In which you may call me Scrooge

Holiday traditions I really, really, really don’t like:

Gift exchanges
The domestic partner and I don’t exchange Christmas gifts. Or birthday gifts. There, I said it. We’re both men of a certain age who merged our completely furnished households three years ago and we’re STILL getting rid of stuff. So we don’t need any more. We buy what we need for ourselves when we need it and we spend the holidays just loving and respecting each other, and we’re both perfectly happy with this arrangement. Besides, wrapping paper is wasteful and expensive. And bows take up valuable storage space. And you probably think I’m some sort of misanthropic, Tiny-Tim-kicking alien right now. It gets worse. Read on:

Candy canes
Sticky, slimy, sugary, gross in your mouth, gross on your tongue, gross on your lips … plus they probably have negative nutritional value. They’re the most repulsive candy this side of Sno Balls. Their only redeeming quality: They can function as an emergency breath freshener. Which is exactly the benefit I look for most when I indulge in a holiday treat.

Mall Santas
Is there anything more disturbing than plopping your kids on the lap of a creepy out-of-work actor in a crowded shopping center in the interest of begging for free toys and perpetuating a ridiculous cultural lie? No, there is not.

Live Christmas trees


Eggnog
Oh, whom am I kidding? I freaking love eggnog!

The war on Christmas
I know it’s extremely trendy for Christians to feel persecuted when Home Depot employees tell them to have happy holidays. There’s even a retarded web site where Christian consumers can rate their Jesus-worshipping experiences at major retailers as “friendly,” “negligent” or “offensive.” And even though I find the vast majority of religious expression itself to be offensive, I am profoundly appalled that people who call themselves Christians actually trot out this intellectually and spiritually repugnant abortion of logic and importance year after year after year.

Secular Christmas carols
File this under gray areas, but I’m the least religious person you know who loves sacred Christmas music. And I loathe most of the secular crap that pollutes every store and radio station from Halloween through Epiphany. I’ll happily enjoy “And the Glory of the Lord” or “O Holy Night” or even “The Little Drummer Boy”—and I’ll joyously sing along with every Messiah chorus at the top of my lungs—but I fight the urge to strangle children every time I hear “Holly Jolly Christmas” … and I’d rather join a convent than listen to “Here Comes Santa Claus” ever again. There is one secular song I actually love, though: “Carol of the Bells.” But probably because it's all dramatic and dour and it never once mentions Santa Claus. Merry merry merry MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Jake’s Mom’s Awesome Pie Crust

scant 2 cups Gold Medal flour
scant 1/2 tsp salt
3/4 cup vegetable shortening (Mom prefers the Aldi or Walmart store brand since Crisco changed its formula)
5 tablespoons COLD water

Mix flour, shortening, and salt with pastry blender until like corn meal. Add cold water. Mix with fork and then with hands.

Roll into two crusts, adding a little flour as needed. Flip each crust once as you roll it.

Form one crust into a pie plate, rolling any extra dough under itself at the edge to create a thick lip. Pinch the edge at regular intervals or make indentations with a knife or spoon to create a pretty pattern.

To bake an empty shell, prick the bottom and sides with a fork, add pie weights and bake at 425 degrees for 8-10 minutes, watching carefully to prevent burning.


BONUS HOLIDAY RECIPE!
Eggnog Custard Pie

1 9-inch UNBAKED pie crust

filling:
2 cups eggnog
3 eggs
2 tablespoons brandy or rum
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/3 cup sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

topping:
1 cup whipping cream
3 tablespoons powdered sugar
1 teaspoon brandy or rum
Nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Prick holes in the bottom of pie crust. Bake 15 minutes to partially cook.

Beat eggnog, eggs, brandy (or rum) and vanilla in large bowl. Add sugar, salt and nutmeg. Mix well. Pour into pie crust.

Bake 25 minutes. Remove from oven, cover with foil and bake 30 to 40 minutes longer or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

To make the topping, beat whipping cream in a small bowl until soft peaks form. Add powdered sugar and brandy or rum. Beat until stiff peaks form. Garnish pie with whipped cream and sprinkle with nutmeg.

What recession?

Remember me? I used to write a blog here. But then the economy apparently got extra-awesome because my company got bombarded with new projects and for the last week and a half I've done little more than work, sleep and work out. And pee, because my protein shakes seem to go right through me.

But! Last weekend my folks came to Chicago for a fabulous Pie and Chanticleer Fest. We spent almost the entire weekend measuring, rolling and baking, and we whipped up 17 from-scratch pies (including a new favorite: eggnog custard!) and invited a bunch of family and friends over to enjoy them Sunday night. As usual, I took tons of pictures of the pies and only a handful of blurry pictures of our guests. But here's what our dining room pie station looked like all tricked out in Christmas crap and caloried crusts:

And here's my newest invention: the living-room pie station, which spread the pies to both ends of the house and forced people to spread out and socialize in rooms with nice comfy furniture instead of clotting around the dining room table where nobody can move. I must be some kind of civic-engineering genius ... not to mention a top-notch holiday decorator:

To cap off our weekend of holiday awesomeness, on Monday night the folks, the domestic partner and I (and an intrepid blog reader who recognized me and ran up to say hello but it all happened so fast I'm afraid I don't remember your name) piled into Chicago's soaring Fourth Presbyterian Church (third row center!) for what was probably my 20th concert by Chanticleer, a 12-voice a cappella men's choir that sings everything from early music to small-c classical to modern jazz and quite frankly would provide me with the ideal lifetime career as a singer if only it had the occasional kickline. And I had the occasional high F. Or at least a stronger passaggio. Anyway! Chicago's annual Chanticleer holiday concert has become a required first step for putting me in the holiday spirit, and this year all but pushed me over the edge of noëlic delirium with a concert that took us from a rollicking "Esta noche nace un Niño" to Franz Biebel's transcendent two-choir "Ave Maria" to a shimmering new (to me) work by Arvo Pärt that left me breathless and light-headed.

And I have a new wish: I want to sing with Chanticleer. As in sit in a room for two or three or four hours with these men and sing through their repertoire as though I were one of them. I don't want to solo. I don't (OK, actually I do) want to perform. I don't even want to make a fuss. I just want to sit in the middle of their shimmery majesty and actually (attempt to) contribute to it for a glorious few moments of my life. I honestly think the happiness of it all would kill me, but I can't think of a better way to go than by climbing the Biebel amens to whatever afterlife I imagine could barely hold a candle to the 12 heavenly voices leading me there.

I think something peed on my shoes

Seriously. Ever since I got home from Thanksgiving in Iowa with my family, I’ve noticed a vague catbox-like effluvium wafting around my person. Except for yesterday, when I didn’t wear the shoes I wore all during Thanksgiving. Clue!

It’s especially noticeable when I take my shoes off before climbing into bed. And when I open my gym locker after my shoes and gym bag and coat (and lunch, the implications of which I don’t even want to contemplate) have been cooped up there together for over an hour.

My folks and my sister’s family both have cats. Non-Jake-liking cats. (Non-most-everyone-liking cats, for the record.) I always make gestures of friendship and love when I see them because who doesn’t want the affection and good graces of a cat? And their cats always rebuke me with all the fire and brimstone their malevolent little feline selves can muster. So this trip, figuring I had nothing to lose, I got kind of hostile with my folks’ cat … the cat that had the most unsupervised retaliatory access to my shoes during my trip. Clue!

I emailed the basic facts of this case to my mom and sister this morning, and they both responded in indignant defense of their adorable little non-shoe-peeing-on kitties. But I still have my suspicions. And my clues. And my personal cloud of shoebox-whiff.

I just moments ago stitched these clues together, and since I’m a little averse to bending down and smelling my own shoes—especially at work—I’m going to wait to do the sniff test when I’m in the privacy of my own bathroom tonight. In the mean time, I’ll walk around terrified that other cats—especially office cats—will walk up to me and feel compelled to mark me as their own once they smell the (alleged) malevolent Iowa cat pee all over me.

But to show I’m not bitter—at least as bitter as I probably smell—I’m ending this post with a cat-positive YouTube clip featuring people who sing way better than an alleged shoe-peeing cat I won’t name here:

We got a new toy on Black Friday!

While I officially have a visceral loathing for the term Black Friday, I have a newfound love for the magical savings it brings me!

We've had a TV sitting in front of our fireplace—which is really the only place for the TV in our living room—since we moved into our Two-Bedroomed, Two-Bathroomed, One-Fireplaced Barbie Dream Condo three years ago. We've been meaning to replace our embarrassingly old-school, 2002-era TV with a giant flat-screen TV that would free up our fireplace for actual fireplace-type activities like providing burning-wood-based warmth and ambiance, but the flat-screen TVs we'd been admiring were all in the $1,500 price range. Until Black Friday! My mom found a 42" baby on sale for $600 in, of all places, her grocery store in Iowa. So we bought it, lugged it back to Chicago today in an upright position—just like the box instructed us, though it meant pushing our seats so far forward that our knees were in our armpits, turning our four-plus-hour drive into an extended BigWheel-in-the-driveway flashback—and spent the entire evening—along with 17 buckets of swear words—mounting it over the fireplace.

It turns out you need an advanced degree in aviation engineering to install a flat-screen TV, but we finished our degree online in only one night and got the whole thing attached to the wall and plugged in ... and it actually works!

Unfortunately, we still need to find a place to stash the cable box. And bury the cables in the wall. And install a mantle. And buy a new DVD player. And (ahem) hook up the VCR. Because we still have a few favorite shows on tape. And we just spent a ton of money on a flat-screen TV so it's not like we can afford to replace them with DVDs right now. Do not judge us.

But in the mean time, we have some shows to watch. And crackling fires to light. And ambiance to enjoy. And bills to pay. But we don't want to think about that part right now.

Addiction, Inc.

They say that getting tattoos is like killing hookers in the basement. You tell yourself you can stop any time you want, but then Sarah Palin doodles on a restaurant placemat with her crayons and gets a billion-dollar book deal while you toil away as a middle-management writer who actually knows how to operate a pen and then Carrie Prejean tells you it’s un-Christian for you to get married while she spanks her vajesus on camera for boys she barely even knows (which there technically isn't a commandment against but then she lies about it, which there is) and the cosmic inequality of it all makes your head spin and one day you look down and holy shit there’s another dead hooker in your basement. Or another tattoo on your arm.

I don’t have a basement, so you get one guess (unless you’re Sarah Palin or Carrie Prejean, in which case you get 74) as to which of the above two scenarios happened to me.

Here’s a hint, for those of you still looking for your rogue-colored crayon or the integrity you think somehow may have gotten lodged up near your cervix (which is not, for the record, a Latin way to say crucifix or a lens setting on your video camera):

This new tattoo—my sixth, which equals one for each marathon I’ve run … and is still two fewer than the Carrie Prejean sex tapes that we know about—was a bit of a well-planned impulse purchase.

I knew what I wanted:
• A Celtic knot whose structure and symmetry would offset the tribal abstraction snaking down the back of my other shoulder and arm
• A big round shape that would cover my entire deltoid for dramatic effect … and continue motivating me to get as pointlessly big as possible at the gym since people would be noticing my fancy shoulders (well, at least my one fancy shoulder) more
• A dangling element that would peek coquettishly out of my shirtsleeve
• Enough wrapping action that it could be seen when I greet people head-on:

Unfortunately, in my little live-and-die-by-the-calendar mindset, I’d also convinced myself I’d walk into a tattoo parlor on my self-imposed get-a-tattoo day, describe what I wanted and get it seared into my flesh on the spot. Which is exactly what happened … except the tattoo didn’t turn out as I’d kinda been picturing it. (Emphasis on kinda, which really didn’t give any tattoo a fighting chance to be what I wanted, right?) And so for the first week I had it I really didn’t like it. Especially because it kinda (there’s that word again) looked like a baroque apostrophe. Or a dialogue balloon from a Gallic cartoon.

But! The darn thing has generated endless praise from friends and strangers alike. It peeks out of my shirtsleeve just the way I wanted. It seems to make my shoulder look thick and round and manly (and fancy!). And the more I see it, the more I’ve started to really dig it for its nontraditionalness. And the fact that the whole apostrophe/dialogue balloon imagery has a quirky relevance for a professional writer … especially one who actually knows how to use a pen. Plus, it’s done. And even though I kept the receipt I’m pretty sure I can’t return it.

Of course, there are still hookers out there (Hi, Carrie!) so I know I'm still gonna want more tattoos. But I may limit myself to one per marathon from this point forward. (Emphasis on may. Even though I was born in April. And I tend to run marathons in the fall.) And next time I will definitely spend more time working with a tattoo artist getting exactly (more or less) what's in my head on paper before I start enshrining half-baked ideas on my body in ink and blood and fancy punctuation marks.

I am totally winning the race to Christmas!

The living room tree is up! And it turned out relatively even! Just like last year!

The dining room tree is up too! And this year's assembly phase was a lot more successful than last year's toilet brush / sparkle factory mishap. Because I assembled the branches in the right order this year. Just like a big boy! But the tree somehow still looks kind of ... squatty. But it's done and I'm way too old to start over and somehow make it less squatty because at 41 you never know when you're gonna keel over as dead as the three strings of lights I had to throw away this year. Good thing I had three packages of backup lights in my Big Box of Way Too Much Christmas Crap. Which means I get to do stock-up shopping during the Christmas Crap Clearance Sales! And that is totally worth having a tree that looks like a gay fire hydrant.