Christmas Invidious

It is, I suppose, creeping up upon me, tho' it's all feeling very last-minute and slapdash. Thanksgiving and then Hogswatch form a sort of double distraction; Christmas just doesn't have the impact over here, coming not out of nothing as it always has done in the UK.

However: one thing at least I'm getting right. The cats' breakfast tins were in order: fish today (as Christmas Eve is a fast day), turkey tomorrow.

Still don't know what we're having tomorrow, but I just checked the pudding and I'm pleased. Dunno what it tastes like, but it's looking and smelling good after ten hours in the slow-cooker last night. (I might have got up at 4.30 to turn it off. Might've done.) Assuming that it survives the taste test tomorrow, I will cheerfully give my wholehearted imprimatur to this do-it-in-the-slow-cooker notion. Ever so much easier than pots of boiling water on the stove and handles of string to get the pudding-basin in and out. (I'm told one can use the microwave for reheating on the day, but - nah. Some traditions must be adhered to. We will be using the slow cooker again.)

Today I need to marzipan the cake. I'm kind of late with that too. Hey-ho.

[EtA: goose. We're having goose. Safeway was all out of all birds other than chicken, and apparently there is still an atavistic part of me that thinks Christmas needs a bird; so we came home and I nipped around the corner to Lucky's, and came home with a goose. Ho ho ho.]

...and breathe.

Verily I have shopped mightily this day, and laboured much. I have marzipan'd and iced the cake (which really ought to be done on separate days and before this, but hey). I have magnificently forgotten the same thing I magnificently forget every year, which is a part of my cake process, apparently: I unwrap the cake and mix the marzipan and take out the jam (guava jam, this year!) with which to adhere the marzipan to the cake, and then I roll out the marzipan and measure it against the cake and get excited because it looks about the right size and lay it on and smooth it over and get halfway around the sides before I remember that I have forgotten actually to apply the jam to the cake, and it's way too late now. So when people eat it, the marzipan/icing congruence will defect from the body of the cake, in an attractive process of disassembly. Every year.

I have wrapped presents and mixed a sourdough also, for baking tomorrow early. It needs kneading, but it can wait; my back aches, and I am going to open a bottle of wine and swallow some pills and sit down with a book for a bit. We went to see The Hobbit last week, and consequently I felt moved to reread the book, for the first time in a long while; and somehow that seems to have segued without my quite noticing, so that I am now five chapters into The Lord of the Rings. Which, hey. It must be at least five years since I read that. At least. It might actually be significantly longer. And it's Christmas, and if Christmas isn't about comforts, I dunno what is.