Early Christmas Present

Look, my two favourite sodas in the whole entire world!

Mr. ETB works near a place that sells exotic soda pop. He also bought me a Paula Deen cookbook which is fantastic because I love her! Really, I do. I think people who get so unhinged about her deep frying butter are just being jerks. You know if Mark Bittman did it they would be raving about how wonderful it is. She seems like just such a lovely person, and lord knows, she's had her difficulties in life. Normally, I get upset when Mr. ETB spends money on new (as in not used) books, but this is one I'll treasure forever.

When I was a child, we had this ritual that only Chicagoans would think of-go out looking at Christmas lights...and then stop for ice cream on the way home. Ice cream, in Chicago, in the winter. See, I told you it was nuts-but we weren't the only family that did it.

There were a couple of ice cream parlours you could go to, but the one my parents favoured was called Lockwood Castle. I liked the place as well because they made an ice cream soda with Green River.

I should explain the whole, "Ice Cream Soda" thing to people not from Chicago. Basically, they filled a tall ice cream dish with the soda pop of your choice, and then put in some ice cream which they mashed up in the pop. Then, an additional scoop of ice cream. I always had vanilla with Green River as it was a pretty strong lime flavour. I'm sure there were idiots that had strawberry, or chocolate...there's always one, you know? Anyway, being a traditional sort, I kept to the clean flavours of lime and vanilla.

It does seem like the drink fell somewhat out of popularity around the time the Green River serial killer was on the loose in Washington State. Speaking of serial killers and Christmas (OK we weren't really, but humour me)one Christmas we made a detour from our usual viewing of lights to go watch the police excavating Gacy's house. That was my family's idea of entertainment. We didn't see anything really-other than police tape and a bunch of cruisers around a kind of ordinary house, but hey-we didn't want to miss out. I don't specifically remember going out for ice cream afterwards...but I'm pretty sure we did. My old man wasn't the sort of person to miss out on an ice cream soda just because some guy that used to be a clown went and murdered a bunch of young men. Priorities, you know.

Hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas. We're trapped at home due to blizzard conditions (seriously, we're talking about scary winds and snowfall), but that's the best sort of holiday as far as I'm concerned.