On The Second Day of Christmas I Dispelled a Persistent Rumor...

Happy Second Day of Christmas! 

I attended a Lessons and Carols service at mom's Episcopal church this morning.  They sang a couple of favorites, including "What Child is This," which is set to the tune of "Greensleeves," a Medieval romantic ballad that many attribute to Henry VIII.  (Though it would have been more fitting if he had written "Redcollar" or something, given his predilection for beheadings.)

Someone told me that the words to that annoyingly repetitive carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas" were actually a code for Catholics to preserve the tenets of their faith once England became a Protestant land.  (And by the way, nothing annoys my people more than the claim that the Anglican Church was founded so that Henry VIII could get a divorce.  Yes, Henry split from Rome, but he considered himself Catholic unto death and two of his heirs, Elizabeth I and Edward, had to hide their Protestant leanings.  It was Elizabeth who truly established the Church of England much as we know it today, and who abolished the "old ways" of Catholicism.)

At any rate, the rumor-debunking site Snopes disputes the popular notion that "The Twelve Days of Christmas" is a catechism song in which, for example, "four calling birds" represent the four Gospels.  Snopes points out that Catholics and Anglicans agreed on virtually every tenet supposedly represented by the gifts in the song, so there would be no need to encode these things orally, nor were all Catholics completely banned from writing about their faith. 

It's too bad, really, as this is a claim worthy of a Dan Brown-type conspiracy.  Can't you just see the dashing Professor Langdon hunting down turtle doves and pipers piping to unravel their secrets?

Night at the Museum

Is there anything better than a gorgeous Beaux-Arts mansion filled with antiques, beckoning you to enter? Swoon. When I went to school in New York I used to visit the Frick Collection regularly. The Met and the Guggenheim were great, but strolling farther down Fifth and turning into the Frick’s gates on E.70th felt as though I were entering a secret world.

Now Chicago has a similar museum, the Driehaus, located only one block off of hectic Michigan Avenue, yet more than a century apart in spirit. I went to a holiday open house there tonight and was astounded at the effort that went into refurbishing this Gilded Age palace. Philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus purchased the former Nickerson mansion from the College of Surgeons next door, and has amassed a wonderful collection devoted to architecture and design, including metalwork, ceramics, glassware, furniture, stained glass, marbles and bronzes.

On his museum’s website, Driehaus writes, “Good architecture brings pleasure; it makes people feel comfortable in their larger home — this great city of Chicago.” Well said, sir. And thank you for inviting me in from the cold tonight to celebrate Christmas in 19th century splendor.

The Richard H. Driehaus Museum
50 E. Erie St. (at Wabash)
Guided tours only; call or visit website for times
312-932-8665
www.driehausmuseum.org

All I ever wanted was a gun and a good read...

The January issue of Chicago Magazine has an article called "In Their Sights" profiling the plaintiffs who are challenging this city's handgun ban.  The Supreme Court will hear the case in February, having already overturned a similar ordinance in Washington, D.C.

I grew up with guns.  My father had hunting rifles and my stepdad kept a pistol and a shotgun in the house for self-defense.  In the Ohio countryside in the 1980s, there was no "911" for emergencies; if anything bad went down at our house, we were pretty much on our own.  So I love shocking the good citizens of Chicago by casually mentioning that I own a gun. I don't have custody of it since that would violate the law (for now, anyway). Instead, it resides with my father back home. But I do have my State of Illinois FOID--Firearm Owner's Identification--card. And one night it came to my rescue in the most unlikely sort of way.

After my workout I stopped at the library to pick up several books I had on reserve.  (In addition to liking guns, we Wasps are quite fond of the public library.  All of those lovely books and CDs and movies... absolutely free!)  Having scrabbled around in my wallet and gym bag, I realized that I seemed to have misplaced my library card. What to do? Despair threatened to set in. There were my shiny new books on the reserve shelf. In between stood a severe-looking gentleman. A total law-and-order type, I could tell. The library allows patrons to take out books with a state-issued ID showing proof of residence, but my driver's license still had my old address on it. I looked through my wallet one more time... and spied my FOID card. A state-issued photo ID. Genius! I offered it up to the librarian and held my breath. He studied it for a tense moment, then smiled and reached behind him to the reserve shelf. Victory! (Should I notify the NRA?)

But seriously, it's kind of fitting that for all of my pistol-packing babe bravado, the only use to which I've put this card is to spring a couple of... books.

A Recipe for Bathtub Gin

The wonderful queen of all cocktails Natalie Bovis-Nelson, a.k.a. the Liquid Muse, notes that tomorrow is Repeal Day, marking the end of Prohibition.  To celebrate, I thought I would post my grandfather Albert Russel's recipe for bathtub gin.  My grandfather was a Yalie, a partner in the prestigious Cincinnati law firm of Taft, Stattinius & Hollister, and generally a Dudley Do-Right kind of guy.  But he apparently made his own hooch during the long dry spell between 1920 and 1933.

To preserve this important artifact for posterity, my teetotaling grandmother carefully copied the recipe on University Club stationery (thus adding a nice air of legitimacy to this otherwise shady operation).  The recipe is a bit confusing, but here it is.  Note that I am posting this as a historical curiosity only, and cannot represent that attempting this recipe at home would be legal, safe or even palatable!


Prepare:

78 drops Oil of Juniper
12 drops Oil of Coriander
30 drops Oil of Orange
5 drops Oil of Cinnamon

Prepare separately:

25 drops Oil of Angelica
Use 2 ounces of glycerin per gallon of alcohol
Add 2 drops of mixture #1 and 2 drops of mixture #2 per gallon of alcohol
Use 4 parts alcohol to 5 parts water

I love that my grandmother added at the bottom, “It looks awful! Milky white!”

Cheers!

Have I got a persimmon Fuyu!

My Fuyu persimmon finally ripened yesterday, after weeks of my anxiously attending to it. Meaning I would pick it up, give it a worried look and a little squeeze, then scowl and drop it back into the fruit bowl.

Aside from the fact that they require a lot of patience, persimmons are the perfect Wasp fruit.  One variety--called, naturally enough, the American Persimmon--is native to this country, so we feel all warm and patriotic when eating them.  (Never mind that the ones most commonly available in supermarkets at this time of year, Hachiya and Fuyu, are Asian varieties.) 

Persimmons are delicious when soft and ripe. I enjoy just scooping their little insides out and eating them raw. The taste is mellowly sweet and the consistency resembles custard more than fruit.  For some reason, others prefer a slightly fancier presentation, persimmon pudding.  Here's a website--called, naturally enough--Persimmon Pudding--with dozens of recipes.

The Complete Jane Austen (meets Belichick)

[I originally posted this on 1/20/08.  My, how things have changed in slightly under two years.  Brett Favre was a Jet for about 5 seconds, is now a Viking, and is playing possibly the best football of his life.  Bill Belichick and his Pats are having a rebuilding year, to put it kindly after last night's Monday Night Football debacle.  But Jane Austen is still going strong, albeit as an unlikely entrant into the ranks of zombie fiction.]

Is anyone else out there reading Jane Austen at the same time as a Bill Belichick biography?

Yeah, I didn't think so.

Here's what disparate tastes I have. For the last two Sundays I've been torn between my two loves, football and Austen.

Two weeks ago PBS's Masterpiece Theatre kicked off its Complete Jane Austen festival with an adaptation of Persuasion that I missed because I was out socializing after the Dallas - Giants playoff game. Then this past Sunday was agony, as I switched back and forth between the Packers and Giants in the NFC Championship and Northanger Abbey, the second in the Masterpiece Theatre series. The latter was so engrossing that I actually stuck with it over poor Brett and the Pack, thus wisely avoiding the tragic end of Green Bay's season. (No I don't have Tivo; call me old-fashioned, but there's just something about watching a show live.)

The adaptation of Northanger Abbey, Austen's satire of Gothic romances, was so fun that it inspired me finally to give the novel a try. As for the late David Halberstam's Belichick biography, The Education of a Coach, a Patriots-loving friend urged me to read it to understand better the work ethic behind the seemingly-perfect team.

Both books are about how youthful optimism gives way to wisdom and experience. And that's about all I can find in common between Austen's and Halberstam's works, other than crisp and excellent writing.