Daily Archives: March 19, 2002

The Lure Of Schnaaps

I have found Nirvana, and its name is Vanilla Schnaaps.

I’m not a drinker. I have a beer now and then, a cider if we go to a pub; some wine if I feel like it and someone’s already opened a bottle. Otherwise, nice cold water or Coke or something is more than fine with me.

We went to a SAQ Select last weekend, though, to pick up some Scotch and some Irish Cream for our Ostara celebration. (Our spin on Irish coffee — mmm.) At the sleepover I’d tasted O’Casey’s, a lighter and smoother Irish Cream than the ubiquitous Bailey’s, so I was searching the store for a bottle of that when I came across the liqueurs section.

Now, I detest peach flavouring. The fresh fruit’s okay, but peach cream or peach chocolates or even tinned peaches are just yucky. So when all my high school friends went crazy for Fuzzy Navels and peach schnaaps in general, I was unimpressed. (Apart from the fact that I couldn’t get past that sharp taste of alcohol.) That general distasteful impression of schnaaps stuck with me until Sunday afternoon when I found myself staring at Dr McGillicuddy’s Vanilla Schnaaps. Suddenly, all I could think of were Vanilla Cokes.

I brought it home.

This stuff is way too easy to drink. A splash in some Coke, a splash in some root beer — divine. You aren’t really drinking, you’re flavouring with alcohol. Evil. Insidious.

I can’t wait to experiment further. Hot chocolate. Ice cream floats with this stuff poured over top. A splash in lime soda.

Mmmm.

I’m so dead.

You Know You’re In A Canadian Movie When

Men With Brooms was a riot. I highly recommend it. If you do not have a sense of humour, or have qualms about your Canadian identity, do not see it. You won’t get it.

The credits faded in and out on the black screen. There was a loon call. I murmured to my seat-mates, “Well, I know I�m in a Canadian movie — there’s a loon crying.”

Then the deep patriotic male chorus started singing about the land of the silver bush to visuals of rushing water and wind through the trees, and the hoarse calls of beaver and the wail of a bagpipe. If the audience hadn’t known by the loon that it was a Canadian movie, they had to have figured it out by then. Not that it mattered; I was crying with laughter already.

Only our row was laughing in the whole theatre. We must have all been curlers or something. Or patriotic. With a wicked sense of humour.

CURRENT READING:

Well, Men With Brooms, actually, because I had to buy something that wasn’t a fashion magazine at the tiny bookstore near Zellers while I was waiting for my husband to come back and pick me up from my haircut (took him over an hour). Contains a couple of scenes cut from the movie that explain later scenes, and classic descriptions of Canada like, “an endless stretch of blacktop heading deeper and deeper into a land that comprised nothing but rocks, trees, lakes, rocks, trees, lakes, rocks, oops there’s a moose, trees, lakes, rocks and more rocks.” (p.196) And then there’s the opening paragraph, which goes like this:

“Once upon a time, there was a very cold country full of rocks. One particular province of this country, known as the Province of Ontario in the Dominion of Canada, was simply chock full of cold and rocks. The rocks, being rocks, didn’t mind the cold. They just carried on, being rocks, until someone (an immigrant from a not-quite-so-cold but just as full of rocks place called Scotland) disturbed their peace.

“Canada has never been quite the same.” (p.1)