Last night, Grace came to us and asked if she could be in charge of our Christmas greeting this year. She said she had been working on a little something and she was sure that her fresh take on our usual Christmas card would appeal to Drew and me. It took a lot of rehearsal, but I think we finally got it down, see what you think.
Wishing you a lots of love and hope for a peaceful and joy filled 2010!
The winter solstice is one of my favorite days of the year. It’s a quiet passing of the shortest day and the entrance into a sleepy time of year, but it is also a time to celebrate the coming light. I grew up reciting Susan Cooper’s poem, The Shortest Day, for most of my childhood, and the notion that this magical day has been celebrated for centuries with festivals of light to “drive the darkness away” is so potent to me that I really do get chills thinking about this special night and the ancient practices associated with conjuring light and joy that have been preserved in one form or another through the ages. Though a bit of a Christmas cliche, this year, in the true American tradition of mixing traditions, I thought that I would share the 1897 letter from little Virginia O’Hanlon to the editor of The Sun, as a “modern” reminder of the magic of this season. In this cold dark time of year, when there are two feet of snow muffling all signs of anything green and living outside our door, a little faith, a little magic, and the optimistic glow of our cozy Christmas lights serve to remind me that, “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.” Welcome Yule!
Dear Editor,
I am eight years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says “If you see it in the Sun it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?Virginia O’Hanlon.
115 W.95th St
Answer:
VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except [what] they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank GOD! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
You know how dinner and a glass of wine or two often leads to a lot of good ideas that wind up going down the drain with the soap suds as you clean up at the end of the night? Well recently some friends of our were having such a dinner, had a brilliant idea, cleaned up at the end of the night but kept the idea going, and now it’s a reality! Fall and Winter are unquestionably soup season, but sometimes there’s not enough time to make soup, or like Drew and me, you can find yourself in a bit of a soup rut making the same two or three over and over. Enter the Cville Soup Group! Every Monday a different soup arrives on our doorstep, taking care of dinner and the desire to have something steaming and comforting on these cool days. In turn, we’ll make and deliver soup when our week comes around, and the good soup times will keep on rolling. We’ve been going for about a month now, and all of the soups have been amazing so far! I wanted to collect all of the recipes in one place, so I tossed together a website with the recipes so far and will continue to update it as the weeks progress. If you’re in the mood for soup and want some recipe ideas, you can check it out here, or by clicking on “soup group” on the right hand side over there. Yea for our clever friends and comfort food!
Just a brief update, we welcomed our son, Asher Andrew Walton, into the world today at 12:50 pm. He’s 8 lbs 10 oz and 21.5 inches long, and we are, predictably, smitten. Pictures to follow but first, sleep! Our love and gratitude to all.
(leaves that I snapped around this time last year…)
September has arrived and brought with it cool mornings and the lingering scent of Fall in the air. I woke up this morning and just laid in bed staring out the open window for a while and enjoying the cool 49 degrees that was filling the room around me while I was wrapped in the blankets. These mornings are as delightful as those first mornings in Spring when you can feel the warmth behind the nip, and here we are 6 months laters gingerly feeling out the cool behind the inevitably warmer day. I have gone on and on about this in the past, but I cannot help to celebrate the weather because it does so much to set the stage for our days. We tend to treat talking about the weather as a safe, if not generic conversation topic, but really there is little else that is such an uninhibited and universal experience. It’s happening all around us and it’s something that we really can share together. Perhaps I am particularly excited about these changing temperatures right now because it’s such a tangible marker of the change that is taking place in our life. Laying in bed I was able to feel the coming months with such strong tenderness in the air that I couldn’t help getting a little swept up in the notion that this is going to be a wonderful Autumn season, full of both the nostalgic comforts that I look forward to at this time of year every year, and also chock full of all of those unknowns.
And unrelated, but maybe somewhat related, I had a dream the other night that will bore you if I go into any detail, but the take home point was, what you resist will persist. This is proving to be an incredibly useful mantra of sorts for me as I prepare for labor, and I thought I would throw it out there in case it meant anything to some of you. A very happy September 2 to you!
There’s a compliment that all mothers-to-be like to hear, and that I am fairly certain Drew has been trailing in front of me paying our unsuspecting friends to occasionally pass it along to me, no matter the cost of this kind lie. The old “You are just all baby!” meaning that the unending pregnancy weight gain is magically concentrated on what Hollywood so adoringly calls the bump. Ahem, mountain might be a more appropriate term…I got a bump on my head this morning when I forgot to bend in half to get in the car…that is not what’s happening on the front of this body that was once mine. But enough of that, what I’m getting at here is that, with just three (please don’t be five, please don’t be five, please don’t be five) weeks left to this pregnancy, it’s official, I’m conceding. I’m all baby. Not so much in the way that the compliment was intended (if that we’re the case, people would be saying, “you’re just all ice cream!”) but more in the sense that my brain is all baby. My days are all baby.
To be fair, I made it pretty far, keeping as many of my baby ramblings as possible relegated to this blog, but at this point, I give. I can’t think about much else besides being a mother to this little boy. I am trying to fill my final days with movies (caught The Time Traveler’s Wife last night…please promise that you’ll read the book before seeing the movie, the book is bliss), live music, books, (I refuse to admit to you what series I’m reading right now, but let’s just say that I have to buy it in the teen fiction section and leave it at that), time with Drew, some pesky housecleaning, and my absolute favorite pastime, sleep. I really am, but in between that, I’m shamelessly reading blogs about mothering, touching the things in his room, or just sitting in the rocking chair in his room, eating I’m sure, and staring out the window trying to wrap my mind around what we’re about to do here. I am positive that my voice and eyes take on a new level of excitement (did someone just say hysteria out there in the back??) when my friends ask about something baby related, and relieve me of having to pretend that I’m thinking about those books or movies or current events. I aspire to, and hopefully will be a woman who maintains a sense of life outside of mothering and all, but for right now, for this precious time of our life and the for coming weeks and months, just bear with me. I’m all baby. I’m supposed to be, the system is designed this way. I will jump back into the mainstream at some point, and from what I gather from my friends with babies, will be desperate to talk about books (you know, or read one) and politics and anything else that doesn’t involve the words “butt” and “rash” but for right now…well, sorry, there’s just no hope. I’m all baby.
Ok, so all of that is to say, check out this blog. It’s called How to Photograph Your Baby and is written by Nick Kelsh (responsible for the pictures you see here), photographer and author of a number of books including one by the same title as the blog. For those of you without babies/children/and interest in my current obsession, hear me out…this is an excellent blog about connecting with anything that you love and then taking a photo of it. As an amateur photog, I appreciate the extreme sappiness of his position on the relationship that the photographer assumes with the subject. If you love taking pictures of insects or strangers or your cats or whatever, I think that you’ll enjoy his musings. I know that I am. And as it turns out, I will soon be taking one or two pictures of our baby, so the pointers are appreciated on that subject too. Take a look, and then go have a bowl of ice cream with sprinkles and possibly some chocolate syrup, and think of me.
