Jenography

All I want for Christmas is this song inserted into my brain via microchip

I can safely say that until about a month ago I had never heard of the band Bowling for Soup, but suddenly I've heard about them from a couple of sources, which for me - in my "so not hip to the music scene" zone - is a LOT. (It might also mean that BfS is not cool. I find I'm OK with that possibility.)

In catching up with my blog reading, I found Him Up North's Musical Advent from Dec 11, which features this frankly awesome Mariah Carey song All I Want for Christmas by Bowling for Soup. This is a tune that unites the generations in our family. My daughter knows the words, I've watched the end of "Love Actually" just to see the performance of it (along with the scene when Emma unwraps the Joni Mitchell CD - watch it here in dubbed Italian!). It's even been known to set my husband's toe tapping.

I love that Mariah writes her own material and I love that Bowling for Soup totally rocks this song. What the hell - it's Christmas and I'm in a good mood!

The superhero Grandma "Mamika"

Throw out the knitting and spit out that Humbug. There's a new granny role model in town. Check out these pictures that French photography Sacha Goldberger shot with his 91-year-old Hungarian grandmother to cheer her up.

Now they are cheering up thousands of people. The project has gone viral with everyone from Boing Boing to the Huffington Post to Harvard Press writing or Tweeting about it.

Check out the story and the photos. (Hat tip to The Bloggess.) You still have 3 days to see the exposition in Paris, or you can buy the book for the supergranny or grandpa in your life.

Thanksgiving and 7 weird American foods

Today is Thanksgiving and this week I discovered the special "Thanksgiving" tab on Ocado shopping. I've never been so horrified in my entire life. I was expecting turkey and fresh green beans and pumpkin puree for pies, and they did have those things. But otherwise this special section doesn't reflect very well on us Americans.

Instead of potatoes, hams and yams, Ocado has Marshmallow Fluff (I don't even know...), Stove Top brand instant stuffing, Jollytime microwave popcorn, Pop-Tarts, Froot Loops - all the traditional E numbers enjoyed by the Pilgrims and Native Americans.

Still, whenever I get high and mighty about anti-American snobbery, I'm reminded of my strolls through American supermarkets which yield a cornucopia of  intriguing "food" stuffs: aisles and aisles of convenience-ised, "fun"-ed up, hydrogenated products that seem just this side of edible. Yet I have a bit of a soft spot for all this weird food. I grew up on it, or grew up desperate for my parents to buy it instead of whole wheat bread and okra. It represents the triumph of industry over common sense.

You can't get these kind of items over here (I imagine they violate Health & Safety rules) so I won't be partaking of them. But today, I give thanks for these very American foods:

* Sno-Balls - Hot pink round balls - made of cake perhaps? - and rolled in coconut. As my friend Nancy from Park Slope Parents remarked, sadly they don't taste as good as they look.

* Twinkies - A classic that's so ingrained in the American psyche that a writer wrote a book about the ingredients, even going 1,600 feet underground to see where one ingredient is mined (you read that right), which in turn inspired a photographer's Twinkie ingredient project.

* Betty Crocker spray icing - It really does what it says on the tin.

* Jimmy Dean Blueberry Pancake and Sausage on a Stick - This is not a satiric breakfast meal...but it could be! A sausage nestled in the warm embrace of a pancake sprinkled with blueberries, then the whole thing is jammed onto a stick, so you can easily eat it in the car on the way to your arteriogram.

* Eggo Real Fruit Strawberry Granola Pizza - The last time I wandered round the HEB grocery store in Austin, I was agog at the sheer number and variety of frozen waffles alone. Now I discover that Eggo, the king of frozen waffles, has expanded into sweet pizzas? It's almost too much to take in. A pizza base, topped with strawberries and, er, granola.

* Cheez Whiz, Velveeta, American cheese - Like the French, Americans love cheese...if by "cheese" you mean a kind of oil product dyed orange. Let's be honest, though, I have served dishes made with this type of cheese at innumerable dinner parties and they have even the most snooty eaters rubbing their bellies and rolling their eyes in pleasure. The trick is not to reveal the ingredients (which, with these cheese, nobody knows anyway).

* Easy Cheese - Again with the aerosol food. Easy Cheese, the convenient cheese-product-in-a-spray-can, is the ne plus ultra of American cheese inventions.It's shorthand for American junk food the way deep-fried Mars bars are shorthand for bad Scottish food. In case you're not too disturbed by the image of squirting "Cheddar" onto your cracker, there's also a Cheddar 'n Bacon flavour.

Got any interesting American foods of your own you want to share?

8 British gifts to get Americans (that I would never give to a Brit)

In an era when every shopping mall and high street plays host to the same set of shops, one of the exciting things about living in a different country from your family is that you can actually give them gifts that surprise, astonish and delight - things that they would never buy themselves because they couldn't.

This year I'll be spending Christmas in my hometown, which means lugging over two changes of socks, three changes of underwear and 22.95kg of gifts in my suitcase - all of them carefully chosen to delight my American giftees. It's just as well that I'm exporting these presents from the UK - because these are things that I could never put under the tree here in England.

1. Revels – My brother loves these. I pack-mule in bags when I visit. And as everyone knows, British chocolate is very different from the American kind. Don’t ask me how. Ok, I’ll tell you – it’s better. I could transport some Green&Black’s or other high-end choccies. But he loves the variety of Revels. He totally gets the Deer Hunter commercial.  In America, a gift of Revels say, “Have a Merry Christmas with this treat you only get once a year.” In the UK, it says, “I did my holiday shopping at the petrol station.”

2. Keep Calm and Carry On –The simple design and duo-chrome palette is stylish even if it was never officially used during wartime. This slogan has become so ubiquitous here – posters, tea towels, mugs, cringe-making versions that say Keep Calm and Carry On Shopping – it makes you want to bomb Dresden. But in the US, Keep Calm reacquires its stiff-upper-lip charm. I’ll eventually buy one for myself...when I move back to America. Until then, I'll be going historical and giving the poster.

Is this what your man needs for Christmas?

There aren't really words to describe this so I'll let it speak for itself.