Christmas Ruminations

Little toy trains, little toy tracks

Little toy drums, coming from a sack

Carried by a man, dressed in white and red

Little one, don't you think it's time you were in bed?

The great Roger Miller wrote the words, Raffi sang the song my kids grew up with.  I was listening to The Prince of Frogtown by Rick Bragg, who was also, to my great fortune, the reader.  He was describing a scene around Christmastime, as he was wrapping presents and unconsciously singing to himself those words that his step-son, "the boy," overheard.  His wife told him the boy was in the next room grinning ear to ear because he thought Rick was singing to him.

When I planned my December week in Florida, I chose a Christmas novel on audio for the car, as well as the many print holiday novels that I was planning on reading at the resort.  I also finally learned to make a playlist on iTunes, and titled it, "Christmas."  The whole inspiration for that being that I wanted to hear Raffi sing "Little Toy Trains" on the drive.

I didn't like Raffi much when I first heard of him.  It was a video given to my baby daughter by her Aunt Jennie.  There were instructions that came with the video.  Raffi, it seemed, did not want kids going to his concerts until they knew the words to his songs.  Well, really, I huffed, what a tyrant.  But in fact I am that parent that teaches my kids the words before they go to a concert, not so they would behave, but because I love to sing, and I loved to sing with them.  And over their childhood years, I came to love Raffi.  Like me, he doesn't have much of a voice, although he does tend to hit the right notes more often than I do.  But like me, what he lacks in vocal depth he makes up for in earnestness.  Turns out he's the uncle that kids like to sing along with.  So Raffi's Christmas Album, along with Raffi's Christmas Treasury were staples at our house, and are still treasured reminders of my Christmases with my kids.

All my Christmases haven't been great, but over my 64 years of Christmas, I have had some very fine moments.  Even in my childhood home, I remember with happiness the trees, going from live to shiny silver fakes over the years.  Though arguments, derision and tension played too much a part of the holiday, I still remember the excitement of Christmas morning, the bells that my father would ring, calling, "Ho ho ho, Merry Christmas" in his deep, broken English (I have those bells, or ones just like them, and I carried on the tradition.  The bells remain in my night table drawer, and I hope to pass them on to one of my kids for their kids.)

I remember the bride dolls sent by family in Sardinia, so beautiful that my father decided that to prevent my sister and I from ruining them, he would keep them stored in their boxes in our attic.  And he would bring them out every now and then and let us look at them.  I'm not sure, but I think he eventually broke down and let us have them and we in turn ruined them.  I'm just guessing; my sister has a better memory for the details of my family history than I.

I remember the bride dolls from Christmas when I was little. When I was a pre-teen there was a hi-fi under the tree for me.  A hi-fi, but Santa hadn't thought to bring records, so my father took me to a record store where I bought five singles, and then when I went grocery shopping with my mother she would sometimes let me buy an LP from what was a very odd assortment of sale records.  I drove my parents crazy with that hi-fi, and when I got to be an actual teen, and we progressed to actual war, at some point my father took the hi-fi downstairs, so that I could no longer listen to it in my room.  Some nights, after dark, and everyone in bed, I would creep downstairs and listen, in the dark and very quietly, to "The Sounds of Silence."  But that is another story.

My point is that Christmas with all its human failings, was a wonderful holiday.

When I got older and got a car, I spent Christmas Eve night at my best friend Arlene's.  The drinking age back then was 18 and I had started drinking with gusto around then.  Arlene's dad, Fred, made me my first Manhattan -- his drink of choice -- and then quite a few more.  They were a warm family that took me in at a time when I needed a warm and loving family.  To this day I only want Manhattans during Christmas season, and they always taste like Christmas, and I always make a toast to Fred who cared about me when my own father did not.

I believe it was when I moved to Maryland, when I was 26, that I began to host Christmas tree trimming parties.  The first one was a lonely affair, the timing was wrong and no one came.  But they grew into happy events with good friends, some new each year, and left me with ornaments (including a series of Peanuts balls that were marked with the year)...

...as well as memories.  My favorite memory was the year I had a small apartment in Baltimore, with a tree that was badly anchored, and a candle on the table next to one of my then traditional brandy soaked fruitcakes.  The story goes -- and I have it in writing somewhere -- that either the tree or rambunctious celebrating caused the candle to tip into the fruitcake which lit up festively.  My friends Christine, from whom I have sadly lost touch, or Susan, with whom I have recently reconnected, could tell you better the details.

When I had my own kids, Christmas exploded.  I began shopping on December 26th for the following year, and started baking cookies well before Thanksgiving.  We made gingerbread together, once I learned the best recipe in my son's first grade class, and made gingerbread boys and girls and trees and stockings, all decorated to within an inch of their existence.  I had also been making gingerbread houses since I discovered the pattern and recipe in The Foods of the World Cookbook:  Germany, but only every few years.  Because it took that long for me to forget what a pain in the ass it was and look forward to making it again.

Mine really looked like this -- once.

Our trees were big and beautiful, and each year I bought at least one new special ornament.  Harps and horns, angels and nutcracker soldiers, bells and icicles, doves and... lobsters.  And of course little toy trains and little toy drums.  I learned to make salt dough ornaments and gave away dozens and hung dozens more.  It was a production that grew larger every year.

We went to visit Santa each year, of course.  One year my daughter brought her list to Santa at the Saint James General Store.  He took the list and pored over it as though he had never seen anything like it.

Santa was in the shed around back.

Another year we met Santa at the Stony Brook Post Office, and he was again delighted to see my children.  I have a photo collage of all the different years of Santa and my kids.  This year I urged my daughter to take the collage home with her, and some of the decorations.  It was my idea, as it is time for her to begin her own family Christmases, but yet there was a small pain in my heart when she took them.

Now I celebrate Christmas quietly, reading Christmas themed books and sometimes listening to my Christmas music.  Lately my son has been coming once a year for a few days at Christmas.  I'm glad to see him, but it takes us a few days to be comfortable with each other, so it is a bittersweet visit.

I love Christmas.  I love it as much because of its winter solstice origins as the Christian myth.  I believe Christmas is the powerful holiday it is because the joy and hope of celebrating the days getting longer merged with the myth of everlasting life.  That candy canes and bearded men with bags of gifts share the holiday with choirs and, yes, Jesus.  That is what makes Christmas such a very full holiday.

If you look around America, you can't hardly swing a dead cat without hitting a Christmas symbol, or walk into any store without hearing Christmas music.  It starts too early, saturating our existence and, sadly, it has to do mostly with making money.  But even so, lights and songs and reindeer make it hard to forget what season it is.  So I wonder about people who rant about having Christmas taken away from them.  After all, if you own the spirit of Christmas, it can't be taken away from you, and the signs are pretty strong that nobody's going to be taking away the symbols.

In fact, a lot of those who are not religious, like myself, still love the holiday, its symbols and its meaning.  But it is tainted these days not just with the manipulations of capitalist greed but with the rage and jealousy of those who claim to be its defenders.

These days there is a self-consciousness about Christmas that causes some to make the greeting sound more like a challenge.  And others to be afraid to extend it.  And the recipients to sometimes wonder if it is intended as a dismissal of their own beliefs.

But life is too short to waste overanalyzing a holiday season that means so much.  The joy of Christmas is certainly in the story of a baby's birth, in the world's celebrating an event that might have been so common.  It is not really the "king of the world" business for me, but the way all creatures from kings to sheep to other children, stop to honor a baby's birth.  But it is also the pleasure of celebrating friends and family, the giving of gifts, the sharing of wonderful food, the singing of songs, that makes this time of year so wonderful.  

So I decided to stop worrying about how to greet people, and how they greet me.  Wish me a Merry Christmas if you like.  I love Christmas.  I also love the spirit of St. Patrick's Day parades and parties, of chocolate rabbits and Easter Eggs.  I don't think too much about serious holidays, although I wish they hadn't become an excuse for "holiday sales" and messages of faux patriotism by politicians.  Thanksgiving was once thought of as the only holiday that hadn't been commercialized, and now Walmart employees have to go to work not just at the crack of dawn on Friday, but on Thanksgiving as well.  The Macy's parade is an excuse for Christmas advertisements that has become more blatant every year.  But for now, at least, stores are mostly closed on Christmas Day, and our merchants have kept the after-Christmas sales to after Christmas.  

Over the years I have made my own Christmas, as most of us that celebrate it do.  It fills my heart.  I hope this December you fill your heart with your own holiday, and whatever special it means to you. 

  

In Each Moment

I have been lately looking around and considering where I am.

The other day, for instance, I stopped and looked around my double-wide.  For as long as I can remember I had wanted a house with a library.  Well, I don't have a "library."  My entire house is pretty much a library, with bookshelves filled in every room, and in some cases, books just stacked on tables and floors.  The books have meaning for me; in some ways they represent my entire life.  I realized that I have the library I always wanted.  The thought surprised me, and made me feel content.

When I moved to Charleston some seventeen years ago, just me and my kids, I was on my own, and that was okay.  In that first year, a nice guy was doing work around my house, and I asked if he wanted a slice of the pizza I had just made for dinner.  He said no thanks, it was the night of his monthly dinner meeting with friends.  I felt a bit sad at that.  I liked eating out, and I missed friends.

But somewhere along the way, I found friends, and we have so much in common.  I now have more lunches and dinners with friends than I probably should.  We have books in common so that I am always being led to another story, another idea, and they will always allow me to tell them about the book I have just read that they would love.  And we share values, both Democratic and democratic, so that my work, now that I am retired, has a sense of purpose and fulfillment, and of community.  And we have laughs, which is as important to me as anything.

My kids are gone now, and that transition has been tough.  But they are doing great things, and even though I may feel more insecure about where I am in their lives than anything else, I am learning to just take pleasure in our relationship, because they both give me great pleasure.

My husband's death, a year ago, was a loss that also led to finding a piece of a puzzle that had been eluding and frightening me all my life.  As I looked around at people who would inevitably die, and wondered at how to accept the fact of my own death, I began to live differently.  Instead of thinking about where I would be in x-number of years, I think about what a day it is today.  The hardest thing about death I think is imagining life going on without me.  But when I die, so does that consciousness.  That makes the present moment the more valuable.

So here I am as Thanksgiving approaches, a very different time for me than it was a year ago.  I am feeling a wholeness I hadn't felt until this year.  And while I know there will be struggle, frustration and sadness, and there are moments when the thought of dying takes my breath away, I know I will get through it and on to that place of contentment again.

Love Has Nothing to Do with It

In my short career as a Master Gardener, before the southern clime killed my once-green thumb, I learned that not everything we call "bugs" is a bug.  Apparently some are not bugs but are "insects" or "arachnids" but Dictionary.com has assured me that it's okay for plain old folks like us to just say "bugs."  Although I prefer to call them "damned bugs."

You can tell it's spring because on the very first and most beautiful days the gnats come out to enjoy the weather.  I bought my house in April sixteen years ago, and around 5:00 p.m. I stopped to make a call at a pay phone (yes it was that long ago), and I was viciously attacked by thousands of gnats.  All y'all know what that feels like.  I had never experienced anything like that, but I had already had the closing on the house and my fate was sealed.

The thing about gnats, though, and now I can say it with a number of years' experience, is actually two things:  1) when they attack they actually are doing something to you that has to do with their survival, and 2) Avon Skin-So-Soft.

The April of my second year I was having a deck built for my pool.  It was early evening and there were a bunch of pretty sturdy guys outside hammering away.  Then there was a knock on my door.  The contractor, a big, sturdy guy, wanted to know if I by any chance had some Skin-So-Soft that he and his workers could use.  They were being driven to absolute distraction by the gnats.  Sadly, I had none, but that was how I learned of the survival effects of that amazing Avon product.

Avon, by the way, has preferred to miss out on the greatest money-making ad campaign ever by not advertising that it keeps gnats away.  I don't understand it myself, because I would be much more likely to spend too much money for skin cream that has been proven for decades to keep away gnats than for one that just keeps my skin moist and sweet smelling.

And another thing about Avon Skin-So-Soft is that, up until a few years ago, it had a scent that took me back to my childhood when my very own mother used it up in Rhode Island.  So, for me, Skin-So-Soft has been a win-win.  Not to mention a victory against gnats.

But let's proceed with the spring bug procession.  At some point fairly early the days get really hot.  This is when even gnats are smart enough to go to wherever they were before the nice weather arrived.  This is when the really stupid bugs come out.  No, I'm not talking about beetles, although they are right up there when it comes to stupidity.  I'm talking about what we here in the South call "love-bugs."

Like gnats, they annoy us in both spring and fall, and in opposite order:  in the fall, the love-bugs come out around September, and then when the weather gets really fine, they go away and the gnats come out.  I don't call them love-bugs, and I'll tell you why.

The first time I saw them (I had left in April after the house closing and returned at the end of June for good so I missed the spring infestation.) was in September.  I had dropped the kids off at school and, back home, walked to the back of my back yard, to what I had proudly come to think of as "my pond".  There I encountered the weirdest creatures I had ever seen, bugs that were attached to each other in pairs, flying around in a drunken, Woodstock-like manner and for no apparent reason, landing on me.

My neighbor came over for a visit, and she laughed when I asked her what the hell was going on.  "Those are love bugs."

Really?  Really???

These are the absolute ickiest bugs I have ever dealt with.  They spend about 24 hours stuck to each other before they die.  Their whole entire purpose is to procreate, although describing it as procreation is just too polite for what they do.  The smaller of the two is the male, and at times you will see some really pathetic single males with their teeny tiny penises curled and ready to spring into action, if only they can find a female.  These creatures do not eat, they only live to spawn.  In the morning, as the day heats up, I have had to leave my favorite reading spot on my porch to hide inside, because the hundreds of pairs of these dirty things constantly landing on me was too disgusting to tolerate.  And apparently, Wadmalaw Island is one of the favorite honeymoon spots for love-bugs.

So let me continue the story of my first love-bug season of my first year on Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina.

After my encounter at the pond, the invasion got worse.  And worse again.  Possibly the winds were blowing them up from their homeland of Florida.  It was the year of Hurricane Floyd, which did just enough damage to cut the electricity for several days.  There I was, standing on a chair trying to clean all the litter from the oaks (I prefer to call them "damned oaks") while those stupid bugs came flying into me and just sticking there.  Which, by the way, they are easy to swat because, unlike flies, they don't have the good sense to move when threatened, but they are also full of what I like to call "goo."  You know, because of what they are doing.

Too many weeks went by, and the love bugs were thick and stupid.  Thick in the sense of so many that I read in the Post and Courier that social engagements in the Lowcountry, from oyster roasts to wedding receptions, were being canceled or moved indoors because, well, you can just imagine....  Thick in the sense that they gummed up car engines and destroyed paint jobs...

not to mention made visibility near impossible.  This happens because not only do they love heat, but they find the heat of gas fumes even more irresistible.  Which made mowing the lawn one of the more excruciating outdoor activities of the season.

And, finally, they were thick in the sense of when they swarmed onto the porch in the heat of the day, they tended to die there, leaving a quarter of an inch of dead bug to sweep up, daily.

I wish I could say I was exaggerating.  Fortunately, there has only been one other infestation nearly as bad in my time here.  I like to think that the colder winters are wiping them out.  It could be their own stupidity, but they seem to be doing just fine in Florida.

I decided to write this post because, to my astonishment, there are people who live a mere twenty miles from me who have not experienced the bizarre love-bug event.  In fact, a friend told me last week that she had seen pictures, but never encountered a love-bug in reality.

It seems that, as with gnats, if you live here you just ought to have that experience.

Wikipedia notes that they are also called honeymoon fly, kissingbug, and two-headed bug.  I believe that these are all inaccurate, although two-headed bug comes close.  The only truly accurate nomenclature for these freaks of nature is "fuck bug."  Because love has nothing to do with it.