Yule Need This.
So a company that makes those coffee makers that use small pods—I won’t name the company because they’re not paying me enough; more specifically they’re not paying me anything, and they’re so ubiquitous they don’t need me to shill for them anyway—has made a machine that makes cocktails from pods similar to the ones that are used for coffee. The problems with this should be obvious. Aside from the fact that the coffee machine already takes up a lot of valuable kitchen counter real estate, leaving precious little for dishes, cups, take-out Chinese food, mail, umbrellas, briefcases, keys, pocket telescopes, pill bottles, and the assorted flotsam and jetsam of home life, anyone who wants a wide range of cocktails would be better off going to a bar. I know the same could potentially be said for coffee, but even though the machines can make a wide range of lattes, cappuccinos, espressos, frappes, and draperies there must be a limit to how much they can do, otherwise all those coffee places wouldn’t be so ubiquitous they don’t need me to shill for them. And while you can pick up your coffee at a drive-through window I’ve never met anyone who went to a bar and asked for their Bloody Mary to go. And part of the appeal of the pod-cocktail maker, as it’s advertised, is that it can make beer. Apparently they haven’t noticed that beer is already easily available—to go, even—in bottles and cans. So is coffee, although that’s a more recent development and probably got the idea from beer. And no one who’s interested in brewing their own beer at home does it casually, as you’ll know if you’ve ever been cornered at a party by someone who tells you beer brewing is their hobby and within five minutes you realize it’s really their obsession and fifteen minutes later you realize they can’t talk about anything else and an hour later when you finally get away you feel like you’ve been squeezed into a small plastic pod and had hot water forced through you, but that’s another story. And even though cocktail-making is more of a niche activity people who are serious about it are the sort who take it seriously enough that they prefer the hands-on approach to making a sidecar, a margarita, or a martini, and, hey, how hard is it anyway to combine vodka and vermouth or gin and tonic or scotch and asparagus? And because it’s the end of the year the cocktail maker is being promoted as a great gift or the ideal accoutrement for your holiday parties even though it doesn’t make egg nog, or any other variety of nog, which I think is really the only drink, aside from mulled wine, which is also really easy to make—just think about it—for the season, one that should be shared with friends and family around the yuletide fire, which reminds me, what is “yule” anyway? When I was a kid I thought it was some sort of animal, like a small moose, which made the idea of a yule log really unappealing, and then I thought maybe it had something to do with Euell Gibbons who could concoct winter cocktails from pine needles and sap, or maybe Yul Brynner whose movies always seem to play around Thanksgiving and Christmas, et cetera et cetera, and then I pretty much forgot about it until now. It turns out Yule is an ancient Germanic solstice celebration that provided both the timing and many of the symbols associated with Christmas, including the decorated tree as well as the feasting and drinking. And I wouldn’t have thought to look that up if I hadn’t hitched onto this holiday line of thought, so something useful has come out of that cocktail maker after all.
Every year when Thanksgiving is celebrated in the United States there are certain traditions, including turkey and its own special side dish which, depending on where you are, is known as either stuffing–because it’s sometimes stuffed into and cooked with the turkey–or dressing. Regardless of what you call it it’s an essential part of the Thanksgiving meal, but varies widely from state to state. Here are the most popular stuffing, or dressing, ingredients across the United States.
Orion is rising west by southwest in the mornings now. It’s the second constellation I learned to identify after the Big Dipper, Ursa Major. It took some time before I could find the Big Dipper, before I even understood what constellations were. I was five when I overheard an older kid, some sunny summer day, say that he was going to look for the Big Dipper that night. I didn’t even know what a dipper was so I asked my mother and she took me out that night and pointed up at the stars. “There’s the spoon,” she said, “and there’s the handle.” I’m sure she explained that a constellation is a picture made up by connecting the stars like dots but I missed that part and thought, what is she talking about? All I see are stars. And I was terrible at connect-the-dots puzzles anyway. I’d get bored somewhere around three and skip ahead to nine so no matter what the picture was supposed to be it always looked like an amoeba, but that’s another story.
For a long time every time I looked at Orion I wondered why ancient astronomers—the constellation was named by the Greeks—had called it that. Why Orion? Almost from the time I could read I was fascinated by Greek and Roman mythology—any mythology, really, but Greek and Roman was the most available—and Orion always seemed like a pretty obscure figure. He doesn’t play a major role in any big myths; in fact Orion seems to have long since been constellated by the time Jason goes looking for the golden fleece, not to mention the fall of Troy and Odysseus’s epic voyage. Why does Orion get such a prominent place in the sky, rising in the mornings at the start of winter in the northern hemisphere, gradually moving to the evenings as Earth approaches perihelion? Who was Orion, anyway, besides a hunter?
It’s dark now when my wife and I get up in the mornings to go to work, and soon it’ll be dark in the evenings when we get home too, thanks to Daylight Savings Time and the autumn tradition of falling back, as opposed to springing forward, although I’m never quite sure what’s “back” and “forward” on a clock. It’s even worse when someone tells me to move the clock up an hour. Does that mean I should add an hour or subtract one? And why do we have to change the clocks anyway? The American poet Randall Jarrell said that when he was training for the Air Force during World War II he and his fellow airmen were put on Double Daylight Savings Time which still baffles me because I can’t imagine telling someone they’re getting up at 5am when it’s really 3am is going to do anything to boost morale, and might even makes things worse because it just puts dawn that much farther away. At least there’s a benefit to the end of Daylight Savings Time in the autumn and that’s one extra hour of sleep on Sunday, which makes me think we should just change the clocks once a year, but that’s another story. Anyway here’s an ode to the end of Daylight Savings Time I wrote several years ago.
Spending the night in a cave was fun.
