So last night as we were leaving the pub, I went to the coat hooks and found that my lovely Sherlock coat, quite expensive and beloved by me for its lines and its lining, had gone.  Whether it was stolen or taken in error, I don't know.  We'll see if anyone returns it in the next couple of days.  I'm normally pretty good with stuff like this.  I was once burgled, they just took electronics (they walked straight past the ancient computer with Human Nature in progress on it), it was all replaced by the insurance company, and I just shrugged it off.  But this felt much worse.  I told Caroline about letting go of the string of a balloon when I was six (that's a universal experience, I'm sure, and a story I included in the rather emotionally incoherent Shadows of Avalon), and of how, my folks being older than most peoples' parents, were of a generation that didn't go in for much in the way of emotional expression, so I'd invested a lot in the balloon they'd got me.  And then I was in floods of tears.  The reason I mention this is that I think perhaps some of what I said in the second blog isn't quite true... I may not have finished dealing yet!  (And yes, I had had a few.)

What you're thinking is absolutely right: there are people homeless and lonely this Christmas, and it was just a bloody coat.  I will make sure to even that score.

In other news, I'm going to be narrating the Nativity for very small children on Christmas Eve, from the pulpit no less, so, best Christmas ever!

Let's cheer up with a slice of unbridled techno-whimsy from Charlie Baxter (that's a link to a Facebook fan page).  Charlie's one of the many great musicians to come out of the scene in my old home town of Faringdon.  He's a geeky-looking Elvis Costello type, who gets up onstage looking lonely with his keyboard, and then proceeds to unleash huge beats while leaping about like a one man Pendulum.  I think he's got a good shot at going a long way.  He does a brilliant live danceable Doctor Who theme.  Here's his specially-recorded Christimas tune.



You can find many more of his tracks here, including something cool involving Darth Vader.  Or go see him at the Frog and Fiddle in Cheltenham on the 23rd, and tell him I said hello.  Thanks, Charlie.

Laurie Pink will be back tomorrow.

I'd planned today's blog to be a review of the things I'd liked across all media.  But it occurred to me that to make a selection of comics would be to potentially incur the wrath of all the comrades I didn't mention, and, as I said on the Coode Street Podcast, I don't want to go through a life in SF fandom being 'that comic guy'.  I'm up for talking about my favourite novels of the year, but since I'd already scheduled a blog about my Asimov's short story picks of the year, it makes sense to move that to there.

Movies I generally deal with on the blog as they come along.  (This year I loved Source Code and Captain America in particular.  Duncan Jones should get Hugo recognition on a regular basis for his commitment to genuinely SFnal film making.)  So that leaves us with telly.  And actually, most of my initial thoughts were about television.  So here we go.

From here, there be Spoilers!  (Actually, I suppose there are in Charlie's Darth Vader track, but really, you'll know that one unless you're the eight year old kid in that YouTube clip.)

Doctor Who, I always say, isn't my favourite TV show, it's my lifestyle choice.  I'm frankly incapable of critical analysis on a series I've been part of (and not just because so many friends are still part of it), but I think it's perhaps as its best now, with, again, a genuine SF feeling about it, and it once more this year provided me with many moments of connection, emotion, and shared experience.  (Notably with that now customary packed hall at Eastercon.)  And, erm, not to pick favourites, but well done Tom and Neil.

Stargate Universe, which I loved down to my socks, finished its run this year.  Cancellation, for some shows, means they fall over and die a long time before the last episode.  But SGU never compromised, right to the end. And I think proved that drama, that is, character conflict, and big SF plots with no reset switches, where consequences pile on consequences, isn't actually what a lot of telefantasy fans are after.  This was, in a lot of ways, my ideal show.  And the first form of Stargate that I've at all liked.

There are some shows, like Castle, which I enjoy, but have nothing to say about.  (Apart from it's a fantasy show in that all us writers would like to have that hero's life.  And the occasional genre name drops largely feel right, and not pandering.)  Haven is an odd series that's still finding its feet after two years, but I find it compelling enough to stick with it, and don't feel able to comment too much until it's worked out what its format is.  Game of Thrones just blew me away from start to finish (the season per book format making it especially clear that George R.R. Martin's main aim for volume one of his series was to entertain epic fantasy cliches and then pointedly go in the opposite direction: at the end of the first year, the heroic lead is dead, the child destined to rule is dead, and women are in charge of every faction).  I'm interested in passing in Terra Nova, but I wait for it to take the leap into originality that would put it on the level where Fringe started.  There's a certain sort of telefantasy that photocopies elements (and actors) from other telefantasy, instantly making itself not, as the uncynical side of that intention aims for, deep in genre, but secondhand.  The 'English Baltar character' in Terra Nova is like that, but it's actually hard for an English Baltar to be a bad thing, because the English Baltar demands a character who deals in grey areas, played by a British actor.  It's as if there's a certain (if limited) helping of televisual quality you can buy in a shop in a pre-packaged module.  An absolute stone cold classic episode of Terra Nova could be made tomorrow, but it hasn't happened yet, and I suspect the series lacks the daring to do it.  (And yes, all right, if you're going to flee into the past and establish a new colony, doing so after the dinosaur-killing meteor has hit would probably be a good idea.  But such smartarse critique doesn't in itself make a bad show, it just sounds clever.  Who's to say the colonists haven't brought along a dirty great meteor-zapping zapper and a map of where it's going to appear?)  I would say the same about Falling Skies, the photocopy target of which is The Walking Dead, out of the far more radical body of which it hopes to grow something beige.  And yet, those good leads, those nods to military tactics, the possibility that someone will one day have to make a genuinely difficult decision.  I'd like to see some TV military SF one day that left the families at home, but that would be a suicide note for any network series.

Fringe continues to delight, my absolute favourite genre show, and, again, that's because it's deeply SFnal in nature.  Okay, so its science may often be the slightest handwave in the direction of the right-sounding words, but it creates, time after time, single episodes that would be remembered, were this the Golden Age of SF, as classic short stories.  I like particularly the way that, based as it is in the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory (and it's shows like this that fix modern physics weirdness in the minds of the public: 'I'm living in a parallel universe!'), it encourages us to continually question the nature of personhood.  For instance, when we join our heroes at the start of the season, with Peter missing, we're encouraged to think that 'our' universe, the one TV viewers are used to watching the fiction of, has been changed simply by him not being there.  That we're in the It's A Wonderful Life genre of time travel story.  We spend a few episodes without Peter, and are as invested as always in the (slightly altered) lead characters.  (We marvel, as always, at the intricacies of character of which Anna Torv is capable, and, through her return to emotional distance, realise she was always that good, and played Olivia that way at the start of the series quite deliberately.)  We understand people being slightly altered by specific changes to a world we know about: that's life, albeit life turned to a different angle so we can see it better, as only SF does.  When Peter returns, he's surely going to warm this world up and win Olivia's heart again.  Except that it turns out this isn't 'our' world after all, and, just as we were encouraged to empathise with and, to some degree, like the alternate universe versions of several of our leads last year, since they, and only they, were in every other episode (and what an extraordinary decision that was: we've met our sci-fi enemy and they're... mostly charming, and have more fun than our usual leads, and we're going to follow their adventures), we've just been told that we've been relating to, for several episodes, a bunch of people that, to Peter, aren't, well, 'real'.  We will now follow his progress, back to 'real' reality, where the characters we originally related to presumably await us.  That's a bold SF message, and a great one: just because someone's from another universe, just because they're at war with our heroes, it doesn't mean they're not a person.  Just swing the camera around 180 degrees, and look, they're a hero.  And so none of the universes of Fringe are disposable.  They're all real to someone.  Except it's always okay to kill shapeshifters.  J.H. Wyman and Jeff Pinkner's 'The Firefly', in particular, was one of those all-time great time paradox episodes that uses the business of SF in a vastly clever way of illuminate the human condition.  That's the sort of thing the Short Form Drama Hugo should be for, but rarely is.  And quietly, Fringe continues to be radical in its gender politics.  Olivia is the rather cold action hero who leads in the field, Peter looks after home and hearth and emotions.  Nothing about this show is less than deliberate, including, I'm sure, that.

Top of the Pops 1976 on BBC4 is, actually, an extraordinary experiment.  For those abroad, TOTP was, for decades, the BBC's weekly pop music show, with bands 'live' (miming) in the studio, or on film.  This year, apart from a few gaps where episodes are missing, BBC4's been showing them chronologically, as if this were 1976 (the first year where there's enough of them to stop it being completely sporadic).  It gives students of pop music (nerds like me), not just a nostalgia rush, but an insight into how pop felt on the ground floor.  We're nearly at the end of 1976, for instance, and punk can only be heard in the extreme distance (the haircut and make-up of one of the dancers, two of Bryan Ferry's backing band in the film for 'Let's Stick Together', a t-shirt saying 'punk' on one of Slick).  This is the era where pop is still very much part of Light Entertainment, where a hit single needs, and gets, the support of everyone from six year olds to Grannies.  This has a good side and a bad side.  The good side is that this is all terribly inclusive.  In the monoculture that existed when there were only three TV channels, everyone knew and cared what was at Number One, and records sold in their millions.  The bad side is that this means that novelty songs and all round entertainers and sheer schmaltz regular climb to the very top.  Top of the Pops makes pop family entertainment, and so acts make more of what succeeds.  Showaddywaddy and the Wurzels are not going to go on to conquer the US.  The biggest acts, that is, everyone from Rod Stewart up, send in videos rather than appear in that very uncool studio.  Queen have risen to number two 'this week' without being seen on the show at all.  The feeling is that something has to give, that teenagers need the rebellion of liking a music that their parents don't.  Watching TOTP, one realises that the punk rebellion wasn't so much against the musicianship of Steve Harley or The Sensational Alex Harvey band (both very sneery and rock on TOTP), but against the bland onslaught of The Brotherhood of Man and Pussycat.  Abba, of course, are in their imperial phase, never in the studio, but offering different videos for the same track, and remaining disdainfully above genre.  This experiment will continue next year with 1977, and I await the arrival of... it'll be The Damned, won't it?

Warehouse 13 had its best season this year.  Like Fringe, but in an entirely different direction, it's a show I admire for its high standards of scripting.  It's a lot less serious, but takes its base reality seriously, and can access the poetic from a standing start through its format, the Bradburyian idea that historical items acquire special powers through, well, sheer import, really.  (We're still waiting for the Higgs Boson of why this works, but would be happy to wait forever and are encouraged not to think about it.)  Our leads are tremendously relatable and enjoyable (particularly Allison Scagliotti's Claudia, with her 'this is what a feminist looks like' badge and vast range of precise comedic business).  The end to the season was particularly interesting, with the Warehouse (and the format) wiped out, but, instead of the audience being asked the familiar cliffhanger question 'how will they get out of that?', we're instead presented with Warehouse manager Artie holding up a particular artifact (which we've seen earlier in the season), and saying this is how they'll get out of that.  End credits.  So the rather more audience-intelligence-recognising cliffhanger question is 'can you work out how they'll do it?'  Points are deducted for killing off their series regular gay character, Jinks, but points were gained for being the first American genre show to have him there.  And for the majority female cast.  And given that cliffhanger, he might be part of whatever reset is about to happen.  Given that I'm not fond of what I've seen of Eureka, which Warehouse 13 takes place in the same world as (SyFy seemingly wanting to build its own universe), and that such lighthearted business could come over, in other hands, as slight or silly, I think W13 is hugely better than it should be.  This year's standout episode was Bob Goodman's '3...2...1', where one artifact is pursued by three different Warehouse teams in three different eras, all of which are charming.  As is this show in general.

Glee is still an addiction for me.  It seems that it'll be following through on its determination to play one season per school year, and will thus lose many of its major characters at the end of this year.  Doing a musical on television must be hell on wheels in the first place.  Doing one that's so offhandedly radical (on Fox no less), with such script values, must require vast effort.  Sure, the characters of the leads, and who is a lead, and their relationships, change at the speed of light.  That feels oddly realistic for the age of these kids.  What is epic and romantic one moment becomes irrelevant the next.  Season long builds are only background radiation and formal shape (such as the contests the club work towards and the school year), a difference that I think genre audiences following this show for the first time take a while to get used to.  I like the show's willingness to build characters from people who were in the background, and the way it continually challenges our expectations, harshing our liberal cool every now and then.  I feel a genuine fannish (that is, irrational) relationship with Glee, in that I identify with Rachel and actually am kind of attracted to Blaine.  That ability to switch off my critical faculties is something I live for.  Glee can also alter its level of realism on a weekly basis.  Some episodes take place in a hyper fantasy world, where Sue Sylvester is a monster capable of bending all possibility to her ends.  Some, like Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's 'The First Time' take place in a very down to Earth world where the high romance of losing one's virginity is mixed up with the high romance of the night of the big show, but those feelings, in that episode, are kept inside the characters' heads, and don't alter the scenery.  The songs, of course, are sometimes the whole point, and deliver, on occasion, like 'Raise Your Glass' or 'Born This Way', the rebel kick on their own.

The Big Bang Theory is actually contentious in fan circles, which surprises me.  Sure, if you see one episode, you might feel that this comedy is mocking geek culture.  But what swiftly becomes obvious is that its mocking it as the dominant cultural force of our time.  Sheldon and his fellow scientists are clearly doing work that's world-changingly important.  The laughs that result from equations and physics are about the gap between their import and the inability to explain them.  We are also led to like and relate to (in as much as everyone in a sitcom will be a loser of some kind, that's why we like and relate to them) these geeks.  If Penny, the voice of social intelligence, spent every episode berating them for their failings, that would be intolerable, but that's two-way traffic, and ask yourself how awful it would be the other way round, without the balance between social/emotional/mental the show achieves.  She never questions that what these people do is important.  She would just like us to know that her work as a waitress is important too.  One of the joys of the series is the increasingly fraternal love, awkwardly expressed, between her and Sheldon, the polar opposites.  (And two of the most talented comedy actors on US TV.  Just watch how Kaley Cuoco, upon being presented with a particularly bizarre mental picture, will roll her eyes up and to the left: she's showing us her seeing it in her imagination, and that makes us connect with the picture and laugh harder.) The show started off as very male, a girl and four geeks, but now we're largely up to gender balance, and, frankly, the show has been stolen by Mayim Bialik as Amy Farrah Fowler.  Her continual vulnerability, her refusal to glam up, her presentation of a geek on the edge who hasn't made all the careful accommodations that Sheldon has, who hasn't fetishised how she is like he has, and her desire for Penny's mainstream ease, an urge for normality and connection that's so strong it becomes sexual, make her the centre of every scene she's in.  It's a sign of a healthy show that now they've found that strength, they'll play to it, knowing the others can keep up.  It's also a pleasure that the geek and science references tend to be very accurate.  This, they say, is written by people who know that world, not by outsiders laughing at it.  (If there are any such left.)  TBBT is also very funny, something which critique, sadly, fails to convey (Sheldon voice.)

How I Met Your Mother is, however, my current comedy obsession.  It's not so much the playing here (those these are also fine comedy actors), it's the construction.  The series is set entirely in flashback, being told to two children by an unseen narrator.  This allows for unreliable narration.  Such as when we're shown a particularly embarrassing naked painting of our hero's father, and are told that 'in reality' the painting was full frontal.  Or when one episode reveals that all the characters have (un-portrayed) been smoking throughout the series.  (It credits our intelligence too, in that it recognises that its desire to tell adult stories is compromised, being on network television being exactly equated to censoring your anecdotes for an audience of children.) Flashback stories are also often told between characters in the episodes themselves, building up layers of unreliable narration.  In order to maintain this story-within-story approach, where flashbacks to episodes several seasons back are commonplace, the writing team has to maintain an extraordinary continuity of remembered detail.  The narrator hasn't told us who the mother he's referring to is, and the show often teases who it might be, but, knowing the actors playing the kids being addressed are getting visibly older, a scene for the planned final episode was filmed with them and their mother during season two.  The continuity allows a surprising depth of character: little touches such as Marshall's love for the Fortean, or Ted's impulsiveness are allowed to build up inside those layers of story.  And, cleverly, the series is ideal for dipping into, because any one episode will give you glimpses of past and future, and the effect of picking a random story for an entire past means they don't really have to be seen in any particular order.  I actually find the characters slightly less real, in terms of emotional comedy, than those of The Big Bang Theory, but the format rather allows for that, in that this is a story we're being told here, and the narrative sometimes admits 'well, maybe it didn't go as far as that', that what we're seeing is heightened by the teller.  We all know men like Barney Stinson, but there isn't anyone real who takes what he does that far.  The men we've known that are like him, though, we probably talk up to his level in anecdote.  And that's what this show is, a long anecdote.  The real depth on display here is what is fed into the heightening, the fact that most of the comedy comes from observation of relationships.  I nod along to almost everything Marshall thinks, and on a regular basis the show will unearth some universal detail that I haven't heard remarked on before, for instance Marshall's admission that, being happily married, his sexual fantasies tend to start with his wife having left him, or, erm, having died.  'You write me out?!' exclaims Lily, tellingly.  So the show's about the collision between emotional reality and the sort of stories we make out of that reality.  It's extremely clever and true as well as being extremely funny. As someone in the comments list called it, last time I talked about it, this is the new Seinfeld.

I've been impressed by Merlin this season, having never seen it before.  There's something refreshing about a British telefantasy series where episodes are about knights fighting a witch, or finding a magic sword, without any attempt to limply over-reach into an allegory about the Iraq War.  Just as Merlin narrows its focus in terms of shot, to suggest many more soldiers on screen that it can afford, and does it successfully, so it narrows it in terms of narrative, letting simple moves suggest bigger, timeless subjects.  Its time slot of 8.10pm proves the adage that the right telefantasy show can fight off bigtime mainstream fare on the other channel, and allows it to be, alongside its straightforwardness, slightly darker than it would be at 7pm, although this is still very much, joyfully, the show the kids see before bedtime.  Not having seen it before, I assumed that, when Arthur had to dispense justice on a captured warlord who was thoroughly depraved and unapologetic, and we cut away before he walked forward to behead him, we would later learn, in a thoroughly damp squib way, that the subsequent moping around the court was because he'd let him off with a warning.  But no, lopping off of head had been done, and the rest of the episode was, entirely logically, and to a wonderfully well-staged degree of hugeness, with massed armies, about the diplomatic fallout from said lopping.  Game of Thrones it wasn't, but it was as close to it as one would happily expect for a family audience.  It doesn't have to be as clever as it is, and sometimes it tries to have it both ways.  Agravaine, for example, to kids, is clearly a villain, because he wears black and is rude to our chums.  But the part is played so that, to the adults in the story, it's entirely reasonable that he'd be seen as honest and loyal.  His lines are written so that the character seems clever in his treachery, and Nathaniel Parker plays him as being as good an actor as the actor himself is.  So when he's caught bending over the unconscious Gaius with a blade to his throat, Parker doesn't play 'I'm acting all innocent', but just acts like he's genuinely innocent, and says, utterly plausibly, that he was checking for Gaius' condensed breath on the metal of the sword.  It's detail like that that elevates everything.  The series, I'm told, began as a riff on Smallville, with a long wait ahead for Merlin to reveal his magic to young Arthur and them to forge a kingdom.  But towards the end of season four now, Arthur is King, he's moving towards accepting magic, and Merlin is regularly changing into the (terrible old age make up) of the character of legend.  The series underlines when progress has been made, and doesn't go back on it.  Occasional nods to the mythic destinies of the various knights are very welcome, as is the portrayal of an Arthur who's starting to display all the required qualities of the Once and Future King, in ways which are sometimes very moving.  'Am I meant to do anything about this?' asks Merlin in a recent episode about Arthur becoming romantically involved with a woman (who, refreshingly, turns out to be entirely nice) who's not his destined Queen, as if the character, as he should, knows something about what's demanded of someone who's got a place in mythology.  The two young leads, I should note, Colin Morgan and Bradley James, are excellent, and add subtlety to every simple beat. It seems churlish to complain that the world Camelot is placed in varies wildly with every momentary need of the series, that no world-building at all seems to have been done beyond the immediate space around the characters, that they might as well be saying 'tomorrow we celebrate the festival of... Thingy', or 'we ride for the nation of... Gobbledegork!'  Indeed, sometimes it doesn't feel that this is actually Britain, but perhaps more continental Europe, the whole of the Matter of Britain being lost somewhere along the way.  But this has been the case since Medieval times.  (And shouldn't be taken as a complaint against the welcome multicultural nature of this Camelot, which was also in place from surprisingly long ago.)  One genuine complaint is that this is a world without Christianity, or Islam, or any other real faith.  There's 'the old religion', there are people called Cathars who aren't what the real world Cathars were.  I suspect that if Arthur and Gwen get married, it'll be in a civil partnership ceremony.  I'm sure the makers of the series are doing this with the thought in their heads that it's about including everyone, that it means that Muslim and Hindu and atheist viewers don't feel pushed away.  I'd say the way to do that is to give everyone someone to root for, not to photoshop out of the picture everyone who doesn't fit (we need a word for that, maybe 'Godwashing'?)  There would also be the modern feeling in play that one doesn't know how to avoid offending those odd faithful folk, so perhaps one shouldn't say anything at all, unless it's in a really really serious context.  This effect is particularly striking in a depiction of what was, originally (not that such a word can really be used about Arthurian myth) such a Christian/Wiccan fusion tradition, which produces a very Christian King.  But regardless, Merlin has transcended its origins, and now feels genuinely interesting.

Finally, on the same subject, Rev is a delight, a comedy show about a vicar that's far from cosy, and, my wife tells me, is true to her profession in great detail.  It's more of a half hour drama that deals in small but profound issues than a full on comedy.  It can be quite bleak, even.  I've seen atheist critics excusing it for being about a vicar on the basis that it's undermining him, sending up his beliefs, but that's a complete (and perverse) misreading.  Like in any sitcom, our hero is deeply flawed.  He can be hypocritical and vain and selfish.  But that merges with the genuine religious feeling of the show.  Of course he's like that, he's a human being, and human beings are all those things, and his continual questioning of himself, his trying and failing to live ethically, feels very familiar to me.  Ralph Fiennes plays a Bishop who has every ounce of the presence, simplicity and Jedi powers of the ones I've encountered.  I think he may know some.  There's something approaching a horror episode about the supernatural aspects of belief.  And the masterpiece of the season is James Wood's uncomfortable episode about a confrontation with a charismatic atheist, with our hero letting himself fall into rage and jealousy, and getting a crushing karmic payback in return.  Rev is a small but beautiful thing.

Bloody hell, here I am going on about karmic payback, when I started this piece by selfishly worrying about a coat.  Hmph.

I'm concluding each one of these blogs with news from a creator about their holiday plans.  Today we hear from a Ms. Mary Robinette Kowal, who writes...

'This year I will be flying home to my parents' house in Tennessee, on what used to be the old family farm. With four exceptions, I have gone to this house every year of my life, and grew up with a Christmas tradition that sounds like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting.  Let's start with the fact that my grandfather built the house.  It even has a name -- Woodthrush Woods.  My grandmother, Robinette, and her sister and their first cousins were all given plots of land from the family farm, which also had a name -- Robin's Roost. It sounds made up already, doesn't it?  My dad and his cousins all grew up on acres of adjoining property and roamed across it, more like siblings than cousins.  With so many relations in close proximity, my grandmother's generation divvied up the holidays.  Christmas Eve was ours.  Every year, the entire extended family descends on Woodthrush Woods for dinner.  This is served buffet-style, but is a sit-down meal. White tablecloths.  Crystal.  Silver.  Cousins to the third and fourth degree.  A vast quantity of food. Handmade Christmas ornament party favors...  The tables spill across two rooms, some years even into a third.  We all wear Santa hats.  We tell jokes, with a running rivalry between rooms to see which can laugh the loudest.  After dinner, we clear the tables and chairs from the living room -- which my grandparents built to have folk dances in -- and sit around the fireplace singing Christmas carols, always ending with 'The Twelve Days of Christmas'.  And I haven't even talked about the talent show.  You see what I mean about Norman Rockwell, eh?  This will be the 57th annual Christmas Eve dinner.  The menu changes very little, and signature dish is my grandmother's Shrimp Curry.  I realize that it is not a traditional dish for any other family, but for me, shrimp curry means Christmas.  Robinette is no longer with us, but my parents have picked up the torch and the extended family still comes to Woodthrush Woods for Christmas.

And here, for you, is Robinette Harrison's Shrimp Curry. 

3 cups cooked shrimp
1/3 cup margarine
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/4 cup green pepper
2 cups sour cream
2 tsp. lemon juice
2 tsp. curry powder
3/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
Dash chilli powder
Dash black pepper

Melt oleo (that's the margarine) in pan.  Add onion and peppers and cook until tender but not brown.  Stir in sour cream, lemon juice, and seasonings.  Add shrimp.  Cook over low heat, stirring constantly until shrimp are just heated through.  Serve over rice.

(It has become a tradition for me to serve this at our Christmas Eve family get-together. I serve it buffet style.  I double the recipe for 20 people.  Any that is left over can be combined with the leftover rice and froze.  It tastes real good after all the Christmas goodies are gone.) --Robinette Harrison.'


And Mary provided this shot of the hearth and table.

I think that sounds like a thoroughly wonderful Christmas. Thank you, Mary.

Tomorrow, I'll be talking about being starstruck, and all that entails.  Until then, Cheerio!