Monthly Archives: December 2008

I haven’t put any pictures up from a couple of weeks ago when the Coopers (my brother, sister-in-law and thier son) visited, so I thought I would put up some pictures of young man Jack.  Please believe me when I tell you that this child is an absolute joy to be around—he’s mild mannered, thoughtful, playful, mischevious and a lot more.  We had fun “discussing” the dogs, trucks, the Fun Tunnel (you’ll see below), That Guy (Uncle Drew and Grandpa Skip, give or take a finger point), all of our names and just about anything else that Jack turned his eye on.  He’s a sharp cookie.

Here he making a little mischief with Grandpa Skip:

And below, Jack is busy turning an apple into a work of art:

Hamming for his Auntie Amelia:

And…the Fun Tunnel!  Mom and Skip gave Jack a tunnel to crawl through, (oh yes, we all took a turn) but why just crawl through a tunnel when you can load up Christmas presents in it and pull it around on your task to collect all of the soccer balls floating around?  Exactly what I was thinking, Jack.  Good man!

Came across a beautiful sky driving Drew to work this morning and thought I would share.  I love mornings.

What a holiday!  This was a unique year as Drew was working in the hospital so we did everything a little differently, but it was a wonderful Christmas nonetheless.  The staff on Drew’s unit each brought in a dish to share and they sat down to a Christmas dinner in their scrubs while keeping an eye and ear out for their patients so he and I were able to silently reach out to each other across our Christmas meals.  We had a lot of fun and time with friends this year which made the days feel so full and abundant, and I am still in the holiday glow as we prepare to take off for Louisiana early Wednesday morning.

On the 23rd I woke up with Drew (even roosters scoff at the time that he leaves for the hospital) and had the Christmas zeal going so I jumped in the car to head to the grocery to get a few final ingredients for a carrot cake.  I was listening to the news and heard this story which had me in stitches in my car outside of the grocery.  It’s about a version of the Nutcracker in San Francisco in which everyone comes and participates in the telling of this Christmas favorite by dressing up and dancing in the aisles.  What a dream come true!  And if you forgot your costume, no worries, there are tutus for rent.  Incredible.  One of the more charming images that NPR has created is their term “driveway moments” referring to a story that is so good that you stay sitting in your car listening even though you’re home.  This story was a driveway (parking lot) moment for me, and it was topped off when a woman pulled in next to me and looked over to see a disheveled 20 something sitting in her car in PJs, laughing her head off before the sun had peaked over the horizon.  I hope that you enjoy the story.

I spent yesterday de-Christmasing the house so that will we arrive home from Baton Rouge in 2009 to a house that’s ready to hit the New Year running.  Although I was probably not the most glamourous New Years elf as I was hauling the tree outside yesterday morning (D was working) it felt good to take the time to organize and do a little de-cluttering.  I got together our Goodwill bags and nested the new Christmas gifts in their homes, enjoying and feeling grateful for the feeling of our space and our abundance.  I will try to get some pictures up, and will hopefully get some posting done while in Baton Rouge.  Happy Holidays!

So it’s the day before Christmas Eve and I am thinking about tradition.  I talked with a pregnant friend this weekend and she was saying that Christmas next year will be very different for her new family because she will be asserting traditions in addition to all of the holiday activities that they share with their collective families already.  We were talking about it, and I was thinking how our traditions so closely mimic what we grew up with whether we like it or not.  There are some things that go; for instance my Mom’s mother always had rice at holiday meals which stopped a while back, and we used to always put out these little Thanksgiving candles that haven’t seen the light of day in years, but other things are so ingrained.  I thought that today would be a good day to share the traditions that I grew up with that I know will still be hanging around when Drew and I have a little one.

Christmas Eve: The Day of Anticipation.

Things that define Christmas Eve: Champagne, or kids champagne, peppermint ice cream, lamb with mint jelly (but that one’s out.  Sorry Mom.) making sugar cookies for the big guy, carrots for the reindeer, staying home all day hanging around the kitchen, and the all important One Present.  Something that Drew and I have added to this routine: reading at least one story from David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice, preferably “Santa Land Diaries” in its entirety.  Because Drew is working this year we read it out loud last weekend and laughed until we cried.  As a family event, this might be replaced by the more traditional Night Before Christmas until the kids are of a good David Sedaris age, but hopefully Drew and I will always be able to slip those stories in after little heads hit the pillows, because well, we’ve been doing it since we were married, and now David’s wry voice fills the air with cheer.

Christmas Day:

Here’s the drill in its entirety: We’re not allowed (still.) out of bed until 6am at which point two things happen in no particular order: the parents are woken up and Christmas music and the tree are turned on to reveal stockings!  Ok, so yes, I am a grown up and I get that, but I still wake up at 6(ish) and my parents still do stockings.  In turn, Mom also gets one, but we’ll get to that.  Ok, so we wake up, turn on the tunes, preheat the oven to pop in cinnamon rolls, and start the oh-so-important coffee maker, and hit the stockings, which are still one of my favorite parts of Christmas.  It’s really not just about what’s in the stockings, but the fact that they just seem to appear (Bless you, mothers of the world) magically and that you never ever know what might be in a stocking. Well, we did always know that there would be an orange in the toe of our stockings, and if we were in NC with Ruth and Daddy, there was always Hershy’s kisses and pistachios in there too.   During this time, Mom usually starts the turkey in the oven.  The long standing rule is that everyone has to have had at least one cinnamon roll and a cuppa before we settle into the presents.  This felt like an eternity as a child, which was a sweet feeling in and of itself,  but now we all just kind of mosey over and ease in.  We open presents one at a time with yours truly generally being in charge of distribution and we try to take our time.  This part is really important to me now especially because I have an appreciation for all of the resources that have gone into creating Christmas morning, and I like that we can see each other opening presents and ohhing and ahhing and it seems like we talk the whole time the gifts are going which is a really nostalgia-inducing and unique time.  After presents are done, with all of the wrapping collected in a big bag as we go, we generally lay around in pjs until it’s time to start getting the rest of dinner together.  As a child, this was generally the time that we would go into an immediate joy coma and try to figure out what to play with/read/wear/listen to first.  We’ve also been known to fall asleep under the tree in a fit of delight.  It’s all a little overwhelming.  But now, Mom and I start cooking together and for the last couple of years, we’ve come up with a new menu every year depending on what we’re in the mood for.  The one thing that we always have is Mom’s pumpkin chiffon pie (or Ruth’s corn pudding if I was in NC) and some variation of the traditional vegetables.

So the new traditions: well, when in VA we’ve been eating Christmas Eve dinner with Mom and Skip’s neighbors which is a multi-course extravaganza and a true holiday event unto itself.  Skip and I have started putting out a stocking for Mom which I love getting together.  We’re having ham instead of turkey this year, I’m adding carrot cake into the desert rotation, and we now have a heckofa nurse in our midst which means that holidays are going to be a little different for us because we have the folks that need Drew’s care to consider.  Something that I love though is that it’s all simply centered around being home and being happy which seems a little obvious, but true.  Christmas was never stressful feeling, or at least I never felt any stress from my parents, it always felt like magic.  I feel really lucky that my various parents, and Mom in particular, have never tried to take that magic away or make us feel like it’s no big deal, because getting excited and making fragrant food with love, and finding presents for people that you think will really be something that they would enjoy, and getting a little spoiled, and behaving like a child, well, I think that is kind of a big deal.  Remember that feeling of twirling endlessly around with your arms out as a kid?  Christmas morning still kind of feels that way, and I think it’s the traditions that give it so much spin.

And with that, Merry Christmas!

Every year from 3rd-8th grade, I was in a play at my school called St George and the Dragon.  St George has played a long-standing role in history, the myth of St George and Dragon is said to have emerged during the Crusades, and the watered-down gist is that a dragon is terrorizing an area and none but St George can protect the village from the dragon.  In our version, a number of colorful characters (who were the same every year, much to my parents chagrin) first have to emerge setting up the story and saying that they know who will be able to fight the dragon before St George arrives.  The highlight was, sadly, when St George would get struck down battling the dragon and a very funny doctor would arrive on a hobby horse and administer a series of quack remedies to revive St George (a favorite line of mine: “If the box don’t cure ya, the lid will!”) before everyone would realize he was a fake and call in Father Christmas who would would save St George.  As kids we are able to mark our school years by which of the characters we were, and there was always the hope that this would be the year that we would be cast as St George or, in my case, The Fool…a role I waited for until 8th grade.  Every year our head of school, Charlotte, would revise the basic script (which was, line for line, the same every year) to incorporate elements of what we were learning that year into the play.  For instance, the year that we studied Shakespeare and Chaucer, there was a troop of actors that arrived before St George to perform bits of various Shakespeare plays and some of the Canterbury-ish Tales that we had written.  Other years we mixed in different styles of dance that we have learned, the various instruments that were being studied and so on.

The show is still going on–in fact it had it’s 25th anniversary recently–and I take great delight in going back to watch it now because for all of the little bits that are different, the general story is still the same and there’s something very comforting about going to a play where you already know all of the lines, and the costumes, and the songs…

The school performs St George on, or as close as possible to, the Winter Solstice and every year the play open in darkness with one or two people standing with a candle and reciting a poem by Susan Cooper in hushed and deeply dramatic voices.  The last line of the poem is “Welcome Yule!” to which in turn, we would all return the call and walk through the aisles with candles singing Deck the Halls and driving the darkness away with the light of 100 little people and their carefully cradled candles.  The candles would stay, flickering and amusing, on a table at the back of the stage throughout the performance and the shortest day of the year (or, of course, one awfully close to it) would come to a close with parents clapping with relief, I’m sure that another St George had come to a close, and kids smiling, thrilled with themselves.

All of that is to say, that whenever the Winter Solstice comes, at some point during the day I hear Susan Cooper’s words echoing in the part of my brain that can’t seem to forget anything that I learned before I was 10 that might have rhymed, and I thought that I would share that with you, a day late.  It’s amazing to think that today will be brighter just a little bit longer than yesterday, and that this summer when Drew and I are eating in the back yard at 8:00 in lingering light, we can think about driving the darkness out on December the 21st.  Welcome Yule!

The Shortest Day
By Susan Cooper

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, revelling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us – listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome Yule!

Ahhh Friday.  We had our office White Elephant party today which was a lot of laughs.  I was wondering about the origins of the term ‘White Elephant’ and discovered on Wikipedia that

The term white elephant refers to a gift whose maintenance cost exceeds its usefulness. While the first use of this term remains an item of contention among historians, a popular theory suggests that Ezra Cornell brought the term into popular lexicon through his numerous and frequent social gatherings, dating back to as early as 1828.

Well clearly White Elephant parties have digressed to be a bit more tongue and cheek, but the suggestion above is that they’ve always aired on the side of absurdity.  I remember a white sailor statue that weighed about 50 lbs that circulated amongst my parents White Elephant parties of yore, and my generation tends to take in a more, ahem, inappropriate direction, but in the end there are always pretty funny.  I thought that I would put up a very short video of what I got at the party today, because there’s really no way to describe it other than to say that it’s a jump-roping pig and then just let you see for yourself.

And now I just have to cross off the minutes until my brother Drew, his wife Meg and their son arrive for a weekend of Christmas fun.  Below are two recent pictures of little man Jack.  My brother describes him as all boy: he’s fiercely dedicated to trucks and tractors and tools and such a gorgeous child.  We are really looking forward to getting our fix this weekend!

The next one is one of my all time favorites.  This is Jack looking as though both he and his kitten Albus ran out of steam at the exact same moment and crashed for a quick nap on the dog’s usual resting spot.  Jack is never without his kitten Albus, which he reports to me on the phone as “Alby!” in a tone of pure delight and devotion.  Little Albus found their family and walked home with them as an itty bitty kitten and so from his earliest weeks, as far as he knows, every cat has a boy to carry him around by the tail and nap with.  Not a bad gig at all.

Happy weekend to you all!

I miss the sun.  Mable misses the sun too–there she is up there, lurking behind the curtain in search of a stray beam to cash out in.  It’s been raining and cold and damp and soggy and sodden and chilly and flat here for days on end which is good for the ground but not so good for this girl.  Grace has been looking up at Drew and me when we take her out as if it’s our fault that she’s getting rained on, and despite our best efforts she just doesn’t seem to understand that we’re getting wet and cold too.  The bright side of a rainy winter is that there’s so much warmth to be had.  Fires and comfort food and baking and steamy stoves and hot baths and tea and coffee and comforters and books about the tropics and down vests and soft sweaters.  I hate being cold, but oh how I love getting warm.  Cross your fingers though, ok?  We need to remember what that strange ball in the sky feels like on a turned up face.

I reconnected with my first cousin Jabal, whom I haven’t seen since my 10th birthday party, this morning and felt a surge of love for the connectivity that the internet brings.  It’s a slight sentiment, but sometimes it really overwhelms me to think about the digital age and how much our appreciation for connecting is changing.  I was just tempted to write evolving, but sometimes I think the tone of that word implies improvement versus adaptation, and I am a big beliver in pens on paper and books in covers, and while I don’t love using it, the plain old phone call, so while there’s improvement, and room for more, what strikes me most is the change.

But back to my cousin.  As I was writing my Christmas cards this year, I thought of him and did some hunting on the internet through the whitepages site and found what I hoped was a current address.  In the card I put my email and received an email from him this morning.  Coincidentally, I noticed that my younger sister had just become friends with him on facebook, and so we have that connection now too.  All because of the world wide web.  In writing that though (on my blog.  posted to the internet.)  I wonder if the ways that this perceived connectivity has propelled us forward is compromised by the ways that it holds us back too.  I text instead of calling.  I email instead of writing a letter.  While it’s the internet that has brought me to so many incredible musings and photos and opportunitues, has the drive that’s gotten us here resulted because we lost direction in the first place?  Of course I can’t answer that, but for just a moment I’ll send out a resounding thank you to the internet for being so cool, how’s that for a random thought for the day.

(photo that I took in September when the world was still green)

So I was trying to think about what to post and remembered that I had a few pictures from the weekend after Thanksgiving that I hadn’t put up yet.  The photo above is from a junk/awesomeness store called Old Lucketts Store in the Village of Lucketts (!) in Maryland.  Every time we go to visit our friend Mike in Frederick Maryland, we always stop and see what we can find sorting through the store.  For those of you that are familiar with the Screen Door in Asheville, Luckett’s is kind of the same idea, except in a huge old three story farm house.

Within the rooms of the house, different artisits and junk collectors set up shop so there’s a wonderful varity of the old and art made from the old.  In short, it’s imagination Heaven.  Drew and I were able to do a fair amount of our Christmas shopping there in an effort to accquire recycled gifts or make gifts this year–we haven’t done it 100% across the board, but we’re at about 75% which is a good feeling.  I had my camera with me thinking that I would want to take tons of pictures, but I got so wrapped up in “what about this for…” and “oh wait!  look at this one!” that I forgot to take pictures after snapping the hats above.  I’m glad we have the choice and all when it comes to women’s fashion these days, but just look at those hats.  Sometimes I think I’m sailing through the wrong decades…

It’s a soggy Monday morning here–heavy sky and strangely warm temperatures are hanging all around our area. I had my first book club meeting last night, we read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. Drew headed out to watch football with the fellas and a group of ladies came over for a little holiday party and book discussion. This is a first stab at a book club for all of us, and I was a little concerned that it might feel forced to have a topic (the book) to sit down and just begin discussing, but we all enjoyed the book enough that the conversation came tumbling out and we had plenty of digressions as well. In the end the consensus is that the book comes with an overall very high recommendation if anyone is looking for any last minute gift ideas for men or women, and the back story is a really interesting too. Without going into too much detail, I will say that the book is largely set in the early 1900s Depression era and focuses on a fictional circus aspiring to the likes of Ringling Brothers. The author did a great deal of research and used many of the anecdotal stories that she came across in her research to build her tale. Something that I particularly enjoyed about the book was that each chapter opens with a real picture from circuses around the time that the story takes place, and gives a peek into what’s to come within the chapter. Because I kind of geek out of stuff like that, I wound up doing some reading of my own about the history of the circus and came across the Ringling archives which is where the following pictures come from. I’m not sure what we’re reading next, Susan in our group is choosing and letting us know this week, but overall, I think the book club is going to be a success!