Skip to main content

About Christmas Decorations and Food

This is my notes, and would like to share with you. You may not come from a Christian country, and don't celebrate Christmas, but you might want to know some Christmas typical decorations and traditional British Christmas food.

From Charles Dickens' novel A Christmas Carol, we learn that the typical Christmas decoration plants are holly, mistletoe and ivy:
The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there.
Holly, mistletoe, pine and fir trees were quite logically celebrated in the winter because they bring color to a colorless landscape. Use these plants to decorate their home during winter festival might have been a Celtic tradition, which practiced by the Druidist.
Holly leaves
Holly
Mistletoe is actually a parasitic plant, found high in the trees. It doesn't take root in the ground, but in the branches of tree itself, and gets all its nutrients by taking them from the tree.
Mistletoe
Mistletoe
A longer list of Christmas food was described by Charles Dickens in the same book:
Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.
One of these delicious food might be not familiar to you, right, I mean the "brown". So what exactly is this? Well, actually these brawn is made from pig's head, trotters, herbs and spices. Here is the James Martin's magnificent brawn made with British brawn recipes.

I had wrong impression that British people doesn't eat pig's head, tongue, tail or trotters, because I have only heard my friends saying that they saw pig's head sold in China Town food market, and it's very cheap, one or two pound a big head! You can't see a trace of these things in a butcher's shop, on the contrary you can buy in any butchers or Deli shop in China.

When I stayed in Belfast, I managed to procure a pig's head from meat supplier for a Chinese restaurant. That pig head was huge, but the problems was that we didn't have a stockpot to boil it, so at the end roasted it in oven.

Punch can be non-alcoholic and alcoholic drink, which was introduced from India to the United Kingdom in the early seventeenth century. Punch is served at parties in large, wide bowls, known as punch bowls.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Does pearls reproduce by itself through time

At the request of several families he and Mrs Legge gave a home for some months to a young Dutch girl, a granddaughter of the first Dutch governor of the Straits Settlements. She had several pearls of which the Dutch residents were great collectors, got from oysters found in a river of the Malay Peninsula, when she left them she gave Mrs Legge a small box containing a large pearl the size of a pea, with a blue spot on it, and two others not so large. This box was then put away and locked up. Several weeks later he took it out and on opening it discovered more than a dozen pearls, most of them very small. Astonished at the phenomenon he called his chief servant, a Portuguese, who happened to enter the room and who expressed no surprise but declared it to be a common occurrence. On enquiry he found that many of the Dutch people had jars of pearls, large and small, which had accumulated in this way. Some years later he related the incident at dinner on board ship. The captain was a cautio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bidmas, Bedmas, Bodmas, Pedmas And Christmas

This BBC GCSE Bitesize post says, BODMAS stands for 'brackets', 'other', 'division', 'multiplication', 'addition' and 'subtraction'. It's the order in which we carry out a calculation. But another article says, the order of operations in Maths called BIDMAS. BIDMAS stands for Brackets, Indices, Division and Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction. The difference is that the second substitute 'o' with 'i', and we can understand that teacher normally chooses easy way to explain whose pupils can understand, exponent or power or indices are out of reach of foundation students, so teachers uses 'other' instead. And in this article , 'o' actually stands for 'order', as far as my memory can go, my English teacher never teach me 'order' actually means 'Powers and Square Roots, etc.' In United States, the mnemonic fo Order of Operation is PEMDAS, because brackets are called pa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Panic or panick

There is only one spelling for panic ; the verb is inflected 'panic, panics, panicked, and panicking’. The form panick is used for progressive tense, past tense and past participle. We don't write panick today, though English speakers from a few hundred years ago might have (in the same way they might have written musick). When the alternate spelling “panick” is used for the past participle: "I panicked last night at the disco." When it’s use for progressive tense: “Invariably, when markets are panicking, they sell the stocks quickly.” It's the rule for root words ending in "c" is that you have to add “k”, so the spelling is related with the pronunciation. If we don't add the <k>, it looks as if the <c> has to be pronounced /s/. If the "k" was not there, “panicing” would look like the word which is supposed to be pronounced as if it is ended in "sing," while “paniced” would be pronounced like “panised”. The same ...
1 comment
Read more