Roast Beast And Tryptophan: The Post-Mortem

As Kyle Broflovski of South Park sang, "It's hard to be a Jew at Christmas." But it's not impossible.

The Wife, being from a family of the American religious majority, dragged my happy ass down to spend the day with her clan, to celebrate the birth of Our Lord and Savior by opening too many presents, eating too much meat, and drinking too much spiked eggnog. Since the Jewish calendar doesn't really have a holiday designed around presents and eggnog, Christmas Day seems as good a time as any for me to get with the program.

(By sheer coincidence, this year Hanukkah -- or Chanukah or Hannukah or Chanuko or Chaka Khan, or however you spell it -- began at sundown on December 25th. But despite the "eight days for eight presents" theme that many American Jewish families have bestowed upon Hanukkah, our "Festival of Lights" is actually a fairly minor holiday, as Jewish holidays go. The gift-giving is mostly an attempt to keep the Jewish kids from feeling left out of the holiday season, not to mention an additional marketing opportunity for America's commercial retail enterprises. But I digress.)

The Wife made no secret that her preferred gift option would be jewelry. She never makes a secret of it. She began to drop hints starting, oh let's see, I think it was last February.

"I want a necklace."

"Can I have a necklace?"

"Look at this wonderful jewelry website. See all the pretty necklaces? Boy, would I sure like to have one of those ..."

Subtle as a case of explosive diarrhea, my Wife. During baseball season, she came up with the following little ditty, sung to the tune of "Take Me Out To The Ball Game":

Take me out to the jew-lers
Take me out to the store
Buy me some Cartier or Tiff-any,
I don't care, it all looks good on me!
So let's root, root root through your wal-let
Max out your gold card and more,
For it's one, two, three carats and up
At the jewel-ry store!

To say the Wife has a jewelry fixation would be ... oh, never mind. I think you get the point.

She got her necklace, and now I'm going to get my Christmas "privileges", if you know what I mean and I think you do. But that's not the point of this story.

No, the true point of this story is the Wife's recipe for eggnog. It's very simple. You buy a half-gallon of store-brand eggnog. You take a large glass or cup. You pour two shots of white rum into the bottom of the glass, and you fill it to the top with eggnog.

You give it to your unsuspecting brother, who guzzles it down quickly, casually mentioning (not in an unapproving way) the pronounced alcohol flavor. So you pour three shots of white rum into the bottom of the empty glass, fill it with eggnog, and hand it to your brother again.

Your brother drinks the eggnog, has a couple of glasses of wine, and then falls into a deep, snoring, booze-induced coma with the crosscut shredder he wanted for Christmas resting on his belly, gently rising and falling with each new snore, as the rest of the family mills around the room and laughs at him.

The Wife's philosophy is that if you add enough booze, eventually you forget you're drinking cheap store-brand eggnog. The third glass (if you maintain consciousness that long) is supposed to be a half-and-half mix of rum and nog. This philosophy works. (Although, I suspect that during her college years, she played "Quarters" with nog so that no one at school would know she was getting smashed out of her gourd.)

Add to the booze a liberal amount of tryptophan-laced turkey and the sugar crash from a HoneyBaked Ham, and you have a recipe for dormitory-style sleeping arrangements.

We remained awake and made it back home safe and sound (I mixed my own damn eggnog, thankyouverymuch) and now you, gentle Reader, get this present from me. (Unlike the Wife, you are very easy to shop for.)

Merry Christmas.