Ok, Christmas Day was yesterday. This is a Christmas Daywander, not a Christmas Day Wander. I\u2019m an editor. Such distinctions can matter. Sometimes.<\/p>\n
As far as the radio stations are concerned, Christmas is over. Seems to me that after pushing Christmas since Halloween, suddenly it goes poof!<\/em> and vanishes at 5PM on Christmas Day. I\u2019m a 4-nation mongrel (Polish, German, Irish and (maybe; i have no solid proof) French. My mother was a child of Polish immigrants, and our home culture growing up was Polish.<\/p>\n In Polish culture, Christmas isn\u2019t merely a day but a season, and not<\/em> one that starts right after Halloween. The season runs from Christmas Vigil (vigilia<\/em>) on Christmas Eve until The Epiphany on January 6. The Epiphany is also known as the Feast of the Magi, and commemorates the visit of the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem. All our decorations remained in place until Epiphany. This was sometimes problematic if we had a live tree, as some live trees die sooner than others. Carol and I often have both a live tree and a pop-up artificial one. This year we got sick in the runup to Christmas, so we stuck with artificial. We put up a few wreaths (one of them using real pine branches) plus Carol\u2019s childhood Nativity scene, and the Plasticville<\/a> farm (including animals) that Carol\u2019s family put under the tree when she was a kid. We also put a stuffed Grinch and Max on the bookshelves along with a few other things. The trains did not go up around the tree this year due to the long tail of the worst colds we\u2019ve had in years.<\/p>\n This year, we\u2019re having one of our traditional a nerd parties on January 6, so some of the decorations will be going back into their boxes a little early. But I\u2019m fully prepared to play Christmas CDs until January 6th.<\/p>\n Most of you know that I\u2019m a filker; that is, I write song parodies like \u201cThe Zero-G Polka,\u201d which you can find in my book Odd Lots<\/a><\/em>. Some days ago, after imbibing Christmas music for a week or two, the following couplet entered my mind as I sat in front of my shaving mirror, Norelco Triple-Header in hand:<\/p>\n I\u2019m shaving all my white whiskers, Fear not, gang. I don\u2019t intend to finish it.<\/p>\n A quick reminder here: I have a short Christmas story on the Kindle store called \u201cThe Camel\u2019s Question\u201d<\/a> for 99c. It\u2019s about the three camels that carried the Magi to Bethlehem\u2014and met the Christ Child, who grants each camel a wish, including an answer to one\u2019s difficult question. If you\u2019re not all Christmased out yet, consider it. Light reading, hopeful, affirming, and all that stuff that I favor. No starships, sorry.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve always boggled a little at an obscure Christmas carol you don\u2019t hear much: \u201cThe Boar\u2019s Head Carol.\u201d<\/a> It\u2019s from the 15th Century, and food was sometimes hard to come by back then. On the flipside, in English tradition it\u2019s brought into the great hall on a gold or silver platter, amidst fanfare by trumpeters\u2014so I suspect it wasn\u2019t the poor who ate the damned thing. I held off mentioning it here until today, because today is the feast of St. Stephen, and there is a Scandinavian tradition linking the boar\u2019s head with St. Stephen. I also wonder if Good King Wenceslas had a boar\u2019s head in the oven while he was wandering around on December 26th helping random peasants keep from starving and\/or freezing.<\/p>\n The question does arise: What parts of a severed pig\u2019s head can you actually eat<\/em>? Wikipedia doesn\u2019t take up that issue, so I had to sniff around a little, though I didn\u2019t have to sniff far. Thrillist has a long-form explanation<\/a>, which is probably a lot more than you\u2019d want to know. TL,DR: Meat is muscle, and pigs have muscular jaws. So the jowls are the part mostly eaten, though the author cites his father, who ate pig\u2019s brains for breakfast. I can\u2019t scoff too hard: Our Fry\u2019s supermarket sells jars of pickled pigs\u2019 feet. Given what pigs walk around in, I think I\u2019d prefer the head.<\/p>\n What surprised me most is that people are still eating pig heads now in the 21st Century, including the ears. Go ahead: You eat a pig\u2019s head. I\u2019ll watch.<\/p>\n Ummm, no, I won\u2019t.<\/p>\n
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Just like the brown I used to grow\u2026<\/p>\n
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