It’s been a while since I did a Christmas post, because in the past few years I was either busy with work and holiday preparations or sick on Christmas or both.
Initially, it seemed as if Christmas 2024 wouldn’t be much better, since I was busy with translation work well into last week. I also wasn’t feeling well, got tired very quickly and my blood pressure was way too low, leaving me feeling woozy. Low blood pressure and feeling woozy was a massive issue in my teens, which somewhat improved in adulthood, but still recurs on occasion, often dependent on the weather.
But before we get to the meat of the post (literally in one case), here are some links to other recent posts by me. For a seasonal starter, I revisit the 1985 He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special at File 770. Also for File 770, I wrote a piece to commemorate the birthday of Leigh Brackett. At Galactic Journey, I reviewed The Unicorn Girl by Michael Kurland and wrote about (West) Germany’s first ever satellite, Azur, which launched in November 1969. I’m also writing for the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow Blog of the 2025 Seattle Worldcon on occasion and have written about legendary editor Cele Goldsmith Lalli, the 1960 science fiction novel The High Crusade by Poul Anderson and the 1960 movie The Time Machine so far. Finally, I’ve also got an article called “Tanith Lee: Dark Mistress of the Weird” out in issue 4 of New Edge Sword and Sorcery, though my copy hasn’t yet reached me.
Back to the holidays: 2024 is also the first Christmas with both my parents gone. Last Christmas, my Mom was still alive, though in a nursing home and in an increasingly bad condition, bedridden and unable to even get into a wheelchair. So 2023 was actually the first Christmas I spent all alone. I visited Mom in the nursing home, of course, but that was just a short visit since she tended to fall asleep after half an hour or so.
There’s something of a stigma about spending Christmas, particularly Christmas Eve, which is the main event in Germany, all alone. It’s considered a very sad thing to spend Christmas Eve alone and there are meet-ups for people who’d otherwise spent Christmas alone organised by churches and charities. I briefly considered going to one of those meet-ups, but then I realised that I didn’t want to. First of all, it wouldn’t be a proper Christmas Eve for me, because even though there would be other people, the food would be all wrong and it just wouldn’t be the kind of Christmas I enjoy. There also are platforms which connect people who want to host a Christmas Eve or Day dinner with people who’d like to attend. Once again, I considered this and then decided against it, because while I wanted to make my personal holiday foods, I didn’t necessarily want to feed strangers. Plus, inviting strangers into the house would mean extra work such as cleaning, whereas if I’m alone and the floor isn’t spotlessly clean, who’ll care except for me? Besides, I actually like my own company.
Initially, I also wondered whether to bother with a tree or decorations. But then I actually put up quite a lot of decorations, including things my Dad wouldn’t have liked like illuminated window decorations. Because my Dad didn’t care for Christmas lights or decorations at all. It usually took asking several times until he could be bothered to put up decorations I couldn’t put up myself like the star in the front window. This time around, I just asked a tall and fit neighbour to do it for me and he did.

This illuminated star, here pictured with the snowy garden, is one new decoration I got for myself, because Dad didn’t like putting things in the window.
So in short, now that I’m alone and no longer beholden to other people (though I would of course prefer having my parents back in the sort of good health they both still had in 2020/21), I could decide what sort of Christmas I want to have, what sort of decorations, food, etc… I also decided that I wanted a tree anyway, because though Christmas trees are a lot of work, they also bring joy. Though my tree is a little shorter than the ones we used to have and I decided to ditch the live candles that my Dad insisted on adding to the tree, because frankly I find live candles too dangerous and decorating the tree is a lot more fun, if you don’t have to worry about accidentally setting it on fire. Besides, not every tradition needs to be kept. I have more lights in my home for Christmas than ever, but not a single live candle, because live candles are too much of a fire hazard for my taste and modern LED candles look just as nice.
As for food, I decided to stick with our traditional holiday dishes, though scaled down for one person, which isn’t always easy, especially with older “feed a regiment” recipes. For example, for our traditional Christmas Eve lunch – grilled venison with red cabbage, apple cranberry sauce and some pasta to soak up the sauce – I ditched the venison (though I like it) and the red cabbage (though – again – I like it) and just kept the sauce and the pasta, because the sauce is actually what makes the dish special. Besides, there’s no law to say that I can only have venison and/or red cabbage on Christmas. I can have both whenever I want to.

Pasta with apple cranberry sauce. Tha sauce is amazing and IMO doesn’t need the venison or red cabbage to shine.
Grandma Buhlert’s famous herring salad (the recipe for which I shared at The Skiffy and Fanty Show several years ago), which we traditionally have for dinner on Christmas Eve (and Christmas Day and Boxing Day and however long the bowl lasts, often up to New Year’s Eve), poses another problem. Grandma’s original recipe produces enough salad to feed a regiment. I’ve scaled it down over the years and scaled it down again this year, but there are some hard limits. For example, the recipe calls for a celeriac root and celeriac roots are big. Even if you buy the smallest one you can find on the market, it’s still big. Sometimes, we would just use half the root for the herring salad and use the other half to make celeriac salad, but the last thing you want when you’re making a lot of salad is even more salad. So the ratio of celeriac to the other ingredients gradually crept up, simply because celeriac is the most difficult to scale down. Boiling a celeriac root also takes forever, even in a pressure cooker (and Christmas is the only time I use pressure cooker and I inevitably curse the damned thing). This year’s celeriac root is a bit crunchier than usual – I guess I should have boiled it even longer – but otherwise the salad came out fine. Last year, I took a small pot of it to my Mom at the nursing home BTW, even though the nurses didn’t want her to eat solid food and insisted on pureeing everything.
The sailor’s curry we traditionally have on Christmas Day was the least problematic, because you can easily freeze leftovers. Though I did scale it down last year and even more this year and it’s still enough to eat on Boxing Day as well, which means that I don’t have to worry about Boxing Day lunch as well. Though Boxing Day was usually the one holiday meal slot that was up for grabs and varied the most. When I was very small, it was often Chicken Fricassee (which I found bland and boring, though I might like it more today). Then, we had French style roast rabbit, because my Grandma gifted her stepdaughters a rabbit every holiday season. Grandma hailed from Moritzburg near Dresden and roast rabbit for Christmas is an East German thing. I actually have Mom’s recipe for the roast rabbit and may give it a try eventually, since I remember liking it. Even later, it became Boeuf a la Mode (which I actually quite liked, especially the way my Mom made it, which included currants and olives – and yes, I have her recipe) or Coq au Vin (which I also like). In recent years, once I took over the holiday cooking duties, I mostly made some kind of Cajun dish – Crawfish Etouffee, Shrimp Creole, Gumbo, whatever ingredients were available. But since the curry is enough for two days, I can enjoy it on Boxing Day as well and just have my Cajun food or Boeuf a la Mode or Coq au Vin or roast rabbit some other day. Not Chicken Fricassee, though. I looked up recipes and it still sounds bland and boring to me. Half the recipes had titles like “Chicken Fricassee just like Mom’s”, so apparently everybody’s Mom made this dish at some point, though other people clearly have fonder memories of it than me.
Of course cooking requires shopping. I hate crowds, so I tend to go grocery shopping either very early in the morning, just after the shops open, or in the evening just before closing time. A lot of ingredients could also be bought ahead of time, but some – particularly the pork for the curry and the salted herring for the herring salad – can only be bought just before Christmas Eve. I had planned to buy the foods that don’t keep well on Monday morning and everything else on Friday early in the morning, so I wouldn’t have to go out on the weekend and could do other things – clean the house and the living room, etc… – that needed to be done. However, it turned out that the one grocery store that usually carries them didn’t have fresh cranberries on Friday, but maybe they would get them in again on Saturday. So I set off again on Saturday – while not feeling well at all – and even drove to the big Edeka store in Delmenhorst to get fresh cranberries, only that they didn’t have any either. The nice lady stocking the shelves even checked the warehouse. So that meant trying once more for cranberries on Monday or use dried cranberries for the apple cranberry sauce.
Another unexpected issue was the pork for the curry. Normally, this shouldn’t have been an issue at all – I’d just send an e-mail to my local neighbourhood butcher, preorder the pork and pick it up on Monday. Alas, when I sent off my e-mail last Wednesday, I got a reply that they didn’t accept anymore preorders at this late date (since when is a week before Christmas late?), but that I could come to the store and buy it there. So I got up really early on Monday morning – in spite of still feeling sick and woozy – to make it to the butcher at opening time to beat the crowds. The butcher opens at 7:30 AM. I was there at 7:32 AM and not only had a war broken out on the parking lot – which is way too small for the shop – but the line was already around the building and all the way to the bakery next door. Apparently, lots of other people had the same idea. And the line didn’t move briskly, because many people take forever at the butcher, because it’s always five slices of this and five slices of that and ten different types of sausages and cheese and salad (which the butcher sells as well) and whatnot. Now note that I was feeling woozy and my blood pressure was already low, so spending twenty minutes or half an hour or more standing in line was out of the question, because I know that standing for extended periods completely wrecks my blood pressure. And I certainly didn’t fancy collapsing at the butcher shop on the day before Christmas.
So I drove onwards to get the herring and the cranberries (and this time around, they actually did have fresh cranberries) and thought I’d come back to the butcher afterwards, when the crowds had dispersed a little. I assumed many people had come before work to pick up the meat supply for the holidays and things would look better at 8 AM or later. Meanwhile, the butcher counter at the grocery store was completely empty – no line at all. I briefly considered just buying my pork there, but then I took one look at what the butcher counter at the grocery store called “filet of pork” and decided that I didn’t want it. Besides, whenever my parents caved in and bought the pork for the curry at a grocery store, we later regretted it. Chicken and turkey are perfectly fine to buy at the grocery store – pork is not and neither is beef. So nope. I wanted good curry, so I needed good pork. So I returned to the butcher shop after finishing my other grocery shopping and found that the line had gotten even longer. Frustrated, I drove back home and decided to try again around noon, when all of those people waiting in line were hopefully at home having lunch or at work or wherever. Anywhere as long as it wasn’t waiting in line at the butcher.
By noon, the line was a little shorter. Still snaking out of the door, but no longer all the way to the bakery. So I got in line and was visibly grumpy, which apparently annoyed some of the other customers. Meanwhile, people who had preordered – which I had tried to do – could just go through. At one point I said to an employee, “Well, I tried to preorder, but you wouldn’t let me.” – “Well, you have to be early enough.” – “I tried to preorder a week before Christmas.” – “Oh, that’s much too late. We stopped accepting preorders four weeks ago.” – “Well, maybe I should preorder for next year then, since I’m here already”, I said snarkily.
You may be wondering why this particular butcher shop is such a mess and so overcrowded. There are two reasons. For starters, stand-alone butcher shops are becoming increasingly rare in Germany. They have problems finding apprentices, are struggling with regulations and bureaucracy and neighbours not wanting “that sort of business” next door, though they’re happy enough to buy the products, plus the supermarkets are cutting into their customer base. The second reason is that this particular butcher shop has been consistently ranked as one of the best in all of Germany in the past few years, which means that there were people waiting in line from as far away as Hamburg. As if you couldn’t find a good butcher somewhere in Hamburg, a city of 1.4 million people.
Not that I begrudge the butcher their success – and besides, the meat really is good. However, this is my neighbourhood butcher. They opened a year after I was born and I have literally been going there since forever. I remember how the shop looked before it was all snazzy and modern, long before it was officially one of the best butcher shops in Germany. I remember when the grey-haired ladies behind the counter were fresh-faced apprentices. I am one of the original customers and yet I get treated like crap, while some people from Hamburg, who couldn’t even find Seckenhausen on a map, get preferential treatment, because they preordered five weeks ago.
I wasted twenty-five minutes standing in line at the bloody butcher and once it was my turn, I was out of the shop in maybe three minutes. The guy who was in line before me took longer to get all his umpteen purchases than I took to get my six hundred grams of filet of pork. Anyway, it seems that next year I will either have to preorder a month before Christmas or find myself another butcher. Which is a pity, because I have been a customer there for much longer than those people from Hamburg – and they looked like wealthy jerks from Hamburg, too.
Once I made it home from the butcher’s, my neighbour (the same one who put up my Christmas star in the window) set up the tree in the living room, because it would have been too heavy for me to carry it inside. We always had a natural tree and though I considered getting an artificial one, none of the ones on offer really did it for me, so a natural tree it was. It’s a Nordmann fir, because pretty much all commercially sold Christmas trees in Germany are, though personally I prefer regular firs.
Because my blood pressure was still too low, decorating the tree took longer than it normally would. And after I was finished, I was so tired that I just went to bed.
On Christmas Eve (which is the main event in Germany), I got up fairly early to chop up the last ingredients for the herring salad and make the apple cranberry sauce. In previous years, I also baked a cake for the holidays, but I decided not to do that this year, because I have plenty of cookies and a cake just for me would have been too much. My blood pressure was also still way too low and I was exhausted, so after lunch I just laid down for an extended afternoon nap.
Now the way Christmas Eve in Germany usually works is that there is coffee and cookies or cake in the afternoon. Some people attend a church service in the afternoon, others go to midnight mass and some don’t go to church at all. After the afternoon coffee and church, if applicable, the tree is lit and duly admired. Depending on the family there is singing, poems are recited or the Nativity from the Gospel of Luke is read out. Then the presents are opened. Afterwards, there is dinner (some families also have dinner before opening the presents, but that’s cruel to young children) and then the family hangs out, tries out new presents, drinks a glass of wine or beer or whatever they prefer. In recent years, the present opening has crept ever earlier into the afternoon to the point that some families are opening present directly after lunch. I’m not a fan of torturing kids by making them wait forever, but the kids can handle some waiting and opening presents before it’s dark is way too early IMO. Besides, keeping the kids occupied and out of the way until it’s time to open presents is the reason why Christmas TV specials are broadcast in the afternoon and also why the first church service of the day is very child-friendly with a nativity play put on by older kids, etc… Honestly, if I had impatient kids at home, I’d send them to the child-friendly Christmas service, because it’s a lovely experience, and IMO children should at least know why they’re celebrating Christmas.
I’d set my alarm for late afternoon to have my cookies and coffee, but when it went off, I still felt woozy and not well, so I snoozed for another half hour or so. After all, I was all alone and no one cares if I have my herring salad at eight PM or when I light up my tree. When I finally did get up around six PM, I still felt woozy and my blood pressure was still low. I didn’t feel like having dinner just yet, so I made myself a coffee and a cookie platter. And then a minor Christmas miracle happened, because after I’d eaten the cookies and drank the coffee, I suddenly felt a lot better and my blood pressure evened out, too. So maybe I just needed caffeine or sugar or both.

Holiday cookie platter, featuring clockwise from the top, spelt cookies, chocolate cookies, nut kipferl, almond cocoa cookies, brown cookies (North German specialty), gingerbread triangles and in the center Spekulatius and black and white coffee cookies.

This Scandinavian modern wrought iron candle holder dates from the 1960s and adorns my dinner table along with some glass votice candle holders.
So I retreated to the living room, switched on the tree and the various LED votive candles in decorative candle holders scattered around the room. Normally, I’d sit with my parents, sip wine, listen to holiday music on CD and open presents. When I was a kid, I also used to recite holiday poem in front of the Christmas tree, while my parents took pictures, but I haven’t recited a poem in years. We also used to sing Christmas songs as a family, but we eventually stopped, because we all are blessed with terrible voices and realised that we all hated it. One tradition we kept, however, was the reading of the nativity story from the gospel of Luke. This tradition started when I won a reading contest in school in sixth grade and just kept going. I always read the nativity story from an old Bible of my maternal grandmother’s printed in blackletter font and stuffed with all sorts of paper ephemera such as ancient church programs and the Seneca quote Mom wanted on her death announcement in the newspaper, because that only that old Bible had the German translation that everybody knows, not the modernised version, which I don’t like. As Bible translations go, I’m a traditionalist. Whenever I need the English version of a specific Bible verse (it happens occasionally when you’re a translator), I tend to go with the King James Bible.
Last year, I took the old Bible to the nursing home and read the nativity story to Mom in her bed. This Christmas Eve, I was all alone, but I still got the old Bible from my Mom’s nightstand drawer, where it’s kept, and read the nativity story to an empty room. Except that it wasn’t really empty, because my Playmobil nativity and a sizable part of my Masters of the Universe collection are currently there. So I read the nativity story to a bunch of toys and it only felt a little weird.

My Playmobil nativity, complete with Roman soldiers directing the traffic and a lot of farmer women and their animals as well as the more traditional players.

“Have yourself a merry little Hordemas” – The Masters of the Universe Masterverse Motherboard action figure is so big that she only fits on the living room table. And when the time came to redecorate the living room for Christmas, I decided to just leave her there and added some other members of the Evil Horde to hang out with her.
Then I made myself some Christmas punch (the alcohol-free version of mulled wine) and put We Wish You a Merry Christmas by the Ray Conniff Singers into the CD player. Now one thing you should know about traditional German Christmas music is that it’s terrible. The songs sound like funeral dirges and are usually performed by choirs or Schlager singers. Nowadays, you have alternatives such as the various pop Christmas songs, but when I was a kid, these terrible German Christmas songs were all there was. And even today, the radio stations still play this crap on Christmas Eve starting just after noon, because people apparently demand it. I call it the terror of Besinnlichkeit. The closest English term is “contemplation”, but it doesn’t quite hit the point. Basically, “Besinnlichkeit” means Christmas being quiet and austere and depressing. Personally, I suspect it’s a conspiracy of the Germanic pagans of yore to make Christmas Eve in Germany as depressing as possible.
However, when I was a kid we had two vinyl Christmas albums that my Dad brought back from the US. One was a Bing Crosby/Frank Sinatra album, which sadly was interrupted by a lot of talking from Bing and Frank (Guys, I want to hear you sing, not talk), and the other was We Wish You a Merry Christmas by the Ray Conniff Singers, first released in 1962. For years, this was literally the only Christmas album we had that wasn’t German terror of Besinnlichkeit stuff, so we pretty much listened to it on an endless loop during afternoon advent coffees and on Christmas Eve. Eventually, we got a CD player and other Christmas albums like the two CD Rock Christmas set which has most of the 1970s and 1980s pop holiday songs, Elvis Presley’s Christmas album and some country music Christmas compilations my Mom picked up at the discount store superceded the Ray Conniff Singers, especially since our vinyl record player no longer functioned reliably. And then three years ago, I bought our old Ray Conniff Singers Christmas album on CD, so we could all listen to it again.
Listening again to that album as adult, I’m struck by the fact that the songs on the album are mostly the English version of the sort of traditional Christmas carols that I dislike so much in German – “Little Drummer Boy”, “Let It Snow” and “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep” are the two newest songs and they date from 1941, 1945 and 1954 respectively. However, English language Christmas carols are cheerier in general and Ray Conniff’s arrangement and the performance of his group make them sound fresher and a lot more fun than the depressing German Christmas dirges.
There were no presents to open, because while I had declared books and toys delivered just before the holidays “Christmas presents”, I didn’t bother to wrap them. The closest thing to proper presents I got were a bag of homemade holiday cookies from one neighbour and a bag with chocolate and a bottle of wine from another and those didn’t need unpacking either.

This year’s “Christmas presents” include various toys and books which happened to arrive shortly before Christmas as well as two nice goodie bags from my neighbours.
So I just sat in the living room, sipped Christmas punch and listened to the Ray Conniff singers. And it was good.
Of course, I also took some pictures of my tree and decorations.
As I’ve undoubtedly explained before, my Christmas tree is basically a legacy tree with the oldest ornaments dating back to the 1960s, when my parents bought them as newly-weds. There were new ornaments added almost every year – sometimes as gifts, sometimes bought – while occasionally older ornaments were cycled out, because they broke (it happened, even if you’re careful) or because we no longer liked them or – for gifts – never liked them in the first place.

A close-up view of the top of the Christmas tree, where most of the vintage ornaments of my parents are. They date from the 1960s and are incredibly fragile. Near the top you can also spot a Santa head ornament I made from a seashell when I was five. No one showed me how to make it, I designed and crafted the whole thing myself as a gift for my parents.
This gives me a beautiful tree with a lot of personal history, which I prefer to the more uniform design many people have.
However, there’s also a problem and that is that the vast majority of ornaments are not things I bought for myself, but things my parents bought and ornaments that were given to me, often by my Aunt Gisela who gave me at least one ornament every year for more than forty years. Now I love many of the vintage ornaments of my parents’ and I love many of the ornaments I was given as a kid. However, the ornaments I love most are usually the ones I bought or picked for myself.
Last year, as I was decorating the tree, I realised that I wasn’t decorating my own tree or even my parents, but I was decorating Aunt Gisela’s tree. Which is ironic, because Aunt Gisela and Uncle Reinhard never had a Christmas tree of their own in all the time I’ve known them. I guess they were worried that stray needles might mess up their beautiful, perfect home. What is more, Aunt Gisela had a very different taste from mine, especially as I grew older. I still kept the Aunt Gisela ornaments, since they’re part of my history (and some of them are nice in their own way, even if I wouldn’t have bought enough Santas and dwarves to recreate the questing party from the Hobbit with Christmas tree ornaments. However, I also bought some ornaments of my own that match the person I am now. This included replacing the tree topper (I think we went through four different tree toppers in my lifetime and I was never really happy with any of them) with a golden tentacle.
Some of my all-time favourite ornaments are three woodcut and hand-painted ornaments shaped like Disney characters – Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket and Winnie the Pooh. A woman called Jenny gave them to me when I was five. She lived in Florida with her husband Jack, who was the manager of a shipyard, which is how my Dad knew this couple. Jenny had a full set of Fiesta Ware (which I used to call Jenny pottery before I knew the proper name) and she was a crafter. She had built the most amazing dollhouse and she also made those woodcut Christmas tree ornaments and gave me three of them, which I’ve treasured ever since. I have no idea what Jack and Jenny’s surname was and whether they are still alive. They were older than my parents at the time, so I doubt it. However, I have treasured Jenny’s handmade Disney ornaments for forty-six years now.
Now pop culture Christmas tree ornaments have never really been available in Germany. I guess cartoon or pop culture characters on the Christmas tree would be too vulgar and also interfere with “Besinnlichkeit” – heavens beware that people might actually have fun. Check out the Christmas address of Germany’s president Frank Walter Steinmeier for a look at what the ideal German Christmas tree looks like – straw stars, red baubles that are not too shiny and real wax candles. Austere and boring. Every year, I marvel at that terrible tree, which looks like something an impoverished Grandma would put up rather than our head of state, and wonder if this will be the year that the tree catches fire and sets the flag, the President and Bellevue Palace on fire. And yes, that bloody tree looks the same every year going back to the 1990s at least. So by German standards, my tree is actually quite gaudy.
What is more, Hallmark, the prime producer of pop culture themed Christmas tree ornaments, doesn’t sell their Christmas tree ornaments in Europe at all. IMO, they’re leaving a lot of money on the table there, because the one thing that every German person who travels to the US brings back are Hallmark Christmas tree ornaments. So I do have a couple of Hallmark ornaments that my parents bought in the 1970s and even one that Aunt Gisela bought during a trip to New York – and whenever I have that ornament – two bells decorated with holly – in my hands I marvel how Aunt Gisela managed to purchase the single dullest ornament Hallmark ever produced. However, I have only one Hallmark pop culture ornament – the Tasmanian Devil of Looney Tunes fame – and that’s one I bought for myself.
Luckily, you can get Hallmark ornaments in Europe via the Internet now, though they are quite pricey. Nonetheless, I got myself two pop culture ornaments last year and another this year, so my tree will reflect the person I am a little bit more. You can probably guess which ones they are in the photos below.

Christmas tree close-up with He-Man and Skeletor, the Tasmanian Devil, the three Disney ornaments a lady called Jenny gave me and a vintage wood shavings angel which we got from my Grandma.

Vintage wooden angels hover around Baby Grogu, because Christmas has room for more than one very special baby. Also note the Wedgewood ornament in the background.
On Christmas Day, I went over to my neighbours to deliver some presents and then I heated up the sailor’s curry, cooked rice and prepared the side dishes for our traditional Christmas Day lunch.

The side dishes for the curry. Clockwise from the left: Hardboiled egg, gherkins, pickled beetroot, banana, onions, atjar tjampoer (Dutch Indonesian pickled vegetables), lime pickle and mango chutney.
The rest of Christmas Day was quiet and so was Boxing Day, where I had the rest of the curry.
And that was Christmas 2024, which all in all went better than I thought it would.
I’m not sure if I’ll get the second part of my adventures at the Church of Eternia Masters of the Universe holiday event posted in 2024 (the post is about half finished), but of course there will be the eagerly awaited announcements of the winners of the 2024 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Horrible Fictional Parents and the 2024 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award.
Merry Christmas, and thank you for sharing all this, Cora.
Thank you, Paul.
Fröhliche Weihnachten, Cora! I’m glad you’re finding ways to keep the traditions you like, transform others, and start new ones.
Thank you. I hope you have a relaxing time between the years and a good slide into the New Year, as we say here in Germany.
You can make a decent soup with your extra celeriac:
In a medium saucepan, add 1tbsp oil.
Chop the 2 medium leeks / 2 medium onions
Sauté for a few mins until softening
Peel and Chop 1 whole celeriac,
Saute for about 5 mins before adding 2pints of vegetable stock.
Boil for 20 mins or until the chunks of celeriac are cooked through and soft.
Peel & Chop 2 eating apples
Add to the soup and cook for just a few minutes more.
Blitz with a handheld blender to a smooth soup.
Season with salt, pepper and lemon juice to taste.
This will of course freeze nicely.
Thank you. That sounds very tasty and I might give it a try next year. Especially since I need apples for various holiday dishes as well.
Bookmarked your Unicorn Girl review as I intend to read this bizarre trilogy for myself.
I really want to read the other two books now, because I enjoyed The Unicorn Girl a lot.