It Is All Rather a Blur . . .

Christmas came somewhat late to Darlington this year.  Not after the fact, mind you, as we observed the appropriate dates as they occurred on the calendar.  No, I'm talking about when the psychology of Christmas finally wrapped its arms around me and said "Now!"

I was very rushed approaching the Christmas holiday this year.  Work was all-consuming and unrelenting, as were the more pleasant demands of the New York social season, and I found myself galloping head forward during the weeks leading up to Christmas with a list of "to-dos" a mile long and the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel a long, long, way away.  Somehow I got through what I needed to by the time I had to do it, and I bolted from my office on the Friday before Christmas shouting with glee that I was finally done with working for the year and that was that!

A full two weeks at Darlington beckoned to me most pleasingly.

Stocked up with comestibles and presents, and fortified by a delicious holiday luncheon at Swifty's with Boy and his two charming assistants, we loaded the family jalopy and drove up to the house that very afternoon, not scheduled to return to the city until the first full week of January.

Darlington's 2013 Christmas Tree

I can't remember the last time we had two entire weeks of uninterrupted residence at Darlington House.  It's been at least several years.  Although we usually spend Christmas and New Year's at Darlington, we often break up our stay with a trip to Boston for a night or two, for a change of pace.  This year we decided to spend the entire break at Darlington.

A Chinese covered jar was inspiration for
the tree's color scheme this year . . .

It's all been rather a blur, really.  A blur of afternoons spent cooking and fiddling about, playing backgammon, listening to music, and reading.  A blur of evenings largely devoted to the joys of the table and bottle, and catching up on movies we've wanted to see (or rewatching old favorites).  It has been a blur of parties, too.  A blur of trips to the grocer or wine merchant, or to Agway for bird seed and dog biscuits.  A blur of attending services at the Episcopal church I go to.  A blur of drinking egg nog and eating tasty treats, promising myself (and Boy) that it would all come to an end in the New Year (but hasn't quite, yet).  A blur of sleeping in as long as I like, wakened not by an alarm clock blaring at me but rather by my darling Basil licking my face, asking to be taken out and fed his breakfast.

It's been an absolutely lovely blur, Dear Reader.

. . . as was our collection of early English
Staffordshire pearlware figures . . .

I've purposely not overburdened myself this break with chores and projects.  I have a tendency to keep myself busy with such time consuming obligations, even while on vacation.  Not this Christmas.  While I did keep a "to do" list (it would be impossible for me not to), I kept it short and have not kicked myself because some of the chores listed upon it must wait to be completed another day.  Although I've had a number of calls with the office while away, they haven't been burdensome or overly time-consuming.

. . . and a pretty pearlware dish

"So, where is this going?" you might ask, Dear Reader.  It is an explanation of why your Dear Old Reggie hasn't posted photographs of our Christmas tree this year, at least until today.  Boy put our tree up and decorated it ahead of Christmas day, but we didn't get around to photographing it until afterwards, completing doing so only yesterday.  The pictures shown in this post were taken over a one week span, seeking to capture the tree at its best advantage, and under the best light conditions.

This Christmas we placed our tree in Darlington's drawing room, for the first time in many years.  Its theme was inspired by the color scheme of the room, and by the English and Chinese ceramics we have placed about it.

In particular, the color scheme was inspired by the painted decorations on our early nineteenth Staffordshire pearlware figures of classical deities and virtues.  We've collected them for years and I've written about them before, here and here.

The pearlware figures are decorated with pretty painted pastel colors in pinks, blues, yellows, lavenders, and greens.  Boy drew from their palette when decorating the drawing room's tree.

The result is very different from the woodsy Winter Wonderland themed trees that Boy has put up in previous years in our dining room.  Our drawing room Christmas tree is very, very pretty.  And very pink, too.

In addition to being inspired by the pastel colors of our Staffordshire figures, we wanted to give our drawing room an old-fashioned Christmasy look, from the 1940s.  I festooned the mantel and mirror with vintage pink lametta garlands that Boy gave to me many years ago.  He found them while on a photo shoot, back before he became a Fancy New York Decorator, and he haggled with the woman who owned them until she sold them to him.  I'm really rather fond of them.

I particularly like this year's Christmas tree.  It is so pretty and sweet that it almost makes my teeth hurt, but in a good way.  It makes me think of the children's board game, Candy Land, which was a favorite of mine when I was very little.  Until, that is, I figured out that the game did not involve the receipt of actual candy, a distinct disappointment to me at the time.

Now that I'm a grown man and have developed a taste for treats other than candy, I can admire the loveliness of our tree unfettered by anything but pure pleasure in its prettiness.

I am writing this post sitting at my dining room table at Darlington.  The table is covered with the white damask cloth we laid for a luncheon party several weeks ago, and it is a pleasant and snowy-white pedestal for tapping away on my laptop, writing this essay.  A footed dish of clementines is but a short reach away.

I will leave Darlington House fortified by a lazy, indulgent two weeks of leisure and relaxation.  I can confidently say, Dear Reader, that this is the first time in years that I have ended a vacation truly rested and ready for what waits for me upon my return.

Happy New Year!

All photographs by Boy Fenwick

Christmas Traditions at Darlington

Every family, however you define it, has its own Christmas traditions.  At least those families who observe Christmas, which we do at Darlington House.  I celebrate Christmas for the enjoyment of the holiday, and also for the spiritual message that inspires it, and me.

Christmas just wouldn't be the same
without pots of paperwhites about the house

There are a number of Christmas traditions that we observe at Darlington that I brought with me from my birth family, and there are ones of a more recent vintage that we have made our own.

FD, Camilla, and MD
Christmas 1947

As I have written before, one tradition that I observe at Christmas is to adorn the grill of our Rover with a wreath.  My mother, MD, decorated her cars with a wreath when I was a boy.  I loved it then, and I love it still.  This year we ordered our Rover's wreath from the good ladies of Cedar Farm.  I think they did a lovely job of it (they also made the wreath shown in the background, hanging on a door of one of our barns).

This year's Rover Wreath

Another Christmas tradition I observe is to set out a crèche.  MD was mad for crèches, and collected more than a dozen of them over the years.  The one we have at Darlington is a dime store crèche made in Italy in the 1950s that I bought at a Groupe Shoppe years ago.  I've been adding figures to it ever since.  If you look closely at the photograph you'll see that there is a little pug, given to me by my sister Camilla, among the adoring throng.

Our not entirely tasteful Christmas crèche

I also have a collection of Black Forest bears that I put out at Christmas.  I inherited the nucleus of the collection from my mother, who inherited it from her father.  I've added to it over the years, and I put the bears on the mantel in our Snuggery, along with half a dozen or so little Steiff toy animals that I played with as a child.  I've had some of them for almost fifty years.

The mantel in our Snuggery, decorated for Christmas

When it comes to food and drink we have a number of traditions at Darlington.  I always make sure to have a box of Darling clementines on hand at Christmas.

Every Christmas Eve, before attending the evening festival service at the Episcopal church in the nearby town (assuming I can stay awake—and sober enough—to attend it), I make a simple oyster stew, a dish that my sister Hermione introduced me to as a Christmas Eve tradition many years ago.

I think I may try Alex Hitz's recipe for
oyster stew this year
Image courtesy of House Beautiful

On Christmas day we tuck into an old-fashioned English dinner of prime rib roast and Yorkshire pudding (recipes courtesy of my dear friend Lindaraxa), followed by Stilton cheese and Christmas pudding with hard sauce.  MD adored hard sauce.

Lindaraxa's English roast beef and Yorkshire pudding
Image courtesy of same

In years past, when Fauchon still had an outpost in Manhattan, we used to put in a store of their sublime pâtes de fruit and marron glacé to eat over the Christmas break.  Now we console ourselves with chocolates and other treats, including blinis heaped with caviar or salmon roe and crème fraîche.  Champagne is usually within easy reach.

A Darlington tradition of Christmases past
Image courtesy of Fauchon

Another tradition of ours during the Christmas break is to drive to Albany, New York State's capitol, and have a festive lunch at the city's venerable Jack's Oyster House.  It's been an Albany institution for one hundred years now.  Jack's is usually packed this time of year with tables of happy revelers out for a holiday lunch.  We heading there for ours today, in fact.

Jack's Oyster House's card

A more recent Christmas tradition that we've added to our repertoire at Darlington is dipping into the most delicious egg nog imaginable, made by our friend Ted Greenwood.  Ted makes a large batch of it from an old family recipe every year and distributes it on Christmas Eve to his lucky friends in Ball jars.  He calls it Ted Nog.  It is beyond yummy, particularly when adorned with a bourbon or rum floater on top.  Needless to say, Ted is very popular with his fortunate friends this time of year!

Our friend Ted "Nog" Greenwood at a
Darlington dinner party several years ago

Another tradition I look forward to every Christmas is listening to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols sung by the choir of King's College Cambridge, and broadcast on our local public radio station on Christmas Eve.

The choir of King's College Cambridge
Image courtesy of Zimbio

Of course we hang garlands and wreaths and put up a tree at Darlington, and we decorate the house festively for Christmas.  But, then, that's the subject of another post, soon to follow. . .

I found these little German wooden candles in
a hospital thrift store ten years ago.
I've put them out at Christmastime ever since

Tell me, Dear Reader, what are some of your Christmas traditions?

All photographs, unless noted, by Boy Fenwick or Reggie Darling

Reggie Recommends, Again: Agraria's Bitter Orange Potpourri

I received a package the other day, Dear Reader, containing an unexpected and thoughtful gift from the owners of Agraria, a home fragrance company based in San Francisco.   It was a box of their Bitter Orange potpourri, which I have been a devotee of for thirty years.  I first wrote about my love affair with Bitter Orange potpourri two years ago, which is how I came to the attention of the folks at Agraria.  They have been kind to send me a present of a box of their Bitter Orange potpourri each Christmas since then, much to my surprised pleasure.

Agraria's Bitter Orange potpourri benefits from
being decanted into a large bowl, so its
heavenly scent can waft through one's rooms

I have never done a paid endorsement of a product here on Reggie, Dear Reader, and I don't expect to start doing ones any time soon, either.  In this case, because the gift from Agraria was sent to me as a "thank you" for an unsolicited review and not in exchange for it, I am happy to recommend Agraria's Bitter Orange potpourri to you.  If you are anything like Reggie is, he is confident that you will also fall in love with Bitter Orange's marvelous, can't-live-without, heady scent.  That is, if you haven't already. . .

Here's a repeat of the post that I published in December 2011, in which I shared how I first learned of Bitter Orange and why I have loved it ever since:

I'm not, in general, a fan of potpourri.  Most of what is available today is vile, made of things like artificial peach scented cedar shavings.  No wonder it has such a bad reputation.

One of our Chinese export punch bowls, ca. 1800,

filled with Bitter Orange potpourri

However, there is one potpourri out there that I love, and which I make a point of buying every year when the weather turns cold and the heating season begins.  It is called Bitter Orange, and it is made by a company called Agraria.  I recommend it to you, Dear Reader.

It is the most marvelous potpourri there is.

Agraria makes its Bitter Orange potpourri in small batches of fragrant dried flowers and orange slices, cinnamon sticks, cloves, lavender, natural oils, and other exotic organic ingredients.  Bitter Orange is lovely—citrusy, floral, spicy, and woodsy.  I fill an antique Chinese export bowl with it every year at this time and place it in our drawing room at Darlington House, where its scent deliciously pervades the room.

I first learned of Bitter Orange back in the early 1980s, shortly after it became available in New York.  I vividly recall my introduction to it, in the living room of a large apartment on the Upper East Side that belonged to the parents of a classmate of mine from Yale.  I remember sitting in a chair in the room and wondering "What is that marvelous scent, and where is it coming from?" and my then delight in learning that it was a potpourri called Bitter Orange from a small company named Agraria, based in San Francisco.  The mother of my friend had just bought it at Henri Bendel, the only store in the city that stocked it at the time, and she was quite pleased with herself for having done so.

A freshly opened box of Bitter Orange,

revealing the treasures inside

At the time I had never seen or smelled potpourri before.  It seemed rarefied and exquisite to me, and I was entranced by it.  This was long before potpourri had become a degraded mass-market commodity found in every gift-shoppe, drug store, and big box retailer in America.  It was very special, then.  Bitter Orange created a sensation in New York when it was introduced to the city in the mid-1970s, where it became known as "the Park Avenue potpourri," as it was immediately popular among the city's uptown smart set.

I had to have it.  I went to Bendels at the next opportunity I had and bought myself a box of it.  I was shocked at how expensive it was, but that didn't deter me.  I simply had to have it.

And I've been buying it ever since.

Agraria's handsome box

for its Bittersweet potpourri

Agraria's Bitter Orange has spawned many imitators over the years, but none have succeeded in replicating its signature scent or quality.  It is unique.  Bitter Orange was the foundation of Agraria's subsequent success, and today the company's products are widely distributed, a testament to its vision and the integrity of its offerings.  I'm pleased that they have been so successful.

If you are not already a fan of Agraria's Bitter Orange potpourri, Dear Reader, I recommend that you get some, because I trust that you will love it, as I do.  But be forewarned: it is addicting.

Agraria's website, which features not only their Bitter Orange potpourri and related products, but also a host of other gorgeously-scented irresistibles, can be found here.

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

Basil's First Darlington Christmas Begins . . .

Boy tells me that I am wasting too much time and too many images by posting on my Facebook page instead of here at Reggie.  He thinks I've been neglecting you, Dear Reader.

So I'm going to do something about that.  I plan on adding more short-and-sweet mini posts here to augment the longer, wordier, image-filled posts I've been doing for most of this past year.  The migration of my shorter posts to FB is one of the reasons I've been posting less frequently here at Reggie.

Today's post follows through on my resolution.  It features a photograph of our sweet little Basil sitting on the floor of one of our barns at Darlington, with our newly cut Christmas tree—an Abies concolor, commonly known as a Concolor Fir—waiting in the background.  Boy cut the tree down this morning at a nearby Christmas tree farm with the assistance of our wonderful handyman/groundsman/all-around-helper/godsend Rich (just as he did last year, too).

We plan on putting the tree up in our drawing room next weekend, with the assistance of darling Basil, of course.  Given what Boy has told me about his plans to decorate this year's tree, I am sure it will be one of the most beautiful we've ever had.

Needless to say, Basil is beside himself with excitement!

Photograph by Boy Fenwick

Crackin' Nuts

One of the pleasures of the winter holidays, Reggie's believes, is cracking open nuts and consuming them.  It is a most satisfying activity, Dear Reader, and one that brings to mind pleasant memories of many cozy winter afternoons spent with family and friends.  Accompanied by a cup of hot tea or a cocktail (Reggie's preferred companion beverage), nuts are a most tasty and satisfying comestible.

I've written before that I am fond of clementines, too.  Nuts and clementines, which are both at their peak this time of year, go together wonderfully, I think.  A bowl of the little citrus is usually to be found within reaching distance of a bowl of nuts at Darlington House during the holidays.  In fact, a clementine was sitting in the bowl of nuts I'm featuring in this post only a few minutes before these photographs were taken.  I ate it.

This Christmas we filled an antique Bennington bowl with an assortment of nuts, and we have another, smaller, Bennington bowl nearby for the spent shells.  In other years we've filled a large silver bowl with nuts, but this year it seemed more appropriate—given our overall woodsy Christmas theme—to use a more quotidian Bennington bowl.

I'm not too picky about where I buy my nuts.  I bought the ones I'm showing here in a bag at a supermarket.  They're delicious.

Once I've filled the smaller bowl with the spent shells I enjoy tossing them on the fire, where they make a pleasing snapping and cracking sound as they burst into flames.

Our nutcracker and pick set, fashioned of horn and steel, were made in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century.  I inherited them from my Darling grandparents.  Their handles are carved to show the likenesses of a hound, a hare, and a boar.  I have a collection of nutcrackers, but these are my favorite—for both sentimental and aesthetic reasons.

I think the nutcracker and pick look particularly good sitting among the nuts.  Tan-and-brown horn handles, tan-and-brown nuts, and tan-and-brown bowls.  They all go together perfectly.

There is little more satisfying than hearing the crack! of a nut when it opens to reveal its treasure.

And what a delicious treasure it is, indeed!  So sweet, so tasty, and so nutty!

If you haven't done it yet this season, Dear Reader, I urge you to buy yourself a bag of nuts, dig into it, and crack open and eat some of the little darlings.  I'll be doing exactly that over the next several days myself.  Won't you join me, please?

Photographs by Boy Fenwick

Christmas Tree Wishes to You and Yours

Every year, when we put up our Christmas tree at Darlington House, I'm convinced it is the prettiest, most magical one ever.  This year is no exception.

As I've written before, I long ago surrendered decorating our Christmas trees to Boy.  He's so much better at it than I am.  Also, I tend to get in the way when I try and be helpful in such things as decorating trees or arranging flowers.  I'm very happy to be Boy's cheering section, where I am joined by our dear little Pompey.

Every year Boy comes up with a different theme for his Christmas tree decoration.  This year's theme is "Silver and Pine Cone Wonderland."

He has covered the tree with vintage silver ornaments and with pine cones harvested from the trees on our property.

Boy has collected silver pine cone shaped ornaments for years.  I like the juxtaposition of them with the  real ones he's added to the tree.

He also added a flock of little birds to the tree, perched on the tips of its limbs.

Doesn't it look lovely?

Boy further decorated the room with bowls and urns filled with silver ornaments.

He covered the mantel with a forest of little frosted bottle-brush trees.  He also nestled loads of pine boughs atop all of the picture frames in the room.  It's really quite enchanting.

But the magic really comes out at night, Dear Reader, when the tree's tiny white fairy lights are illuminated, and the room glows like a winter solstice fire.

I have a lot of admiration for people, like Boy, who can photograph a lit Christmas tree.  It's not as easy as you'd think.

I like the way the ornaments and tinsel icicles glitter in the light.

Don't the pine cones look marvelous?  So woodsy, I think.

I count at least six vintage silver pine cone shaped ornaments in the preceding photograph.  Do you think I've missed any?

Here's the little silver barrel ornament we found last year on our travels.  I've become intensely fond of it.

But it is the little birds that really make the tree quite magical, I think.  I love them.

See all of the birds in a flock, perched on the top of the tree?  I think they may be hiding there so they won't frighten Pompey.

But, then again, Pompey seems to have his mind on other things than the little birds.  I suspect he's more interested in hastening the delivery of his next yummy treat, particularly since he was such a good and obedient model for this photograph.  We make sure that our little Pompey joins in the fun here at Darlington House during the Christmas holiday, too.  And why not, since he's part of our family?

And with that, Dear Reader, we in our family—Boy, Pompey, and I—wish you and yours a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Photographs by Boy Fenwick and Reggie Darling