Christmas Eve

We had our first big dinner party tonight for Christmas Eve, and we all had a wonderful time. The menu: roast beef, Blaine's buttery mashed potatoes, grilled veggies, Russian salad, corn muffins and bread and butter, and cheeses. Dessert: an oat-pecan tart, apple pie, ice cream and choc truffles. And champagne and delicious red wine.

Our guests were the Newsweek family: Christian and Natasha Caryl, and children Timothy and Alexandra; Natasha is Russian from Kazakhstan and Christian grew up in Midland, Texas. And Hughie and Susan Mulcahy and children Max and Evelyn; Hughie is Irish and Susan grew up in Stamford, Conn.. Plus - and this was a huge plus - Susan's babysitter Rima.

It's funny to celebrate Christmas in a non-Christian country. Shopping malls heavily promote the holiday as a prime reason to shop, and I'm told that Christmas Eve is a huge "date night" for dating couples, like a second Valentine's Day. But there are few actual Christians here and you rarely see Christmas lights or trees - nothing like in Seattle, where the elaborate house/light displays made me feel like a holiday slacker.

My supper's biggest challenge was making the roast beef in our small French gas oven, which ranks temp settings as 1 to 10 without any correspondence to an actual temperature. Based on the thermometer I've hung in it, setting the oven at "1" gives you approx 350F, while "max" is perhaps 450F - without much variation for any setting above 4.

This put our lovely, New Zealand 7-lb roast (that's 3100 grams, for those pondering the metric system) at risk of overcooking. (It came from Nissin, an expat-friendly supermarket that refers to itself as "Meat Rush.") Fortunately, the much-observed, carefully timed roast landed gently at medium rare, with leftovers for tomorrow. Thank you, Barefoot Contessa!

The best part of the evening, though, was child management. We fed the kids pasta and hot dogs (don't they ever get bored of it?), cookies and chocolate, and turned on Monsters Inc. and, when they lost interest, Toy Story 2 - upstairs in our guest room, supervised by Rima!

With the children occupied, the 6 adults went to the dining room table and sat in complete silence for 2 minutes, astonished that we could eat in peace. How sophisticated! We had actual grownup conversation about our own Christmas traditions (or, in my case, the lack thereof), the American presidential campaign, Vladimir Putin, and Jesuit colleges.

Okay, okay, so Arno did leave foil and chocolate bits sprinkled around the house, and one child gave his sister's hair a trim while we were eating... But who could anyone have predicted that?