December 11, 2005 Email Shows Recipe Calendar Archives
Christmas is a big noisy thing that keeps you from experiencing the darkness of the solstice. Christmas is like having the TV on in a room all the time. I counter it by singing softly in my head "everything I think I know is just static on the radio." I counter it by getting up early and writing this by Christmas tree light while the rest of the house sleeps. I counter it by avoiding toxic Christmas music and listening instead to the hippie mysticism of Gandalf Murphy as I drive home from Augusta at 40 mph through the first good snow of the year.
In just one day we went from the open water in these photos to a mostly frozen over lake, although it's only in the last couple of days that the lake has been groaning, an indication that the ice is growing and settling in.

Melissa's new ride is a 2003 Subaru Baja. It's basically an Outback with a little something extra on the rear end; hence the license plate. Personalized plates only cost $15 in Maine; that's why so many people have them. We live in an all-wheel drive kind of world up here.

A few days ago lagniappe was the Word of the Day that comes to my email:
"We picked up one excellent word," wrote Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi (1883), "a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word — 'lagniappe'.... It is Spanish — so they said." Twain encapsulates the history of "lagniappe" quite nicely. English speakers learned the word from French-speaking Louisianians, but they in turn had adapted it from the American Spanish word "la ñapa." Twain went on to describe how New Orleanians completed shop transactions by saying "Give me something for lagniappe," to which the shopkeeper would respond with "a bit of liquorice-root, ... a cheap cigar or a spool of thread." It took a while for "lagniappe" to catch on throughout the country, but by the mid-20th century, New Yorkers and New Orleanians alike were familiar with this "excellent word."

Thanks to those who contributed a recipe to the 2006 calendar. Eight more years to go before I'll have a full cycle of calendars (7 regulars, 7 leap years). Time to look in my big calendar bin in the basement to see what years get to come out and play again.

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