Cookie Swap

Hello World, HO HO HO! MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! We find ourselves perched on the very precipice of the North Pole's gift to the world, and staring down both barrels of Father Christmas working his proverbial magic on Saturday night, to awaken the believers to untold joys on Sunday morning. The retail experts in their ivory towers will tell you that there is technically still one shopping day left before the 25th, but I've got some bad news for those clowns. Bill and I went to the supermarket on Friday, which was not even Christmas Eve, and the place was an absolute madhouse, you couldn't take 2 steps anywhere in the joint. It looked like one of those soccer riots at the World Cup, except with shopping carts, which was no improvement over your standard riot accessories, believe me. Personally, my advice for anyone on Saturday is to stay hunkered down indoors, make no attempt to leave the house, for any reason, and let the epidemic lunacy carry all before it without you. I have the feeling that even jolly old St. Nicholas himself would utter a great big "Bah Humbug" at the idea of braving the malls on the 24th, and I dare say that even grizzled veterans of soccer riots would blanch at the prospect as well. In fact, about the only person I can think of who would welcome the histrionic gyrations of conspicuous consumption would be Donald Trump - after all, wasn't his campaign slogan "Make America Gyrate Again?" Of all the joys of the season, I have to say that nothing smells like Christmas trees in the living room, heaven knows, and its sentimental familiarity makes it no less welcome for all that. It always makes me wish that we could keep one up all year round, and revel in its heady fragrance from the bitterest blasts of winter to the torrid swelter of summer, and its sparkle of twinkling lights even more so, by jingle. Of course, our cats are now all seasoned campaigners from yuletides past, and having an evergreen in the living room is not enough to even raise a curious eyebrow from them at this point - and I have the pictures of bored indifference to prove it. But for the rest of us, the tree is a source of endless wonder, and I could just eat it up like a chocolate-covered candy cane. (Now, why has nobody come up with THAT idea before this???) Speaking of holiday food, last week in honor of Hanukkah, I mentioned hamantaschen, the well-known Jewish dessert, that was merely acting as a feeble stand-in for what I was really looking for, which was the legendary pogatch of yore. For years, the Purchasing Director at the hospital took great pains to make this family favorite for all of us, and we did our best to say nice things about it, but it was tough sledding, and that's putting it mildly. In fact, I'm pretty sure that pogatch is a Yiddish word that means "hockey puck," and it certainly lives up to its name, and not in half-measures, but to an epic degree. I realize that it's no fault of the pogatch itself, because that's how it's made, and no amount of trying to turn it into some light and fluffy confection can change the fact that it's simply a heavy and dense thick disc, more reminiscent of a rudimentary weapon than a cookie, no matter how you slice it. Without the Purchasing Director to back me up, I've never met anyone else who's ever heard of the darned thing, much less tasted one, and the only item you can find on the Internet called pogatch is shaped like a crescent roll, and filled with raisins and nuts, certainly not what I remember from the old days at The Employer of Last Resort. So that's a Hanukkah mystery that may never be solved, living on only tenuously in my memory, and we all know how unreliable that can be, oy vey. Like many other people, I'm sure, over the years I have managed to amass quite a collection of Christmas music - starting with my mother's beloved 45's of the Vienna Boys Choir, then vinyl albums from the likes of Andy Williams and Robert Goulet, and on to tape cassettes by The Chipmunks or Bobby Sherman, and finally now CDs with anyone and everyone who's ever recorded a single snowflake, sugar plum, or stocking hung by the chimney with care. It occurred to me that we all know so many Christmas carols, it's positively amazing when you think about it, really - everything from Away in a Manger all the way to Wenceslas, that good old King, and back again - with stops for Jingle Bells and Silent Night along the way, I shouldn't wonder. That's why it was such a surprise to find the very seriously wrong words in a modern remake of O Little Town of Bethlehem (called "The Glory of Christmas") which the choir sang at Lessons & Carols the previous week. While the rest of humanity has long since been singing "where meek souls will receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in" for the past 200 years or so, this new version instead put forth this curious idea: "He makes souls well, receive Him still, the dear Christ enters in." What the frickety-frack is that supposed to mean??? It isn't even like they sacrificed meaning for the sake of rhyme, because it doesn't rhyme anyway, and it wasn't even because the original words were so outdated or confusing that modern people wouldn't understand them anymore. In fact, when it comes to confusing, these new ones were a whole lot worse, and that's not just a lot of herald angels while shepherds washed their socks by night, by heaven. Meanwhile on the local scene, alert readers concerned about my safety (and who wouldn't be, I ask you that) will be glad to hear that in the 2 weeks I've been working at the construction office, we've made significant headway in the tottering piles of papers and debris that greeted me on that fateful first day. Right now after a considerable amount of yeoman service, there are actually horizontal surfaces visible to the naked eye, without so much as a single object on top of them, in any way, shape, manner, form, or description. That credenza is looking far less like a place to scamper when gravity inevitably takes it relentless toll, and more like a useful piece of furniture for storing files, just like in the real world. It may not yet meet the rigorous standards of OSHA's nitpicking minions, but it's a lot better than the shark-infested waters of terror from my early days there, I can tell you that. At this rate, it won't be long before it starts to look like a regular office where ordinary people could actually do work, and not a house of horrors where you take your life in your hands just sitting at the plank propped up on top of two file cabinets that serves as a make-shift desk. Of course, everybody knows that I am a person who applauds improvements of all kinds, and this no different, so I'm looking forward to further developments with optimism and an open mind. But I am planning to find a space to store my pogatch, just in case. Elle