Scylla doesn't need anything for Christmas other than other people's gifts. Here she stalks through her natural habitat hunting stray ribbons and slobbering on tissue paper.
Molpe, on the other hand, really likes her tiny little stocking full of catnip and mice. We still haven't solved her mouse issue, but this year we got some mice that are about 90% similar to her inaccessible favorite, and with a little pinch of drugs they went over very well.
So this was our Christmas Eve table, served on actual Ukrainian china from the vast dusty recesses of our basement. I think that my stand-out favorite was actually the beet borscht. 2008 was my Year of the Beet -- I cooked with it and ate it a lot, especially compared to its near-zero incidence in prior years. Anyway, NDM's borscht was fantastic.
NDM made a slew of different kinds of varenyky for a traiditonalesque Ukrainian meal on Christmas Eve. There were potato varenyky, sauerkraut varenyky, and plum varenyky. These are basically pierogi, except less Polish. They were all boiled, but some were also fried afterward.
LEM helped NDM with the construction of the kolach. Alright, the all-knowing Wikipedia pidgeonholes this as a pastry, but for our purposes this Ukrainian bread is more like a babka. The girls constructed it from a series of braids...
...which were laid into some springform pans, and eventually produced...
...a massive tower of baked goods. Sorry about the exposure. For future reference, it is impossible for 6 people to come anywhere near to consuming something like this over the course of a week.
There was lots and lots of baking -- so much that I was barely allowed in the kitchen. My only role was to pinch hit for kneading the bulichka. I've been merciful and chosen a fairly innocuous photograph. The manufacture of this sweet roll calls for squishing pats of butter into a huge mass of dough by hand, and I have some really unappetizing closeups of that which illustrate the strange sensibilities of my photographer.
We got a slightly larger tree this year, and so were able to break out a significant portion of our ornaments. The puppies were both very excited about the balsam-Frasier hybrid.
Due to the tree's location, we intelligently didn't utilize it for actual gifts. Wouldn't want the dogs to accidentally, say, burst a pipe while rooting through wrapping paper. For example.
'Dolon and Líle were fantastically excited to see my parents again. Their whole week was a blur of illegal foods and excessive licking.
Well, even though my builders didn't bother to insulate anything in the guest suite bath, and even though there's a clear pathway for outdoor air to come in and play around its water pipes, it took the last few days' incredibly cold weather and stiff western breeze to finally let the water come out to play.
The bathroom, positioned just over our front door, sprayed a glorious fountain of freezing water down our front steps. These photos don't really do it justice, as this is after a couple of hours of cleanup and knocking down most of the icicles.
Both hot and cold water pipes had burst, knocking a hole in the wall between the guest suite bathtub and toilet. The cold water faucet's compression fitting had also blown off, so there was a secondary eruption underneath the sink. To my builders -- nice job on that compression fitting.
We had sheets of water in the guest bedroom, in the entryway on the first floor and into NDM's office, and of course in the basement. Water was coursing down through the vents, through the light fixtures, and through my evil smoke alarm system. The system's humidity sensor had them all screaming at a mile a minute the whole time.
Well, I apparently owe NDM $5. And it was totally worth it. Congratulations to the United States of America!
