White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Christmas Is Coming — I Know Because There’s a Cake!

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Christmas is coming. I know this because of indelible evidence in my own home. My wife, Linda Gasparello, has just baked a Christmas cake. If I doubt that this is the month of Christmas, I just have to look at it, cooling on the kitchen counter, declaring itself, in its way, the harbinger of the holidays.

The cake can’t be eaten yet. No, no. Linda, who’s a phenomenon at the range, explains when she sees me circling with a knife, the cake needs to “cure” for at least a week. Rum must infuse the cornucopia of fruit that has bonded with flour and eggs and whatever else makes a cake a cake. I don’t know all the fruits and nuts that go into The Great Christmas Cake, but I do know there are dried apricots. Linda gave me some as a bribe to get out of the kitchen while she was baking the cake.

All year we eat very little cake in our home. Desserts are avoided for the usual reason: keeping down the calorie count. But recently, for a party, Linda made a carrot cake. Not because she’s my wife, but because I adore carrot cake, I can say that hers is the best ever.

How come I indulge in carrot cake when I eschew sponge, hide from German chocolate and, with a heavy heart, have even shaken my head at Sachertorte (chocolate cake covered with apricot jam and chocolate icing) in Vienna — a crime against Austria, practically an act of war? (I must confess, though, that I once ate the cake in the Hotel Sacher in Vienna where it was invented.)

The answer is carrots sound so healthy. “Good for you,” my mother used to say. She was a frightful cook and so raw carrots were better than anything she tried to do to them, which was mostly boil the life out of them until they were soft and spongy, most of the nutrients gone.

This year I read “Hotel Sacher,” a novel by Rodica Doehnert that traces the role of the great hotel at the end of the 19th century — how it was a kind of headquarters for the events that led to the end of Austro-Hungarian Empire and to World War I. If you want to research this in chilling detail, read Max Hastings’ book “Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War.”

Back to cakes and Christmas. Linda’s cake has so many things in it I wonder it doesn’t cause a criticality incident or spontaneously ignite.

There seems to be a boom in cooking and baking in particular. It all goes back to Julia Child, “The French Chef” on television in the 1960s, who whet the nation’s palate for cooking. Julia showed that cooking could be fun (especially if you cook with wine and imbibe as you go) and challenging — so much so that today we have an abundance of cooking shows.

The ones I hate are those that weaponize cooking — with contestant chefs who are sent home in tears because their sauce separated or, horror of horrors, their souffle collapsed.

Anyway, it seems 2018 is the bakers’ year. Linda is an exception because she bakes and tames meat. She can make a delectable osso buco as easily the tiramisu that follows. Mostly, there’s a divide between the flour people and meat people. Pretty much in the same way, when I worked at The Washington Post, there was a divide between the pot smokers and the drinkers. Me, the latter.

I can tell baking is in by the number of recipes I find people exchanging, and I put it all down to “The Great British Baking Show” on PBS, which entertains and makes baking exciting. Here contestant chefs also are sent home, but with such teary reluctance that if you want a hug from the whole cast and the other amazing chefs, you deliberately add a cup of salt instead of sugar to the cake. Tears and hugs all round.

We’re planning a Great British Christmas Tea at our house with Devonshire clotted cream and jam on scones, little sandwiches and — play the drums and trumpets fortissimo — the fruited cake that is curing very nicely, thank you.

And for Christmas itself? We’re going out to a restaurant. Happy holidays!

The Cruelty of the Holidays

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T.S. Eliot may have had it wrong: The cruelest months are November and December, when the holidays are upon us, not April. For those who are broken – broken in all the ways that people can be broken — the holidays are a special hell.
The bedridden, the incarcerated, the mourners, the maimed from accidents, disease or wars, the heartbroken – either those who have had their hearts broken by lovers or others, or those who have had no one in their lives — endure the holidays in anguish, hurting even more than the permanent hurt that has become their lives.
You may find the broken in the corners at parties, sitting glumly at the table. But the real suffering is unseen; the real sufferers cannot make it to the table – or dare not for fear that the outing will cost them later. The brave face can mask the deepest hurt. They are the permanently sick. Those who will be sick today, sick tomorrow and sick in the next holiday season as they were in the last.
There are people who suffer constant illness in all the myriad ways that a body can be afflicted or fail. No afflicted cohort is more deserving of understanding than another; none has a greater call for science to redouble its efforts for a cure than another.
But the effort to find cures is woefully skewed by the institutions of medicine, by the pharmaceutical companies and by those diseases that have celebrity champions, informing the public and the politics of research institutions. Yes, there is always politics and so there are winners and losers. Celebrities can help: Elizabeth Taylor did so for AIDS, Jerry Lewis for Multiple Sclerosis, and Michael J. Fox is doing so for Parkinson’s disease.
I write and broadcast about one disease in particular, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. It is a disease largely orphaned by the medical community which has no test for it — cannot say with assurance that a patient has it until months of debility validate that it is ME. In medical parlance, there are no biological markers. What is known is that it is almost certainly a disease of the immune system, and that there is no cure. It also has no celebrity benefactors and no lobby in Washington.
I think of it as a terrorist disease, which takes its patents hostage and confines them in an alternative world of muscle pain, headaches, diarrhea, dizziness, brain fog and almost permanent collapse. Some are adversely affected by light, others by sound.
One sufferer says that having ME is like being an engine without fuel: Your tank is empty and you hurt in new and refined ways almost daily. Sufferers go through long periods of disability where they cannot function at all. “I thought I was already in my coffin,” another told me.
The joys are few and sometimes from little things, like a pet or nature observations. One sufferer, Elisabeth Tova Bailey, wrote a wonderful book, “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating.” It is about the habits of a snail in a terrarium next to her bed, during two years of sustained collapse.
This is a disease that steals lives, chains them up in dungeons of despair where loneliness and suffering reach “excruciating proportions,” according to my colleague, Deborah Waroff, whose life was snatched by this disease 25 years ago. Together Waroff and I established a YouTube channel on ME, mecfsalert.
The loved ones, and the caregivers – if there are any — are enslaved by this disease, seeing those they care about in a place where neither love nor medicine can reach them. Literally and figuratively, they must fluff the pillows once again and mouth the empty words — lies really — of encouragement that we all utter in the face of hopelessness. Those who live on their own, often in poverty and sloth they cannot ameliorate for themselves, suffer what one woman told me was such sustained loneliness that she prayed nightly for death.
Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and New Year's Eve are on the way. Sadly, while the rest of us are suffused with joy, the permanently ill take stock and find their lives are terribly wanting and isolated on the holidays. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Christmas Is Winning the ‘War’

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The sinister forces that are supposed to be vanquishing Christmas, in what is called the “War on Christmas,” are in retreat. In fact, they are celebrating it.

Across secular Europe the creches are on display and decorations adorn street lamps. In most towns and villages, the central square is transformed into a Christmas market with a skating rink and stalls selling good things to eat and, even better, to drink. A million amplifiers blast carols in many languages. More traditional carolers go door to door.

Across the United States Christmas fever has been building, like the strains of Maurice Ravel's “Bolero,” since Thanksgiving. It is humanity's greatest festival; a wonderful collective indulgence, a surrender simultaneously to our profound and trivial selves.

The “War on Christmas” is an argument advanced by commentators on Fox Cable News that centers on skirmishes over the First Amendment. Fox actually publishes on the Internet a map of sites where it believes the forces opposed to Christmas are in hand-to-hand combat with the defenders of the Baby Jesus. Really!

The crux of the argument from the “war” people is that Christmas is a religious celebration that has been taken over by the ungodly. In fact, historically, it is an ungodly festival that was taken over by Christianity. It was a pagan festival that became a Christian festival and adjusted to the lands where it spread—and to the religious intensity of the time.

There is no mention of snow in the Bible; but thanks to Northern and Eastern Europeans, snow is part of Christmas. In hot Africa and India, shop windows are decorated with cotton wool and children sing “Good King Wenceslas” with the acceptance that snow is part of their Christmas, too. Yes, people who have never seen snow can dream of a white Christmas. That is just part of the great cultural snowball that is Christmas.

There is a silliness attending those who persist in believing that forces of atheism, secularism, and all the other religions, especially Islam, are out to rip the religious soul out of Christmas. Not quite. In Islam, Jesus is a prophet and a messiah and to be a believer, you must accept him. Others love the story of the nativity without accepting it as a threat to their beliefs.

One of the joys of Christmas is that it is such a wondrous bundle of beliefs, cultural agglomerations and ethnic inclusions that to strip out any of them is to do violence to the best time of year all over the world. Charles Dickens' masterpiece “A Christmas Carol” may embody the Christian spirit, but it features ghosts; Father Christmas comes from a union of German and Nordic mythology with the first Christian saint, Nicholas, who was known for his gifts to the poor. The old man who lives at the North Pole is now a global figure – incidentally, Megan Kelly — of many ethnicities. There is an Indian version, a Turkish version and a Brazilian version of him. I doubt any of these three is thought of as Caucasian.

Christmas is a festival of many splendors: decorations, from Russian icons to tinsel made in China; flora, from fir trees and mistletoe to ferns, in tropical climes; food, from German stollen to Mexican bacalao; music, from Bach to Broadway.

Much of the argument nowadays is about Christmas greetings, “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays.” My father, who read the King James Bible every day, had never read the U.S. Constitution, never heard of the separation of church and state, and who lived all his life in British Africa, used to say, “Season's Greetings” or “Compliments of the Season.” His argument was that “not everyone is a Christian, but everyone has Christmas." Quite so. Merry Christmas. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

 

A Cotton Wool Christmas

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It wasn’t the Grinch who stole Christmas; it was Northern Europe.

As a child born and raised in Central Africa, I was very aware of this confiscation. It outraged my mother, who was also born and raised in Africa.

We lived in British colony of Southern Rhodesia; and we were dominated by British immigrants who insisted on “dreaming of a white Christmas.” Well, tough luck.

As my mother liked to point out, not one more flake of snow fell in Central Africa than fell in the Holy Land, where Jesus Christ was born.

But we were — indigenous Africans and settlers alike — in the thrall of snow imperialism.

Being so close to the equator, snowfall was a meteorological impossibility. So those under the European cultural thumb decorated everything in sight with cotton wool. We could only dream of a cotton-wool Christmas.

Unlike my mother, my father felt no pressure from the European and North American inauthentic portrayal of Christmas as a white, cold affair. He didn't mind that the retailers edged their windows in cotton wool or that the Anglican Church went along with the Northern Hemisphere’s implication that Joseph and Mary struggled through the snow to get to the manger in Bethlehem.

The one thing my parents agreed upon was that Christmas began on December 24 and lasted for the traditional 12 days.

Not only was no snow substitute allowed in our house, but also no commercially produced ornaments; flowers and greenery were fine. As a result the whole family would go to a marshy area, known as a vlei, on Christmas Eve and cut great quantities of ferns which would be strung along the picture rails.

Decorations could be added to the green frieze, but only if we made them out of painted paper. Mostly, we stuck fresh flowers in it. It was a green Christmas.

When it came to food, my mother relented completely and we made English Christmas pudding (boiled for hours in muslin), fruit cake and pies made with mincemeat (an all-fruit mixture).

We weren't a drinking family, but a bottle of sweet sherry appeared at Christmas. My mother — who otherwise drank only tea and sometimes coffee (no water, milk, alcohol or sodas) — would take, ostentatiously, a very small glass of sherry. Having downed this half-ounce or so of fortified wine, she'd announce that she wasn't responsible for her actions, that she could feel her legs getting heavy and that she was drunk.

My brother and I watched Christmas after Christmas to see if there was any sign that there had been a physiological or psychological change in Mamma, but none was recorded.

We then ate a very English meal and listened to very English Christmas carols, like “The Holly and the Ivy” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.” My mother, who hadn’t signed her separate peace treaty with Germany, wasn’t too keen on “Silent Night.”

It wasn't until I had turned 20 and was working in London at United Press International that I saw real snow. Sorry, Mamma, it beats cotton wool and it makes for a splendid Christmas, even if things were a bit different in Royal David’s City two millennia ago.

Now for some wassail. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate