Christmas Past

My mother has been gone for over seven years, yet I woke up at four this morning thinking about all the wonderful Christmases we shared when I was a child. We didn't have much, but we had love and fun and time together.

My mother raised me alone. My father, the sperm donor, left the family before I was a year old. I spent many of my formative years in a house filled with women: a grandmother, an aunt, a mother, and me.

As Christmas grew closer, the bestest odors came from the kitchen. Mother made terrific tollhouse cookies. She wasn't fancy. She just used the recipe on the back of the Nestle chocolate chip package. She let me eat a little bit of raw cookie dough. We didn't know it was bad for us. So far, it hasn't killed me. Grandmother made peanut butter and oatmeal cookies. I got to press the fork on the peanut butter balls to flatten them and put the criss-cross pattern on them. My aunt baked pies -- apple, pumpkin and cherry. Nothing was low fat.

On Christmas day, my aunt and mother would get up at three in the morning to put the turkey in. My mother always received a turkey from her boss, and it was the biggest damned bird you ever saw. Eventually, the cooks would make stuffing, sweet potato casserole, fresh vegetables (I confess. To this day, I have never had green bean casserole.), creamed peas and onions, tomato aspic. Without all of these foods, it wouldn't have been Christmas. Add pickles and olives on toothpicks stuck in a ceramic rooster and canned cranberry jelly and the table was ready.

With all these aromas floating in the air, what do you think is my favorite Christmas smell?

New crayons. I get a box of new Crayolas every year, along with coloring books. To this day, a box of Crayolas takes me back to Christmas mornings when I was a little kid.

I miss my mother, today as much as any other day. I'd walk a thousand miles to open one more Crayola box from her. I miss you, Mini Mommy.

Communicating

I'm old enough to remember sending out paper Christmas cards. I even wrote letters to go in each. Not a generic Christmas letter, but hand-written personal notes to friends and family. I'd start around November 1 in order to get 100 cards and letters done and mailed.

About a dozen years ago, I wussed out and wrote the generic Christmas letter. Around eight years ago, I turned that task over to my cat. I took more shortcuts: printed labels, return address labels, etc. I also reduced the number of cards sent. I decided if I didn't receive a card, the people to whom I was mailing cards weren't interested in what I was doing. I didn't want to annoy them. This year, I mailed fewer than 50 cards and letters.

What I'm seeing in return is a shift in the way we think about communicating. E-mail used to be a good way of sending notes to our friends. Individual notes with actual news in them. Health updates. Travel updates. A real message addressed to me. I noticed a subtle shift a few years back. More messages came in addressed to me but were clearly generic in nature. Many of my friends discovered the .bcc function in e-mail programs. Notes moved from personal to impersonal.

Time passed and people discovered Facebook and Twitter. Now, I get postings all day long from my friends. It's easy to send out a blast on FB and think you are communicating. You are, but you aren't reaching me on a personal level. Maybe you don't want to. (Think about Obama using the teleprompter instead of looking into the camera. I'm sitting in front of the TV, dammit. LOOK AT ME.)

I've been thinking about this a lot. We've lost the ability to reach people on a personal level. We mistake pokes, and jokes, and forwarded messages for communication. It's not helping us relate to our children. Oh, what's that you say? You just text your kids when you want to get their attention. At the dinner table. In the same room. In the same house. How silly is that?

Know that I'll read your messages with the attention they deserve. And then I will hit the delete key on e-mail to kill a FW: FW: FW: joke or ignore the message on FB.

I was looking through a desk drawer last weekend. It was like an archaeological dig. I discovered a fountain pen that belonged to my great-grandfather. It has a lever to draw ink into the barrel from a bottle that used to sit on his desk. I held it for a long time. What would it be like to sit with fine stationery and write a letter using a fountain pen again? Probably would make the recipient drop dead in shock. I don't want that responsibility.

Holiday Musings

Again with the musing, you say. Yup. Get used to it. I like to think about what holidays mean, what they don't mean, and how to get the most pleasure out of them.

With Thanksgiving behind us, I turned my attention on "what's next." First, it was disemboweling the turkey carcass and turning it into sliced meat for sandwiches and broth for hearty soups. Then it was pulling the Christmas decorations out of the garage and dragging them to the front porch.

Thank goodness for more football games than any human should watch. With various games in the background, I managed to get the tree up, decorate it, and decorate the remaining hard surfaces in the house. That is, those hard surfaces that I felt like decorating.

Like many people, Terry and I have waaaay too much stuff for the holidays. Not everything comes out every year. A few things stay behind and are not seen for years. One of these days, I'll find them and march them over to Goodwill. Maybe someone else will display them.

Still, I am as decorated as can be.

While all this activity was going on, I realized how happy I am. I love my husband and our life. I might even love it more if I weren't working three days a week. I don't yet know when I'll pull the plug, but having nine days off in a row made having nine more off in a row veeeery attractive.

Thanksgiving Musings

I have so much to be thankful for every day of the year. Sometimes, though, it is a good thing to take stock of the list. Today is that day.

I am grateful for my family, in all its iterations and variations. We are not a "typical" family, whatever that is. We all have good health, keen minds, and jobs. In today's environment, all three have equal weight in the plus column. My husband and I will become grandparents for the first time next spring, so we are doubly grateful for the little pink peanut growing in Aleta's womb.

I am grateful for finding my sense of place. After decades of living hither, tither and yon, I am so glad Terry and I found our sense of place at Smith Mountain Lake. I can lay my eyes on still or roiled waters. I can look at mountains near enough to touch. I am grateful for the artistic and literary communities that have embraced me and encouraged me to follow my dreams.

I am grateful that I live in a counntry where I can engage in political discourse and peaceful discord without fear of reprisal or arrest. I may not like everything that is going on, but I pray that cooler heads will prevail and collectively we can move the country forward one baby step at a time.

I am grateful for the turkey roasting in the oven, for being able to put food on the table, for my loving husband, and all my friends.

I wish everyone a loving and restful day. As for me, I plan to spend the afternoon in a turkey coma watching football. Happy Thanksgiving everyone.