Fuck Christmas this year.
More than at any other point in recent history, Christmas was literally just a Wednesday with turkey. Granted not the worst ever Wednesday, but yeah, fuck Christmas 2019.
Part of the problem was that we diverged in some of the preparation from the usual script, which is often a giant mistake. But I also made fresh bread for Christmas morning. Which did require me to get up just after 5am, but also let me get things organise before I left the house for the day, as well as watch a bunch of crap on YouTube.
But, bread proofed and baked, I loaded up the car and headed up to Ma's place just after 8am.
And Ma was making the last of the ham hearts and mince tarts... so I got to have a few of them fresh out of the oven, always good. Then we had actual breakfast... and while freshly baked bread is awesome, and was possibly more special for Ma since I haven't really been able to give her any of the "freshly baked" stuff, it didn't necessarily feel as "special" as our usual Christmas morning breakfast of croissants.
Still nice though.
And I have, in previous years, complained about the fact that none of the networks just slap on any old Christmas movie during the day... because it's Christmas, and it's nice to have random crap on in the background when you're doing other things... or whatever.
This year I got my wish, and how. Now, I've been a fan of the YouTube channel MovieBitches for a while now, and they've introduced me to the phenomenon of the Shitty Halmark/Lifetime/Netflix Christmas Movie. Yep, Channel Nine came to my rescue this year and ran four of the things back to back from 9am to 5pm. So damn ridiculously BAD, but the first two (Oh Christmas Tree/Fir Crazy and The Spirit of Christmas) were either entertaining or ridiculous enough to actually leave on while doing other things. Granted it was diminishing returns, so Fir Crazy was the best, and they got worse from then on... we had the third one on with no sound and then actively switched the last one off after about ten minutes.
After that, we did a little prep for lunch, then it was present time.
Such as it was.
Let me just point out that I'm not saying I should have gotten more stuff, it's more that there isn't the money this year to do much of anything. Plus there really isn't much of anything I desperately, actively need. So yeah.
- Disney/Typo 2020 calendar
- DVDs
- Avengers: Infinity War
- The Lego Movie 2
- Missing Link
- Wakanda Forever/Black Panther mug
- Dukkah dipping set
- Gingerbread men
- Turkish Delight
- Little Buddah keyring (which I forgot to flip over for the photo dammit).
Christmas lunch is really when the wheels fell off the day, and as I described it a collection of loosely connected fuckups.
These start all the way back on Saturday.
Normally Ma picks up the bits and pieces for our Christmas salad the day or so before Christmas, but this time she asked me to do it and I somehow forgot to say no. I should have said no.
If only because, by the time we got to Christmas Eve night, the basil I bought had withered and shrivelled inside the fridge and the cherry tomatoes were a little too ripe. I didn't know this until after the shops had shut though.
Then the second issue was that Ma didn't read the instructions on the turkey packaging correctly. Fortunately it didn't effect the turkey itself, but it was still a problem. My mother and reading instructions correctly, it's an ongoing theme.
And I know she asked me if it was okay to get the turkey with flavoured stuffing in it, at least I seem to have that memory, and it seemed fine at the time, but on top of everything else in the moment it just seemed problematic.
Anyway, the timing issue meant that we should have put the potatoes in the Weber at the same time as the meat in order to have lovely roast potatoes. We did not.
So then we had to fry some of the potatoes to try and get the same effect. Newsflash, not the same at all.
And then Ma started cooking the haloumi way before she should have. This was also partly on me, because I saw her do it, but I don't think my brain registered how much of a dumb idea it was until it was already finished.
So, we ended up with:
- wilted/shrivelled basil (and for some reason Ma had no salad leaves in her house)
- overly ripe tomatoes
- un-roasted roast potatoes
- turkey with unnecessary stuffing
- bacon that was cooked but not super crispy and crunchy
- haloumi that wasn't as good as it could have been.
Let me just say, it wasn't inedible, by any stretch of the imagination. It was pleasant. It just that almost none of it beyond the sausage meat and the turkey was actually finished in the way it was supposed to be or has previously been.
So while I might otherwise have had a second bowl or sat and picked the yummy bits (usually the meats and the potatoes) out of it after we finished, I just didn't. Also, I'm gunna guess it was mostly because this is our first Christmas dinner in Ma's new house, but the whole prep and construction stages were kind of a hot mess also.
I was pretty over everything at this stage, I'll be honest. But there was some clean up and whatnot. As there usually is.
Then we sat down to a couple of game of Forbidden Island (also borrowed from the same friend as the Unicorns for the same reason). We did pretty well... we won the first game (which was basically on "easy mode"), then lost the first game in the first turn before resetting that board and trying again, and getting right down to the wire of only having two land tiles left and lost. We almost got there, we just couldn't do it.
Between games of Forbidden Island we stopped to have some dessert, our usual "Eton Mess" style thing with meringues, mince pie ice cream, berries and slivers of chocolate. Always good, and yes, that all worked just fine.
That was followed by a couple more games of Unicorns, which actually went better than the first couple, Ma was less tentative and we had a lot of fun.
Once we'd packed everything up and I left, it was maybe 8:30ish... I got home around 9 I think, unpacked, dicked around for a bit and then called it a night.
So there we go, Wednesday with turkey, complete for another year.
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