Excess Christmas Quotes

The Christmas tree, twinkling with lights, had a mountain of gifts piled up beneath it, like offerings to the great god of excess.

Aunty Azalea was always the eccentric one in a family not widely famed for an extravagant excess of marbles.

Disgusting, how excessive and gluttonous this priest is, he thought jealously in the dark as he stole the last slice of Mrs. Howard’s pumpkin bread from the rectory larder. Eating sweets and sitting in front of warm fireplaces while others are starving! His bitter countenance was made uglier by his unshaven face and unkempt hair, which hung long and greasy on either side of his face.

I think they wanted me to be happy,” Mia told me, “but in a very shallow, let’s-not-get-too-deep kind of way.” Mia recalled that her parents accepted her happiness only about tangible, outer-world things they approved of, such as Christmas gifts, new clothes, or a good report card. Mia hid her true reactions because her parents often judged her feelings as excessive, weak, or oversensitive. Because of their rejection, Mia began to minimize and hide her feelings from herself too. She gradually lost her emotional freedom, her right to feel whatever she felt.

I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize the wind had come up quite so strong. Trying to get some fresh breeze from the lake in here to get rid of the overpowering smell of this glue.” Even so, the strong chemical fumes hung around the office. He pulled his hand away from the model, quickly wiped away the excess glue from his fingers on a rag and strode toward her, holding his hand out for hers. “Are you badly hurt? I can take you to the clinic if

I don't know where to begin on my plate. Everything looks so unfamiliar, yet appetizing. I decide to aim for the starch first, and settle my fork into a generous portion of what turns out to be risotto with bite-sized pieces of suckling pig. I'll take creamy risotto over that vile poi any day. The pork, so tender and juicy, has me humming Mele Kalikimaka, cause it feels like a Hawaiian Merry Christmas gift. I next try the entrée, a tender, flaky and surprisingly un-oily mackerel sprinkled with feta cheese and olives and cloaked in taro leaves. I have to give Telly some credit, I didn't know how this place could pull off merging three such divergent flavors, but somehow it works despite itself. "I can't believe how fantastic this food is," Jess mumbles through a bite of her pineapple-balsamic glazed wild boar spare ribs with tzatziki sauce. "Who'd have thought you could actually assemble a menu with Italian, Hawaiian and Greek food? I honestly thought it was a joke." "Joke's on us, cause this stuff is amazing." After dinner ends, Telly returns with a selection of desserts (including a baklava made with mascarpone cheese, coconut and pine nuts), a tray with sample shots of grappa, ouzo and okolehao, and a somewhat excessive appreciation for his customers.

Paul Ricœur has two terms that neatly sum up this difference between modern contracts and God’s covenants.12 Contracts obey a logic of equivalence, a regime of strict justice in which unerring calculation determines the just measure of commitment in each case. It is the logic of the transaction and of the market, a reciprocal paradigm in which debts must be paid in full, but no more. The logic of equivalence belongs to a view of the world in which every gift is a trojan horse that requires reciprocation sooner or later: “They invited us round for dinner and baked their own dessert; we will have to do the same!” It is the ethics of a Derrida who ruefully acknowledges that “for there to be gift, there must be no reciprocity, return, exchange, counter-gift, or debt.”13 This is an impossible standard that leads him to conclude that the pure gift is impossible and could not even be recognized as such: gifts always fall back into economies of debt sooner or later, a grim reality that leads Terry Eagleton to remark “one would not have wished to spend Christmas in the Derrida household.”14 The contractual logic of equivalence is the logic of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It is a human logic. God’s covenants, by contrast, operate according to a logic of superabundance, a lavish, gracious, loving paradigm of excess. God walks between the animal parts alone; the exodus rescue precedes the Sinai law; Christ lays down his life in the new covenant in his blood. This is the logic of the “how much more” of the Pauline epistles (Rom 5:9, 10, 15, 17; 11:24; 1 Cor 6:3; 2 Cor 3:9) and the letter to the Hebrews (Heb 9:14; 10:29; 12:9), of going beyond the call of duty, beyond what is right and proper, beyond what could reasonably be demanded on a ledger of credit and debt. The logic of superabundance replaces the fear and submission of Hobbes’s Leviathan or the tyranny of Rousseau’s general will with the love and sacrifice of Christ. It is the logic of grace and the gift. It is a divine logic. The

I am being ridiculous.” She did wave the handkerchief, but then she dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “I’ll see them all again in just a few days at the Christmas gathering, and the children too. I suppose an excess of sentiment can be forgiven. I hadn’t seen St. Just in months, and Maggie is expecting, but I’ll see a great deal of Sophie—” He hauled her against his side and gently pushed her head to his shoulder. “We’ll visit all you like, all over the realm, even the perishing West Riding if St. Just insists on ruralizing there. I did want to take you to Paris in the spring, however, and you’d like Lisbon too, even if it gets quite hot. I’m not as fond of Rome, though Sicily has all manner of ruins you might find interesting.” Her

Recipe 19: Honeydukes Chocolate Frogs Ah, the legendary Honeydukes! Honestly, that store is enough to drive a person with a sweet tooth absolutely bonkers! Honeydukes is like a Muggle candy store on steroids! Anyway, I made these chocolate frogs as an experimental Christmas present for my little nephew. He went crazy when he saw them and actually asked if I would take him to Honeydukes the next time I went there, the cute thing! Here’s the recipe and a few variations that you could make! Serving Sizes: 8 Duration: 1 hour List of Ingredients: For the Shell 1 big bar milk chocolate or 1 cup chocolate chips For the Filling Use anything from fruit to hazelnuts to peanut butter. If you are feeling particularly tricky, which is pretty much my constant mood, get some popping candy and make a sort of hybrid cross between a Chocolate Frog and a Fizzing Whizzbee. You will also need chocolate frog molds to get that froggy shape. These are easily available on Amazon. WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW Preparation: 1. First, melt the chocolate in your microwave at 30 seconds, till the chocolate is melted and smooth. Use a big bowl, you’ll soon see why. 2. Stir the chocolate until it is slightly cooler but still runny. 3. Fill a piping bag with the melted chocolate, this makes the entire process less messy! 4. Take your frog molds and lightly spray them with cooking spray to make the demolding easier. 5. Pipe chocolate around the mold and in the centre. Don’t worry about quantities but ensure that the surface of the frog is completely covered. 6. After you’ve filled all the molds in the tray, flip the tray over the bowl of melted chocolate to get rid of the excess chocolate inside each frog. 7. Place the mold inside the freezer for about 10-15 minutes and allow the chocolate to harden slightly. 8. In the meantime, choose your fillings. I usually use nuts and peanut butter as one option and popping candy as another. I make an assortment so that when someone bites into the frog, they get a pleasant fizzy surprise! If you intend to use peanut butter or something runny, use a piping bag or a small squeezy bottle to fill your frogs. 9. Next, get the mold out of the freezer and carefully fill with the desired filling. 10. Top the filling with more melted chocolate and smoothen out so that the mold is completely even and covered. 11. Return to the freezer for another 30-35 mins. 12. When the chocolate has hardened, remove from the molds and store in the refrigerator. So perfect for boxing up as gifts and so easy to make that you can probably go into the business of making Chocolate Frogs professionally!

He loved Christmas... a sanctioned time to indulge his love of excess and family, his outsizes generosity.

The food we managed to gather was considerably more limited than we'd been led to believe. An excess of individually wrapped panettone and reindeer-shaped chocolate- the dregs of Christmas. Baskets of savory biscuits and variations of chutney. Kitsch American stuff like packets of Froot Loops and jars of marshmallow spread. Large decanters of flavored oils but nothing to dip into them. There weren't even any cheeses or cured meats. But the alcohol was good: bottles of champagne and prosecco, Żubrówka in sculpted glass jars. We sat on the hard floor. Stevie had brought blankets and paper plates, plastic cups and cutlery. It felt like a picnic at the end of the world. I made a plate of Gruyère cheese twists and port-and-fig chutney. I slathered salted caramel dip over savory oatcakes. I had a slice of hazelnut panettone. I finished with some shortbread and sea-salt truffles.

Everywhere a sudden light shone down. The all-type cover of New York’s Christmas issue harked and heralded the news that “NEW YORK IS BACK.” “The death of this city has been declared so often,” it read, “that almost no one realizes life here is actually getting better—safer, nicer, tastier, cheaper, snazzier, more sensible and exciting than it’s been in years. Who knew?” Inside, the “celebration of the new, improved metropolis” began “Admit it: You’ve been feeling better, but don’t know why,” though it certainly hinted by naming Rudy himself one of the thirty-eight “new, improved” things about New York: “Rudy Giuliani’s first year as mayor, though far from perfect, has been so eventful, so thrillingly New Paradigmatic that the Dinkins administration seems even less accomplished in memory than it was in fact.” Yet out of the thirty-seven other reasons cited, little was new or in any way related to Giuliani. From Times Square, Chelsea Piers, and Bryant Park to better subways, bustling flea markets, and a wave of coffeehouses, this sudden awakening was the result of policies, plans, and battles of prior administrations and the tireless efforts of individuals who’d fought and labored with their fellow New Yorkers for more than a decade.

In 17th-century England, Christmas was one of the few times of year that religious Christians could let their hair down, eat mincemeat pies and go a-wassailing. They took it to extremes, with widespread games, feasts, drunkenness, promiscuity and other forms of excess. When the Puritans took control of the British Parliament in the mid-1640s, they tried to abolish the holiday and outlaw all of its customs in the face of a resistant public. But in America, the Puritans made it happen: In 1659, the Massachusetts General Court banned Christmas, punishing anyone caught drinking eggnog or kissing underneath the mistletoe with a five-shilling fine or a stint in the stocks. The laws were later overturned, but the bias against Christmas had wended its way into Massachusetts culture: In Boston, public schools were open on Christmas Day until 1870.