Christmas Eve dinner at the Tollerson house was a low-key affair. My father had purchased one of those cooked rotisserie chickens, and the side dish was apples. Not baked, not fried, just whole apples sitting next to the chicken on a paper plate.
Such is the level of cuisine on this very special occasion from my normally culinarily triumphant father. Without anyone to impress, however (my mother was absent from the holiday, staying at her mother's house in California), he seemed to be off his game.
Early on in the night, I presented both Dad and Sarah with the Christmas mix (cover, liner notes, back) I made as stocking stuffers for a dozen or so people, and my father liked it so much that it was played about 27 times over the course of the next 48 hours. I was flattered. I also can't listen to it again for at least another year.
When not listening to Merry Christmas (I Don't Wanna Fight Tonight)—also referred to at HQ in Winder as “The Tollerson Christmas Theme”—we intermittedly switched around channels in on the tele, me periodically harassing my father to stop on TBS's 24 hour marathon of A Christmas Story. He keeps asking us to watch Dawn of the Dead with him. Sarah and I repeatedly refuse, retorting that it's not very Christmasy.
No tree, no stockings, no lights, and we had the audacity to claim that Dawn of the Dead wouldn't be Christmasy enough. But it worked.
At about 10:15 pm, Sarah suddenly shouts, without provocation, completely from nowhere,
“Eggnog!”
“What?” My father and I were appropriately dumbfounded.
“We forgot eggnog. We need eggnog!”
I agree. “Dad, let's go.”
“Well if we are going to get eggnog, we need booze. Let's go to a liquor store.”
What must be noted is that my ‘deddy’ is not really a big boozer, so his declaration of buying liquor, and furthermore, once we were in the store, insisting on whiskey, was foreign to me, in a hilarious way. I was delighted.
We were in our first liquor store, one of six stops, less than 5 minutes after Sarah made her initial random interjection. When it comes to partying, Tollersons are apparently your go-to guys.
We picked out a whiskey, and then inquired at the counter about eggnog. The cheerful family working pointed us to Old St. Nicks Alcoholic Eggnog in a Noel-decked bottle. My father bought the whiskey and the eggnog while ignoring my suggestions to add on a bottle of Jager. Then we were off to search other locales for a non-alcoholic version of holiday cheer to... add alcohol to.
We are a strange lot. Read More »
