Merry Christmas to all Friends and Loved Ones

and

Even Those I don't know who Visit this Blog!

Snow Pictures

As you can plainly see, we have a little bit of snow at our house and the weather people are promising more.  No matter how much it might rain later we will have a white Christmas up here at 500 feet.  This morning the squirrels were outside, running around in the snow, probably trying to find their old caches of sunflower seeds and when they couldn't dig down far enough to find them they decided to use intimidation instead.  They stood facing the house, staring at me as I looked out at them.  So I bundled up and bowed to their needs and went out and scattered some more birdseed, which is supposed to be for the birds but I am a realist and know that the squirrels will get the bulk of it.  They are sweet, though loud, little creatures, and I know they are just rodents with good PR, but I like them.

Christmas is coming and we are getting fat, let alone the goose.  Lots of cookies and goodies are on the kitchen counter and I love to bake at Christmas, so I will be making more.  My oldest daughter and her fabulous husband are here now and we are all tapping away on our laptops and humming Christmas songs and planning to bake today--french bread and more cookies.  More snow is coming, and so is another daughter and Christmas is only 2 days away.  This will be one for the weather record books, and for the personal record books, too.  How long has it been since I had so many of my children close at this time of year?  It's been almost two decades.  18 years.  We have all changed and not changed.  I am still Mom and my daughters are still little girls to me, even if they have children of their own and my eldest was offered a senior discount the other day, though she is still at least 10 years away from qualifying.  That daughter still has a sneeze just like mine and loves sweets, just like me, and is smart and funny.  Youngest daughter sounds exactly like me and is just as opinionated. We start out right where we left off, even if it was 2 1/2 years ago.  Oldest daughter and I went to Scotland in 2006 and we are enjoying remembering our favorite parts. We be taking many, many pictures to remember this event because it isn't likely to repeat itself soon.  I'll put them on another post, so you can see my girls with their Mom.

I'm trying to convince someone else to go outside and make a snowman with me to surprise my little grandson who will be here on Christmas Day, but so far there are no takers.  We are readers, writers, thinkers and not big action takers.  Fabulous Husband of Daughter was outside chopping and hauling wood this morning, being very useful and he has helped with dishes several times, so his action-taking is at a pretty high level, but I can't blame the rest of them--it's cold out there.  I hope all of you are managing to stay warm and cozy and have all your shopping done and plenty of food in the larder.  Enjoy the beauty of the snow--we don't get to see this much of it very often.  So far the lights have stayed on and we haven't had any adverse affects, so we can be pretty blithe about it.  Hope all is going well for you, too!

"Our contemporary, semi-secular Christmas is similarly a collection of everything yearned for: warmth, plenty, peace, family, conviviality. Like Narnia, the holiday is a fantasy, but there are times when a fantasy is exactly what you need."  Laura Miller NY Times

In her editorial Laura Miller says she reads The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe every year at this time because it means Christmas to her.  She makes a good claim that our present celebration was pretty much invented in Victorian times, by Charles Dickens, Clement Moore, Washington Irving and I would add, Thomas Nast, who gave us the jolly red-suited Father Christmas.  Everything before that, that put Jesus' birth in December, the Christmas Tree, gifts, etc., etc., was handed down over centuries with only second, third, fourth hand reasonings from German, Roman and other pagan civilizations.  Why not celebrate it the way we do--who is to say that the way it has evolved is incorrect or sacrilege?

My daughter-in-law watches It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas time.  She is an admitted Christmas Fiend--the season means as much to her as my books mean to me.  She guards it's sanctity, but her sanctity is not the same as someone else's.  Hers mean that there is a live tree, that each precious ornament, collected over her 33 years and lovingly wrapped and stored, makes it's way carefully to the tree.  It means that Christmas carols are playing all day every day.  It means that her children understand that Christmas is a time of quiet adoration of the tree.  It means that her birthday (in the middle of December) not be confused with The Holiday.  It means that only 3 pieces of tape are used to wrap rectangular presents, so that unwrapping is not torture.  It means gingerbread men made with her kids and beautiful decorated sugar cookies.  It mean reading Christmas storybooks at bedtime.  She is not religious.  Christmas for her has to do with love--of the season and of her family and of the beautiful sparkling trappings of lights in the window and on the trees.

Can't it be that way for any of us?  Isn't it okay to make Christmas into what is good for you?  For me Christmas is my little tree, the beautifully familiar music, giving gifts and baking.  It is an excuse to be sentimental, to eat a little more sugar than usual, to spend money on those I love, to remember Christmases past and to put a glow on them that might not have been there originally, but who cares? Why would anyone care what Christmas means to me and how I keep it?  Why would anyone care if my Christmas is sanctified with Jesus and the Wise Men and the Virgin Mary?  Why would anyone care of I remember The True Meaning?  Everyone's Meaning is True.  If you celebrate Christmas by putting up thousands of lights on your house and making them blink in time to the Trans Siberian Orchestra that's okay with me.  If you chose to celebrate with a dinner of deep-fried turkey, that's okay with me. If you choose to celebrate by buying goats for families in Africa, more power to you. If you don't send cards and don't bake and ignore the whole thing, that's your choice.

I like the red and the green and the sparkle and the smell.  I like the hustle and the bustle and the Merry Christmas greetings from everyone, stranger or not.  Today I am loving the snow and wishing my husband's work would let him go home so that we could enjoy some hot chocolate together before nightfall.  We will build a fire and the flames will dance off the reflective ornaments on my little tree.  The fake candles on the mantle will flicker and if the lights don't go out we can watch Miracle of 34th Street again.  We can think about those we love and eat a cookie and put brandy in our tea.  And Christmas tonight can mean being cozy under a warm blanket with the one I love and the fact or fantasy that for this brief moment, all is well.

From The Land of The Great Yellow Cheese

Ali with Spot the Dog, Mr. Duck and Thirsty Baby Bear

Greetings from Wisconsin, where the men drink beer and cheese, the women make egg casserole and the children area all good-looking.

Would you believe (in the words of Maxwell Smart) that I started this blog when I actually was in Wisconsin and that I've been back since December 9 in the evening?  Would you believe that when there are two granddaughters to play with that there is NO TIME to make blog posts?  That's a fact.  How their Mama finds time to not only make short posts but also upload 1000s of photos to FLICKR I just don't fathom.  She is Wonder Mother for sure.

I had a wonderful time in the Land of the Great Yellow Cheese, though we didn't actually eat much cheese except as a topping for my son's fabulous chicken enchiladas.  Mostly I spent it playing Mr. Duck and Spot the Dog with my granddaughter Alison.  You haven't heard of that game, you say?  That's because it is an original created by Alison and her Grandma Christine.  It involved a stuffed duck, about 5 inches tall and a very small resin Dalmatian, only 2 inches tall at the most.  The game started with Spot asking Mr. Duck if he could possibly help with the large bones that Spot was trying to move to his doghouse.  The bones (plastic croissants from the kitchen set) were awfully large for the diminutive Spot and so Mr. Duck agreed to help out.  Mr. Duck's back story, as imagined by Grandma C., was that his real name or adopted name, was Arnold Duckinator, after his idol of a similar name.  Mr. Duck (or Duckinator) visited the gym regularly to keep his muscles in tone, therefore making it easy to help Spot whenever necessary.  Mr. Duck also had some kind of Arkansas accent and referred to Spot often as Little Buddy.  This game morphed eventually into a more medical theme, as Ali decided Mr. Duck did construction work for a job and was not very handy with his hammer and nail.  It turned out that whenever Spot helped Mr. Duck by holding his nail (a plastic celery from the kitchen set) the hammer would slip and poor Spot would get a wound on one of his paws.  This necessitated cleaning the wound, ointment, bandaging and medicine.  Poor Spot never learned that each time he held the nail he was in danger, so this "treatment" went on and on, day after day, with the washcloths, ointment, bandaids and medicine becoming more and more elaborate.  There were washcloth, bandaid, ointment and medicine cupboards and patterns for cloths and bandaids (the white with black spots bandaids becoming the clear favorite) and flavors of ointment and medicine that ranged from mixed berry to cinnamon.  Ali never got tired of this game and greeted me each morning and after afternoon naps with, "Can we play?"  Of course, I obliged, and I miss our game now and wonder what Mr. Duck and Spot the Dog are up to since Grandma C is not there to participate.  I preferred this game to the one called Farm School that involved Big Stomping Bear and his cub, Thirsty Baby Bear.  This game was shorter and had Baby Bear losing his hat every time and the search for it and Big Stomping Bear being hungry and demanding food.  It also required that the players be on the floor, not a problem for a 3 1/2 year old but a little challenging for Grandma.  The Duck and Spot game was a couch game--much more comfortable.

There were other things that we did.  My son and I visited Stillwater, Minnesota, just across the river, and a German ornament store that has become a favorite with me.  We discovered a cool coffee shop with used mugs and comfy chairs with blankets for chilly bones.  We did our annual visit to The Real Santa in Mall of American and Ali and I played in the snow in 23 degree weather.  It's amazing how relative temperature is.  23 degrees here in Washington is COLD, but in Wisconsin it's moderate for a December day.  I'd look at the temp and declare, "It's 23 degrees!  Warm!" and we'd prepare to go outside.  I got to be there for Zuzu's first birthday, even though it was a tiny celebration.  The real "kid party" would come after I went home.  Mom make a cake and cut it in half, so that the cake that would be destroyed would be Zuzu's and the rest of it would not have hand prints in it.  All except Mom got colds while I was there.  Daddy was trying to recover from a sinus infection and Zuzu was on cold #3.  Grandma and Ali came down with colds on the same day, one day before I left for home.

The 7 full days I was with my granddaughters went by in a blur.  I so wish they lived closer so that airline tickets and packing suitcases was not involved in a visit, but when you raise your kids to be independent how can you get mad at them for being so?

I am home now, looking at their pictures on Flickr and putting my own there, remembering the softness of young skin, the smell of clean hair, the look in Ali's eyes when her Mom told her Grandma was going home the next day.  She gazed at me for a long time, unblinking, her eyes locked on mine.  I wonder what she was thinking.  I was thinking that I love her beyond words to describe and that I will miss her every day until I see her again.  And I'll miss Mr. Duck and Spot, too.