Browsed by
Category: holidays

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Comments 0 Comment

Once again I’ll re-run this blog post, which I wrote ten years ago. Merry Christmas!

12/24/11

Our old house has seen better days. The siding is dented, the walkway is cracked, the yard is muddy and tracked with Copper’s paw prints. Inside is one of the fullest and most aromatic trees we’ve ever chopped down. Cards line the mantel, the fridge is so full it takes ten minutes to find the cream cheese. Which is to say we are as ready as we will ever be. The family is gathering. I need to make one more trip to the grocery store.

This morning I thought about a scene from one of my favorite Christmas movies, one I hope we’ll have time to watch in the next few days. In “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Jimmy Stewart has just learned he faces bank fraud and prison, and as he comes home beside himself with worry, he grabs the knob of the banister in his old house — and it comes off in his hand. He is exasperated at this; it seems to represent his failures and shortcomings.

By the end of the movie, after he’s been visited by an angel, after his family and friends have rallied around him in an unprecedented way, after he’s had a chance to see what the world would have been like without him — he grabs the banister knob again. And once again, it comes off in his hand. But this time, he kisses it. The house is still cold and drafty and in need of repair. But it has been sanctified by friendship and love and solidarity.

Christmas doesn’t take away our problems. But it counters them with joy. It reminds us to appreciate the humble, familiar things that surround us every day, and to draw strength from the people we love. And surely there is a bit of the miraculous in that. 

‘Tis the Season

‘Tis the Season

Comments 0 Comment

The door is wreathed, the gifts are wrapped, the cards are mailed. But there is one more sign that the holidays have truly begun: I’m having cookies for breakfast.

It was a matter of necessity. I needed to remove at least two from the cookie tin in order to fit them in. 

But the fact is that all dietary decorum has broken down. 

‘Tis the season…

Buying Local

Buying Local

Comments 0 Comment
This year’s tree came did not grow on a sloping hillside in the richest county in the United States. We did not wait in line 30 minutes to be allowed the pleasure of cutting it down.

This year’s tree was not bought from Vale United Methodist Church, the white building at an ancient crossroads like a picture postcard with each purchase contributing to a fund to end hunger.

This year’s tree came from a small lot I noticed on the way out of town, a beaten-earth parking lot with a big tacky Santa Claus and a string of simple lights. On our first trip there, we met Bradley from Whitetop Mountain, down near the Tennessee and North Carolina border. His family has been selling trees on this spot for decades, he said.

Bradley apologized. The trees had been picked over, he said, but he was expecting a shipment that very evening. If we liked, he would take our number and let us know when the shipment arrived. I didn’t think we would hear from him, I figured the tree shortage had caught up with us, that we’d have to pay hundreds of dollars for a scrawny spruce.

But by noon last Friday, Bradley texted: the new shipment was in. We hurried over and found a full and fragrant Frasier fir. It now sits proudly in our living room. This year we bought local by necessity. Next year, we’ll buy local by choice.

The Lights

The Lights

Comments 0 Comment

Of all the rituals and practices of the season — the gifts, the tree, the wreath — one means more to me every year. It’s the lights. 

It’s the candles in the windows, the spotlights on the door. It’s the stars on high and the luminaries down below. It’s the icicles hanging from eaves and tree limbs wound with blues, reds and greens. 

It’s these candles in the dark, because that’s what all of them are: our puny fists raised together against the dying of the light. 

Christmas Oratorio

Christmas Oratorio

Comments 0 Comment

Walking to a holiday playlist the other day, I made a merry discovery: the opening chorus of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is just my speed. It’s a bouncy piece of music, and when I was striding down the W&OD trail, dodging the bicycles, it seemed just about perfect.

There’s the timpani pounding out the beat, the flutes trilling in response, the trumpets soaring above it all, and then, of course, the chorus, entering in unison before breaking into various voices throughout the movement.

I looked up the English translation later. “Shout for joy, exult, rise up, glorify the day.”  The kind of words angels might use when announcing the birth of Jesus to shepherds in the fields. 

But even before I knew the meaning, the melody and meter passed through my ears to my feet, in that way that only music can.

The DNA of Shopping

The DNA of Shopping

Comments 0 Comment

My Christmas list has morphed from one that was always on paper, even just a few years ago, to one that’s mostly in the notes section of my phone. 

This parallels my shopping, which has evolved from mostly brick-and-mortar to well over half online. 

I still scrawl gift ideas on slips of paper which I then tuck into my purse. And I still like to go shopping, to physically enter a store, even if I have to wait a few minutes in line or spend more time than I’d like looking for a price tag.

It’s part of the eternal give-and-take of hunting and gathering, a proclivity that I’m convinced is buried deep somewhere in our DNA.

(Not a shopping list, but a shopping district … this one in Lexington, Kentucky.)

What Goes Up …

What Goes Up …

Comments 0 Comment

From my upstairs office window I can see our neighbor’s sad deflated holiday display. The extravaganza is typical of many these days: inflatable snowmen, Santas and reindeer, even inflatable creches, decking the yards this year. 

Tall, imposing, lit from within, these blow-up holiday decorations seem to be everywhere. It’s not brand-new technology, but it seems to have reached a price point or a tipping point that makes it the decoration of choice.

When glimpsed at night among spotlit tree trunks or fairy-lit boughs, these inflatable holiday sculptures are one thing. But when spotted in daytime, without their electrical assist, they are quite pitiful: a bunch of unblown-up balloons littering the half-dead grass of early winter.

Inflatable Santas: what goes up, must come down. 

Decoration Inflation

Decoration Inflation

Comments 0 Comment

I heard it first at the dentist’s office a couple weeks ago. The assistant who was prepping me for a procedure lamented that it was almost October 1. “And you know what that means,” she said. “Next thing you know it’s Halloween, then Thanksgiving, then Christmas and New Years.” 

Of course, she’s right. And I probably feel it more than she does, too, being a decade or two older. I notice this holiday speed-up not only on television, where ads for holiday films fill the airwaves, but also in the neighborhood.

It’s not that people are lighting trees and plugging in inflatable Santas just yet. But I’ve noticed a steady “decoration inflation” the last couple of years, driven, I imagine, by what’s available to buy. Which means that a home without spider webs in the trees and smiling pumpkins on the lawn looks downright miserly.

At my house, it still looks like summer.: potted geraniums on the front stoop, roses in the backyard, a flowering hosta by the garage. So I have forgone the mums and ornamental cabbage. I haven’t even bought a pumpkin yet. Here the fall decor is only what nature supplies: turning leaves and the red berries of the dogwood tree. 

Taking Care of Business

Taking Care of Business

Comments 0 Comment

Today is a work holiday, which means that it’s a Day to Get Things Done. What kind of things? Applying generous electronic gift cards to electronic accounts, for instance. 

I’m famous (or infamous) for letting gift cards go unspent. I imagine many of us are; retailers count on it. But this way, that will be harder to do (if all these pronouns make sense). 

Of course, electronic to-dos aren’t the only ones I have today. There are other, more tangible tasks: cleaning and cooking and decluttering … the endless list. Guess I’d better get to them!

(Detail of a surface that needs dusting …) 

Jammin!

Jammin!

Comments 0 Comment

Every year at Christmastime, Mom made a jam cake. It was a recipe from Dad’s side of the family, and was passed down with great care. Mom copied the recipe over several times, but she saved the old versions. Reading through them, which I did to make sure I was getting the ingredients right, was like an archaeological dig; there was the same fragility to the oldest artifact.

Once I figured out that the “modern version” (which included purple crayon scribbles, proof of its age) was indeed a fair and true copy, I still had to make the cake, which began, as it did for Mom, with an all-out search for jam with seeds. In my case, the search took me 20 miles away, to a Walmart Super Store in Sterling. (I found this highly ironic since Mom never visited a Walmart; she thought the stores were destroying small-town America — and in this case, as with so much else, she was right.) 

Once the jam was purchased and the other ingredients assembled, I proceeded to make the cake. Mom had always made a very big deal of it, as if she was making a four-tier wedding cake. How hard can it be, I wondered. 

Pretty darn hard, it turns out. There is the sheer muscle involved in stirring the thick batter. There’s separating the six eggs, beating the whites till frothy (I was convinced I had botched this part) and pre-mixing certain ingredients (such as vinegar and baking soda) before adding them to the batter. 

By the time I got the cake in the oven, it looked like a small tornado had ripped through the kitchen. But after a tense baking period (I can remember holidays where the jam cake fell — and that was not a pretty sight), the cake emerged more or intact. I couldn’t have been prouder. Now all I had to do … was frost the thing.