Category Archives: Christmas

If all the world a single body shared —

Christmas, church, poetry,

THE ANTIDOTE

If all the world a single body shared —
One heart, one breath, one blood, one flesh, one life —
Then sin has not one cell, one atom spared
The poison of shared wickedness and strife.

What wickedness, what strife, you well may ask,
Oblivious that you yourself are sick,
That fallen nature’s health is but a mask
And trust in this world just a devil’s trick.

We are one body, and our body died
The day we sinned, the days we sinned anew,
The walking-dead until the Crucified
By dying killed our sin to make life true.

And so, live well, ye merry gentlemen:
Sin’s antidote was born in Bethlehem.

-Fr. Louis Tarsitano

 

 

St. Nicholas most simply put

Christmas, quotes, saints, ,

The feast of St. Nicholas begins with a vigil service this evening and continues with liturgy in the morning. Happy Feast Day! I read the following in The Winter Pascha by Thomas Hopko:

The extraordinary thing about the image of St. Nicholas in the Church is that he is not known for anything extraordinary. He was not a theologian and never wrote a word, yet he is famous in the memory of believers as a zealot for orthodoxy, allegedly accosting the heretic Arius at the first ecumenical council in Nicaea for denying the divinity of God’s son. He was not an ascetic and did no outstanding feats of fasting and vigils, yet he is praised for his possession of the “fruit of the Holy Spirit…love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Gal. 5:22-23). He was not a mystic in our present meaning of the term but he lived daily with the Lord and was godly in all his words and deeds. He was not a prophet in the technical sense, yet he proclaimed the Word of God, exposed the sins of the wicked, defended the rights of the oppressed and afflicted, and battled against every form of injustice with supernatural compassion and mercy. In a word, he was a good pastor, father, and bishop to his flock, known especially for his love and care for the poor. Most simply put, he was a divinely good person.

I rescue cookies.

Christmas, food and cooking

At the beginning of November I had a cookie craving, and it occurred to me that I might as well make one of our favorite kinds of Christmas cookies; I could eat a few and freeze most of them, and be ahead of the to-do list. Our family’s holiday traditions include platters piled with various kinds of cookies, most of which won’t be seen again until the next Christmas. For this first session of baking I chose the soft Ginger Spice Cookies that feature an intoxicating combination of spices and diced candied ginger as well.

Something went wrong, or maybe a few things. I had made a note on the recipe card suggesting that I cut the sugar back another 1/4 cup from the previous alteration, because, “they are plenty sweet.” I am reminded of the story about the farmer who discovered he could add some sawdust to his horse’s feed and save money that way. He kept adding more and more sawdust and the horse seemed to do fine with it, until one day it died.

The recipe must have been just about perfect before I changed it just a little, and then the cookies came out terrible. Was it only the lack of sweetness that made them taste strongly of baking soda with pockets of overwhelming clove flavor? Or perhaps I hadn’t mixed the dough enough? I thought I would have to throw them out.

But wait – couldn’t they be used for something? If I dried them in the oven, and ground them finely in the food processor, I could use them as the basis for different cookies….so I tried just that. To the fine crumbs I added a cube of butter, an egg, and extra sugar and flour. A little more ground ginger and a tiny bit of cardamom. Then instead of dropping the dough by teaspoonfuls I chilled and rolled it, into trees. Now we have crisp gingerbread cookies that surprise the eater with an occasional tiny piece of candied ginger, and that warm your mouth with an even more complex and winning flavor. Alas, never to be duplicated.

This made me brave enough to tackle the other failed cookie product that had been sitting in the freezer for awhile, since the time I made some Russian Tea Cakes but only put in half as much flour as they needed. The buttery, pecan-studded cookie crumbs I had stuck in a jar in the freezer, being unwilling at the time to give up on them.

Now I dug them out and experimented in a similar way, adding an egg, sugar, flour, baking powder and lemon zest. I tried to roll this dough, too, but it would not hold together, so I shaped disks and stuck a pecan half on each one. Behold! Another new and non-repeatable Glad Christmas cookie, which the man of the house has tasted and approved. I do hope nonetheless that I can avoid making a yearly tradition of the Cookie Rescue.