Drink Up Your Lambs Wool – It’s Twelfth Night!

Christmas is not over yet. Tonight is Twelfth Night. Tomorrow is Epiphany.
Twelfth Night or Epiphany Eve is a festival in some branches of Christianity marking the coming of the Epiphany, and concluding the Twelve Days of Christmas. It is defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as “the evening of the fifth of January, [...]

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I Love QQ Food. Tang Yuen, Better Late than Never!

I love QQ food. I love Q food too.
Q is not a question. Q is a texture. Or as expressed much more succinctly and beautifully by Zoe Tribur in the Spring 2006 issue of Gastronomica
QQ is a unique oral sensation that
cannot be mistaken for any other. When you put something
in your mouth—cold or warm, salty [...]

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There Was No Old Woman Who Lived in This (Chocolate) Shoe

How our shoes define us! (Maybe even moreso than our haircuts? Arguable.)

Link to the online boutique of Jean-Paul Hevin, Master Choclatier
The feminist in me growls at this shoe. The image, the pain, the everything! The girl in me purrs at this shoe. My god. Or rather my goddess. How gorgeous. The chef in [...]

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This Mother is Mine, At Christmas and Forever

(This is Part 5 of 5, of ‘The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas‘)

My other two mothers, the ones whose stories have been told, were Rida and Ada. Naturally, following my rather far-fetched reasoning process, these names came from the Magi.
the Armenians have Kagpha, Badadakharida and Badadilma
Rida from Badadakharida; Ada from Badadilma.
I’ve saved the name [...]

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The Christmas of My Second Mother

(This is Part 4 of ‘The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas’)

Ada had been cooking food for tables filled with people for as long as she could remember. That memory extended back to the small farm in Italy that was said goodbye to while still a child, to emigrate to America.
With six children now grown, [...]

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One Mother’s Christmas

(This is Part 3 of ‘The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas’)

Christmas was no joke to Rida.
What it was, was a hell of a lot of work.
It all began shortly before Thanksgiving and then progressed, as if drawn out on a blueprint.
At least the menu didn’t need planning. The menu for Christmas dinner was [...]

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Three Mothers, Three Magis and some Magic

(This is Part Two of ‘The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas’)

The word Magi is a Latinization of the plural of the Greek word magos (μαγος pl. μαγοι), itself from Old Persian maguŝ from the Avestan moγu. The term is a specific occupational title referring to the priestly caste of Zoroastrianism. As part of their [...]

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The Way of Three Mothers at Christmas

I’ve had three mothers at Christmas, in my life.
Like the Three Wise Men, each mother had a different precious gift they carried along to offer. These gifts were not for a child as invested in hope and wonder as the one we think of as being born on Christmas Eve. The gifts they offered were [...]

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