Christmas Day

I can’t think of anything to write and I know the reason why. The blood is in my stomach. No air can get to my brain because all available resources have been redeployed to the Russian front of my anatomy.

First, an Apology

I am about to launch into a discussion of my digestion. I realize this is not O.K. I’ve been reminded several times over the past few days that I am succumbing to “creeping barbarism.” The author of the remarks was my eldest brother, the wise and fair “Fathole.” We had three separate exchanges where it became clear that I had gone savage. The first was when I suggested we use mugs instead of tea cups to serve coffee. The second was when I tried to get the Christmas dinner menu changed to “kielbasa and beer.” And the third was when I said we didn’t need to clean the bathroom because the wood smoke from the fireplace would cover up the smell. Now that I am on the path back to proper manners I don’t want to relapse immediately by talking about digestion. What is it nowadays that makes people think that it is O.K. to talk about vomiting or diarrhea? There is no taboo surrogate that makes it alright to talk about such things. The topics themselves are off color. Saying “cucumbers repeat on me” is not acceptable in polite company. You simply say “no thank you” when offered cucumbers. Likewise, unless you are shooting an episode of “Jackass” the term “puke” should be avoided. “Got Sick” is not better. If you must say something, just say that you are “not feeling well.” Saying “I’m not feeling well” will allow people to draw their own conclusion. If you’re a woman they will assume you’re having menstrual trouble, and if you’re a man they’ll figure you’re swimming with venereal disease.

The Essence of Good Manners

If you want to learn about good manners you should spend time in the South. Southerners understand that the key good manners is allowing people to believe what they want to believe. So, if you have to pee while riding in a car, you stop your car and walk far enough into the woods that when a passing child asks, “Why are those people stopped by the side of the highway?” the mother can reply “they must be picking flowers.” It’s the difference between saying to someone at the door “she is not in” instead of “she is not home” when “she” is cowering in an upstairs bathroom or passed out on the settee from drinking too much gin.

I’m not sure why I just talked about good manners, since I’m about to descend directly into barbarism. Don’t say you were not warned.

A Description of the Christmas Cheer that Is Rotting in My Stomach

The sea is in my intestines. I am not sick. I feel fine. I just happen to know that the gastric equivalent of the big dig is going on somewhere below the tightly stretched skin of my gut. Here is an approximate map of how I think things stand right now:

The following expands on the above diagram for those of you who don’t have the good sense to stop reading now.

Antipasto

Eaten on Christmas Eve. Cioppino (fish stew: cod, mussels, clams, squid, tomatoes, etc), meats (capiccola, sopprasseta, Genoa salami, prociutto), cheese (provolone, fresh mozarella), vegetables (roasted peppers, pickled cherry peppers, pepperoncinis). My feeling is that the fauna in my stomach have already made friends with the salt water biohazards I ate three days ago. I won’t make any jokes about low tide.

Roast Beef

On Christmas day we eat what is affectionately called the beefbomb. It’s like a Yule log for the carnivorous set. The general rule of thumb is a pound of meat per person. This year we had five at the table and a seven pound roast. We don’t eat particularly good beef. The Boston Brahmins we ape eat rib roast, while we opt for the top round roast. Just because we want to be like them doesn’t mean we’re foolish. The meat is served extremely rare. Rare like you can’t get in a restaurant because the health department won’t allow it (15 minutes per pound on the outside). When you don’t cook meat much there is an awful lot of blood that comes out when you carve it. We call that “gravy”.

I suspect the undigested meat is robbing me of my creativity. My hypothesis is based several previous experiments where I ate large amounts of rare beef and then tried to talk. After a good meal the conversation usually runs like this:

Friendly Intellectual Aunt: So, what does your generation think about support of the great cultural institutions?

Gutbloom: Must…. Drink…. Water

Yorkshire Pudding

Yorkshire Pudding is flour, eggs, and milk mixed together and then baked in a pan with the drippings from the roast. This is why my father said, “don’t worry, I have suet in the refrigerator” before myself and Fathole went out to buy the beefbomb. What he meant was, “if the beefbomb doesn’t have enough fat on it I will add suet to the pan so we can have Yorkshire pudding.” Believe it.

Making Yorkshire pudding is not out of character for my clan. You must understand that I come from a family where people butter donuts. The way we eat sinkers is to spread butter on each bite. Given that, you might think that we put butter our Yorkshire pudding. You’d be thinking right.

Lard

The lard in my stomach, represented by the yellow band percolating like a lava lamp through the other sedimentary layers, comes from the beef, Yorkshire pudding, cookies and chocolate. The scientifically minded among you are going to say “but butter isn’t lard.” Well, it is after I get done with it.

Chocolates

You’ll notice that the chocolates are in two different places in the diagram. This is to represent the fact that I eat chocolates all day on Christmas, so I’m not sure where they are. For example, when in the kitchen fetching salt for the table after dinner is served I ate one of the Lindt truffles sitting in a bowl on the island. While clearing the dishes I poked into the Whitman’s sampler to grab the butter cream nougat. The bulk of our candy eating at Christmas comes from traditional Whitman’s samplers distributed among the family as “gifts”. Several people have pointed out to us that these are cheap chocolates. I agree, but when you are eating candy while cooking bacon for breakfast you shouldn’t really be eating good candy.

I ate other candy as well. I ate ribbon candy and jellied fruit slices, but not in quantities large enough to merit a color band in the chart of indigestion.

Cookies

Good cookies, like chain restaurants, come from the Midwest. Luckily I have someone from Wisconsin living next door. She is an innovative Christmas cookie baker, so in addition to the regular molasses, anisette, and sugar cookies this year I also had some cookies where part of a snicker bar had been baked inside. Sounds obscene to you? Well, I’ll have you know that those Midwestern cookies sealed the lard lagoon in my stomach like a cap on a landfill. Without them I might have had to go to the emergency room.

Fluids

My thinking is that the fluids rise to the top, so I put them on the top of the diagram. I’m always dangerously under slept on Christmas. I drink lots of coffee and Tab in a desperate effort to avoid falling asleep while waiting for the first level of the Whitman’s sampler to clear, since the rule is you can’t go to the second level until the first is completed and it can take hours for someone gets desperate enough to eat the cherry cordial. I colored the fluids grey because they are all salted by the time they get to the stomach, so that’s salt coffee, salt Tab, and salt beer you’re looking at.

Fluids 2

Did I forget the real salts? Man, I dose myself hard with the Alka-Seltzer after a major league session like this. I opt for the lemon lime flavor of Alka-Seltzer. Lemon lime is such a refreshing flavor, don’t you think? So light, so effervescent… it leaves a sophisticated aftertaste that both clears the palate and calms the humors. It is, to my mind, the culinary spirit of Christmas.