Update: Jonathan just got home and he has passed his first exam for law school! I am so proud of him!

 

The wolves have been howling at night lately. It echoes around the forest and the ravine behind the house and, when we walk out at night, we are careful, peering into the darkness and intent, listening to every sound. The dark comes very early now. Somehow, it all makes Christmas seem so much more real.

The Christmas fairs seem sparkly in the dusky winter light. In Pietrasanta, there are stalls selling special cheeses wrapped in straw and special sausages. There are stalls with local wine and new olive oil and different types of honey -- chestnut and linden and acacia and "a thousand flowers." There are stalls with serving implements carved from swirly olive wood and ones with delicate lacy shawls and sweaters crocheted with wool from local sheep. There is a stall with fifty different types of herbal teas, including one called "butterfly." Everything seems to twinkle a little bit.

But despite all this, the holiday season doesn't seem actually commercial. Instead, everyone we know is busy exchanging homemade baked goods and homemade wreaths and homemade jams and jellies and pickles. Jonathan and I are bringing around jars of our lemon-ginger marmalade and loaves of Jonathan's fresh-baked bread.

The commune here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea has put up a creche in the little park that commemorates the fallen war dead. There are sheep that have been made by pinning cardboard sheep faces onto hay bales. They give off a very distinct "Little Prince -- please will you draw me a sheep?" vibe and every time we go by them, I feel warm in my heart.

 

One of the nice things about being a grandparent is that now I can do fun things for my grandson that I thought about doing for my sons, but never did because I was too busy actually, you know, parenting them.

So during these past couple of weeks, I wrote a very silly book for my grandson called "Muffin and the Circus of the Sun" that stars a little hedgehog named Muffin along with other characters like the Later Gator and the Gift Horse and some very nice Dingbats.

For $11, there is a company in the US that is printing my book and binding it nicely and shipping it to my grandchild who can't read yet, but maybe will one day.

So that is what I did with the first half of December and now it is one its way and I am free to fall into all of the holiday festivities -- markets and concerts and dinners and parties. Today's festivity is a General Strike all over Italy that means the trains aren't running and our paper recycling wasn't picked up this morning. So that is festive, but in a different way from the choir concert.

Now that the cold weather has come, the air out over the sea is crystal clear and we can see all of the individual houses and gardens down on the coast and even across the bay to the headlands at Porto Venere. The evening air often smells of woodsmoke and the only birds are owls and the sunset over the sea is the color of rubies. The leaves are falling every day and we can see down into the valley behind us now to the lights of Solaio. Late at night, wolves howl and the sound echoes around the valley forest.

We bought a two-foot-tall plastic Christmas tree at the big supermarket out on the highway and installed it in the living room. I thought that having at least a few of our old family ornaments hanging on it would make me feel more like it was Christmas. But now that it is up, I realize that I miss the smell of the fresh-cut fir trees that we used to have every year, hiking up into the high mountains and tramping through the silent snowy forest to find the one we wanted. We brought thermoses of hot chocolate and hot apple cider and scrambled eggs and bacon wrapped in tortillas and Christmas cookies. 

We always decorated the tree right away when we got home and the whole house smelled like the snowy winter forest. I will go out later and cut a pine branch or two from our woods and bring them into the house for the sake of their perfume. But I know that it will not be -- could not ever be -- the same.

Because there is a fried catfish motif running through Armadillo Massacre Number Three, I have made a new trailer based on that theme from an idea Tris came up with. The only problem was finding catfish and buttermilk, neither of which are readily available in Pietrasanta -- or even in Italy in general. For the catfish, I substituted the fish in the grocery store that looked to me most similar (it turned out to be plaice). 

And for the butter milk, I thought, "Well, we'll just make it ourselves." For my entire life, I have been under the impression that buttermilk was the milk left over after you churn cream into butter.

So we bought three half-liters of heavy cream and dutifully churned it into butter, carefully saving the leftover milk in a big bowl. When it was all done, I got set up to film and then while I was waiting for Jonathan to be ready, I gave the buttermilk a little taste -- just out of curiosity and to make sure it was right.

So do you know what is left when you churn butter out of cream? Not buttermilk, that's for sure.

It's skim milk. Just plain skim milk.

So at that point, I looked online to see how to make buttermilk. It turns out that buttermilk is a cultured product produced in a similar manner to yogurt, but using a different culture agent. All of the recipes for making it yourself begin with, "Take two tablespoons of buttermilk and add them..."

But if I already had access to buttermilk, why would I be making it myself? In the end, we stirred in a couple of spoons of plain yogurt to the milk and carried on. The end product was tasty nonetheless.

But now we are left with a giant ball of butter as big as a baby's head. We used some of it to make cookies and I also made a concoction of butter, honey, cinnamon, and cloves that we are eating on Jonathan's homemade bread. I've had worse things in my mouth. But we still have a lot of butter to go.