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Mmm! Final errands all done! Took in all the bins. Presents (and food) acquired for the kitties. Wine (for me and for gifting) purchased. Ingredients for several tasty meals from Clarissa Dickson Wright's Hieland Foodie purchased. Checked in on the UnderCats and petted them extensively. Now relaxing with some Shiner Holiday Cheer and a toasted cheese sandwich and some Doc Martin.

Oh, I promised cute catz with tree pics! Let me get the cable...

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I realised the other day that not having my parents around makes Christmas very...disconnected for me. It was one holiday we almost always spent together, and if we didn't, we still exchanged gifts. I love giving people presents, and without them or a wife to shop for, I kind of get lost somewhere in November. And I miss the rituals of Xmas at their house, the things that made it really magical for me, including the tree (even if, yes, Chris, I didn't always help decorate it :-), the midnight service at Bruton Parish, sitting on their brick hearth as the fire died down and you knew it was time to be going to bed (only to sneak out later and put out presents for everyone.)

So I was hunting around for a movie to watch tonight that would be about family, and I picked Gurinder Chadha's What's Cooking? It doesn't look so far as if it's going to be a great movie, but it's fun and has a number of actors I know and like: Alfre Woodward as a harrassed daughter in law who is on the hook for things out of her control, Julianna Margulies (yum!!!) as the lesbian partner of a Jewish-American woman whose parents (Lainie Kazan and Maury Chaykin) are definitely not comfortable with her relationship with their daughter, Joan Chen as a Vietnamese woman caught between her parents' love of tradition and discomfort with America and her kids' desire to assimilate in America. I love GC's films, and somehow I've never seen this one before.

It's not It's A Wonderful Life (which I'm very fond of--my sap tolerance is high) or Comfort and Joy (my favourite depressing Xmas movie) or Love, Actually (my favourite romantic Xmas movie). But there's plenty more holiday, and tonight I'm not feeling totally in the mood for sap, and I couldn't take either of the other two, not tonight. There's Scrooge, too, in the Spoor Xmas Movie Collection, but that will save for another night.

The ancient Roman ragout I tried making was a but odd, but not bad--spices, ham, leeks, and apples, with "dumplings" (meatballs, essentially) of pork. I wilted some spinach and added garlic as a side dish and had some more of the Holiday Shiner. After dinner has had time to settle, I think I'm having the spotted dick for dessert, with some cream. It's tinned spotted dick, but that's way better than nothing, Sadly, no Xmas pud this year, but that's probably just as well where the ever-expanding waistline is concerned.

Now, back to the movie! Sleep well, y'all!

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What's Cooking? was excellent--kind of a mash-up of Love Actually, Moonstruck, The Big Chill, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. There are some pretty obvious parallels with Bend It Like Beckham (Chadha's first big hit, which came out two years after What's Cooking?) Relationships, families, trust, and the desire of children to be independent and not follow in their parents' footsteps--especially kids in immigrant families--are obviously important themes to Chadha.

I'm sorry her latest film (which I haven't seen yet) got such hugely negative reviews--I really like her work.

Oh, and two more additions to the Spoor Xmas Film Catalog that I was reminded of: A Child's Christmas in Wales (my mum's favourite, with Denholm Elliot) and A Lion in Winter (a great "family gathering for the holidays" film, with Henry asking, "What shall we hang? The holly, or each other?" :-) An honorable mention to Die Hard 2, which takes place at IAD at Xmas, and which kept me sane through one particularly difficult summer night in central Texas when only the reminder that winter and home existed somewhere kept me from going doolally.)

The pudding was good (suddenly I had a flashback to a character in a comic strip saying "Well, what do you know? Canned figgy pudding!" redactrice will understand. :-) Now it's time to decorate the tree and pop off to bed, then wake up in time to see what Father Christmas brought me and the cats...