Christmas Thoughts

A late Merry Christmas, and a marginally early new year to all. A few Christmas-based observations, from various lines of thought that have been knocking around my head over the festive period.

Cooking and the Internet

The internet can sometimes birth amazingly useful things in unexpected fields. The one I am thinking of at the moment is in cooking; I have been cooking a lot of food this Christmas, and I have built up a reputation in my family for being someone who can make traditionally ‘complicated’ things (pie crust, Yorkshire pudding, etc). To clarify, I am not a good cook, or at least the food I invent myself is not liked by others (I like my mustard and chili pasta sauce, or my three-mushroom fried rice, but no-one else seems to). However, I have been shown by some more food-literature friends of how the internet can turn someone like me into a competent chef.

The hidden secret is the BBC Good Food website (which is distinct from the BBC Food website, presumably dedicated to bad food). The website consists of a crazily large number of recipes written by professionals; however, the real secret is that there is a very dedicated readership of amateur cooks who report their experiences, and rate the recipes on a scale of 1-5. It is this later part that really makes the website great; while a random recipe from a chef will often be relatively good, those that have been rated as 5 stars by the community are, virtually without fail, excellent.

The interesting thing is that many of the recipes look very weird at first, but turn out to work amazingly well. Cut the skin off gammon, and cut slits before roasting? Add flour to the filling of an apple pie? Pastry that should ‘look like scrambled egg’? These are the sort of thing that make you look to your family like an expert cook; you end up doing things that to them (and indeed you) look like madness, despite actually working.

Keynesian Christmas

I read a fun and insightful essay, reprinted at OpenDemocracy, about the Keynesian economic bases of a Christmas Carol. The idea is that the early 1840s were a time of deflation; the value of money was shrinking, and the value of goods were shrinking faster still. The economy was sinking into recession; deflation meant that investment wasn’t worth while, but because goods were worth less each year, people avoided buying things as well. Added to this was a Malthusian attitude that the world was too full to support population growth, and that saving and parsimony was the order of the day.

These fears combine to make a villain that is both indicative of, and the cause of, the recession. The miserly rich man, fearful of financial uncertainty, who hoards money without spending it either on themselves or others. And when Scrooge learns the spirit of Christmas, he also learns to be the sort of person that the economy needs for recovery; someone who gives and spends without thought for the cost, who buys things for the sheer joy of doing so, not because they are good value or even needed.

There is a similar feel to the carol Good King Wenceslas, which was also written in the 1840s; the Saint, upon seeing a poor man in the cold, on a kind-hearted whim calls out for flesh, wine and firewood to make a feast for the peasant. It is the spontaneity, the lack of economic calculation, that makes him a Saint; he spends on others for the sheer joy of doing so.

Oddly, these values are close to what we now call consumerism; buying things for the sake of it, not because they make your life better. This ties nicely into a post by Ed Yong; consuming goods, spending on yourself, does not give you happiness (most of us have more than we need anyway). However, spending on others, like Scrooge or Saint Wenceslas, can bring you happiness.

Saint Nicholas

As a final Christmas thought, before I put away childish things for the year, is this: Has anyone ever considering going to the Basilica di San Nicola at Christmas Day, in order to visit Santa Claus’ grave? One for the kids, perhaps.