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Category: holidays

Door-to-Door

Door-to-Door

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The boxes come in and the boxes go out. In this very different holiday season, I never know what I’ll find when I open the door. A large box or a small envelope. A package that arrives seemingly in the middle of the night — another that arrives during a snow and sleet storm. A box of oranges or a carton of long-awaited gifts — ones I’m giving others that still have to be mailed to distant destinations.

News reports tell of an overwhelmed post office. And no wonder! I feel like they might be overwhelmed just with our stuff alone. 

I’m not a comfortable online shopper. I’d rather see and touch the items I buy before making the purchase. But these days we have little choice. Even before the pandemic, brick-and-mortar stores had begun to limit their selections, to offer to order things for you from their store. 

It’s a more distant and less friendly world we inhabit now, to be sure. I’m hoping that the boxes I send release the warmth I feel when packing them. 

A Paco

A Paco

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A week into December the house gradually assumes a Christmas character. The tree that was biding its time in a bucket is now gracing the far corner of the living room. The piano has its nutcrackers, the Beethoven bust its Santa hat. The jolly cloth wreath is tacked up in the kitchen and silver snowflakes hang from the chandelier. 

But the tree has no ornaments, the banister no greenery and no cards yet grace the mantel. Maybe they will all be as late as mine this year — mine which I just go around to ordering. 

There’s a term I remember from my musical days: “a paco.” It means a little or gradually. It means we’re not going to thunder into the next passage but tiptoe into it gingerly.

That’s the way I feel about Christmas this year. The holiday will be so different, with family members unable to travel here. So best to approach it with caution, to lure it like a shy young bird. Little by little. 

Getting the Tree: 2020

Getting the Tree: 2020

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I worried it wouldn’t be the same this year. No girls along, for the first time in decades. And, more to the point, no Snickers Gap. The little cut-your-own place discovered in the early aughts and now a juggernaut of traffic jams and parking woes.

So instead, it was the tree lot on the corner. Ah, but what a lot and what a corner. The latter an old crossroads with a picturesque white church on a hill. And by going after dark, there was magic at work: piped-in carols, icicle lights in the trees, happy volunteers slapping their mittened hands together to stay warm. 

We found a tree within a few minutes, an aromatic Douglas fir — probably the earliest Christmas tree we’ve ever purchased — and got it home and into a bucket, where it now sits drinking happily. 

Like so much else this year, it’s closer to home, stripped down … but memorable just the same.

Grandparents’ Day

Grandparents’ Day

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It’s the first Sunday after Labor Day, which means …  it’s Grandparents’ Day! This is the first time I’ve ever paid much attention to this day, though I think I occasionally sent my parents my kids’ hand-scrawled notes around this time of year. Now, I’m the grandparent. I’m still wondering how that happened! 

But, since it did, I decided to look into the derivation of the holiday. Turns out, Grandparents’ Day is not a Hallmark creation. It was started in 1956 by a woman in West Virginia who volunteered with older folks and wanted to create a way to honor them. Grandparents’ Day became a national holiday in 1978. 

What I also learned from googling, though, is that today is Father’s Day in Latvia and Macedonia, Day of the Homeland in Germany, and Knabenschiessen (a holiday based around a target-shooting competition) in Switzerland. It’s also National Peanut Day. 

So we grandparents don’t have a lock on this day. Like every other holiday, we have to share it. 

Eggs-travaganza!

Eggs-travaganza!

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Even when it will just be the three of us for actual Easter dinner (as opposed to the virtual one that will take place on Zoom), I still make too much food. A huge bowl of ambrosia, and 18 eggs, which means 36 deviled ones.

I make too much food even when there’s a crowd to consume it. So this year there will be leftovers galore. But they will be eaten, I’m sure of it (quarantines being good for cooking and eating, if not much else).

These deviled eggs — or dressed eggs, as I grew up hearing them called — were made the way I usually make them, which is by taste. I never recall using a recipe. Instead, I imagine Dad whipping up the yolks, adding vinegar and mayonnaise, asking us to taste and tell us if he had the balance right.  In my memory, he always did.

These eggs aren’t exactly ready for a close-up, but they were made with love.

Everyday Epiphanies

Everyday Epiphanies

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This year the feast of the Epiphany falls on the first back-to-work-and-school day. For some, it may even delay the first back-to-work day. For me, back-to-the-office cannot be postponed … so I’ll just have to be astonished by the daily grind.

Maybe this is not such a bad thing. Maybe we need to take our epiphanies where we find them, not just in the grand celebrations of life but in the everyday moments — hopping on Metro, settling into the office, getting a glass of water at the kitchen sink.

It’s difficult to find wonder in the everyday, but it is, I think, what we were born for.

Over Again?

Over Again?

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Even though I worked last Thursday and Friday, I did so at home, so tomorrow looms as the first real return day. In reflecting over the Christmas that was, I relive the lovely moments with family and friends, surely the highlight of this or any other holiday.

I also recall a day I’ll remember for its contentment, when I felt strangely happy. I say strangely because I was fighting a cold and still had a lot to do: all the cards to write, gifts to wrap and baking to do. But the tree was up and decorated and a marathon of biblical movies flickered on TV.

I addressed envelopes and curled ribbons to the soundtrack from “King of Kings” (I watched the film some too, but I listened more than looked). The majesty of that music seemed more fitting than any Christmas carol, and I went about my holiday tasks with a new sense of meaning and anticipation.

It was just a moment, but it was such a pleasant one that it seems to encapsulate all this holiday’s happy moments. Now I sit in front of that same tree, which must soon be taken down, and, well, I just wish I could do it all over again.

2020!

2020!

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Even the numbers look futuristic, and our new year is nothing if not balanced. Is it my imagination or is there a hopefulness among these digits, a sense of vision clear and untrammeled?

It’s too soon to tell, of course, but I’ll enter the new year like I always try to: with more hope than trepidation. I’ll take some deep breaths before the messiness of daily living intrudes upon this blank slate.

And for today, before the newness wears off, I’ll do my usual Janus thing: look back at the past, craft resolutions for the future … and of course, eat plenty of black-eyed peas.

Bounding into the Future

Bounding into the Future

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Copper and I reached the gate at the top of our deck stairs this morning at exactly the same moment that a four-point buck landed in our yard. He had jumped over the fence, trotted down the slight slope and paused in his foraging, as if listening to a faraway call.

I’ve become quite inured to the deer around here. They eat the day lilies and even the impatiens, if there’s nothing else. They cause auto accidents and are responsible for several dents in our cars through the years.

But seeing the buck this morning, so young and strong, stopped me in my tracks. I stared at him, mesmerized, and he stared back. He was beautiful, a messenger from a wild world. And indeed, in some cultures deer are sacred, a symbol of death and rebirth on account of their antlers, which they shed and regrow.

How perfect to see the deer on this day, which is itself a passageway to another world, another decade. I took the fellow as a good omen. And he — since he disappeared with a flash of his white tail — is not around to correct me on this.


(The stag I saw wasn’t white, but he was noble. Photo: Wikipedia)

Fast Away…

Fast Away…

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Tomorrow is the end not just of a year but a decade, so in case this warrants two posts instead of one, I’d better get busy.

First, 2019 wasn’t nearly long enough. It’s a trait this year shares with its recent predecessors and will, I fear, share with its successors, too. On the other hand, the year didn’t drag with direness so I can’t complain.

It’s a year that saw increasing dissension and partisanship, in our country and others, and I worry that 2020 will be worse in that regard.

Then there is the almost 70-degree high predicted for today and all that stands for in terms of climate change and environmental health.

As I look out my window at the bird feeder and the sparrows clustering around it, though, I see a balm for much of what ails us — our dear old Earth, which grows more precious by the hour.