Tag: russian

Бульон с клецками (bul’on s kletskami, bouillon with dumplings)—Russian/Eastern European/Hungarian farina dumplings

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Бульон с клецками is like chicken noodle soup, without the chicken and without the noodles and with farina dumplings instead. My mom makes it for us when we’re sick and also just as a meal and expression of love, this weekend included. For most of my childhood I took for granted that it was Russian—but when I tried to talk about it with my Russian friends in undergrad none of them had heard of it or anything like it. I decided it wasn’t Russian, so I decided it was Jewish, some version of matzo ball soup—but when I asked my parents it turned out it came from my paternal grandmother, the Russian side of my dad’s family, not the Jewish side. So we decided it wasn’t Jewish, either. When we set out to solve the mystery of where it came from the closest we found was a Polish dish, and then I found a Hungarian recipe, which mentions that it is popular in Eastern Europe as well, and that it is indeed a version of matzo ball soup—so both Jewish and Russian and other cultures’, despite being a mystery to seemingly everyone directly in our lives but us. I asked more Russian friends and one of them had distant family and acquaintances who have it in their families. I have no idea how the recipe got into my family if it didn’t get into theirs; for all I know it came from a friend of a friend and not from a long line of relatives—horizonal transmission rather than vertical, maybe bouncing around between Jewish and Russian and back again and again until it reached us.

Here is my mom’s recipe, passed on from my paternal grandmother—

Ingredients:

  • Broth
  • An egg
  • Farina (манка)
  • Flour
  • Salt

Process:

  1. Heat up a bit more than a soup bowl full of broth.
  2. Whisk one egg with a fork in a bowl.
  3. Add two pinches of salt.
  4. Stir about a third of a cup farina into the egg. The exact amount might vary, but the important thing is that it should look like this:
  1. Stir about one eight cup into the egg-farina mixture. As before the exact amount might vary, but the important thing is it should look like this:
  1. The broth should be boiling now; if it’s not then wait for it to boil.
  2. Stick the ends of two spoons in the broth to heat them up—it’s very important that they are heated.
  3. Scoop up spoonfuls of the dough, stick the spoon with the dough in the broth, and let the dough fall off into the broth. If the dough gets stuck on the spoon, use your second spoon to scrape it off into the broth.
  4. Leave the dumplings on the stove for a few minutes. They’ll be ready pretty quickly.
  1. Transfer to a bowl, get a new spoon, and eat.

As a bonus, here’s a fancy avocado salad my grandmother created after doing what she usually does to get recipes, which is to read a ton of recipes on the Internet and then let her neural nets process them into the resulting final recipe.

  1. 2 avocados—peel and cut them small.
  2. 3 eggs, hard-boiled—cut slightly bigger than the avocados.
  3. A little cilantro or a similar small leafy thing—chop small.
  4. Green onion, 3 stems—cut off the roots and then chop and add the white and green parts.
  5. Juice of one lemon.
  6. Salt to taste.
  7. According to the Internet you can also add mayonnaise, but my grandmother doesn’t.

Here are some photos of the sunset at Shaver’s Creek, in Central Pennsylvania, this past weekend:

2022 → 2023: New Year’s resolutions and reflections and салат оливье (salat olivye, Olivier salad)

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In 2022 I:

  • turned 30
  • got to see my first co-first author paper published (and in Cell!)
  • relatedly, got my first journal cover (and in Cell!)
  • relatedly, got my photo in WIRED
  • got to write an article for MIT Tech Review’s MIT News magazine
  • and got the cover for that too
  • presented my work more times than I’m going to count
  • got my driver’s license
  • got my Novavax covid booster*
  • went to my first in-person conference*
  • relatedly, went to London for the first time, and the UK in general*
  • relatedly, had our first special romantic trip as a couple with Cory
  • relatedly, got Global Entry/TSA PreCheck
  • celebrated our 11th anniversary
  • got the all-clear to defend my thesis in 2023
  • started up a bunch of awesome projects, in lab and outside lab, and made good progress on them
  • wrote a bunch of getting-started guides for computational work in lab
  • won two awards
  • got a severe mental illness diagnosis*, and stayed alive and employed through it and didn’t lose any friends
  • started treatment for said diagnosis—started three meds and stopped one, for a net gain of two meds that are working for me so far, knock on wood*
  • relatedly, experienced Parkinsonism for the first time*
  • relatedly, organized and flood-proofed the whole basement
  • relatedly, built a little library
  • had my first anaphylaxis (on New Year’s Eve, barely squeezing into 2022)*
  • relatedly, rode in an ambulance for the first time*
  • wrote 36,000 words of blog posts, not including this one or the essays I have drafted up for 2023—that’s 133 book pages
  • wrote between 24,675 and 30,148 words of fiction—or between 92 and 112 book pages, 58 of them in the same project
  • read nine books
  • watched a lot of TV and movies
  • got covid for the first time (that I know of)*
  • relatedly, got my last wisdom tooth out*
  • experienced my first-ever Salem Halloween
  • went to Pride for the first time
  • in the US, visited Florida, Delaware, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, California, New York, and Washington DC
  • tried a kiwano melon for the first time, and forever lost grapefruits* and probably mangoes* to the sands of time
  • rode the ferry*
  • rode the commuter rail*
  • rode the T
  • listened to 42,636 minutes of music—or 711 hours, or a full month (thanks Spotify wrapped)
  • listened to Taylor Swift a lot—2,888 minutes, or 48 hours, or only two days (my favorite Taylor Swift song was “Karma”)
  • though “How You Remind Me” by Nickelback was my fourth most-listened-to-song—lots of loud singing along there

* which I will blog about soon

The worst:

  • lost my paternal grandmother to covid
  • the war

The best:

  • spent good time with family and friends
  • did work I’m proud of
  • went to new places
  • read good books

Here’s the last sunset of the year, from a kayak in Key Largo:

In sporadic bursts from about 9pm through after midnight we watched the fireworks from our rented home in one of the channels, which means we watched the fireworks both in the sky and reflected below on very still water.

Every year for New Year’s my family makes a gigantic салат оливье (salat olivye, which translates to Olivier salad, named after the chef who invented it—and apparently it was stolen by his sous-chef Ivan Ivanov, a proper Russian folk tale).

Here is this year’s салат оливье, made by my grandmother and my mom:

Here is how you make салат оливье, a close version of which I previously wrote up here—

Ingredients:

  • Potatoes
  • Carrots
  • Eggs
  • Pickles
  • Green onions
  • A can of sweet peas, salted
  • Mayonnaise
  • Salt
  • Bologna

Process:

  1. Rinse all your fresh vegetables.
  2. Cook potatoes and carrots in a casserole dish in the microwave for about 15 minutes, covered (or boil them—that’s fine too). Peel the potatoes and carrots once they are soft (or rather, not crunchy) and chop them into cubes with 1.5-cm sides. Put them in a big bowl.
  3. Hard-boil eggs and chop them into little cubes with five- to seven-mm sides and add them.
  4. Peel cucumber(s) and chop them first into fourths the long way, and then into three-mm-thick cross-sections.
  5. Chop pickles into fourths the long way and then into thin cross-sections.
  6. Drain and add sweet peas.
  7. Chop off the white roots of the green onions and put them away. Chop the green parts into three-mm-thick cross-sections and add them.
  8. Chop bologna into half-cm squares and add it.
  9. Add mayonnaise.
  10. Add a small amount of salt.
  11. Mix the salad, lifting it up rather than pushing down on it. Add more salt and mix again if it tastes like there should be more salt.

I’m not including quantities here because I think the relative quantities are a very personal preference. You should make it to look more or less like the photos above, but if it is different it will still be good.

I opened my customary New Year’s gift to myself, a daily Moleskine planner in the cheapest color, which when I bought it this year was a cheerful yellow (referral link, so I get a small percentage if you click and buy). Opening a new planner is the most New Year feeling of the new year. A whole book of blank pages.

My resolutions for 2023:

  • Start every day with 20 minutes of a passion project for lab and 20 minutes writing fiction. I’ve been trying 20 minutes each on lab passion projects and writing fiction this winter break and I’ve found that I get more done than I usually do (especially since that 20 minutes usually turns into more than 20 minutes) and I am happier with my day even compared to days when I work more but on fewer things. 20 minutes ensures I make at least some progress every day on the passion projects no one in lab is going to pester me about or care about except me, and 20 minutes ensures I make at least some progress every day on writing the books I want to write and becoming a better fiction writer. On days I commute to lab the 20 minutes of passion project for lab can easily happen on the commuter rail and the 20 minutes of writing can easily happen on the Green Line/Orange Line/Red Line.
  • Meditate every day when I wake up.
  • Meet up with friends for meals in person more often.
  • Read more fiction.
  • Write a complete fiction book, even if it’s trash I would never show anyone.
  • Blog at least once every two weeks.
  • Make an app.
  • Finish my ongoing lab passion projects and publish them.
  • Travel outside the US.
  • See my family at least once a month, like I did before the pandemic.
  • Get my PhD.
  • Stop saying mean things about myself and about the perl programming language.
  • Board games at least once a month.
  • Learn Шествие гномов (March of the Gnomes) on piano.
  • Relearn front walkovers and back walkovers.
  • Get to a point of wellness wherein I take my meds and otherwise don’t think or worry about it.
  • Get back to making art on Adventures Are Dangerous/nightlyfieldlog.
  • Less scrolling and fewer phone pings/alerts. On Shabbat I use my phone and laptop only for talking with family and friends or for working on personal (non-work) passion projects that I feel called to work on. I set everything to do not disturb and don’t check email or the news or twitter and so on. I want to extend this practice to most of the rest of the week, only checking messages that aren’t from family or close friends a few times a day and severely limiting my time scrolling twitter or the news and such. This one’s to make time for everything else.

Wishing you health. Happy New Year!

Sharlotka, radish salad, and doing my best

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova1 Comment

This Thanksgiving we had the usual American Thanksgiving foods (turkey stuffed with apples, plum sauce because I’m allergic to cranberries, and stuffing, recently introduced by my magnificent and magnificently American boyfriend/partner Cory). We also had radish salad made from radishes I grew in our garden and sharlotka, an apple sponge cake.

Radishes

First I will tell you about the radishes. I grew them myself, planted as a bit of an afterthought in the pumpkin patch because they do well in the shade and therefore do well with pumpkins. Under my grandmother’s advisement I left the hose out in the sun for a bit and watered them with warm water. They did shockingly well; we are now enjoying my second round of picked radishes and there are still plenty left for a third. The exact seed mixes I used are here and here (referral links, so I get a small commission).

I grew regular pink radishes, purple radishes, daikon radishes, watermelon radishes, and black radishes. All the exotic radishes had less intense flavor than I was expecting: the daikon radishes were a bit like watered down regular radishes, the black radishes were a bit like turnips with a radish flavor, and the purple radishes had a bit of an onion-like flavor—nonetheless all radishes, maybe more tolerable than the usual radishes (I like the usual radishes, I just can’t eat too many at once). I dragged the radishes from Boston to a friend’s wedding in LA and then to South Carolina to my family (my bag/”personal item” was mostly radishes, my laptop, and a pair of heels). Here’s more or less what the radishes looked like, minus a few radishes because we’d already started to eat them.

My mom made some of the black and purple radishes into a gorgeous, delicious salad (left) and the daikon radishes into another gorgeous, delicious salad (right):

We all thought the salad was very special and delicious especially because the radishes were fresh and also because we could probably taste that I remembered to water them every day (amazing).

Sharlotka

My mom also made sharlotka (шарлотка), Russian/Eastern European/former Soviet Union apple sponge cake distantly descended from the English charlotte (sharlotka translates to little Charlotte). It’s a really cozy comfort food kind of cake, light and moist with a sweet crunchy crust and with apples inside baked just so they’re soft but barely still crunchy.

Here’s our family’s recipe, for my own reference and maybe for yours too—

  • apples
  • 4 eggs
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 big cup flour (“big cup” meaning 250 ml—mom says “technically a cup is 200 ml”)

Chop up unpeeled apples and put them on the bottom of your baking dish. In the mixer, add the eggs first and beat until they are white. Then add the sugar, then add the flour. Bake at 375 F for about 35 minutes, though it’s hard to tell for sure how long. You’ll know it’s done by the color of the crust. You can also touch the crust: it shouldn’t give too much.

Here’s the process:

Here’s how it turns out:

Doing my best

The radishes were particularly special to me because they were a very proud and successful accomplishment requiring months of sustained effort.

One of the lessons/epiphanies I learned (or just drilled into myself with some but not a lot of success) this year is about doing my best. My whole childhood my parents encouraged me to do my best, and especially as it applied to school whatever my grades were was fine with them as long as the grades actually reflected my best. Clearly that worked out but this year, when I was practicing for my driver’s license, aka driving, I decided that actually doing my best is not usually such a good approach.

When a person is driving, for example, they probably shouldn’t be doing their best. Ideally, a person should have such a reserve of skill and experience and muscle memory that their best is completely unnecessary, to such an extent that they could even be a bit distracted or upset and still be a decent driver. (They might even be thinking about the concept of doing their best, and they should have enough buffer to not run a red light or a stop sign. Should.)

And then I thought that probably this applies to most of the rest of the things I do. If I’m coding, for example, I can put on a movie and my code will be just as bug-free as it is usually, because I’ve been coding for 18 years and because I learned in undergrad how to add safeguards to make my code as bug-free as possible. Sometimes I work a lot harder—when I’m implementing a new algorithm or when I need to solve a particularly challenging problem or when I’m chasing one of those dumb four-hour bugs. But even then it’s something I’ve done a lot, and I’m comfortable with it.

I’ve noticed this year that ideally, if I have the necessary skills to do my work, and if I have not overextended myself, and if I am working in a healthy, sustainable way, I should not need to do my best. If I find that I am doing my best that is something to investigate. It might be that I am learning a new skill, which happens often and is not a bad thing but requires extra caution to avoid errors. It might be that I have too much on my plate, which means I need to try to find balance, and soon, and probably need to find partners to share my work with, otherwise delegate, or evaluate my priorities. Or it might mean that I am working on a short-term but very important project, in which case I just need to survive until it is over and make sure I am doing at least the minimum to maintain my health. (Our Cell paper, for example, was a time when I absolutely did my best, but it was not sustainable.) That kind of effort, at least for me, is how I’ve usually done everything but it only works in short bursts, and carefully.

When I successfully studied for and got my driver’s license, I did not do my best. First, my dad taught me how to drive stick shift and then I didn’t sign up for a road test and then I went to college and then a decade went by. Then I practiced on my and my partner’s first car, a 2001 Highlander that made sounds I recorded and sent to my dad every week, with my licensed and very brave partner in the passenger seat directing me around very narrow Cambridge streets where side mirrors go to hospice. Then when the Highlander failed its inspection I scheduled lessons, more or less once a week, and I showed up. I took the commuter rail and then the orange line or the red line and I arrived at the designated place at the designated time with the designated amount of cash, somehow never late (though I did forget the cash once and a kind and very smart coworker who unlike me still carries cash lent me the money), and I drove around for 45 minutes with my brave and patient instructor who had and used an instructor brake, and I did that more or less every week. I was terrible at it, then great at it, then terrible again, then more or less okay more or less consistently. I scheduled my road test, did pretty poorly, and somehow passed. This kind of workflow is new to me. I didn’t do my best—I allocated the time, I showed up, and I did the work, a little every week, and then I looked back and I saw that the goal was achieved.

The same thing happened with the radishes. I planted them, I watered them every day, I reluctantly (with Cory’s help and insistence) culled them when I had to, and then some months later I had radishes—and then I had radishes again, and there are still more that might grow even bigger, more radishes than I know what to do with.

What happens when a person does their best

As evidence that doing your best is a bad idea, here is our gingerbread house, which we made in earnest as a family:

The Summer of Shit

Unrelatedly I am reminded all of a sudden that there was one summer recently but pre-pandemic when, no joke, a bird pooped in my eye on two separate occasions (two separate birds, presumably, but I can’t be sure). I wear glasses (all the time, or I’d walk into a pole (with my luck a pole from which a bird is just taking off)), so that means the bird would have needed to aim so precisely between my glasses and my eye, at just the right angle, just slightly closer to my eye than to my glasses. Twice.

I remember one of the incidents was under a stoplight, which is probably why I had trouble noticing them while learning to drive. Something about repressed trauma.

An Early Resolution

Since my driver’s license/radishes revelation I have been trying to apply some kind of sustainable, gradual-progress type of workflow to all my work. It is very different from how I usually or naturally work, which is in short, passionate bursts followed by long periods of burn-out. (Of course, because my work is tangential to public health and the pandemic specifically I don’t always get to work sustainably, but I am trying when I can. (Not trying my best, though—as just established that is not the goal.))

Gradual, sustainable progress requires difficult planning and facing reality, the former of which I enjoy and the latter of which I do not: breaking a goal into small steps, being realistic about how much I can get done and prioritizing my goals accordingly, and doing those steps bit by bit every day or every week, with or without passion, efficiently during the day rather than in happy bursts of hyperfocused all-nighters. I haven’t entirely gotten the hang of it, or figured out how exactly it works for me specifically: do I, for example, work on one project on Mondays and Wednesdays and a different project on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Do I let myself follow my interests, so long as I make a bit of progress on each of my active projects every week? Or do I work on each project a little every day, perhaps optimized by the type of work I do best in the morning, afternoon, or early evening? Maybe, since school worked so well for me, I should break my day into two-hour “class periods,” giving each project a class period and stopping when the time runs out?

(So far, it’s looked like working on whichever of my active projects I’m most excited about at the moment, switching when I get stuck, and getting unstuck during the semi-rest/not thinking about it of working on the other project, like epiphanies showing up in the shower but instead more like epiphanies showing up while I’m working on something that is at the moment more fun.)

Figuring out a productive, happy, sustainable workflow is one of my goals for the remainder of the year and for the year to come—or in other words, to do the work I care about in a productive, happy, sustainable way and learn how to do that as I go.

Reaching

This is my favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. She’s reaching for something in the water—reaching quickly, judging by her hair. She’s definitely not going to get whatever she is reaching for, because she is a statue, and every time I see her she is still reaching. I like the motion captured in her body and her hair and I like that the water is also a part of the sculpture, and that the reflection of her hand is also part of the sculpture.

The Fates

This is my grandmother’s favorite sculpture in our favorite sculpture garden, Brookgreen Gardens. The three fates: one spinning the thread of life, one directing it, and one cutting it.

Lights

Brookgreen Gardens is a magical place to spend Thanksgiving, because it is when they are in the midst of decorating for Christmas and you get to see their progress from day to day. They put up every conceivable kind of light in every color, including lights in glass bubbles floating in fountains. It’s an enormous, unimaginable effort by many volunteers. My favorites are these string lights hanging from a small forest of oaks and a few other trees at the edges:

Butterflies

I was talking with a volunteer who told me that the paths in the gardens were originally shaped like a butterfly, proboscis and antennae and all, and butterflies are special in the gardens. Then he pointed out to me that the ceiling was covered in butterflies glowing gold in the lights. He had put them all up the previous day. Apparently there were monarchs before but they switched them out. My photos absolutely do not capture the overwhelmingness of the quantity of butterflies, but this is what they look like:

New Fruits

We didn’t get to spend Rosh Hashanah together so we marked one of our family traditions for the new year (which we do sometimes on Rosh Hashanah, sometimes on the calendar new year, and sometimes both) both late and early over Thanksgiving: trying some new fruit.

This year’s new fruit was a kiwano melon. We spent a few days admiring its exterior (we didn’t google it so as not to spoil the surprise). We were very surprised when we cut it open that it was bright green. It was like a sweet-sour cucumber:

I dragged it along with a bunch of mangos, avocados, a papaya, dragon fruit, and four varieties of persimmon in a trash bag together with my radishes as a carry-on when I realized in LA that I had a carry-on for my flight to South Carolina, that I wanted to use that free space for fruit, and California had more exciting fruit than the non-Florida East Coast.

Here is a kiwano melon and a dragon fruit:

Ocean

And here is the ocean on the beach, and a bird flying over the ocean on the beach.

Gratitude

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for:

  • sharlotka
  • an excellent crop of radishes
  • a garden for my radishes, and for our other crops, and all the crops that grew
  • my mom, who made the radish salads and the sharlotka
  • my grandmother, who taught my mom how to make sharlotka
  • my dad and my brother, who in addition to being wonderful also give the sharlotka and the radishes and the radish salad their whole purpose (my dad loves radishes, and my brother loves food)
  • my family abroad
  • my partner Cory
  • our housemate
  • Cory’s family
  • all our friends
  • and our health and survival
  • the covid vaccines
  • modern medicine—oh, especially modern medicine
  • that I get to do work I’m passionate about, and that I get to choose what I work on, and that I get to chase ideas down rabbit holes, and that, though I would of course prefer it be more money, I get paid money to fuck around and find out, irrespective of whether or not I actually end up finding out anything of value
  • my dissertation committee
  • my mentors and coworkers
  • the people who made my career and my life possible, at various stages
  • my growing ability to apply sustained, sustainable effort towards a goal and achieve it
  • and my progress in no longer doing my best, when possible
  • our Cell paper (omg!)
  • my driver’s license (yay!)
  • new fruits and new experiences
  • no bird poop in my eye yet this year

Happy Thanksgiving!

Christmas

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova2 Comments

Christmas is special to me in a way that no other holiday is, because my only claim to it is that I am American. My other winter holidays are my birthright: Hanukkah I inherited from my Jewish ancestry, Russian Christmas and Old Russian New Year from my Russian Orthodox ancestry, and New Year I get simply for being part of a society that follows the Gregorian calendar. Christmas, or Catholic Christmas as most of the Russians I know call it, I have no innate claim to. Christmas, much more than even the 4th of July, is my special American holiday.

We immigrated in January 1995, when I was almost four, so our first Christmas in America was at nearly our first anniversary of living in the United States (my and my dad’s—my mom came over six months before us) and I would have been almost five. At that point I had experienced almost a full year in an American preschool. I’d learned the language, I had friends, and I had been fully indoctrinated with the traditions and expectations of an American childhood. Our first Christmas as a family is one of my personal origin stories, one of the small pieces of personal history that make up the core of my identity. As my mom tells it, when Christmas rolled around it was just another day for us. My parents were alarmed and confused that work was closed for the day, and that stores were closed for the day, and most inconveniently my preschool. I was less confused. I asked my mom: “Where are the presents? Why haven’t we invited anyone?” I knew it was Christmas. I had a very good sense of what was meant to happen on Christmas and I was very determined that Christmas should happen as was described to me in preschool and on television. I corralled Mom into getting presents together for my friends and at the last minute we called and invited all my Russian immigrant child friends and their families, my parents’ friends, to our apartment and we had a Christmas party. Mom says there might have already been a tree, since New Year’s was coming up and though most people didn’t decorate their tree until December 31st, people with kids often decorated it earlier. (In Russia, the tree goes up for New Year’s.) We got the presents at Kmart, and Kmart in Chicago on Christmas in the 90s was a mess—Mom says everything was on the floor, literally in piles on the ground and not on shelves, and that we were crawling through the piles on the floor looking for toys that were sufficiently together or whose pieces could be lined back up to make into suitable presents. Somehow we got presents for everyone and we wrapped them. Everyone had a really lovely time—the kids loved their presents and the celebration we were promised by society and the adults loved the company. (In full disclosure I’m not certain that all of the parents fully understood that the celebration was for Christmas; Mom says that as our guests were leaving some of the adults remarked that it was very nice to have gotten together just because, without it being anyone’s birthday or any other special occasion.) I think everyone in attendance was sufficiently newly arrived that it was everyone’s or almost everyone’s first or second American Christmas. This story feels particularly and joyfully American to me, a little island of childhood happiness in a process that I don’t think is easy for any family that goes through it. We were very new here, but we were determined to be Americans; we felt welcome to and all did our best impression of the traditions that were to be our chosen inheritance, a magical first American Christmas.

My strongest memories of Christmas in my childhood are memories of winter in Chicago, the first place we lived when we came to the United States. Until we moved away, every winter I had ice skating lessons at a lesser known outdoor ice rink downtown—it was down a hill and not visible from the street and maybe for that reason hardly ever had many people there. Mom would pick me up with food in the car after school; I ate in the car and then I spent the evening at the rink until Mom was done with work. Skating lessons were late in the evening, so I joined karate lessons by the rink before skating lessons started, or I did homework, or I would skate on the rink on my own, and then after skating lessons were over I would skate on my own or with whatever friends stayed late after lessons until it was time to go home. Those memories are very special to me. I remember the cold air, and skating as fast as I could until I tasted iron in my mouth, and hot chocolate with marshmallows from the hot chocolate vending machine, and the pain of warming my feet up after I couldn’t feel them anymore in the cold, and skating with friends, and skating alone, and the snow falling around me after sundown, the lights of downtown Chicago all around me and the starless night sky above me, Christmas music playing on the ice rink speakers. That is my Christmas tradition, and that is where I am transported by Christmas: by Christmas music, by ice skating, by dark cold city nights, by hot chocolate with marshmallows, by gently falling snow.

The rest of my Christmas memories are the polar opposite, set in Florida. When I was growing up we used to go camping in the Everglades. Those memories are of damp, warm air, of mangroves and of wind and pouring tropical rain, and of going to bed early on New Year’s Eve, vaguely cognizant of cheering and fireworks in the distance signaling the end of the year through a cloud of sleep.

I love hearing about my American friends’ Christmas traditions. Of course there are presents (for Christmas morning, though my family opens them on Christmas Eve because we are impatient), and the concept of Santa, and the nice-smelling tree with ornaments and lights on it and maybe a train or stuffed animals underneath. I really like string lights in general, and I especially enjoy little glass icicle ornaments and the way the colorful lights refract in them. (In the winter I am especially grateful to be Russian, since the Russian winter holidays give me an excuse to leave the tree and lights up through at least the first half of January.) I don’t think my family has ever done photos with Santa, but I have seen the lines at malls and of course seen them in movies. Christmas cards are also new to me as of the past decade, and I adore them. Our lab puts together an extremely thoughtful and elaborate holiday card every year, and last year was my and Cory’s first year sending Christmas cards ourselves. I’d long heard of stocking stuffers, but this year since we moved in with our friend PJ is the first year I’ve gotten to live with someone whose family hung fancy socks up with small presents in them, and gotten to see them hanging up, though I don’t fully understand what you’re supposed to do with them or the timing of it. I’m hoping maybe by next year I will have something of an understanding of the stockings. I’ve learned from Cory that there is meant to be a very large ham for dinner, which I don’t understand or find particularly appealing. This is the first year I’ve heard of and I absolutely do not understand the elf on a shelf. I also don’t understand caroling.

This year’s special new-to-me tradition has been advent calendars (“microdosing Christmas”). Cory and I have gotten a Lego advent calendar for a few years now, but this is my first year that I’ve really leaned into advent calendars and I’ve discovered I really like them—though the exact timing is always getting shifted around. (Doing something consistently every day, starting at a specific day and ending on another specific day, is it turns out a challenge, far too much of a challenge for this or honestly any other time of year.) We have a Lego advent calendar, a dog treat advent calendar, a chocolate advent calendar, and a tea advent calendar, and then I got my family three separate tea advent calendars, a recent out-of-print Lego City advent calendar, and, our favorite so far, an advent calendar with a new metal wire puzzle for each day, increasing in difficulty, whose components can hopefully be put in a nice basket for guests to enjoy once we’ve figured them all out. Advent calendars can also fancily lead to a culminating Christmas or New Year’s present on the same theme. (More wire puzzles, in other words.)

In true capitalist tradition, below are links to the wire puzzles I bought this year. These are links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission.

(These photos are the puzzles we’ve opened so far—there are many more in the box.)

Each puzzle so far has been two loops that you are meant to separate. They’ve gotten more challenging as we’ve progressed, to the point that we’re starting to feel intimidated by what the end of the calendar is probably going to look like. I am pretty bad at these—or rather, they take me longer than anyone else in the family. My brother Max is absurdly fast. Our parents and grandmother are pretty speedy as well (but not as speedy as Max).

My grandfather on my mom’s side loved wire puzzles; the entirety of my mom’s side of the family grew up on them. I think he would be really excited that we are solving wire puzzles every day. They feel like a joyful way of honoring his memory, a little bit each day all month long.

Merry Christmas!

Three Kinds of Russian Pancakes: Сырники (Syrniki, Cheese Pancakes), My Grandmother’s Recipe; Оладьи (Oladi, Kefir Pancakes); and Traditional Russian Блины (Bliny, Crepes)

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova3 Comments

Being Russian, we get to enjoy a lot of different kinds of pancakes, a wonderful diversity of pancakes that I think greatly enriches life. (The big, fluffy, American pancakes usually eaten here are actually considered a kind of omelet, at least among my mom’s side of the family, at least after we first moved here.)

Today I want to teach you (and the future me reading this) how to make сырники, really delicious Russian cheese pancakes I remember fondly from my childhood and have just this year finally learned how to make myself. I am also going to share with you оладьи (oladi), small fluffy pancakes made with kefir, and an old, traditional recipe for блины (bliny), Russian crepes that my mom remembers from her childhood and which she shared with me for my birthday this year.

Сырники (Syrniki, Cheese Pancakes)

Very early on in the pandemic, when one day I had half a tub of ricotta left over from making lasagna, my maternal grandmother, who had covid at the time but didn’t know it yet (and who is thankfully alive and well, knock on wood), spent an inordinate amount of time with me over Skype teaching me how to make сырники, she in Moscow watching me in Massachusetts and guiding my hands through the physical process.

Here is the recipe, modified a bit to reflect my own experience with it.

As a note before we start, I am going to assume you have an effectively infinite supply of:

  • all-purpose flour
  • olive oil

I am also going to assume that you are wearing an apron or a shirt you don’t care about, and that your skin is either covered or emotionally prepared to dodge hot oil.

You will want the following:

  • 16 ounces ricotta cheese—a small half-container, or half a large container
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 teaspoons sugar
  • ½ teaspoon baking soda
  • 4 tablespoons flour, with a peak of flour rising up from the spoon
  • some blueberries or frozen blueberries or another berry or anything else you might like in fancy pancakes—no more than a quarter cup or so, nothing overwhelming

Having gathered that, you will now do the following:

  1. Mix everything together in a big bowl. It should turn out liquid—not too thick.
  2. Pour enough olive oil into a large non-stick pan that the pan is comfortably coated in olive oil. Leave it uncovered on the stove at medium heat to heat up.
  3. Pour some flour onto a big plate in a small mountain. In addition, coat a cutting board with flour. (This is of course more flour, not included in the 4 tablespoons you mixed into the ricotta.)
  1. Scoop up some of your ricotta mixture with a large spoon and plop in onto your flour mountain. Drizzle some flour on top of it. Gently, reach your hand into the flour under the blob and scoop up the blob. Toss it between your hands a few times, touching only the floured parts, not getting into the wet insides, rolling it about and smushing it a bit. This part is baffling, especially the first time, especially watching an experienced pro, but it gets much easier after a few tries.
  2. Your ricotta blob won’t gain any actual structural integrity, but at some point it will feel less like liquid and more like liquid with a substantial amount of flour-covered surface tension. Place your precious flour-coated ricotta blob on the flour-covered cutting board. Repeat until you have four or so delightful ricotta-mixture blobs on your cutting board.
  1. At this point, your pan and the olive oil should be hot. You can test out that the pan is hot by taking a bit of flour and dropping it into the pan, which is something my grandmother likes to do because she is epic. The flour should sizzle in a way that is frankly violent and terrifying to anyone who is not a grandmother.
  2. Scoop up your ricotta blobs and plop them onto the pan. Smush them a little with the flat part of a spatula. Because your pan is hot (and you made sure your pan was hot), your blobs should sizzle aggressively. This is important. Sit and feel the violence of this particular part of nature and contemplate that we as a species have turned it into something delicious, because some things in life are beautiful and because of course we have.
  3. Once your blobs have formed a nice crust on the bottom, flip them over. Lower the heat and cover the pan and let your blobs cook through to their insides for a little bit. While these pancakes are cooking, get to work on the next round of blobs.
  4. After a while, remove the lid and flip the pancakes over a bit more until you are satisfied with the crusts on both sides. (This is where I diverge a bit from my grandmother’s initial advice, which was more organized.)
  5. Remove your cheese pancakes. Replenish the olive oil, add more blobs, and repeat until you are out of ricotta mixture.
  1. Serve immediately with honey and/or sour cream and enjoy.

Оладьи (Oladi, Kefir Pancakes)

Another pancake that is similar to сырники is оладьи (oladi)—оладьи are made with кефир (kefir) rather than ricotta cheese (though I think you can make them with other dairy products instead) and come out smoother, more pancake-like, and less cheese-pancake-like. Almost three years ago, or two years before I started drafting this blog post, in August in 2018, my good friend Masha, whom I met in 7.02 and who at the time still lived in Boston, came over and taught me how to make оладьи. The recipe we used is here. It is a very very special memory. We were squeezed into my tiny kitchen and Masha taught me how to use our roommates’ (who are also very close friends and are one of the two also Russian) cast iron pan. (They later gifted us a cast iron pan when they moved out to their own new home, and thanks to Masha I know how to use it.)

Both of my grandmothers have made me оладьи, just as both of my grandmothers have made me сырники, though their recipes produce smaller, limper cakes, while Masha’s are fluffy and more solid. I especially fondly remember from my childhood оладьи with small apple slices in them, still crispy even in a cooked pancake. All options are excellent.

(And I have very fond memories of my paternal grandmother, who lives in Perm, saying “Практика, Лидия, практика” while teaching me how to cook.)

Here are the оладьи that Masha and I made, so perfect and fluffy:

A translation of the recipe we used, with some of my own embellishments—

Here is what you will want:

  • ½ liter kefir
  • 1 egg
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2½ cups flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking soda
  • olive oil

And here is what you will do:

  1. Beat the egg lightly with a fork. Add the kefir and stir. (The recipe suggests warming the kefir up a bit in the microwave first to bring it to room temperature, since you’ve probably refrigerated it.)
  2. Stir in the sugar, salt, and flour. Finally, at the end, stir in the baking soda.
  3. Stir the mixture and let it stand for 15-20 minutes.
  4. If you would like, stir in berries or thinly chopped apples—a satisfying but not too great density of berries or thinly chopped apples.
  5. Heat a frying pan and pour in some olive oil. When the oil is warmed up, reduce the heat.
  6. Spoon some of the pancake batter on the pan to form small pancakes, multiple pancakes on the pan at a time. Cook over low heat. (The recipe suggests cooking without a lid over medium heat if you have a heavy pan with a thick bottom, or on low heat with a lid if you have a light teflon pan. The important thing is that the pancakes have a chance to cook all the way through.)
  7. Serve with sour cream or honey or jam or berries or anything else.

Traditional Блины (Crepes)

I got to see my family for the first time in a long time for my birthday a few months ago. My mom asked me what I wanted for my birthday, and my answer was cakes: lots and lots of cakes, cakes for every meal. For one of our cake meals, my mom made pancakes—specifically, my mom made traditional Russian блины (bliny, crepes), following a recipe we do not usually use because it involves too much butter. It gives a feeling of a very special and loving multigenerational full circle—my great-grandmother Lydia, whom I was named after, used to make traditional блины for my mom and this year my mom made them for another Lydia: me. It feels like a meal and a love shared over a century, a bridge by people who are lucky to have overlapped—my grandmother, my mom, and me, Lydia; and my mom, my grandmother, and my great-grandmother Lydia—connecting two lives that did not overlap—us two Lydias.

Here is a loose translation of the recipe my mom used—

You will want the following:

  • 300 g all-purpose flour
  • 300 ml milk
  • 7 g dry yeast
  • 70 ml butter
  • 3 eggs
  • 60 g sugar
  • 1 tablespoon sea salt
  • 200 ml water
  • olive oil

And you will want to do the following:

  1. Combine the eggs with the sugar and salt and beat thoroughly until an even layer of foamy bubbles appears on the surface. Add the yeast, butter, flour, milk, and water. (The recipe notes that it is better to add warm, recently boiled water—but make sure you don’t kill the yeast with the heat.) Mix well so that there are no lumps and the mixture becomes homogeneous. (My mom notes that she added everything at once and mixed it in a blender. It turned out great and is easier, so you should probably do that instead.)
  2. Cover the container with a towel and put it in a warm place (the recipe suggests a warm place by the radiator) for 40-50 minutes.
  3. Thoroughly mix the risen dough and leave it in the warm place again. (My mom notes that she did not do that.)
  4. Without stirring, cook in the usual way for pancakes: preheat the pan and lightly grease it with oil. (The recipe suggests using a culinary brush or half a potato to grease the pan.) Gently scoop the dough from the top with a ladle and pour it into the pan, letting it spread evenly. When the surface of the pancake is dry, flip the pancake and fry the other side.
  5. Serve with caviar, butter, sugar, jam, or honey. I have very fond memories from my childhood of блины (our usual recipe, not this one) buttered and then folded into quarters for the butter to melt and then sprinkled with sugar; they are alternatively very good buttered and then with caviar spread over the butter and then the crepe rolled, or with sugar sprinkled on or a light coat of jam or honey and then rolled. Many magical options, all excellent—best to enjoy a few of each.

Here are some photos of our crepe experience (crepe-sperience, if you will):

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This part of the blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!

In case you see any of them and are considering looking for them, here are my things that appear in these photos or were barely off-screen:

  • This large non-stick pan, which I bought because my parents had the same pan and liked it. It has lasted three years so far and stood up to near-daily heavy use with none of the usual non-stick pan misery and speedy demise. I don’t think I’ve ever had a non-stick pan last three years. I have no complaints and am very happy with it, which for non-stick pan is a huge compliment. I liked it three years ago and I still like it a lot now.
  • This huge lid with ridges on it that fits on any size large pot or large pan. I have one and I bought one for my parents because I like it so much.
  • This dish set we bought when we first moved into our apartment. We bought it because our friend we subletted from had the same dish set, and when we tried to remember what we thought of it we couldn’t remember it at all, which is an excellent compliment. We have since broken a few of the pieces, but most of the set survives six-ish years later.
  • This very pretty set of small plates that I bought more recently to complement the surviving dish set after we broke all the small plates. They are all different and all pretty and a small happy experience of their own to add to meals.
  • These mixing bowls, which we bought because our roommates had them and moved and then we missed them (the roommates, but also the mixing bowls). The roommates also had colorful lids for the mixing bowls, which I will probably end up buying eventually.
  • Happy and colorful yet classy and sturdy and grown-up measuring spoons.
  • My adorable powder blue toaster, which I chose entirely for its color and aesthetic and which brings me joy every single day, even when I do not use it, and which I will never regret paying a little extra for just because I like the color.
  • My adorable powder blue tea kettle, which matches my adorable powder blue tea kettle and has a glorious extra feature of keeping my hot water hot after it has boiled and after I have forgotten it, so that when I remember it again I do not have to boil it again, thereby risking forgetting again and starting the whole tragic cycle anew.

Secret Santas and the Icy Cheer

lydiaandreyevnakrasilnikova2 Comments

The man living alone in the $4 million mansion across the street has over the past month gradually accumulated not one, not two, but six Christmas trees, at least, with lights and decorations on all the trees and outdoor lights on all his trees and fences outside, which he doesn’t have on a timer, like I thought he would, but turns on by hand every day at sunset, and garlands and strings of lights on the stairs and walls, lit up like a Christmas Gatsby mansion projecting green and red and blue and yellow onto the road when it rains at night, a million tiny colorful moons reflecting off our little river of a street. Every day he sits alone in his home office on the other side of the house facing the main road until dark, when the sun sets and the dark sets in and he sits in the dark lit up by his computer screen and then walks through the house and around the house turning on all the lights and makes dinner in the big open kitchen behind the big bay window with one of the larger trees, which has a nearly identical tree of just slightly smaller size situated precisely above it like an axis of cheer crossing the ceiling through the next floor up. That tree is the one he had last year, too, and the year before it, and usually he leaves it up for months into the new year. (Usually it’s just the one—the profusion of lights inside and outside is a new development, just for this year, or at least hasn’t been around when I’ve been in town, and I’m always not by now.)

This is my first winter break away from my family and my first winter break with my Cambridge family. Our roommate goes to work and my partner Cory goes to work a few days a week and I work remotely from home and occasionally go to the grocery store. We watch movies and TV shows and we cook elaborate meals and we undersleep and oversleep and stress out about work. We go for walks at least once a day on most days. Sometimes we drive around.

Here is our Christmas tree, which we got from Ricky’s Flower Market in Union Square. It is small, because our apartment is small and also because we are hoping that if it lives through the winter and the weight of the decorations we’ve burdened it with we might plant it someplace where it can live a good life.

Another cheerful Christmas thing we did was to send out Christmas cards. They looked like this:

—All very strange. It bothers me that the couples-jacuzzi one has the marshmallows literally skewered. Most menacing is the marshmallow face melted into the hot chocolate surrounded by little marshmallow body parts floating next to it, and more marshmallow body parts on the ground by the cup. (I am also bothered by the happy messages inside reflecting for the reader how lovely it is to spend Christmas with family, in a year when most people safely can’t.)

These aren’t the Christmas cards we ordered. Shortly before Christmas we got a Christmas card from Cory’s uncle, which was very classy and nice and made us very happy and also regretful that we had nothing prepared to send to give those same good feelings in return. We ordered some Christmas cards with cute animals on them. (I like to optimize and look at every option before making a choice, but Cory saw them and knew he liked them and we bought them right away without evaluating other options, which is a new feeling for me.) We got these instead. Cory decided that we should salvage the whole situation by including hot chocolate and stickers (two stamps for two ounces almost exactly!). They turned out nice.

The actual process was a very fun assembly line, perfect as a background task during a movie. It reminded me a lot of our lab’s holiday card assembly lines, only while doing them just the two of us I got to do every stage myself, which was fun. Cory writes pithy and clever messages that make people laugh. I write really long and heartfelt and far less funny messages, which takes a lot more time, signing some or most of the cards: “Wishing you and yours health, safety, love, cheer—and maybe even happiness.” Here is one early stage of our assembly line:

Christmas card giving seems to have increased this year, or at least it feels like it has. We got five Christmas cards! I am going to be using two of them as proof of residency for a parking permit. I do not think we usually get five Christmas cards.

The week before Christmas we had a magical snowstorm (like a foot of snow) and our first time shoveling cars and even sidewalks, which was great exercise and a lot of fun. It was the kind of snow that makes the sky pink at night and makes our usual streets feel unfamiliar and quiet and perfect, and everyone says hi when we pass each other even though we don’t usually do that and don’t know each other at all. I bought shovels the night before, and then I got up before sunrise and I got to spend most of the whole day outside, with breaks to get warm and change my socks and gloves. In the morning it was just me and the plows and the snow falling and the light beams from the plows made gorgeous lighthouse light beams through the dense snow falling. A few people were skiing. There was an incident with a FedEx truck that got stuck in the snow and shredded a parked car. I got to see a family of rats playing in the snow, which was actually delightful. It was overall an eventful day.

On Christmas Eve we went for a long walk during the day and again at night to look at everyone’s lights in our neighborhood and the nearby neighborhoods. We called our families and opened presents, then Cory made a lasagna by a new recipe and I fell asleep on the couch, and then he fell asleep and we burned the lasagna and that whole experience reminded me a bit much of undergrad. (We did end up trying what was between the top layer of burn and the bottom layer of burn and it must have been a very good lasagna.) The next day was warm and raining, which melted most of the remaining snow, and we had a lovely warm walk under the rain looking at lights in other neighborhoods and then when it got too cold and windy we went home and opened our presents to each other and made duck by another new recipe, which we did not burn and which turned out wonderfully, and watched Christmas movies and built wintry Lego sets. The day after we drove to a friend’s empty apartment for a change in environment and did a virtual Secret Santa with Cory’s friends from high school and looked at Christmas lights in another neighborhood. My Secret Santa got me a candle called Exhilarating, which in this case means peppermint and rosemary, a sugar scrub called Exhilarating, which in this case means peppermint, rosemary, coconut oil, almond oil, and shea butter and is apparently not edible despite tasting delicious, and honey and almond and olive oil soap that is not called Exhilarating—all very lovely smells, the former two of which give me the same good feeling as one time when I accidentally got mint toothpaste in my eye.

I really like American Christmas. I don’t think any of us expected it when we moved here, because Christmas in Russia (at least in the Orthodox church) happens on the Julian calendar two weeks later and is a purely religious holiday, and the usual Christmas things—the presents and the party and the tree with the lights on it—are all New Year’s things to us. My mom likes to tell me that our first year in America, in Chicago, I, probably not yet fully speaking English but apparently already properly indoctrinated into the tradition of the American Christmas, was the one to pull the rest of the family into the proper ritual. On Christmas, which was going to be a regular day for us, I said: “But where are the presents? Aren’t we inviting everyone? Mom, don’t you know it’s Christmas?” Mom took me to the store and we picked out presents for the other recent Russian immigrant children living in our neighborhood, and we invited our small immigrant fold and had a lovely last-minute American Christmas party in Russian and everyone had a lovely time.

My most special memories of Christmas music in particular are from Chicago on an outdoor ice rink that doesn’t exist anymore, where I used to skate twice a week from right after school until late in the evening. My mom used to pick me up from school and drive me to the rink with dinner in a tupperware I’d eat on the drive while doing my homework, and then I had karate lessons sometimes and then a few hours of downtime on the rink, then skating lessons, then more skating until Mom was done with work and ready to pick me up, and sometimes she’d skate with me too. I loved skating. The rink was downtown, hidden from the road between tall buildings, and was never crowded even when the other rinks were. A lot of the time the staff played Christmas songs over the big outdoor speakers and sometimes the snow fell while I skated. Whenever I hear certain older Christmas songs that is what I think of, the snow falling and the cold air and the taste of blood from the cold and the pink sky and the tall Chicago downtown just barely darker than the night sky all around me and above me with its beautiful lights.

I miss my family, especially after Skype calls and missed messages that should be days and meals and adventures lived together in person. I just couldn’t justify risking the rest of our winters for this one.

The lesson, if there is one, I guess is to prioritize and be grateful for your health and the health of your loved ones and to make the best of what you have.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. The rest of this blog post includes links with my Amazon referral code. If you click one and buy something, I get about 4% of the price as commission. You don’t have to buy these things from Amazon—actually, you don’t have to buy these things at all. You can also support me by buying merch of my art, by buying me a campground store decaf coffee, or by simply reading and enjoying. Thank you!

The Christmas cards we actually bought were these. The Christmas cards we received were these, and the roll of stickers I bought was this one. It isn’t too late to send cards. You can say they got lost, or that you’re feeling Russian and your cards are meant to arrive by New Year’s.

If you like them, my Christmas lights are these, which I also own in Halloween colors, and my icicles are these. (I also really like these curtain lights, which I bought for my parents in off-white and for a friend in off-white and pink.) The combination of the icicles and colorful lights, reflecting off the wall and off and through the icicles, especially at night, gives a very nice effect of a snowy-rainy street in the winter, and makes it feel like there might be cozy snow and adventure outside even if the snow is melted or it’s raining instead. Bonus points if you arrange the lights around and behind winter Lego sets. Extra bonus points if you build the winter Lego sets while watching some classic American Christmas movies.

My parents got us skis, for which I’m counting down the days until our next big snowstorm (there were a few people skiing on the road in the early morning when it was just the plows and few adventurers and me). I got them a portable-ish pull-up bar that seemed pretty similar to ours, two cozy candles, and a wintry 3d puzzle and a salt-tree activity. Cory got me a book of Taylor Swift songs adapted to the piano, which I think I will just write the notes in because I still can’t sightread and life is too short to not play songs I want to play, and a watercolors and paper set with paper small enough to be a low-pressure art commitment, which is very important to me (unless I’m drawing something very special and fancy I always fold the page I’m drawing on in half first to make it less scary). Our friend in Florida sent us a box of starfruit from her backyard, which is a hilarious contrast to the weather here.

My Secret Santa asked for baking things and for a candle and said they like beach things, which in New England means something that got washed up and raked over the rocks in the cold, so I got them this driftwood candle and a danish dough whisk and a lame and a really exciting cookbook of bread recipes. Last winter Cory and I took a no-kneed baking class at Harvard that changed our lives, and the recipes from the class were based on those in that book. A lame is a special tool for carving designs into the bread, and is actually what gave away that I was that person’s Secret Santa—they were opening parts of the present and started opening the razors and I had to warn them that those were razors and to please not open them any further in a manner that was appropriate only for things that aren’t razors. (I also got Cory that same book and a lame, with a similar worry about the razors, and I’m very excited to try carving fancy patterns into our breads.)

This year’s present that I am most proud of was to two children of a close lifelong friend, one of whom I met when they were very young and one of whom I’ve only seen on Facebook. I got them a fancy hardcover Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman, which has absolutely gorgeous black-and-white illustrations, and crayons to color them with. A really good, funny book with beautiful illustrations is a very nice present, I think, especially if it comes with permission to color.

Here are ten nice presents to give to someone you’re not sure how to give presents to, perhaps because they’re your Secret Santa and you don’t know them that well:

  1. Tiny notebooks. Everyone needs tiny notebooks. They can write down their ideas, or their todo lists, or five nice things that happened to them that day, or their unwritten novel. If you’d like, you can suggest things you think they might like to write, and they may or may not follow your suggestions. Texture is important here, and the line type and spacing. Get them something that is pleasant and interesting to hold and has classy thin lines or even a grid.
  2. Nice inky pens. I like these pens, which are my favorites, for todo lists and fancy or important writing and art, and I like these pens, which I used to borrow from lab, for flowy-mind, lower pressure writing. It’s most important that the ink flows nicely. If the person you are shopping for has a favorite color that you know about, you can get them pens in their favorite color and they’ll probably like that.
  3. Little circle sleds. A lot of adults in cities don’t have sleds, or space for sleds. I couldn’t find a satisfactory modern American version of the little butt sled I had as a kid (as well as an actual, much larger sled). A little butt sled is not as fun as a real sled but it’s very easy to store and transport, and is much better than having no sled at all. If you buy them several they can bring a friend or you can keep one.
  4. Nice candles and fancy soaps. A nice way to gift a smell. Texture is also valuable here, albeit secondary. It’s nice to get them something varied and interesting, like a soap with little oats in it or a candle with coffee beans on the sides. Take care not to get anything containing lavender or tea tree oil (which is sad because I love tea tree oil, and still use it even though I know I shouldn’t) if the product is meant to go on the skin.
  5. Soft and fancy socks, or socks with neat pictures or patterns on them. One of the other people in our Secret Santa group got Batman socks with little capes on them.
  6. A star finder, which can tell you what stars are in the sky at any given moment. (Stellarium is even better, but not as portable.)
  7. Hot chocolate, which almost everyone likes and which is apparently available online mostly in absurd quantities. (If they don’t like hot chocolate, they definitely at least like someone who does.)
  8. A book you really like, maybe with a custom bookmark you drew or post-it notes on your favorite pages with some notes on why you liked that part. Don’t write in the book itself, maybe, in case they don’t like it and want to sell it later.
  9. A nice teacup, maybe with a little saucer for it. My grandmother on my mom’s side sometimes gives me nice teacups. They all make me very happy every time I want to feel fancy, and someday maybe I’ll have tea parties. I like to occasionally gift people flowering tea. Tea is a low-stress gift you can give a person lots of times, which is nice.
  10. A nice potted plant that is not too likely to die soon. Plants are nice. Bonus points if you made or decorated the pot, or if you put some special rocks from a special beach or haunted warehouse or other special destination on the surface of the soil, or if the plant is a clipping from a larger plant of yours that you particularly like or particularly don’t like or if the soil contains the ashes of their enemies, delivered as a message of goodwill for the coming new year and a release of your debts. Hopefully they don’t think of the plant as a metaphor for your relationship.

Here are ten things you probably shouldn’t give people:

  1. A copy of your dissertation, probably—especially if you don’t know that person that well, especially if that person is not your thesis advisor or otherwise on your committee (because if they are your thesis advisor or otherwise on your committee then a copy of your dissertation would actually be a very good present).
  2. A book you don’t like, with a note saying you do like it, with the absolute worst and most boring parts highlighted—with real highlighter marks so they can’t resell it to buy something nicer.
  3. Dante’s Inferno, probably.
  4. Their dissertation, with lots of comments in red—especially if they’ve already graduated but still have nightmares about grad school.
  5. Pencils with the lead pre-broken inside, probably.
  6. Someone else’s dissertation.
  7. A plane ticket, given the pandemic.
  8. A surprise visit (or any kind of visit), given the pandemic.
  9. A blank notebook with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover. In fact, I find this potential gift so distasteful and cruel that I made one really quick that you can buy online. Here are two blank notebooks (click the images), one with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover and one with “Your Thesis” written on the cover:


You can also get them as clocks or drink coasters if that would upset you more, or magnets or stickers or postcards or t-shirts or mugs or laptop cases or clothes for your child or blankets and pillows to hug at night or the smallest zipper bag.






You can view all “Your Thesis” products here and all “Your Dissertation” products here. Enjoy.

  1. Live bugs, like 1000 mealworms or 1500 ladybugs (pretty much the only thing worse than a blank notebook with “Your Dissertation” written on the cover).

Wishing you and yours health, safety, love, cheer—and maybe even happiness.