Christmas: The Day That Was In It

 

 It was, as Nero Wolfe would have put it, satisfactory*.

Midnight Mass --  at 7 p.m. rather than midnight.  But that has been rather common in southern California for a few years, with or without the Wuhan Devil  And as it was outdoors  (thank you, Governor Nuisance)  so the weather, albeit chilly, was probably more comfortable than whatever the temperature was at midnight.  After the five or six month sacramental hiatus at the beginning of the year, the liturgical surroundings almost don't matter.  The hunger for the sacraments makes outdoors on a business office patio beautiful.

Today our cousin came by for Christmas dinner and good talk.   No turkey this year but the roast beef of old England, which, I'm told, is an even more ancient custom for Christmas dinner than the turkey or even the goose.  And there was pie and ice cream.  And Christmas cookies (thank you, Ann).  And canoli.   And something else which I didn't quite catch the name of but I think is Greek.

(*For those not familiar with the corpus, "satisfactory" is Mr Wolfe's highest praise.)

(And, no, I don't know how or why the line spacing in the first two paragraphs changed. Mysterious are the ways of Blogspot its wonders to perform.)