Birthday Weekend

It was a wonderful birthday weekend, made special by family and friends.  Thanks to Gommie, Aunt Banana, and Lambeth for calling with birthday wishes.  

Friday:
I had a little holiday coffee Friday morning, inviting many friends over for treats.  I don't like to be all alone around my birthday and have long hosted my own little get togethers.   Only a few friends could make it, but we had a jolly time together, setting the spirit for the whole weekend.

That evening was the annual big holiday party.  Mmm, mmm good:  

• Steak, green beans, baked potato, slab bacon, with Peter Luger sauce 
• chicken tikka 
• spinach dal 
• chicken taco 
• corn and mushroom taco 
•  Italian sausage pasta 
• spinach pizza 
• prosciutto, mint, and mozzarella pizza
• pesto orchiette
• Turkey and stuffing bread 
• porchetta slider
• cheese burger
• Smoked tofu noodles
• chicken sausage and pancake corn dogs 
• scrambled eggs with tater tots 
• s'more doughnut
•  cappuccino doughnut
• homemade Twinkie 
• homemade Ho Ho
• homemade chocolate cream Ho Hos
• Captain Crunch marshmallow treat
• Fruit Loop marshmallow treat
• homemade malomar bar
• Concord grape pop tart
• alcoholic creamsicle drink
• alcoholic holiday julep drink

Saturday:

We awoke early to head to Boston where we would see the exhibition, Class Distinctions:  Art in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.  I have always loved Dutch 17th-century painting and even minored in it as part of my graduate school studies, taking classes even with Simon Schama (who broke his leg during our semester!)   Genre paintings are my favorite and so knew there would be a lot to like in this show.

We got there around 11 a.m., and went straight to the exhibition.  It was crowded, as expected, but not so much as to be unenjoyable.  We talked to the kids about the 17th century, the rise of the middle class, Dutch trade and merchants, conventions of landscape painting (the brown-green-blue progression) and portraiture (pendants, status markers), and practiced "reading" what was happening in the various genre paintings.  There were many wonderful paintings--not only Vermeer and Rembrandt, but by Hals, Ter Borch, de Hooch, Steen, Maes, Metsu, van Ruysdael, etc.  The names meant little to the kids, but they liked some of the paintings.  Mama and I felt like we were walking through an art history text!  We had a midday snack before looking at some of the 20th century works by Pollock and Picasso at Sis's request and then browsing the bookstore.  Had to get the heavy art catalog!  

Then it was off to our second stop:  early dinner at the Publick House, where we'd eaten the before our Girl Scout overnight at Old Sturbridge Village in March (four days before my surgery.)  Again we sat by the huge and lovely fireplace, unlit in our remarkably unseasonably-warm December weather.  I had a full turkey dinner plate with butternut squash soup and Indian pudding; Mama and Bud had lobster pie and clam chowder and raspberry tart, while Sis had chicken pot pie with apple pie.  It was a lovely meal sitting in the old space cheerfully decorated for Christmas, setting the mood for our next outing.

Yep, Candlelight at Old Sturbridge Village!  We hadn't been since 2012, having been three years in a row, so it seemed new and unfamiliar to the kiddos.  But for Mama and I, it was much the same;  tastings of cider, gingerbread, plum pudding, roasted chestnuts; demonstrations of tinsel making (but we never found the cornucopia making); riding the horse-drawn carriage; and watching the roaring bonfire (and each practicing taking photos.)  I liked the carol-singalong, which was a first for us this year.  Sis and Bud loved watching the potter at work, making cups and candleholders out of lumps of clay.  The potter had a wonderful kinda grumpy rapport with all the kids standing around--saying that he wasn't an artist and only made things to be useful not beautiful, that no farmer wanted to find clay, that he would have rather been a sailor, and so forth.  All the while his fingers pressed and worked the slippery stuff.  We each got to select a free clay ornament:  teapot, bunny, goose, and heart.   

We stayed much longer than we expected, almost closing the place at 9 pm, which means we got home very late.

Sunday:  

We were up early for church; I was the assistant RE teacher.  After that, we had a seafood lunch and . . . Mama and I slept for 3+ hours while the kids played!  We didn't mean to nap the day away.   Later, we finished the day with dinner and the original Miracle on 34th Street.  

Advent Activities: O Christmas Trees!

With rain in the forecast, we decided to ditch our plans to go to candlelight at Sturbridge Village tonight.  So we headed into NYC instead.  Not for the usual 5th Avenue promenade and visit to the Rockefeller Tree, but uptown on both the East and West sides to visit the Met and the American Museum of Natural History.

The kids didn't get into either of the audiobooks we had so we played car games--the ABC game (J and Q are hard), counting the cars (1 pt for cars, 5 for buses, 10 for trucks, -5 for police!), count the Christmas trees (more of that on the way home), then once we hit the city, we looked for iconic NYC things--taxis, food carts, police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, bodegas, fire escapes.

Our first stop was the Met, where we went straight to the medieval hall to see the creche.  All the while, Bud kept telling us that a group of Adelie penguins is called a creche.  We were a bit doubtful, having heard of colonies of penguins, even rafts of penguins.  But guess what?  I just looked it up and he's right.  A creche of Adelie penguins.

Well, there are not penguins in this creche.  Instead, we saw an elephant, a camel, numerous sheep, a donkey, an ox, some dogs, plus, of course, the Holy Family, angels, Wise Men, the shepherds, and all the Neapolitan peasants surrounding them.  It was a delightful I-spy.

  

Before we left the Met, we took a detour to the newly-installed (relatively) American galleries specifically to see Emmanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware.  We looked long and hard at the huge painting, talking about art vs. history--the sunrise halo around Washington, the stable triangle-shape of the figures in the boat, the pinnacle at the flag, the diversity of figures in the boat (Scottish, frontiersmen, African, etc), as well as how and when the actual crossing took place.  Plus the original circumstances of the creation and exhibition of the work about 100 years later.  It really is a fun painting to explore.

The kids probably could have stayed all day, but we were off across the park to AMNH.  I have long wanted to see the Origami Tree and so we headed straight to it.  And we loved it!  If I-spy was fun with the creche, it was doubly fun with all the origami animals:  koalas, owls, penguins, bunnies, pandas, hedgehogs (perhaps--they were high up!), dolphin, ducks, swan, jellyfish, foxes, lemurs, peacocks, bears, horeshoe crabs,  oh so many different critters.  Just look at the pictures.  There are over 500 figures, made by members of Origami USA, who start in July to finish in time.  Very intriguing and inspiring.

   



We visited the dioramas--both in North American mammals (bunnies!) and the hall of the Blue Whale (penguins and manatee).  Did you know that the Blue Whale hall might be the best place to stretch your back in NYC?  (Well, I bet Central Park would be good, too, but not in December.)   I spent awhile on the floor, horizontal like those around me, admiring the whale from below.  Very good for the spine!

Then we headed to the special exhibition, Global Kitchen, which is all about "food, farm to fork."  The first bit of the exhibition was perhaps too science-y for me and even too preachy (and I'm the choir!  Maybe that's why!)--gallons of water, pounds of waste, etc etc etc.  Though, as the NYTimes reviewer notes, this is an exhibition about how people have intersected with nature for sustenance and how that has totally gone awry recently with agribusiness.   But then, I prefer anthropology and social history.  There were a few history of science facts I found intriguing--kohlrabi, Brussel sprouts, cabbage, and all cauliflower actually originate from the same wild cabbage weedy-thing that has been cultivated for thousands of years; apples are 7 times less bitter than their crabapple forebears; bananas might be extinct in our lifetime because they only use one genetic family which is susceptible to a blight right now.  We had fun tasting cornbread in the Whole Foods-sponsored kitchen (mine is better!  They change the topic every two weeks).  And we liked sniffing all the different scent interactives (yeah, lavender; ugh, garlic).  We especially liked the Aztec market with its basket and bags and pots full of fish, beans, corn, tortillas, agave, iguana, turkey, tomatoes, pumpkins, squash, squash blossoms, etc etc.  It was a great display.  And without wheat, cheese, chicken, or beef--several of the items we associate with modern-day Mexican food.  Or plastic or styrofoam or even glass containers!  We also loved situating ourselves at meals through the ages--a feast with Kublai Khan, ice cream with Jane Austen, reclining with Roman empress Livia Drusilla.  And cooking our own meals on an interactive computer "stove" making groundnut soup, poached eggs, grilled salmon (see here for more recipes and info).  And seeing what Ghandi usually ate (vegetarian), what Michael Phelps downs during intense training (Bud wanted to try to eat that--3 breakfast sandwiches, omelets, oatmeal, French toast, coffee, what Otzi (the 5,000 year old Iceman found in the Alps) had for breakfast the day he died (dried Ibex and some fruit, I think), and what Nobel Peace prize winner and sustainable food activist Wangari Matthai would eat.  There were also displays on cookbooks, the history of utensils, and the specific traditions of China, Morocco, France, and Korea.  The only part that fell very very short was food as ritual--two small cases cramming diverse celebrations such as Chinese New Year and Day of the Dead together, accompanied by a too-short film about different traditions.  This could have been an exhibition itself and was not properly addressed.  But the gift shop made up for the slightly rushed end--we chose several different kinds of chocolate and candies to sample on the ride home!  And so we drove home up Broadway, munching on black raspberries, peach chewies, chocolate marzipan, and "milk bottles" of condensed milk candy.

But that wasn't the end of our day!  After a two-hour rest at home (including several holiday specials I slept right through), we headed for dinner at Bloodroot--because it's Latke night for Hanukkah, where a lovely clay menorah was lit in the center of the dining room!  The kids even played the dreidl game with another little kid and his dad while we all waited for our food to come.   Then we happily gorged on porcini soup (Bud's favorite), Cambodian kanji, oatmeal bread, three kinds of latkes (potato, cauliflower, and beets, with sour cream, applesauce, and a great beet spread from the NYTimes, Selma said.  Sis loved the cauliflower latkes), halushkin (noodles and cabbage), solianka (tomato-y mushroom-cabbage dish), Jamaican jerk "chicken" with this spicy green chile spread, marinated tofu salad, and then cranberry kissl, kombucha squash roll with cream cheese (think pumpkin roll), and hot fudge sundaes!

A wonderful day of family, food, and fun.  And trees!

One of Bloodroot's cats curled up on Bud's jacket.