#DEUS SOL INVICTUS!
##All Hail the Invincible Sun!
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But, what about the ham?
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I prefer to think of her as a thespian.
Wait, what are we talking about?
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Invincible? Soon, very soon, you will see the folly of your words!
I have planted a device at the heart of the Sun, which will cause it to transform into a red giant, and then, eventually, a white dwarf!
The sun,as you know it is doomed, and there is nothing you can do to stop it!
Doomed, DOOMED I say!
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Isn’t getting everyone together to eat ham the reason we get together and eat ham?
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Well, their flesh is much sweeter than oxen. Particularly King Pryderi’s swine of Annuvin. But we are having turkey (because AMERICA!)
Anyway, a cycle’s a cycle, the whole world 'round, however you measure it. 
I’m celebrating another turn around the sun, the passage of life into death, the birth of the new season of lengthening days and the end of the Long Night, and the resilience and fortitude under adversity of my family, friends, species and world. And also turkey and ham and mincemeat cookies.
Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle. The sky is round and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same and both are round. Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing and always come back again to where they were.
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You rang?
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Paging @japhroaig! Come and get your Medieval Rose Pudding!
Rosee. Take thyk milke; sethe it. Cast thereto sugur, a gode porcioun; pynes, dates ymynced, canel & powdour gynger; and seeth it, and alye it with flours of white rosis, and flour of rys. Cike utl salt it & messe it forth. If thou wilt in stede of almounde milke, take swete crem of kyne.
The modern translation and measurements at the link previously given come from The Medieval Cookbook by Maggie Black (which Jeremy probably already owns).
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Freezin’?
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Just took a sunset dip in the freezing ocean with a bunch of Pagans to celebrate Winter Solstice. I figure it doesn’t hurt to cover the bases.
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Is that what the kids are calling them these days? 
I wager Pascal wore his swim trunks, too!
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This wasn’t really a “swimming trunks” kind of event if you get my drift.
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Our traditional meal after our sunrise Yuletide ceremony(*) includes bacon, but not ham. We did, however, have ham as part of the lunchmeat for lunch, much to the joy of the cats.
(* - The neighbors’ dogs are always interested and bark happily at us as we ring bells and sound horns. The neighbors themselves manage to sleep through this, although I’m unsure as to how.)
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Gardnerians represent!  Don’t freeze your, um, bases off!
(OK, not really a big Gerald Gardner fan. Just quite fond of skinny-dipping.)
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Did they really have almond milk back then? Rice flour I can almost believe, but almond milk?
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I’ve been served a fair number of almond-based medieval sweets and trifles, (and some meat & almond milk dishes that I dislike) but I honestly never thought about the historical provenance of almond milk before - good question!
I do know that both almonds and rice traveled the Silk Road and were very well known throughout Europe and the Near East in antiquity, well before the medieval era. Almonds have been cultivated for something like 5,000 years at this point, and were known in England before the White Christ.
Anyway Gerard’s Herball references the milk, fruit and leaves of the almond tree frequently, in a way that implies that by the 1800s literally everyone who could read was intimately familiar with almonds and their products and processing; he says stuff like “the fruit of such-and-such is divided like the almond” and “a juice or liquor is trodden from so-and-so in the same manner as milk from the almond” &etc.
Wikipedia references Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women by Caroline Walker Bynum to claim “Almond milk was a staple of medieval kitchens because cow’s milk could not keep for long without spoiling.” I can believe the first half of that sentence (as Wikipedia also notes, in the Medieval era “almond milk was known in both the Islamic world and Christendom… [and] …it is suitable for consumption during Lent”) but I have a little more trouble with the second half of that claim, since producing and preserving dairy foods was a solved problem in the Middle Ages.
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Hibernation!
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