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Category: holidays

Holiday Time

Holiday Time

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By December 20 we are deep into Christmas territory. These are days shaped before I had the knowledge to shape them. Days that lasted years when I was a young girl—and that never seemed long enough when I was a young mother.

Now they vanish quickly like the other days. Another work day, check. Another run to the store, to the mall, to the post office. Check, check, check.

How do we get back to the slow times?

Holidays offer promise. They can be fluid and what we make of them. They aren’t bound by the rules of typical time passage. I am holding out hope for them—as I do every year.

Wrap On

Wrap On

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The wrapping station has moved downstairs this year. No more bending over a bed or spreading the paper on the floor. I’ve (mostly) cleared the table behind the couch and will wrap at waist height with a Christmas-tree view.

So far, only a few gifts done … but looking forward to more soon.

Every year I remind myself that the days before Christmas are the best, that as much as I try to enjoy the week between, there’s often an anti-climax about it that requires pushing through.

This requires a two-fold approach: enjoy this time as much as possible … and the days to follow, also.

Hmmm … sounds familiar.

Lighting Our Way

Lighting Our Way

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Last night, Copper and I took a walk after work. I slipped on my reflective vest and we trotted off into the dark evening. It was chilly but not frigid, and Christmas lights made our way much brighter than it would have been otherwise.

Each year I need these lights even more, need their candles in the darkness, their collective fist shaken at the void.

I have my favorites—the classic white-bulbed colonial with the graceful fir swag, the spotlit front door with the fruit-studded wreath, the house with lights around the entire perimeter of the backyard. That house also has a star perched high on its chimney.

I wonder if the people who live there ask themselves, “Do we really want to do this again?” It must be a lot of work, tacking up hundreds of feet of lights. But every year they do it anyway. I hope they know that their lights, their effort, lifts the heart of this pilgrim, and, I imagine, the hearts of others, too.

(Pictured above: outdoor lights of a different sort.) 

We Brake for Trees

We Brake for Trees

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I can’t remember how we discovered Snicker’s Gap, the Christmas tree farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. But I do know that Claire (pictured below with her puppy Bella; her beau, Tomas; and their older doggie, Reese) was in middle school. So it’s been a few years.

And in those few years, a few other people have caught on that trekking out to the country and felling your own fragrant Douglas fir provides more seasonal cheer than driving to the shopping center at the corner and choosing a tree from the parking lot. We did that often, too, when the children were younger. But Snicker’s Gap has been the tradition for 15 years now.

What’s become abundantly clear, especially since yesterday, is that many others have made the same calculation. We waited 30 minutes to get into the place. The lesson for next year: Leave earlier, arrive later … or find a nice tree in a lot somewhere.

Shopping Season

Shopping Season

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What’s the saying, when the going gets tough, the tough go … shopping?

As Americans hit the malls and big box stores, as they weed through websites in search of cyber deals, I think about the pastime of shopping, what it can do for you and what it can’t.

My mother liked to shop. If she had time to kill she would while it away in a store or two.

This is not the way I unwind. Put me in a darkened movie theater or downstairs in the basement with an episode of “The Crown.” For me, shopping is a means to an end.

But the shopping season is upon us, so today I’ll do my bit for the economy. Not with joy or gladness but with a sense of duty.

Gratitude on Ice

Gratitude on Ice

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It’s one of the coldest Thanksgivings on record here, with wind chills in the teens and temperatures that won’t make it out of the 30s. A perfect day to stay inside, chop onions, peel potatoes and baste the turkey, all in a steamy kitchen.

Though it’s tempting to put heat at the top of the list of things I’m most grateful for today, I’m going to push it aside for friends and family. We haven’t celebrated Thanksgiving here for a couple of years, Suzanne and Appolinaire having stepped in as the hosts with the most lately, but today the clan (minus Celia, who’s in Seattle) is gathering here, and by late afternoon there will be a full house.

It has lately been made clear to me (as if I didn’t already know it), just how important family and friends are. Not just for celebrations like today’s, but for the dreary mornings and frantic evenings of life. So on a day for giving thanks, my heart is full of love for the people who make life worth living for me. Not just today but every day.

Sweet Start

Sweet Start

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There was dancing last night to ring in the new year, and so many desserts that I was forced to take a bite of each one. Woke up this morning to a bright new year and a temperature of six (6)!

Weather like this requires a roaring fire, a bit of the bubbly … and dancing, all of which were in ample supply at last night’s gathering.

Add some sparkle and glitz … and it’s not a bad way to enter the new year.

I Wonder as I Wander

I Wonder as I Wander

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The Christmas music season is drawing to a close. My favorite classical station stopped the carols cold-turkey on December 26, though we’ll be singing holiday hymns at church for another couple of weeks. Time to give a nod to a song I’ve heard often this season, a relatively new entry to the Christmas canon, “I Wonder as I Wander.”

It’s a haunting melody in a minor key, more “We Three Kings” than “Joy to the World.” But it is lovely and soft, a light snowfall on a still night. And … it was written by a Kentuckian, John Jacob Niles, a noted balladeer who collected Appalachian tunes later popularized by folk singers in the 1950s and ’60s.

I met John Jacob Niles several times at a Christmas Eve gathering hosted annually by my kindergarten teacher, Grace Cramer Webber, who became a friend of my mother’s. Like Niles, Webber was both behind and ahead of her time.

It isn’t easy to have your carol enter the Christmas canon — but Niles’ song has done just that.  As I listen I wonder, too. Not just about the birth of the baby Jesus, but about the power of music to take us places we otherwise couldn’t go.

Shopping Local

Shopping Local

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Let empty boxes collect at curbsides, let the men in brown dash from truck to stoop. But last-minute shoppers unwilling to pay for overnight shipping (or maybe just people like me, who enjoy a bit of the hustle bustle) were out full force yesterday at the mall.

It felt good to be jostling with other shoppers, to be part of the public square. I’ve been worrying about the public square lately, wondering if its day has passed. Many of the young folks I know shop solely online, and recent forays to the mall have only confirmed the threatened condition of old-time getting and spending.

But yesterday drew out the folks who only shop this time of year: dazed men wandering with shopping bags; the very young and the very old; working folk who seem more at home behind a desk than checking out spatulas in Williams and Sonoma; parents jostling toddlers in the line to see Santa.

All of this in a glorious cacophony of squeaking toys, shouting kids and the nth rendition of “I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus.”

I didn’t have to go to the mall yesterday; I was buying a few extra gifts that everyone could live without. But I’m glad I came.

The News

The News

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For most of the year I grab the Washington Post from the driveway and read it on the way to work. Now I’m reading a different kind of news.

Friends from Groton, Massachusetts, have downsized to Bonita Beach, Florida. Family from South Carolina has met family from Sweden. There have been travels to Italy and Kenya and North Carolina. Children have grown, dogs have been photographed in Santa hats and people I love have lived another year.

Time is always passing, but this is when and how we mark it. Not with rue or agitation. But with joy and gratitude.