple of miniature pine trees around it for ambiance and a border of little silver-painted sugar balls spelling out wishes for a Merry Christmas. Also one kitchen  that looked like it had passed through an icing-sugar supernova, and one empty bottle of glycerin whose label looked, on belated reflection, subtly… wrong.

             We'd found it in the back of the pantry- a battered bottle with the label peeling off - it had looked mostly right and we used it without thinking.  Now, in the bright glow of the aftermath, the label appeared to have a couple of significant spelling errors, and in Big Bold Black Letters, right underneath, a jolly motto reading "If ingested, contact your Nearest Poison Control Center immediately."

             It was all over the cake.  It was all over the kitchen.  It was all over the insides of us.  Burping nervously, we grabbed for the telephone directory and dialed.

             The lady on the telephone at the Poison Control Center was professionally reassuring.  We'd be fine, but did we have more than one lavatory in the house?  She was very glad to hear it, because in about four hours, we'd both be becoming rather intimate with the fittings  for the next day or so.

             She didn't even giggle. Hanging up the phone, Mum sighed and looked at me, and while she showered and rushed out to the shops, I stripped the cake of its gorgeous iced topping and re-laid the floor with fresh sheets.  And we did all of it, all over again. We never did find out where the bottle had come from.

            We were living in California that year, and although we'd stripped the cake bare and even gone so far at to shave off the upper half-inch of cake, just in case, we thought we'd better bow to the local culture and insist that all our guests sign limited liability waivers before they tried it.

             Not one single guest took a single bite of our Christmas cake that year.  Every one of them declined the privilege. 

We found it hurtful.

Darwin

Before we relocate to Chile, we are taking a week's  holiday driving a great big equilateral triangle (For a given definition of triangle, and an even looser definition of equilateral) through Australia's Top End.   
Enjoy! 

The next morning we drove back to Darwin.

            A Potted History:  The area of Port Darwin has been home to the Larrakia people for millennia.   The Europeans didn't arrive until 1839, and took another 30 years to think about stopping there to stay.  For the Larrakia people, that went about as well as you can imagine.  In 1870 Darwin gained some prominence as the site of the very first post of the Overland Telegraph - the great engineering achievement that connected Australia with the world.  The same year, workers sinking telegraph posts several hundred kilometers to the south struck gold - and the Pine Creek Gold Rush put Darwin onto the map, as an entry point for the North.

            Darwin has risen to national prominence twice in the twentieth century - It languished, a sleepy port town in the tropical heat until WW2, when it was a major point of national defense through the War of the Pacific.  In 1942 the Japanese bombed Darwin - dropping more bombs on the city than were dropped on Pearl Harbor (courtesy of the same fleet, in fact.) Darwin was bombed all the way through 1942 and 1943, until the Japanese were pushed back north up through Papua New Guinea.
            Darwin received another wallop - and its place in modern Australian mythology- when a completely unprepared city was flattened by Cyclone Tracy on Christmas Eve, 1974.  In a single night, 70 percent of the city was destroyed - a whole city gone in a night.  1974 was before the days of cell and satellite phones so it took a day or so for the news to trickle out to the rest of Australia, but when it did, the result was the largest airlift in Australian History.  In a town of 43, 000 people, they flew out 30, 000 of them in the days between Christmas and the New Year.  There was - literally - nothing left for them to stay for.

            No water, no medicine, no homes, no clothes -

            Mum remembers it.  That year she was spending the New Year with friends in Adelaide.  She remembers flying into the Adelaide airport and seeing an aircraft hanger lined with tables piled high with donated clothing, and crowds of blank-faced people in t-shirts and rubber thongs (you wear 'em on your feet, people, not your bottoms.  Up North you call 'em flip flops and Hawaiianas) and ragged pajamas pawing through it all looking for something that would fit.

            The people that remained in Darwin - those that refused to go, and those that had nowhere else to go, lived in tent camps and on ships anchored in the harbor, and together they rebuilt the town.  It was a good time for them, considering: bank clerks and schoolteachers turned themselves into builders and construction suppliers, and launched the businesses that still control the industry there today.
            The city that was rebuilt after Tracy bears little resemblance to the sleepy town turned to splinters and sawdust back 1974. It's still a small town, hot and parched and spread out wide and panting under the sun -  but the population has quadrupled to almost 130 000 people.  They live in houses built up on breeze-blocks with concrete hurricane cores locked onto the foundations, or houses built small and bunker-like  out of concrete and veiled with bougainvillea and frangipani (that would be plumeria, for you benighted lot up in the northern hemisphere)and there is a 21st century downtown on the edge of the water - built sky-high with airy condominiums and business towers. The Darwinians who lived through Tracy look somewhat askance at downtown, and wonder what happened to the Post-Tracy building codes, and what will happen next time a blow like that comes through.

We arrived back in town in time for the Mindil Beach Evening Market.  A weekly art-and-craft-and-homemade jam sort of street show and street fair down on the beach.  The goods were mostly the usual floating international tat, but there was a good fire-dancer and acres of good food -  and  there was a sunset.

            Mr Tabubil and I scratched our heads.  It was an all-right sunset, but nothing spectacular.  No color, no fire, no great glowing balls of flame sinking into the sea -  nothing at all to write home about, in fact, but as the sun dropped behind the sea what must have been half a thousand people materialized in twos and tens and hundreds out of the dune grass to take pictures of it.
            We couldn't see the draw ourselves.  So we took pictures of them instead.

The Sunset in Question:

The Crowd:

The Crowd when it was really fierce:

Christmas on the Streets of Santiago

The Gift-Wrapping Status Quo, Post Stabbage.

Mr Tabubil DID take over the gift- wrapping.  After an evening spent ostentatiously shuddering every time he saw me holding something so deadly as a blunt butterknife, he picked up the scissors and tape and became so very enthusiastic about the wrapping that he went a little too far and wrapped up the comfort-food sci-fi paperback books I had strewn around me on the sofa, and labeled them to his father and put them under the christmas tree.

And since Mr Tabubil-in-law IS receiving a small stack of books of his own for Christmas, we had to unwrap EVERYTHING to get at the wrong ones.

I'm allowed to use the scissors again now.

Christmas Nit-Wittery

Feliz Navidad, you-all.

This year Tabubilgirl is celebrating with a knee full of stitches.  She managed to stab herself with a pair of scissors while wrapping Christmas presents.

            One minute I was looking around for address labels and the next moment there was a bright red fountain coming out of me. I didn't even feel the blasted thing go in, but blood was spurting twelve inches sideways onto the tile floor.  It was pinpoint perfect stabbage.

           I have the worlds most wonderful mother-in-law (may the gods bless her and keep her forever and ever and ever).  She took my rather frantic phone call and jumped straight into her car and came straight over, and took me with her to the hospital. 

            She even mopped up the floor of my flat.  (Which was very brave and kind of her - she is very very unhappy around blood.)

As I hopped through the doors to the local Sala de Emergencia (Emergency Room),a bloody washcloth clapped against an even bloodier leg, an admitting nurse scooped me straight into a wheelchair and said "What happened?"

            "Stabbed myself with a pair of scissors."

            "Aaaaah." He nodded knowledgeably. "Wrapping presents, were you?"

            "I'm not the first person this has happened to, then?"

            "Dearie, you're not the first person today. We see this right through the New Year.  There's a whole season for what you did."

            And smirking slightly, he wheeled me over to the admissions desk and abandoned me.

Sigh. 

I was given a tetanus shot for starters, and this being the Clinica Alemana, they insisted on an ultrasound to make sure there wasn't anything inside the wound, because -

            "Sometimes the tips of the scissors break off!" 

            "The scissors were in one piece when they came out of me!!" 

            "There might be something else in there!!!"

            -and when there wasn't, I was sent back to my cubicle for suturing - and had to wait while a small child who'd fallen and sliced open her chin screamed the whole hospital down while she was sutured up.

            She was quite upset about her situation and most of the ER staff was looking quite seriously agitated by the time she was done.  Which was nervous-making.  A strung-out doctor who's spent half an hour being kicked by a hysterical seven year old is not a doctor I want approaching me with loaded needles.

            But after the last harried nurse fled the suturing room we waited quite another while- about the right amount of time for a nice friendly coffee break, and at last, I got stitched up. With steady hands.

           His hands were steady, but the doctor was sarcastic. He stitched, I said "Thank You, Doctor," he smiled and said "Take Care" and strode off into the hallway - and as he cleared the door he turned back and said "I presume your husband is taking over the rest of the gift-wrapping, hmmm?"

And then he about-faced and was out of that door fast, grinning manically.

My mother-in-law and I went home. And found Mr Tabubil looking pale and woebegone.  He'd just been drilled for an entire hour at the dentist, and was minus most of a tooth, and looking forward to more of the same after Christmas.  He was curled up in one of his beloved Ikea Poang chairs with a very sore face and looking very sorry for himself.

              In other news - My sister-in-law broke her toe this evening.  Or rather, her husband accidentally stepped on it and broke it for her, and she's not feeling so great either.

My mother-in-law is not having the best of all possible weeks.