Christmas with Boney M. et al.

We went to Karin’s mom’s house for our final Christmas party. The best part was hearing stories about Karin’s grandma, who died in 2016. (Don’t tell anyone, but she was my favorite person from that branch of the family.)

Karin’s mom used to consult a book called Mrs. Dunwoody’s Excellent Instructions for Homekeeping.

Mrs. Dimwitty, Karin’s grandma called it.

Karin noted that her grandma was the “queen of ‘work smarter, not harder’.”

She liked to dump ingredients into a vessel and let them bake. Hence her fondness for cookie bars – which are cut out from a grid, not sculpted individually – and for casseroles.

And she’d start washing the dishes while everyone else was eating dessert.

That’s pretty much how I like to clean and cook, except that my appliance of choice is the rice cooker, not the oven.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

It was a rough Christmas. Samuel and Daniel opened many gifts and fought over them all day long. I kept thinking of The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980), in which Bushmen fight over a Coke bottle that has fallen from heaven. Would my children fight so viciously no matter what, or would they get along better with less? Some of the famous “peace” churches severely restrict private ownership. Does it help them, peace-wise? The Thomas Friedmans of the world think that competition and accumulation help to make for a more peaceful planet. I really don’t know. This is the sort of thing that ought to interest “peace studies” academics, those who talk about war-curbing and peace-building. How many of them are telling people to get rid of their possessions? I can’t imagine there’d be much incentive for that sort of message, even if it were correct, but again, I don’t know what those writers actually say.