Aveiro: we wish you a merry codfish.

Muito muito obrigada to Miguel and his family for letting me celebrate Christmas Eve with them!

It was the warmest Christmas of my life - earlier in the day, we went to a café, and do you know what we did there? We sat outside! In the sun! And it was warm! On Christmas! Holy cow! [Or, I guess, holy baby? What with it being Jesus' birthday and all.]

Miguel's mom had cooked up a feast that included codfish. And I liked it! I'm clearly making progress on my "learn to at least tolerate fish" quest - and/or Miguel's mom is a miracle worker. A bit of both, I guess. And, as another guest put it, "Here, codfish isn't fish." It's pure Portuguese magic, is what it is.

Dinner finished up with bolo rei [king's cake], bolo rainha [queen's cake], tasty pumpkin-y things covered in cinnamon [yeah, you know what I mean], and more...mmmmm.

And thanks to the Simpsons movie being on, I didn't just spend the whole dinner staring vacantly at people, not understanding what they were saying! Success all around.

Later that night I Skyped with my parents and relatives and my parents' new cat, Boo Zazzles. Thanks, technology!

[Some more notes on holidays: Thanksgiving this year amounted to a drunk spelling bee with the University of East Anglia American studies kids. My first word was "judgment" - I spelled it "j-u-d-g-optional e-m-e-n-t," and the judge gave me a look, so I said, "Alright, no E," and then he approved. But really, it can be spelled with an E, and in fact, that spelling is "especially British" according to dictionary.com, so his look was quite unnecessary, thank you very much! They served up turkey sandwiches with a bit of stuffing and cranberry sauce, and that was the grand total of my Thanksgiving feast. I totally intended to try to make a pumpkin pie from scratch at some point, but then...I never did. People were encouraged to dress up as something to do with Thanksgiving, and one guy came as a pirate. Well, alright. I'm all for pirates, but I don't remember them helping to harvest the corn to earn their rightful place at the First Thanksgiving.

But! Ella, Charlie, Tina, and I did try to make egg nog. We were somewhat foiled because we acidentally got super duper heavy duty cream instead of just the regular kind, so it didn't really mix in well and there were bits of cream all over the place, but it still tasted fine - although not like the store-bought kind I'm used to. And it was the first time I had ever had liquor in egg nog. It was fine and all, but really, I like the taste of egg nog so much that I'd almost prefer to not have the booze tainting the pure, delicious, egg noggy joy.]