The finished product! Stop by at the store on Saturday and try one out.

One of the many recipes we used

In one of the stranger moments that has occurred lately, I happened to be showing this mandolin to my grandson, Rocco. He said, "Grandpa, it has a little puppy on it". Of course, mandolin is one of Eastman’s famous DG models made based on instruments in the collection of David Grisman. As I am telling this to Rocco, my phone rang in my pocket. Now, I usually don’t answer calls without a caller ID but it said Petaluma, California so I clicked and answered. Lo and behold, it was my old friend David Grisman himself. We had not spoken in  quite a while and he just happened to call me out of the blue to catch up on our life events….true story.

Later in the evening Rocco gave me a very serious look and said, "Grampa, what do you want to be when you grow up?" I’m still scratching my head about that one!

Granddaughter, Nora and aunt Grace show off some of the cookies

Some of the other delicacies were wandi, pingolata, cassatedi and ossa de mort (the translations are fascinating, and of course, this last one is the bones of the dead). My grandmother always made  "sfingi" on Christmas Eve. These were little donut type things that were dropped in her deep fryer on the stove. When we were little kids, she had a tradition that we would watch her plop the batter into the hot oil and then we were to tell her, as it sizzled, what animal it looked like. Sometimes they were turtles, sometimes they were little elephants, and sometimes they were fish, but we would always say what it looked like. Invariably when she plopped one of those doughballs into the fryer, someone got a little hot oil splashed on their face. It was all part of the tradition.

On Saturday, my new friend Gavin Rice stopped by with my Edison Model B Fireside wax cylinder player that he fully restored. It sounds amazing and I have several boxes of wax cylinders that we will be playing. Stop by on Saturday and hear it.

Merry Christmas to all….