Thursday, December 24, 2009. Turning Into Christmas. Cheesecake Patience. I spent the entire morning writing my annual Christmas poem, which I started working on yesterday. If I had ten more hours to spend on it, I would keep refining the meter and the rhymes. Poetry on a deadline isn't quite right. I know somebody will complain about it on the messageboard. I will ask him (or them) how many other local journalists pen any kind of poem to analyze for scansion. My favorite line in this one is "Brigtsen's and Charlie's, Marna and Frank/The Taste Buds I hail as they drive to the bank."
Even though hardly anyone will be in the radio station offices when I arrive at four, I always go in on Christmas Eve. I have a tradition of about ten year's standing of singing Christmas carols with the listeners, who seem to enjoy it. I know I do. This year, two different carloads of people called to sing a song together. After they did, they each said that doing this is part of their yearly routines as they head off to Mass (in one case) and a party (in the other).
Something about being the last person to leave the radio station appeals to me. As far as I knew, absolutely nobody else was in the facility when I left at six-thirty. All the FM studios were dark. Even WWL, whose programming requires a live person on duty almost all the time, is automated for Christmas Eve and Day, during which (barring an emergency), the big station becomes just another music outlet. My own station will content itself with wall-to-wall football games tonight and tomorrow, but even that can now run without anyone there.
I was tempted to stop at a few restaurants on the way home to say hello, the way I used to. But my family was waiting for me to arrive home so we could have supper together. Mary Leigh made spaghetti and red sauce. For the first time I can remember, it was not very good. I wouldn't say that if she didn't also think so. I think she burned it. Pots must be stirred.
And I needed to make a cheesecake, a special request from Mary Ann's sister Sylvia, who was invited us for Christmas supper tomorrow. Baking a cheesecake isn't hard, but it takes a long time. Forty-five minutes to make the filling and crust, an hour and a half to bake, and then three hours for cooling. (If you cool a cheesecake too fast, an ugly crack across the middle is inevitable.) So, over four hours. I set the alarm to wake me at eleven, midnight, and two for attending to the next stage of cooling. I was surprised and pleased that I went right back to sleep each time.
While I did all this, Mary Ann and kids played Old Maid. Nothing tickles the mother of my children more than a regression to the days when they were little. Between hands, they wrapped the Christmas presents. They say that almost every present under the tree is for me. Everyone else has taken his or her Christmas gifts in advance: new Apple laptop for Mary Leigh, a plethora of trips for Mary Ann, and a lavish lifestyle for Jude. He really says that he has been richly gifted by us, and that he wants nothing. Imagine that! But it could be that the best part of all this (or the worst, depending on one's wistfulness) is that the children will not wake up the house at five in the morning to see what Santa left. If the do, they might encounter me, moving the cheesecake from the counter into the refrigerator.
