We now have enough snow to ski on, should you wish (I don’t). Jack is five months old now. He’s enthusiastic about the snow. You can see that it was snowing yesterday, quite hard but not unpleasantly (there was no wind).
At times he goes quite bananas.
And he likes to share his enjoyment with Topsy.
Topsy chases him. We think she has a plan to tire him out so he’ll spend less time later trying to attract her attention in an in-your-face way while she’s taking a nap.
Today we went to the dog run. It’s in the middle here, on the near side of the red cabin by the lake.
Jack has to stay on a lead in case he runs down on to the lake. I think he’s still quite relieved not to have to face the big dogs yet, too.
Topsy made a friend, an Italian water dog-Labrador mixture called Alex.
They had fun with snow,
chased one another,
and made peculiar facial expressions that changed too quickly for the naked eye to pick up but were caught by the camera.
Tomorrow I’ll show some more pictures. I don’t want to make this post too huge to download.
A Bad Guide 
Jack is a star in the making.
He is, isn’t he?
Oh how wonderful! How wonderful! All the dogs are wonderful!
All the dogs are taking naps now.
Oh, oh, oh! Lovely, wonderful, fantastic!
Jack is certainly a star (already).
Merry Christmas to you all!
¡Un beso desde Buenos Aires!
Jack is REALLY REALLY cute (as is Topsy). I’m amazed you can get any shots of dogs-at-play. We keep taking pictures of the adorable playtime between Riley and her Border Collie buddy Leroy, but in the photos they look as if they are about to tear each other apart.
As a son said, merry Chrismas* everyone.
*Or Xmas to Marie-lucie; do you remember the chrismon?
Merry Christmas to all of you!
Joyeux Noël!
God Jul!
Fröhliches Weihnachten!
¡Feliz Navidad!
(Jesús, no entiendo lo que quieres decir).
>Marie-lucie
I’m sorry. Some time ago we’ve told – I think it was in “Martian Spoke Here” but I’m not sure- about the chrismon, the Christian symbol where the “X” instead of “Chris” can be written. For that I wrote Xmas to you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrismon
Talking of wee dugs, Henry de Winter prefers to perform with his on stage. Name of Bobby. Honest.
Thank you for your comments, one and all. Since testerday I’ve developed a horrible cold and I don’t feel up to posting anything as I’d intended. However I did take a lot of pictures, including some for a post on Goats’ Christmas, so one of these days I’ll get up and do it. All I know is Alma’s felt rotten for a week and I got two pairs of pyjamas for presents so I’m going to try them out. Have a good Christmas.
Just finishing Christmas Eve here. I was invited by a Norwegian friend to spend the evening with her (mostly Canadian) family. We ate Norwegian style, I was told (shrimp and lettuce; pork, cabbage, carrots, potatoes; dessert: stewed cloudberries with whipped cream in a hard, edible cup made of some dough; later, coffee and pastries). Great food, nice people, adorable kids, lots of presents! Oh, it is now past midnight! see you tomorrow. God Jul!
My wife (of an old friend): “He wanted to be a conductor.”
Daughter: “Bus?”
Wife: “Opera.”
Get well soon, Mr Crown!
Our Christmas dinner is always a buffet froid. Last night was extremely hot (30ºC al 12 o’clock, we couldn’t have stand each other without air-conditioner)
Should I supply him with tunes or with jokes, Julia?
Both your choices are excellent, dearieme
I just saw your great video (that dog is a star), and your joke (which for me came after I sent my dinner comment) has a PG Wodehouse style…
Happy holidays to all, and get well soon, Kron!
Those wonderful photos make me glad that when the kids come over for Xmas dinner (my wife’s making her traditional Norwegian meatballs and potatoes) they’ll be bringing Lily, their new rescue dog (a mix of black Lab and some sort of hound, lean and beautiful and friendly) — I can use a canine fix today. (We’ve moved the cats’ food and water and litterbox into the cellar so they can hang out there in safety and sneak up if they feel adventurous; the last time Lily was here she barked at Pushkin, but it was a friendly bark and he didn’t seem fazed. It was the first time anyone had heard her bark!)
marie-lucie: Just finishing Christmas Eve here. I was invited by a Norwegian friend to spend the evening with her (mostly Canadian) family.
In Norway we traditonally celebrate Christmas Eve, starting with rice porridge for lunch and more or less finishing the Holiday with the long, slow, extravagant breakfast Christmas Morning. It seems quite handy for a bi-cultural family to have two feastdays.
We ate Norwegian style, I was told (shrimp and lettuce;
A starter? Delicious, but not especially traditional for Christmas dinners. If anything, I’d expect different sorts of stewed herring, or gravlaks, or lutefisk. With aquavit, of course.
pork, cabbage, carrots, potatoes;
Oh, yes. The pork’s probably ribbe, whole sides of pork roasted in the oven until the rind is crusty. It’s often accompanied by meatballs or sausage of medister (fat pork mince). I’d expect surkål (Norwegian sauerkraut) rather than fresh cabbage and carrots, and also lingonberry jam. And aquavit, of course. We had that lille julaften, and again today. This is the most common Norwegian Christmas meal.
The second most common is probably also ribbe — in the western parts they eat steamboiled smoked mutton ribs under the same name or as pinnekjøtt. The same sidecourses plus mashed rutabaga. (I’ll venture to guess that this was the tradition in Hat’s mother’s family from Ryfylke.)
In our house at Christmas Eve we serve turkey of all things. But it’s what my parents finally landed on after trying everything traditional on picky children, and my wife loves it — and can eat Waldorf salad for hours.
dessert: stewed cloudberries with whipped cream in a hard, edible cup made of some dough;
Moltekrem served in krumkaker (or koppkaker when they’re formed to cups rather than cones) (I have the iron, but I’ve not taken up baking them after my father died). Could it be more canonical? The only Christmas dessert that can compare is riskrem, whipped cream mixed with the leftovers from the rice porridge lunch. It’s served with a sweet and sour sauce from red berries. At our house we’ve dropped desserts for Christmas for some years, out of general fullness.
later, coffee and pastries).
Yes. Inbetween we go around the Christmas tree (singing, first hymns, then silly folk songs). We’re all so full from dinner that we hardly can walk, but the children insist. But it’s good for us, or at least it makes some sort of abdominal room for the pastry. Later, or with the coffee, we open the presents, Different families have slightly different ways to do this, of course.
Great food, nice people, adorable kids, lots of presents!
Exactly like here, of course. But then, I made the food myself. And the children, come to think of it. Not the presents, though. My sister and French brother-in-law gave me Henriette Walter’s 1988 Le français dans tous le sens. It’s a general audience book, and I haven’t got longer than the préambule yet, but both that and André Martinet’s préface are very sensible.
Oh, it is now past midnight! see you tomorrow. God Jul!
Here’s a linguistic tidbit as bonus. The fronting of the vowel of jul to [ü:] is originally a Swedish and Eastern trait, while more conservative dialects have preserved [u:] (written ó in archaic Nynorsk). And here’s a twist I didn’t see coming, a possible semantic split: There’s been some public debate in Norway about how our national broadcaster NRK presumedly disregards our heritage by making Christmas Children’s TV with no religious content (i.e., no Jesus in the nisse stories. And vice versa, but the concerned don’t mention that). This year’s julekalender was a Medieval fantasy Brothers Lionheartish thing, which of course made the concerned more concerned. In the episode the day before Christmas Eve a children’s choir performed a song written in dialect or archaic Nynorsk, and my religious mother-in-law got upset with the pandering to ancient heathendom when the song had jól [ju:l] rather than >jul [jü:l]. For some reason she’s never objected to fine, old hymns like Elias Blix’ Kling no klokka.
languagehat: my wife’s making her traditional Norwegian meatballs and potatoes
Medister for Christmas?
Oh, and please get well! I must have edited that out in my usual final mash-up.
Takk, Trond! The idea was not to have a fully traditional Norwegian Christmas Eve meal, as among other things our hostess had to deal with three allergic persons at the table (all with different allergies!), but still mostly Norwegian food. The cabbage was not fresh and green but looked indeed like sauerkraut, except that it tasted completely different and unexpectedly sweet, after cooking for about an hour and a half. There was another Norwegian lady as a guest and I heard a word which might have been surkål. For the pork, our hostess explained that it was impossible to get the proper cut outside of Norway, as Canadian butchers automatically trim off the skin and fat. She had bought the meat at a specialty shop and there was indeed a fair amount of fat, and the outside did seem quite crisp to me (and tasted very good) but she and the other Norwegian lady both found it not crisp and crackling enough. There were also some small sausages. The berries were small yellow ones which they called “cloudberries”, a word I had often seen in print but never associated with the actual berries. I think they are supposed to grow in Canada but I am not sure where. Apparently they are rare in Norway too. They were not “lingonberries”, another word I had often run into without knowing the berries, until I saw and ate some in Sweden last year and found that they were probably red currants (Fr groseilles), which are rarely seen in Canada. We had some red wine with the meal, no aquavit (although that word was uttered at some point). We did not dance around the tree either! But it was a great evening.
Le français dans tous les sens is a great book. I bought one from the author herself when she was touring Canada to promote it, and later my mother (in France) bought me one, not knowing I had one already. My first copy is now torn and tattered since I used it several times as a textbook in courses I was teaching. The author is very knowledgeable and knows how to make things understandable to the average person, without going into unnecessary technical jargon or pedantically minute details. She also has a great sense of humour. That book was a huge success in France and she has since then written several others, also for a general audience.
AJP, I too hope you get better soon, so that you enter the New Year in good health and spirits.
The berries were small yellow ones which they called “cloudberries”, a word I had often seen in print but never associated with the actual berries. I think they are supposed to grow in Canada but I am not sure where. Apparently they are rare in Norway too. They were not “lingonberries”, another word I had often run into without knowing the berries
There was a berry discussion at LH here; we had lingonberries with our meal, and very good they were too, but we haven’t been able to find cloudberries to go with the krumkake, which saddens me (we’ll have them with ice cream, which is fine, but not the same).
We had “pigs in blankets” with our goose (small sausages wrapped in bacon) and apple sauce and bread sauce. Plus peas, roast parsnip, red cabbage and roast potatoes (King Edwards). My wife takes the legs off the goose so we have roast crown of goose with the legs done as a confit.
And poor old Crown is moping about with a cold. Get well soon, Crown. Here’s two jokes from a recent FT review.
a 1910 cartoon from Punch magazine in which a boss berates his secretary for typing “income” as “incum”. “Good Heavens!” exclaims the secretary. “How did I come to leave out the ‘b’?”
And in 1750 Lord Chesterfield, the statesman, advising his son to brush up on his spelling, warned: “I know a man of quality, who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled ‘wholesome’ without the ‘w’.”
And since then, it is to avoid lifelong disgrace that many people are careful to start “holistic” with a “w”.
Cloudberries (Norw. molter) are dark yellow and look like raspberries. We use them as a breadspread or with whipped cream or icecream for dessert They grow in moist, somewhat acidic soil — bogs, moors and open birchforests. Here‘s where they’re supposed to grow. West of the Atlantic they’re thriving in most of Canada, but not in Nova Scotia, if the map’s to be believed, but you wouldn’t have to stroll very far into New Brunswick to find some. It’s even growing in spots as far south as Long Island. In Eastern Canada they’re called bakeapples, says WP.
Lingonberries (Norw. tyttebær) are dark red, small, quite hard on the outside but juicy on the inside, and are used with heavy meats, either as a side dish or in the sauce. They’re fond of shadowy spots with acidic soil like pineforests. Wikipedia says they’re known as foxberries in Nova Scotia.
Get well, Mr Crown! We got your lousy weather — temperature jumped from -26 C to -3 C in about 18 hours, which is actually horrible — but I hope we don’t get your cold, too. Here in Moscow Riley (rescue pooch) and I crawled through traffic to our British-Russian family friends for our annual Christmas party. This year we’d hit the cool eco-pure farmer’s market ahead of time, which provided goose pate and the sweet American cranberries I used for sauce. We had turkey and all the trimmings, Christmas pudding with brandy butter, and my piles of cookies. Pooch spent most of her time in the kitchen, begging turkey. We sang Christmas carols — with the Americans providing alternate tunes for some of the standards — and our Russian friends can now do a credible version of Good King Wenceslas and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. We all ate way too much. Everyone put on Santa hats. Then at midnight, pooch and I got in our taxi and crawled home through snow and traffic almost as bad as rush hour. Pooch, gorged on turkey, snoozed on the floor. The taxi driver laid out his plans to leave Russia and start a business because he was sick of all the bribes required to set up shop in Russia. When we finally slid to a stop in my courtyard, I wished him well and gave him a ridiculously large tip (drank too much, too — always makes me generous). Riley and I climbed into bed with vision of sugar plums (and turkey bones) dancing in our heads.
A cheer-up for Crown: I was typing a comment today and noticed that I had referred to “the nineteeth century”.
And now a surefire remedy: Dr Jazz.
No doubt it was a better time than the fourteeth – fewer indentured servants, for one thing.
Mab, what a marvellous description. I wonder where the poor old taxi driver was planning to move. Don’t Russians have their own carols? Give my best wishes to Riley.
Alma is building an igloo. I have blown the snow off the driveway. Now I’m going back to bed. I found that my new pale-blue pyjamas have pockets in the trousers, something I’ve never seen before.
That’s to make you believe you can loll about in your pyjamas all day at home and still be a practical dad. Normally dads must get out of bed and get dressed so as to have pockets.at their disposal. This may be a Chinese campaign to undermine Western dress-codes. Soon everyone will be running around in practical blue pyjama uniforms.
Thanks for the jazz, dearieme! AJP, listening to it will make you feel better.
Berries: thanks Trond. I have never seen either berry in the wild, although I have heard of bakeapples here. There are pictures of all those berries on Wikipedia. The lingon- or fox-berries look like red currants but are obviously a different plant. In British Columbia there is a native berry called salmonberry which also looks like a raspberry but rather larger, and yellow-orange, which grows on a very high bush (about 6 – 9ft as I have seen them). Some salmonberries (and even some individual elements of the berry) turn to red, but not the rosy red of raspberries. They are quite edible but not as tasty or sweet as raspberries.
Mab, a great description of your day. About “sweet American cranberries”: I know cranberries very well, I have picked them in spongy mossy boggy areas around here, but the sweetness comes from the sugar you add to them to make the sauce, no?
“Alma is building an igloo”: this means you must have the right kind of snow now. A few years ago we had an unusually abundant snowfall: 90 cm in one night. This would not have been a problem in Montreal or Ottawa but here the city was not prepared to deal with that much snow: they had to import snowplows from neighbouring cities and it took weeks to clear everything, so the sidewalks were not cleared except on the major streets. On residential streets people only cleared narrow paths. Some of my neighbours were able to build high snow walls by cutting large snow “bricks” just as for an igloo. I had never seen that before! This year we have had only the merest suggestion of snow: a few flurries that left traces of snow on the ground or grass, and a little ice on the streets in the morning, but that’s about it. Not much of a “White Christmas”.
dearieme: “the nineteeth century”
We’ve been to the cinema to see The Hobbit this evening. There was a line written especially for the entertainment of those of us who had just read this joke (me).
marie-lucie: salmonberry
Except for the high bushes your description really sounds like molter, and the WP pictures aren’t that different either. They must be close relatives — and I think they could be used in much the same way. Thinking of it, I’ve even seen recepies for salmon flavored with molte — maybe it’s inspired by the Salmonberry.
“Alma is building an igloo”: this means you must have the right kind of snow now.
Heavy, wet snow might work, but light snow, packed by wind to slate-like layers that can be cut to slabs is the best. Or that’s what I’ve been taught. I haven’t built one to sleep in for thirty years, so I’m hardly an expert.
She’s not planning to sleep for thirty years, so don’t worry about that. I’ll certainly pass on your and m-l’s experiences. The last I heard it wasn’t going too well. She was sort of packing it as she went and the walls looked kind of thin, she wasn’t using blocks (blocks was also my suggestion, but this is light snow and I don’t know if it would be possible).
Yes, powder snow is not the right kind for igloo building. It has to be naturally packed. If it sits for a few days it might develop a more suitable consistency. Igloo builders cut snow blocks with large knives.
Trond, about salmonberries: I always thought that the name came from their colour, but Wikipedia says that native people used to eat it with salmon, and you mention salmon “flavoured” with those berries. So the link may be that the berries (the first to ripen, at least where I know them) ripen around the time the first salmon species (out of 5 species in the Pacific) migrate up the rivers. Salmon has plenty of flavour without it needing to be enhanced by relatively flavourless berries! But perhaps the pairing is or was for texture rather than taste. In coastal BC the traditional indigenous meal was salmon first, for the main course, followed by berries (often mixed with a fish oil) for dessert. As other species of salmon came up, different berries started to ripen in their turn.
Would it be possible to get out a garden hose and spray it on the snow to impart some artificial crunchiness?
I wish we had snow here. We got a pretty snowfall on the morning of the 25th, which lent a nice backdrop to the extended family scene but amounted to nothing.
You know, Mr Crown, your cold DID come to Moscow along with the lousy weather. Ugh.
Christmas carols: well, Russians had them, sort of, but they forgot them all during the Soviet period. Easter is the big Orthodox holiday; Christmas, which now comes after New Year’s, hasn’t really caught on again. In the old days there was pre-Christmas carolling and mummery (frowned on by the Church), but that’s gone now. The big Catholic cathedral in town has been holding concerts, and I went to one with a group of Russian friends. Ave Maria is still a novelty for them…
Cranberries: Russians grow (or rather, in Russia grow) the small very juicy kind of cranberries that are what I think of as “northern European.” They are bit tarter than the big and hard American cranberries. This year I bought cool organically grown eco-pure American cranberries grown here, and they were really sweet. That is, I used the usual amount of sugar, which produces a sweet-tart sauce, but it was a lot sweeter than I expected. (I make it with an orange cut up — rind and all — cardamon seeds, ginger, cloves and cinnamon. The Russian contingent has claimed the recipe for their own. They like fruit with meat and foul — apples, dried apricots, prunes, lingonberries, cranberries — so the sauce fits right into the culinary tradition.)
We got AJP’s snow (at least six inches by the time I got up), and I got his cold.
*honk*
Would this limpid little Blues cheer up the two invalids?
Here’s another lovely wee Blues.
Let’s hope that your lurgies aren’t this serious:
“Relaxin’ at the Touro”, named for Touro Infirmary, the New Orleans hospital where Muggsy had been treated for a perforated ulcer early in 1938. He had been at the point of death when he was saved by one Dr. Alton Ochsner who drained the fluid and eased Muggsy’s weakened breathing.
Dearie, I very much enjoyed all of them, but especially Henry de Winter & his dog (full screen) and Mamie’s Blues by Jelly Roll Morton. He has that same funny accent as Louis Armstrong; it must be old time New Orleans but it sounds almost like an old time-y New York, not like a Southern accent at all.
When I first read that Henry de Winter was born in 1959 I thought it must be a misprint. There are pictures of him performing with other dogs, but I like Bobby the best. I’m assuming he only wears shorts in the summer (Henry).