Breadsauce and Christmas Pudding

Now that I've finally had Christmas pudding, I can see why the British despise Bill Cosby, whose saccharine Jello ads promote a product that is completely unrecognizable to our powdered wig sporting friends. Christmas pudding is like a cross between a good fruitcake (let's postulate for the moment that such a thing actually exists) and a really good bran muffin, served broken up in a bowl and still relatively moist from the oven. We also had something called breadsauce, which to my surprise was not a type of beer. Breadsauce looks a lot like oatmeal, but tastes like wheat bread in sauce form, making it's name rather practical. This is perhaps the opposite of welsh rarebit, which is cheese on toast according to one welshman present at our feast.

English Chistmas seems to be fairly similar to our own, except there's a good deal more drinking and you have to wear a waistcoat. While many American's seem to retain some microbial amount of puritan shame, Brits are happy to drink to excess alongside their parents, grandparents, and religious officials-- in fact it seems to be encouraged and makes Christmas more exciting. In this state of ecstatic truthfulness, not one of the poms expressed even a hint of animosity toward us colonials for going are own way, isn't that nice? Even better, David Beckham's name never came up at all, although I did find out that Bay Watch is an infinitely more potent cultural export than I had imagined, fairly trouncing any other book, movie or television show as an instantly recognizable charades topic. Phil merely puffed out his chest and jogged a few slow motion steps to elicit an almost instant chorus of correct answers. This was, sadly, quite the opposite of "On The Road," which was identified phonetically although no one seemed to know the book. I'm sure ol' Jack was too drunk to care, wherever he is.

Other festivity highlights include Vanessa's conception of, sole entry into, and victory in the ugly christmas sweater contest. Secretly, her sweater is actually a Christmas tree stand cozy, but she wore it as a sort of serape and scored a box of chocolates as her prize. We also had a Christmas quiz, courtesy of our hosts Mark and Caroline, and played an impromptu version of pictionary, that was really just charades on paper, and a lot of fun. We also exchanged gifts in secret santa fashion, with everyone taking a wobbly turn on our gregarious Seeth Ifrican Santa's lap. I somehow managed to draw my own gift, The Godfather, at random, which was fine with me since they were mostly gag gifts anyway. Vanessa did OK as well, drawing a bottle of champagne and managing to avoid the Mrs. Claus costume and steering wheel cozy that others were saddled with. Since we couldn't be at home, this was a very good place to spend the holiday and we lavished a fair amount of attention on our little pal Harvey, as we were missing our new niece Sonia. We did get to coo at her later that night via Skype, which was great. Some people are embarrassed by the way that babies reduce grown men and women to gurgling imbeciles, but for me it's just status quo.