Time to Eat, Drink, and Be Merry,
with a little help from Starbucks and Cost Plus

Greetings, fellow babies, this is Onnie coming at ya and welcome to Day 2 of our Christmas Countdown. As you already know if you read my previous entry, the Official Christmas Season doesn't begin until the day after Thanksgiving, and while Starbucks and Cost Plus both jumped the gun and had their Xmas booty in full swing before my birthday (November 17) even, I must admit that we did purchase some seasonal swag from them ahead of schedule. But at least we kept quiet about it. Until today, anyway.

I must also admit that if anything can get me to break my Christmas season timing rule in a heartbeat, it's the annual roll-out of Starbucks' Christmas Blend coffee. Heck, they could start selling it on Arbor Day and I'd be in line for a cup. I also used to go on Eggnog Latte benders (available right around Thanksgiving) for a couple years, till I made the connection between downing one of those, feeling my head explode, and testing my blood sugar to find it at 200 or so, alas, so it's Christmas Blend (CB) with Splenda now. Not that I'm complaining.

The lovely Colyn bought me two, count 'em, two pounds of CB, one pound regular, one pound decaf (the decaf's in the green bag, by the way). This was sometime in the middle of November, I think. I usually mix a pot of half-caf, half-decaf, as I will drink a pot of java a day (weekends only) and if I drank that much pure-caf coffee I wouldn't even show up on radar. For a few days I even made coffee at home before coming to work and thermos-ing it in, just to have some CB, but as luck would have it, the local coffee bar in the building over started serving CB, straight-up, a few days after I got my own stock. It's a buck for a refill if you bring your own cup, such a deal. Otherwise it's $12.95 a pound for the beans and being I'm a cheapskate, it greatly pains me to pay thirteen bucks a pound for beans when my standard Winco house-label brand (pretty decent Sumatran) goes for six bucks a pound and even then I complain.

But my vices (the ones I pay money for, anyway) are few, I don't drink, smoke, gamble, or play Halo or whatever's hot on Wii this week, so I s'pose splurging on coffee one month out of the year ain't so bad.

Y'know what goes really good with Starbucks Christmas Blend coffee? Christmas stollen! And I'm not even German. And I never grew up with stollen, nor did I even know it existed until about ten years ago -- I was at my local Cost Plus store in Seattle, when I lived there, it's around Christmas and they had racks and racks of these funky powder-sugar covered loaves of I dunno what, one of 'em was on sale for $3.99, and I thought, what the heck, I'll give it a try.

Now here's the thing about me and most pastries or baked goods: I really don't care for most pastries or baked goods, aside from chocolate cake. And even then it better have good frosting or I'm outta there.

And stollen is not only not frosted (unless you call powder-sugar-dusting "frosting"), it's also, to put it bluntly, dry. It may be that fresh stollen (if there's even such a thing) is moist and chewy, but the stollen available at Cost Plus is -- no offense -- stollen that has the consistency of bread baked six months ago and left uncovered since then. Not exactly moist.

But darned if I didn't take one taste of it and go -- "Hey, this is good." I wasn't blown away, it's not like I'd wait in line for a slice of stollen, but for some reason I really like it. At Christmas, anyway. So when it goes on sale at Cost Plus, I always pick up a loaf. I have to parcel it out in pretty thin slices over the course of the holidays, as it's quite rich and can send me into glycemic shock if I overdo it. But it's lovely dunked in coffee.

Notice the price has gone up to $4.99. But it's still a deal. Ironic caveat: I didn't actually buy any stollen from Cost Plus this year (yet), I just took the photo. But I did pick up a baby-loaf of stollen from a German deli not too far from where we live, and it's pretty good stuff. Not as dry as the stollen from Cost Plus, but it'll do in a pinch. I also picked up an incredibly awful Oktoberfest CD for Colyn, not that I planned on buying her an incredibly awful Oktoberfest CD, it just happened to be for sale there and I hoped it had yodeling songs on it (Colyn loves a good yodel). But it doesn't, it just has an extremely annoying drum track and backbeat that goes on and on and on ... anyway, where were we?

Oh, yes, CHRISTMAS CRACKERS!!! It's not Christmas without Christmas Crackers!

I didn't grow up with Starbucks Christmas Blend, and I didn't grow up with stollen, and I didn't grow up with Christmas Crackers, but no Christmas is complete without the trinity of these wonderful things. My great affection for Christmas Crackers can be traced to my great affection for an old British TV series, "The Good Life" (known on this side of the pond as Good Neighbors), specifically to one episode of that show, a special Christmas episode, titled Silly, But It's Fun.

Anyway, on the show, they shared Christmas Crackers, complete with bad jokes and silly hats, and this was back in the early 80's or so when we used to watch it (on PBS, our entire family would watch it together), and I didn't know (at the time) how much of a cultural instituion (in the UK) Christmas Crackers were. But it looked like fun.

Here's the scene from the episode, you can watch it by clicking on the "play" button on the image:

My sister was actually the first person in our family to find Crackers here in the US, probably at Cost Plus, and so she started the tradition for us and we've done it every year since. And of course they're great at weddings, too!

Coming up tomorrow: More fun at Cost Plus!!!