My grandfather absolutely adored Christmas and he took it very seriously. He shopped for his wife and daughters and later his grandchildren by himself. Forget shopping on December 24 and just grabbing anything that would do. No, he began early in the year and he paid attention to individual likes and desires. If, in June or July you indicated that you liked or wanted something, it might well end up under the tree with your name on it. If you indicated the same thing in December, forget about it. It was considered bad manners to ask for something directly for Christmas, so we never, ever made lists in our family.

It drives my kids nuts when they ask me what I want for Christmas, because I can never come up with an answer. All that training is still with me, but I also feel like I have pretty much everything I want in this life, so I always leave it up to them to figure out what to give me. This year I was inordinately pleased to unwrap a pasta maker from my children. I had never realized until I opened it, that I would actually love to have one of these. What a great little green machine. It's all hand operated, so there's no electricity involved. The pasta cooks in a fraction of the time of dried pasta, and still cooks much faster than fresh store bought pasta.

We were out for Christmas dinner and Boxing Day is always spent in the movie theatre, so I didn't get to try my pasta maker out until Saturday. It was quite fun to make and was such a success that I made it again on Sunday. My family is going to get bored of pasta, I think. I had some organic bacon left over from our Christmas breakfast, so I made a simple Pasta Carbonara and it was really delicious. I used Marcella Hazen's measurements of 3 eggs to 2 1/4 cups of all-purpose flour for the pasta from her book The Classic Italian Cookbook.

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