Anton made a daring suggestion from Netflix: In Bruge. When we returned home from our family Christmas party on Christmas Eve, we just couldn’t face The Christmas Story, again. The balance of toasted seeds, camphory rosemary, and butter was so pleasant and went extremely well with other cookies, especially these chocolate-pistachio sables (we made ours with pecans instead of pistachios).īest Movie: The standard Christmas music and movies were overplayed and over-referenced all season. Our favorite, in the end, was the least likely: Rosemary and Toasted-Caraway Shortbread. We spent that week baking cookies to send to them, instead. Given that I wasn’t in good enough shape at that time to hike 10 miles in a snowstorm to the next town if we had car trouble, and our vehicle is getting old, and we have a 5 month old puppy, we decided not to go. Montana, however, just set a record for snowfall amounts in the month of December. From what I did peruse, however, the following cultural sampler made my list of Christmas 2013 takeaways.īest Cookie: The boys and I had planned to make a quick road trip to Montana to visit my family before Allan got here. Without my work to keep me distracted and focused on things nonholiday, I was a sitting duck for this commercial bombardment, though I tried to keep it at arm’s length as much as I could. If you have ever read the young adult novel Feed, I tell you it feels like we’re not far from a world where marketing is hardwired into our brains and shopping is as easy as completing a thought. Pop-up advertisements on Internet pages increased exponentially in the weeks following Thanksgiving and with increasing specificity.

Commercials that make me cry, like the one featured below, know exactly who they are talking to, who has the expendable income, and what pulls ,specifically, my strings. When I get home, I AM the targeted consumer, and I really feel it. The tone, the content, and the motivation for buying in another country are different and I am not who those advertisers have in mind. I am not even likely to spend much of my clothing budget locally, so I’m not tempted by the sale banners in the stores.

I don’t have long black hair, so the shampoo commercial advertising extraordinary darkening and strength-building properties doesn’t tempt me. Billboards, advertisements on the radio and television, signs in the stores pass through my vision without recognition because I either don’t completely understand the language they are in, or because I am not their target audience. You can observe the culture around you, but the culture is not generally targeting you for a response. You feel a little like you walk around wearing a cloak of invisibility. It is a peculiar and luxurious thing to live in a foreign country much of your year. I’ve just completed my first holiday season in the US, right from Thanksgiving through Christmas, in 14 years.

Black forest trifle donna hay