Keeping busy, staying happy

Initially, it seemed like such a good idea. Since Holly was off to spend the weekend with her cousins, it was the perfect time for Rick and me to bring Tim and three of his friends up to Maine for Tim’s belated birthday celebration.  Both kids would have something special to do; neither one would feel left out of the fun.

But as the weekend approached, I began to suspect I’d taken on a little bit too much at one time. My mind was a jumble of details. Had I submitted the paperwork to the airlines for Holly to fly as an Unaccompanied Minor? Had I researched the ferry schedule in case Tim and his friends wanted to go biking on one of the Casco Bay islands? What time would we need to leave for the airport to get Holly checked in for her Friday morning flight? How many quarts of milk and orange juice would four 16-year-old boys consume in 48 hours? Did I have the two forms of ID I’d need for expedited airport security? Did Rick have the access card to the Portland garage?

By Friday morning, I thought my head would burst open and all the details would come rolling out. Just get through this weekend, I coached myself. Just get Holly safely off to DC; just keep the boys well-fed and reasonably supervised; and then you can de-stress.

And whether because of, or in spite of, my stressing over all the details, everything went beautifully. Holly had a wonderful time visiting her cousins. Tim and his friends were boisterous and cheerful, and much to my surprise, there was still food left in the pantry when their weekend in Maine ended.

Okay, I told myself when I woke on Monday morning. Now you can stop worrying about the weekend. It’s behind you and it was a success.

And then I remembered that Thanksgiving is in ten days and I still haven’t ordered our turkey (or the chicken or duck that we’ll need to make Tim’s beloved Turducken). Also the annual gathering Rick and I host every year for my high school crowd is next Monday and I should start planning for that. Also we need to choose a date for the annual holiday cookie exchange, which usually falls the first week in December. Also I should start working on our Christmas card.

It’s the nature of life as we currently live it that there aren’t really days when nothing needs to be planned or assessed or overseen. And sometimes it’s stressful. Especially at this time of year. I try to remind myself it’s all supposed to be fun, and if the stress of any individual undertaking outweighs the fun, I shouldn’t do it.  After all, we don’t have to host the annual high school gathering. We don’t even have to host Thanksgiving. And we certainly don’t have to send out Christmas cards.

But we will do all of those things, because ultimately, the fun does outweigh the stress, or the traditions wouldn’t exist.

In this morning’s paper, I read an article about homeless women in Boston who are now sleeping in parks and under bridges because the shelter in which they were living abruptly closed due to infrastructural problems.

“That’s what stress looks like,” I reminded myself. “Carrying around your belongings in a cardboard box because you have no place else to put them. Trips to visit cousins….belated birthday celebrations….holiday parties….holiday poems….those are not stress. Those are recreation.”

Of course they are, and of course any one of the women in the article would happily (and probably quite capably) take on any one of my sources of anxiety.

Have fun, I reminded myself. The holiday season is beginning.

And I will. I’ll remember that the stress and anxiety are trivial compared to the joy of getting together with family and friends. And it will all be wonderful, just as it is every year. 

Peaceful and joyful

Not long after Halloween, a friend described her daughter practicing Christmas carols on the piano. "I know this is early, but it sounds so peaceful and joyful," she wrote.

Perhaps this is true of all writers, but certain words catch my ear in a particular way: a simple phrase that, when dissected, can't possibly be original or unique, but somehow hits me as if it is. "Peaceful and joyful" – it may not quite bear the resonance of t.s. eliot’s "When the evening is spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table" or Robert Frost’s "The woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have promises to keep" and yet their pairing jingled in my mind as pleasingly as the Christmas carols must have sounded to my friend when she wrote that.

Peace and joy are words that are often twinned in the holiday season, of course. And surely those two abstract nouns are among the most noble goals to which we might strive. But “peaceful and joyful” are a more tempered version. Adjectives, not nouns, and somehow more modest and relative in nature. Even when the absolutes of peace and joy seem impossibly out of reach, the adjectival forms seem possible: even if we haven’t achieved peace and joy on either the universal or the domestic level, an 11-year-old playing Christmas carols can still be deemed peaceful and joyful.

I liked the phrase so much I decided to adopt it as a holiday season mantra and resolved that everything I choose to do under the umbrella of the holiday season had to fit into one category or the other, or better still into both.

This isn't to say I expect the entire month of December to be peaceful and joyful for me. There are other things I'll still need to do -- like buying groceries, and folding laundry, and commuting to work -- that may seem neither peaceful or joyful. But anything I opt to do in the name of the holiday season -- any party I attend, any gift-buying excursion I embark upon, any hours spent creating the perfect holiday newsletter -- are hereby required to fit into at least one of the two categories.

It’s a little simplistic as a benchmark, I realize. Peace and joy should be hallmarks of everyone’s holiday season, and for that matter, everyone’s non-holiday season as well. And I’m sure I’ll still find myself standing in a long checkout line or baking Christmas cookies at midnight at some point this month, feeling neither peaceful nor joyful. But I still like those guidelines. Peaceful. Or joyful. Maybe even both. As a way of approaching the holiday season, it just sounds right.

Christmas season under way

It goes without saying that really bad things can put the holiday stress into perspective. Find the perfect gift doesn’t seem all that important when you compare it to feeling assured that your kids will make it home from school at the end of the day.

But it’s perhaps less often observed that really good things can put the holiday stress into perspective too. Though I wouldn’t use the term “stress” to describe it, I was feeling a little overwhelmed with To Do items yesterday. I had two articles to file, three batches of candy to make, eight co-worker gifts and six teachers’ gifts (of the aforementioned homemade candy) to assemble, a Christmas Eve menu to plan, a few Christmas cards still to address and mail, and a handful of holiday-related errands left to complete.

And no matter how many times I told myself none of this really mattered, I wasn’t convinced. We wanted to give all those gifts of candy. We wanted to be sure the kids’ stockings were filled. We wanted to drop off the donation at the toy drive. And I didn’t think the oncoming holidays were any excuse for missing work deadlines, with their compelling incentive at this time of year of the paychecks that follow the deadlines.

Still, I was aware that I was starting to lose sight of the Christmas spirit. I wasn’t irritable, just frazzled. It was only two days ago that I mailed the last of the forty letters I was obliged to write on behalf of Carlisle Santa, and a bad cold earlier in the week set me back a little bit as well.

But late Wednesday night, my sister and her kids arrived at my parents’ house for a pre-Christmas visit. Holly and Tim played with their cousins all Thursday afternoon; after dinner we brought the cousins back here for still more fun.

I set to work packing candy gift boxes with the sounds of the four cousins laughing, singing, wrestling and dancing in the background, and that, more than anything else, reminded me of what the focus of Christmas should be: happy times together. Recipients always appreciate our homemade candy, but no one was actually going to notice or care whether there were four different kinds in their box or only three. Christmas Eve guests wouldn’t check under the dining room table to see how thoroughly I vacuumed. And my kids don’t even really keep track anymore to see if they have the same number of gifts in their stockings.

In short, none of the bustling around mattered all that much, but not until the house was filled with the sounds of kids playing together – long-distance cousins who don’t see enough of each other throughout the year but always fall immediately into the same joyous hilarity when they get together – was it absolutely clear to me what mattered. This: their silliness, their clamor. Never mind the housecleaning or the dessert-making or ensuring that every card is mailed in time to arrive by Christmas. The cousins were playing together and being loud and silly, and so at our house, Christmas had begun.

 

My holiday season indulgence: A night of middle school music

I have many friends whose idea of self-indulgence during the holiday season involves pedicures, massages, or long lunches at fine restaurants.

Mine is a lot more low-budget. My yearly December indulgence is attending the middle school holiday concert.

Last night, just as with every year, someone I run into in the audience is bound to look at the stage, look down at their program, and say in a slightly puzzled tone, “So Tim is in the chorus this year…? Or Holly is playing with the jazz band….?”

Their puzzlement is justified. Neither of my kids is in any musical group associated with the school (or any musical group not associated with the school, unless you count Holly hiphop-dancing on her bed while blasting her iPod), and they can’t imagine why I’d bother to spend a whole evening during the busiest time of year attending a school concert if neither of my kids will be on stage.

But that’s just what makes it an indulgence: I’m under no obligation whatsoever to be there. I go just because I so enjoy hearing talented kids sing and play instruments, and I get such a kick out of seeing them all so dressed up and engaged in the moment of performance. As they file onto the stage, pick up their instruments, train their gaze on the conductor, bow to the audience’s applause….it’s such a different view of the same kids whom I normally see thundering in and out of the school cafeteria or swarming the soccer field or jostling each other in line at the ice cream stand. This is the side of them that foretells a different kind of future ahead: one in which they know how to carry themselves with dignity, dress formally, follow someone else’s lead in order to create magnificent results.

So I go to the yearly holiday concert because it’s such a pleasure to witness this, but also because in some small way, I feel like it’s an important exercise in conquering the tendency to rush through the holiday season. Yes, there were many things I could have been doing with those same two hours, many items that would be crossed off my To Do list today if I’d skipped the concert. I might have made some progress with holiday baking. I might have mopped the kitchen floor. I might have packaged the gifts that need to be mailed to Colorado by this weekend. Or I might have finished writing the couple of articles that are due today.

But it’s good sometimes to renounce your To Do list, especially during the holiday season. There was no reason for me to spend two hours at the concert, but I did anyway. I heard some good music, witnessed talent both great and still developing, and made it a priority not to be bustling around in the usual holiday season way. No, it’s not a pedicure or a fancy night out: just a free evening of music in the school auditorium. But I’m really glad I was there.

A seasonal battle with my conscience

Yes, I’ve already done a lot of Christmas shopping on line. And yes, I feel a little guilty about it.

But when I take a closer look at the guilt, it really just serves to remind me that there are very few ways of Christmas shopping that don’t make me feel guilty. The whole concept can just seem so self-indulgent, even if I’m shopping for other people.

At the same time, it’s so satisfying to point, click, and save myself a trip to….well, anywhere. A mall. A superstore. A plaza.

Last weekend, I was lucky to be in Portland for a couple of days.  So, having not shopped at all – on principle and by preference – on Black Friday, I actually did quite a lot of small-scale purchasing on Saturday. But that didn’t seem so bad. A far-reaching public relations campaign had dubbed the day “small business Saturday,” and it felt like that’s what I was supporting: small businesses. Even though I know many of the little unique-looking boutiques in Portland’s Old Port are actually small chains, with counterparts in other boutique-heavy communities like Edgartown, Nantucket, Chatham, and Portsmouth, I still felt like I was shopping the old-fashioned way, ducking in and out of little shops, carrying my purchases by hand rather than pushing a cart, aware that since I was car-free, I’d better not buy more than I could comfortably tote the several blocks back to the condo, on foot.

It did feel like the right way to shop, compared to the newspaper and TV images of people in line at big box stores on Black Friday. But my self-righteousness only goes so far. None of it was really necessary – not the little pieces of Christmas candy for the kids, the token gifts for friends, none of it. We could all celebrate Christmas with no gifts at all. But it was fun, and I was contributing in a very small way to local vendors and artisans, so I mollified myself with thoughts of how I was adding to the city’s economic development.

A few days later, though, I couldn’t resist plowing through most of the remainder of my gift list on line. I still had no desire to get into the car and drive anywhere to shop. And even though it pains my conscience to give so much business to Amazon rather than local businesses, it still doesn’t seem entirely wrong. I was saving carbon emissions by not driving anywhere. And, well, I was saving myself a lot of aggravation, which I would like to think benefits the world in other ways, though that may be a bit of a stretch.

But the reality is, there’s no one answer to whether it’s right or wrong to indulge in holiday shopping, and whether there are right ways or wrong ways to do it. Yes, any shopping supports employees somewhere – whether in Framingham or Bangladesh – who no doubt need the work. No, I still can’t begin to explain how buying stuff has anything whatsoever to do with the birth of Christianity. Yes, shopping on line means avoiding the environmental impact of driving. No, I don’t feel great about the often bizarre amount of disposable packaging in which each small item shipped from Amazon is swathed. Yes, I do understand that those “two-day shipping” promises exact a toll on the overworked employees required to fulfill the orders at breakneck speed.

But in a way, what I was left with was realizing, mostly, that there seldom are cut-and-dried answers when it comes to matters of the conscience. Yesterday on NPR I heard a debate about communities outlawing plastic shopping bags. A great idea, in my opinion – except the other side of it is that people end up buying plastic bags for things like lining wastebaskets and cleaning up after pets for which they previously used their old grocery bags. It’s easy to have strong opinions when you don’t give things much thought.

Last night after dinner, my ten-year-old sat down at my computer and designed a brochure advertising holiday services. According to the full-color printout she gave me, she’s willing to do tasks such as wrap presents, design cards, address cards, and “personalize gifts,” all for less than a dollar. I contracted her immediately to wrap and make cards for any gifts on my list that weren’t for her. It will run me about six dollars. That’s one form of Christmas spending I think I can do with a clear conscience. Possibly the only one, but it's something.

The quiet at the end of Thanksgiving Day

I really love Thanksgiving. I love the menu-planning. I enjoy the cooking prep that begins the weekend before and extends right through Thursday midday (my very last culinary act yesterday was to assemble an apple crisp and slide it into the oven at 2 p.m., just as Rick finished carving the turkey). I even relish the supermarket trips that take me to three or four stores in place of the usual one or two in order to find exactly what I have in mind (produce from Whole Foods, staples from Market Basket, cheese – of remarkably high quality at remarkably low prices – from Trader Joe’s, and fowl – turkey, duck and chicken for the legendary dish known as turducken – from Roche Brothers, because that was the only butcher I could find willing to debone all three for me the week of Thanksgiving). I love the way everyone in my husband’s family of origin praises my cooking throughout the meal because they’re glad I hosted and they didn’t, and I appreciate the fact that my sisters-in-law and my nieces are always up for a walk after we eat.

But I always forget that one of the best parts of the day comes after the guests leave, when the table is cleared, the dishwasher is running, the leftovers are in the fridge, and for at least an hour or so, no one is asking me what they can have to eat.

It’s such a peaceful time. Darkness falls early on Thanksgiving; our guests left yesterday at around 4:30, and by 5 it was dark. I hadn’t had time to read the newspaper that morning, having gone for a run and then started in on the remaining cooking and kitchen preparation tasks, so I sat down with the kids and my Kindle. I read; Tim watched football; Holly worked on her Christmas wish list. Rick was already sound asleep, explaining to me that a long nap was critical since he’d be up late watching the Patriots game.

The sense of peace came from more than just having it be the end of a busy day. There’s something about Thanksgiving that feels like the deep cleansing breath before the holiday season kicks off. We’re not big holiday shoppers; we won’t be at any malls or department stores on Black Friday or quite possibly for the entire holiday season, but there’s still a lot to do once December begins. And even though most of it is a lot of fun – concerts, pageants, parties – it’s still good to have a conscious moment of rest before the calendar dates start filling in.

My family of origin likes to have Thanksgiving dinner at night; when we were growing up, we’d do other things all day – those who weren’t cooking, anyway – and then get into feast mode at about 6 p.m. It took me a while to get used to an early afternoon Thanksgiving meal; the first few years we celebrated on that schedule, which is more traditional in my husband’s family, I felt like we’d missed out on all the other possibilities of a free day. But I’ve come to like the schedule, eating a big holiday meal and then having the late afternoon and evening free.

So Thursday evening was blissfully serene. By a little after six, the kids were starting to ask me what they could have to eat, but even that was easy; they were happy with reheated mashed potatoes, leftover cooked carrots, a small slice of pie. All I felt like eating by that time was cottage cheese on crackers. I wish there were more nights with the hushed calm of Thanksgiving night. I felt thankful for a lot this year: health, happiness, security of various kinds. But as night fell, I also felt thankful for that particular moment: the quiet after the storm, even though it’s a good storm.

Un-decorating

Putting away Christmas ornaments feels like a task that embodies the spirit of New Year’s Day, even more so than putting out Christmas ornaments embodies the spirit of a Saturday in early December. As joyful a feeling as it is in the weeks before Christmas to fill the house with sparkly things and fragrant things and little objects that glitter, it’s an even more welcome feeling to put them all away on the first day of a new year.

Setting up the tree ushers in the holiday season. The kids love this job; they remark over each ornament as they unpack it, reminiscing about where it originated – as a preschool crafts project, a gift they still remember unwrapping, a memento bought on a vacation far from home and far from Christmastime – and working together cheerfully as they decorate the tree’s branches and then carefully arrange the larger Christmas decorations elsewhere around the house.

Three or four weeks later, when it’s time for the un-decorating, the kids tend to disappear, consumed suddenly with other necessary tasks in other parts of the house, but I don’t mind. It doesn’t bother me to put away the ornaments and decorations by myself. I love seeing the living spaces of the house miraculously become uncluttered: tabletops bare again, the corner where the tree stood once again open, nothing dangling from overhead in the entryway. It’s the biggest and yet also the easiest decluttering process of the year: no big decisions about what to keep and what to discard and where to store what; it all goes into the big plastic Christmas bins, and from there down to the basement.

I’m not good about treating the ornaments delicately. Though they may look as if they should each be wrapped individually in tissue paper, years of experience have taught me it isn’t really necessary: storing them in layers with soft items such as Christmas stockings or tablecloths between layers is almost always good enough to preserve them intact for the next year. It gets the job done quickly, and it gives me the instant gratification of seeing my nice neat house emerge from under the holiday glitz once again.

A tidy, sparsely decorated house for New Year’s feels exactly right: clean open lines to welcome a new year that hasn’t itself been claimed by ornamentation or themes yet. The year will develop its own details as it develops; plans, events and memories will eventually dot the calendar like decorations on a Christmas tree. Right now, the year is still unclaimed, and so are the surfaces and spaces in the house that yesterday were still filled with Christmas décor. It’s good to have breathing space – in our house, in our minds – as we welcome 2012.

Seventy-five percent to Christmas

I’m about seventy-five percent ready for Christmas.

I’ve done about seventy-five percent of my Christmas shopping, but my Santa role requires me to take one or two more trips to the nearest retail hub.

I’m about seventy-five percent done with our Christmas cards, too: the newsletter-poem has been drafted and designed, and about one-third of those we’ll send out have been printed, but we need to make a Staples run for another printer cartridge and then print all the envelopes as well before they’re done.

My Christmas cooking and baking feels about seventy-five percent done. I’ve made truffles, toffee, peanut butter squares and peppermint bark for the candy assortments we make up for friends, neighbors and teachers, but I still have to make a peppermint cake for Rick’s office potluck later this week, and I need to make a couple of desserts for Christmas Eve as well.

The house itself seems about seventy-five percent to where I’d like it to be when Christmas Day arrives. It’s generally clean and tidy, but Holly’s room is still a disaster zone, and I definitely want to have it tidied up by Christmas. Not to her standards; to mine, which means I’ll be doing the tidying more or less on my own. Plus there’s one laundry basket of clean sheets and towels yet to fold.

Christmas is six days away. That last twenty-five percent niggles a little bit, but I’ll get there. It’s not such a bad position to be in right now. Christmas is, after all, only as complicated as you make it. The idea that we need to include four kinds of homemade candy rather than two or three, or that Holly’s room must be neat when Christmas morning dawns, or even what should be included in the kids’ stockings, is an idea entirely of my own construct, I realize.

What does it really take to celebrate Christmas? An eagerness to embrace the holiday, whether that means with all its religious significance or rather Christmas as a cultural celebration of family, friends and feasting.

There are plenty of people in the world without children for whom to buy stocking stuffers, parties for which to make desserts, family members for whom to plan a holiday dinner. Christmas festivities are ultimately whatever you make of them. I’m making a lot out of Christmas because I can. And that makes the final twenty-five percent feel entirely worthwhile, no matter how much it may seem to hang over my head.

O Christmas card, O Christmas card....

Due to various circumstances -- most of which fall under the category of personal laziness -- I hadn't been to the post office in three consecutive days when my 9-year-old and I finally stopped by yesterday afternoon. Our post office box was packed with envelopes. The two of us unstuffed it piece by piece, hauled the load home, and spent a very pleasant half-hour opening Christmas cards. As I should have realized, if you're going to take a three-day hiaitus from collecting your mail, mid-December is not the optimal time to do it; on a typical day during the holiday season, we receive as much personal mail as we often receive in an entire month or more at other times of year.

But it was worth it, because catching up on the trove of cards that had arrived during that time was so much fun. I know a lot of people don't enjoy Christmas cards as much as I do, but for me it's a hallmark of the season. And even though lots of satirists have fun poking fun at the different strains of holiday greetings, I can only say that I like them all. I like the posed, professionally produced family portraits. I like the funny offbeat candid snapshots of kids running through pumpkin patches or digging sand castles. I like those taken in people's back yards and those taken at the far reaches of the earth. I like seeing what people did in Disney World, at Niagara Falls, on Mount Kilimanjaro, in the Caribbean. I like those that were clearly intended to be Christmas cards as the shot was composed and those that have more of an "I guess this one will do" feel to them.

I like holiday newsletters, too. I don't mind when people go on and on about every twist and turn in their family's year. Perhaps because personal stories and how people tell them are such an integral part of my career, I'm interested not only in the facts people include but the subtext about what they chose to say and why. One of my friends wrote a fairly long newsletter but had exactly one paragraph about each child and one detail amplified in that one paragraph: a daughter learned to drive; a son started working at his school's radio station; another daughter is going to be in a play soon. How did she choose those singular details?, I wondered. Were there other ideas that she cast aside?

A few details that friends have chosen to include in the past struck me as unusual enough that I still remember them years later. One friend broke the news of her divorce, apologizing ahead of time for breaking the unspoken rule of including only good news in Christmas cards. Two different women I know who are both mothers of men in their 20's routinely discuss the goings-on of their sons' girlfriends, which I find a little odd -- these aren't even members of the family. But it's still interesting. One of my husband's childhood friends even once started a Christmas card with "Thank God that for once we don't have to start with the news that Tina is pregnant."

Our own Christmas card situation has me annually tearing my hair out. I decided the first year Rick and I were married to write a 12-stanza poem describing our year. It was a fun way to narrate events, and I discovered that the kind of people who complain in general about holiday newsletters don't seem to mind poems because of the poems' innate tongue-in-cheek quality: we're not boasting about anything, we're just trying to come up with rhyming couplets. After we’d done two years of holiday poems, a friend of my mother very offhandedly told me an anecdote about a young woman she knew who had done the same thing for a few years but then found it too hard to maintain the tradition. Needless to say, I took this as a challenge, and that's the primary reason that our holiday poem continues to exist nineteen years later. Now a small number of our friends even write little rhymes back to us.

In the past, we threw in a photo card as well, assuming that some recipients would read the poem, some would look at the card, and some might do neither. (Or both.) But as home-computer technology has improved, the cost of commercial printing has gone up, and the environmental impact of photographic dyes and materials has come into question, we ceased ordering glossy photos and just started embedding small snapshots into our newsletter.

It's one of those traditions I love for about 11 1/2 months out of the year, and then dread when it's time to start writing. But as with any big writing project I face, the sense of relief I have when it's behind me makes all the stress seem worthwhile. As Holly and I pored over the pile of cards we received yesterday, I thought about how those same people would be receiving ours in another few days. I hope they enjoy our work as much as I've enjoyed theirs. Because every single card I receive means something to me, and I hope it's a tradition that never stops.

Pre-holiday getaway

When we first broached the idea with friends about going away this weekend, I acknowledged that in some ways it seemed like not the best timing. “I know every weekend in December is really busy with parties, plus there’s always Christmas shopping or baking or decorating to do….” I said tentatively. “But do you think it might work out to go away the second weekend in December anyway?”

And in some ways, as the date approached, it continued to seem like a silly idea. After we’d agreed it could be fun to be in Portland instead of home this past weekend, party invitations started arriving via snail mail and email, and I realized we’d miss out on some key social events. I looked at my Christmas preparations list and saw how much still needed to be done – not just the inevitable gift-shopping but also the card-writing and candy-making and Christmas tree-purchasing. I wondered why we didn’t pick a wide-open weekend sometime amidst the tedium of late January instead.

But there was still a sneaking suspicion that this could be a great weekend to go away. And it was. Holiday spirit abounded in Portland, and the city glowed with glittery ornamentation in a way that our quiet suburban town just can’t match. We toured a Victorian mansion decorated for a Civil War-era Christmas; we shopped at bustling downtown stores as part of a Downtown Holiday Stroll, and we viewed an exhibit of gingerbread houses.

Then, inspired by all the clever gingerbread architecture we’d seen, the four kids in our group made their own gingerbread houses. After dinner, we strolled to the Old Port to see the colorful lights on the outsides of buildings downtown as well as the pretty wreaths and somewhat more discreet ornamentation on our neighbors’ doors.

Rather than pulling us away from the holiday spirit, going away actually seemed to add to it. But it wasn’t only because of all the festivities. If I had stayed home for the weekend, I would have done a lot of cooking and some housecleaning and a little bit of shopping. Instead, we did a lot of walking throughout the city, ate some wonderful food, learned a little bit of history at the Victorian mansion, and had a great visit with our guests. Since we didn’t have a lot on the schedule, the kids could take all the time they wanted decorating their gingerbread houses, and when they were done, there was still nowhere else we had to be, so they went outside to toss a football around.

I’ve often wished our holiday season involved a little bit more time for nature and reflection and a little bit less time going to parties and addressing Christmas cards. Yet I wouldn’t want to do without the parties and cards and other holiday minutiae altogether. They’re part of the season also. But being out of town gave me the opportunity to focus on some of the aspects of the season that I tend to neglect: time outdoors, quality time with friends.

On Friday night after dark, I stood out on the balcony looking at the full moon over Casco Bay, with the masts of sailboats lined with holiday lights twinkling from the harbor below. It was a new perspective on the holiday season. And just like the rest of the weekend, it made stepping out of our usual holiday-season routine for a couple of days seem like a wonderful idea.

Unseasonably warm

It seems that people generally fall into two camps regarding the unseasonably warm weather with which December of 2011 has begun. Some, like my friend Jenn, are saying “The holiday season just isn’t the same without frosty air and snowflakes. Where’s the weather to set the mood? When can we say it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas?” Others are just happy to be catching what feels like a little reprieve before true winter kicks in.

In past years, December has been a cold and snowy month, though last year’s epic snow accumulation didn’t begin in earnest until the day after Christmas. Nonetheless, this week’s temperatures in the sixties seem to mean something to everyone, whether positive or negative.

I’m a little reticent to admit it, but at the moment, I fall into the reprieve camp. I say “reticent” because relishing the unseasonably warm weather makes me feel, well, old. There was a time when I found snowstorms romantic; frigid mornings inspiring; icy ponds and frost-crusted branches magical. But that time was decades ago, when the driveway seemed to magically plow itself and the ultimate crowning touch to a snowy day was a school cancellation the next morning.

There are still plenty of things I like about winter weather. Snowshoeing, for one thing; and I’m looking forward to snowshoeing even more this winter because of all the trails near our new house. I like the surprise of getting to sleep a little bit late because school is closed and the kids don’t have to catch the bus. I like watching Tim and Holly go sledding together. I like the way the fields and woods throughout our town look when blanketed with snow.

And perhaps it’s only because I’m so sure all of that will still come within the next few months – or maybe weeks – that it’s easy for me to say I’m enjoying this unseasonably mild weather. But the fact is, temperatures in the 60’s or even 40’s, with the ground still dry, simply make life easier than deep snow and crusty ice. Last night was our annual town tree lighting. For the past several years, the weather has been uniformly freezing for that event: adults stamp their feet and dab at their runny noses while kids run in circles to stay warm while we sing carols and wait for Santa’s arrival by firetruck. True, it’s a little harder to be in the Santa mood when you can stand outside during the tree lighting in a sweater rather than a parka, but it still seemed like an easier evening overall this year than it has recently.

The weather is expected to change in the next day or two, and maybe then I’ll finally get some Christmas shopping and decorating done. Snow and cold are definitely a catalyst to getting into the holiday mood, as I learned when we had a foot of snow in late October and Holly started talking about her Christmas wish list even though it wasn’t yet Halloween. “It feels like Christmas!” she said on that October 30, and it did. Now it feels like September. But September is a beautiful month, and I’m going to breathe deeply of the mild damp air and enjoy it just a little more before I have to dig boots and gloves out of the basement for another long winter.

Christmas candies and cakes and more

What I like least about Christmas: the pervasive awareness that for so many people, Christmas is not what they wish it was. It’s hard to celebrate wholeheartedly knowing how many people are unable to celebrate the way they would like to – and the way that so many marketing messages tell us we all should – because they are hobbled by illness or financial woes or physical distance from loved ones.

But there are many things I do like about the holiday season: the parties, the decorations, the special concerts and performances.

Way up at the top of the list of what I like about the holidays, though, is the food. Every year, the list of foods I traditionally make for the holiday season seems to grow. When we were in our twenties, Rick and I developed the habit of making truffles for gifts, and that was our sole holiday cooking ritual for years. But now the roster has expanded. The candy we make for gift-giving includes the original truffles but also peppermint bark, toffee, peanut brittle, and peanut butter balls. For entertaining, we make chocolate mousse pies, eggnog cheesecakes, peppermint chocolate layer cakes, at least two or three of each every season. For parties, we buy specialty cheeses and dips.

Sometimes I almost regret the fact that we eat so well all year long, diminishing the specialness of fine food on holidays, but we purposely avoid these special Christmas foods the other eleven months of the year so that they always seem like a novelty when their time comes around. It’s true that eating large and rich meals is not a luxury reserved for holidays, as it must have been for almost everyone centuries ago when a Thanksgiving or Christmas feast stood out markedly from the menus of the rest of the year. But the candies and eggnog cheesecake and peppermint layer cake are always something I’ve gone eleven months without, and the return to those savored treats are among my favorite things about the holiday season.

This week, I’ll start baking in earnest: for our annual cookie exchange party tonight among a small group of friends, for gifts for the kids’ teachers and our neighbors and other friends; later for Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas Day brunch. I could happily live without ever hearing another Christmas TV ad from Target or another story about Black Friday shoppers gone mad, and I wouldn’t even mind a ban on inflatable ten-foot-tall Santas in people’s front yards. But the tastes of Christmastime bring back all the best of the season to me, and I’m looking forward to the kitchen soon filling up with the aromas of chocolate and butter once again.

Pausing

Our church service yesterday morning focused on the theme of taking time to pause and concentrate and absorb. We sang a hymn I hadn’t heard before about the need to behave like cows and sheep, standing in the fields watching and thinking. Our student minister read the well-known poem by Mary Oliver in which she describes spending a whole afternoon contemplating a grasshopper. And in the sermon, our minister described a classroom method biologist Louis Aggasiz practiced at Harvard in which students were required to stare at dead fish for days on end and describe it in detail, only to discover time after time how very little detail they were actually absorbing.

This was good for me to hear. I hadn’t been to church for several weeks because of other options on Sunday mornings. A couple of those weeks I’d been out of town, but other weeks I’d wanted to concentrate on other priorities: spending time with my sisters and their families when they were in town on a rare weekend visit in mid-October, going for a run with a friend another Sunday in early November and urging her to stay for a cup of coffee so that we could catch up a little bit.

So sometimes, going to church feels to me like the opposite of pausing and concentrating. Sometimes, I avoid going with the excuse that when Sunday morning comes, I just can’t rush around anymore. I rush every weekday morning to get the kids to the schoolbus on time; I hurry throughout the course of my work day; I hurry to get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour; I hurry to get to bed early enough to try for seven hours of sleep. On Sunday mornings, sometimes I just need a break from hurrying – even if hurrying means something as theoretically contemplative as being at church. I need to pause at home and regroup.

But being back after several weeks away yesterday reminded me that in some ways, the only time I really can stop and concentrate is in church. I tell myself some weekends that I’ll have a leisurely, focused breakfast and maybe even read the paper, but more often than not, I eat while simultaneously unloading the dishwasher and making breakfast for the kids. I imagine going for a leisurely run instead of church, but instead I run with one eye on the clock, calculating what time I need to be done and showered in time to be on time to the next commitment.

I’m not good at pausing and concentrating, and during the holiday season this tendency for distraction only grows worse: instead of letting my mind absorb the present, I’m thinking about the next party, the next cooking project, the next holiday performance on our schedule.

So it was good to be in church yesterday morning to hear this message, and also to be able to enact it just a little bit. In church, there is nothing to do but sit and listen. I couldn’t unload a dishwasher or go for a walk even if I wanted to: it’s church. So that’s the one time of the week when I know I really will just sit still. And it was good to be reminded yesterday of what an important priority that is – at any time of year, but perhaps on the brink of the holiday season most of all.

November elegy

I wish November could last forever.

But then, almost every year I wish November, or at least the first two weeks of it, could last forever.

This month in particular, though, it’s increasingly obvious that we are in the midst of the most perfect few weeks of the whole year. October impresses with warm days and blazing colors, but in November, the pale gold sunlight streams through the bare branches and slants across the burnished dying grass on the fields. Mild days like we’ve had this week seem like a remarkable gift this late in the season, especially after the snowstorm with which October ended. I’ve gone running in temperatures in the mid-50’s the past few mornings, and it seems like such an unexpected bonus.

This is a quiet time of year, a time for in-gathering. Fall sports are wrapping up. The school year is well under way; the kids are comfortably established in their classroom routines, but it’s still too early for major projects or productions. The report cards, conferences and concerts that mark the end of a term are still several weeks away.

And just as far away, mercifully, are the holidays. Well, not quite. Thanksgiving is next week, and I should already be planning the menu and table settings, but it feels like even that can wait a few more days, maybe ‘til the weekend. As for Christmas and New Year’s festivities, I won’t even think about that until we’ve finished cleaning up the kitchen after Thanksgiving dinner.

This is a quiet week. I’m immersed in work and community events, and fitting in as much time outdoors as I can while the weather is still so mild. With the early sunsets, the filtered November daylight seems all the more vital.

Next week, I’ll start thinking about Thanksgiving, and then figuring out the December schedule with all its parties and events, and then Christmas itself. This week, I’m just savoring the quiet and peace and beautiful days of mid-November.

Un-decorating after New Year's

It’s sort of a holiday Jack Sprat story, I suppose: my children and husband love putting the Christmas ornaments up, and I love taking them down.

They look forward to a mid-December Saturday each year when the three of them file up to the attic and then march down with plastic bin after plastic bin. I think we have four in all, plus a few smaller cardboard boxes, housing our Christmas décor. Then there’s the tree stand and the tree skirt. The Christmas storybooks have their own box as well, and even though Holly doesn’t read picture books anymore at other times of year, she still likes to pore over Santa Mouse, the pop-up version of the Nutcracker, The Polar Express, Christmas at Noisy Village (my favorite) and all the others. So when she gets tired of the decorating process, she heads up to fetch the carton of books and places it near a comfortable armchair for pleasure reading throughout the holiday season.

I don’t remember ever taking a stand against helping them with the decorations; it’s just evolved into an unspoken tradition. There’s so much else for me to keep busy with around the house on December weekends. So somehow it just always happens that they do this job while I’m baking Christmas cookies, preparing packages for mailing or composing our annual Christmas card poem.

When New Year’s rolls around – the day itself, or the day after, if that happens to be on a weekend as it was this past year – I do the undecorating without any help, and that’s fine with me. I find it so soothing to take each little bauble and trinket from its place on the tree or table or shelf, wrap it in a sheet of tissue paper of newspaper, and place it back into one of the plastic bins.

To some extent, the appeal of this process is obvious, especially for someone who prioritizes domestic tidiness as much as I do. Our rooms just look so neat and spare after the decorations are put away. Once we’re accustomed after a few weeks to seeing their shiny shapes and bright red, silver, and gold hues, the spaces they’ve left behind look even cleaner and clearer in their absence than those same spaces did before the ornaments went up.

But the peace of mind that this job brings me goes beyond mere housekeeping. I like saying goodbye to the ornaments. I like thinking about how they’ve borne witness to yet another joyful holiday season, marked by family get-togethers, parties, visits from friends, and the ritual of gift-giving on Christmas morning, but that now it’s time for us to foray into the New Year without them, to focus on our January goals and upcoming plans free of the responsibilities that the holiday season always entails.

Of course, there’s never any guarantee that these ornaments will witness another happy holiday season with us, and I’m far too suspicious a person by nature to promise the ornaments that we’ll be reunited with them under the same circumstances in a year. But I’m willing to take that chance as I bid them farewell for the next 11 months. At some point during the summer I’m likely to be up in their corner of the attic, and I’ll cast them a quick passing glance, sweating in the heat of August and almost unable to imagine another snowy December day when we’re ready to take them out yet again. But for now, it’s good to see them go, knowing that clean, bare surfaces and the clean slate of a new year are taking their place.

Christmas walk

Rick arrived home a little bit early yesterday and I had some Christmas cards I wanted to get into the mail stream before 5 p.m., so I used his early arrival as an excuse to walk to the post office rather than drive. I knew the kids didn’t want to go with me, but once he was home, there was no reason for me not to go by myself.

It was a chilly evening, but I was bundled up. On Bedford Road there was the usual cascade of rush hour traffic, but on the footpath that winds alongside the edge of the woods, I was safely removed from it. In the Town Center, the pace of traffic was calmer. Lights twinkled from the windows of the antique houses that ring the rotary. The library parking lot was still half-full just minutes before closing; it’s typical in this town that a good portion of the population was apparently preparing for a long holiday weekend by loading up on books and DVDs.

In the backyard of the house next to the library, a bonfire was burning. I’m not sure this is really allowed, but it was obvious that a good time was taking shape, and I admired their creativity in lighting a big winter fire. Six or eight people were gathered around it already, with more making trips in and out of the house, calling to each other, offering help with this or that. I breathed in the sharp smoky air that drifted off the flames as I kept walking up the hill past our church and past the town Christmas tree. It seems like just days ago that I was presiding over the refreshment table for the town tree lighting, but that was actually the first week of December. This month always passes by so quickly, no matter whether you find the pace exhilarating or frantic. With its unbroken sequence of gatherings and performances, public events and private parties, December always rushes along.

I walked past the school, the parking lot already empty less than two hours after the closing bell. Even the custodial staff was gone; the buildings were closed up tight for vacation. It’s satisfying to know that everyone who works so hard to make the school day run smoothly, both literally and figuratively, is somewhere else now, taking much-needed time off.

I headed down the Church Street hill past the playing fields. The grass was shorn and frosty. All fall, there’s a steady stream of soccer players on those fields, from the toddler groups playing “Sharks and Minnows” at eight o’clock on Saturday morning to the South American nationals who use the field after their work day ends and play well into the evening. Soccer ends at last once the holiday season starts, and the fields looked abandoned.

At the base of Church Street I passed into the cemetery. DPW trucks must have been doing maintenance earlier; the powdery snow on all the pathways were well broken in already with tire tracks, so it was easy to walk despite the inch or two of slippery new snowfall. Even in the gathering darkness, I could see how many gravesites were adorned with Christmas decorations: small trees, wreaths, even the occasional ornament. I wondered what they do with those little evergreens after Christmas. A bell tinkled in the breeze from a nearby cluster of stone markers.

At the far side of the cemetery I exited back onto Bedford Road and crossed back onto the footpath. I’d been walking for 45 minutes and was almost home. For reasons I couldn’t explain, this early evening walk felt more to me like Christmas than any of the festivities that I’ve taken part in this month. I’m not sure why that is; to me there’s just a certain congruence in marking Christmas through a quiet meditative walk, absorbing the winter’s hush. And as much as I enjoyed the town tree lighting, the church pageant, and a couple of great parties this season, after my walk yesterday, I finally felt ready for Christmas. More than anything else, that walk had put me in the right frame of mind to begin a holiday of peace and love and goodwill.

Wrapping bee: The wrap-up

I understand that “new tradition” is something of an oxymoron, as is “first annual.”

But yesterday evening did feel like a new tradition and a first annual, because it was so much fun and met a need and augmented the cheer of our holiday season. And oxymoronic or not, those factors do seem to me like the ingredients of a new tradition.

Wrapping Christmas gifts has long been a bit of a sticking point in our holiday routines. Even before we were married, Rick and I were in the habit of staying up late on Christmas Eve to do our wrapping together. This is not the best way to spend Christmas Eve. The work is tedious, the practice is superficial and the timing ensures that you won’t get to bed at a reasonable hour. We always wake on Christmas morning tired rather than refreshed, and not because of meaningful holiday-related rituals or festive celebrations running too late the night before but just because we weren’t organized enough to get the necessary chore of wrapping out of the way sooner.

For the past few years, I’ve tried to make it different, especially after we started the far more fulfilling Christmas Eve tradition of hosting my sisters and their families as well as my parents for Christmas Eve dinner. We’d go to church in the late afternoon, have a wonderful evening of conversation and food and fun – and then after the dishes were washed, it was time for Rick and me to start wrapping. That’s just not the right way to head toward the mythical hour of midnight on December 24th.

A couple of years ago, a seemingly insignificant line in an article about Christmas baking caught my imagination. The article described a variety of homemade gifts that you could prepare several days before Christmas – “So that on Christmas Eve, you can put your feet up and wait for Rudolph,” the writer concluded. I loved that image: being enough ahead of schedule that I spent Christmas Eve, or at least the part after the dinner guests left, just relaxing. Or reading. Or sleeping.

But I was never able to make it happen.

And then I had a spontaneous exchange with a friend earlier this week. “We should have a wrapping bee,” I wrote to her. “Just get together for an hour and get all our wrapping done.” Not only did she like the idea, she was available the same night I was, and so was another friend of ours.

So last night we had the First Annual New Traditional Wrapping Bee. It certainly wasn’t an hour – closer to three and a half. But we did it: we got all caught up on our wrapping. I have three or four gifts to pick up today and I can wrap those tonight and then I’ll really truly be wrap-free by Christmas Eve.

Not only was it efficient, it was such a good way to visit. I heard about one friend’s Thanksgiving trip to London and another friend’s perceptions of her son’s new school: we talked about everything from peculiar habits our mothers have to reasonable responses to bullying. We talked about books, vacations, and of course the gifts we were wrapping. We made our way through a bottle or two of Chardonnay.

So for me, the evening bore all the hallmarks of something I certainly want to make a yearly occurrence. The conversation with my friends nourished my spirit; the activity filled a necessary practical need. On Christmas Eve, I’ll put my feet up and wait for Rudolph, and I’ll think very warm thoughts about my two Wrapping Bee buddies and how great it is to start new traditions together.

It's time to make the candy

For a variety of reasons, I admit that I was resisting the arrival of December. I wanted fall to last forever this year. I even dreamed over the weekend that I was teaching a kindergarten class; the children were insisting it was time to decorate the classroom tree while I was trying to tell them the activity for the day would be carving a pumpkin. (The fact that our public school system would allow neither of these activities in the classroom had little impact on my subconscious.)

Nonetheless, December arrived without my permission and in spite of my pervasive anxiety that in myriad ways I’m not ready for the holiday season.

And then yesterday at the supermarket a little spark went off as I stood in the baking aisle. You may be feeling really resistant to the idea of shopping and wrapping and getting ready for the church pageant and helping at the Greens Sale and planning the Christmas Day schedule, a voice in my head said, but don’t forget about making candy! That’s always fun.

Right. That is always fun. In fact, it’s one of my favorite yearly traditions: filling up my kitchen with the aromas of melting butter and chocolate as I arrange ingredients all over the countertop and turn out pan after pan of confections: chocolate truffles, nut brittle, peppermint bark, toffee, peanut butter balls.

So I stocked my grocery cart with nuts, chocolate chips, corn syrup, all the ingredients I’d need for this annual practice. Candy-making is one of the things I love about the holiday season. I love how easy it is to make all these different candies, and I love the fact that unlike cookies, candy-making is still seen as a novelty, something unexpected and unusual. It’s also both easier and neater than baking, in my opinion: no flour settling in a fine dust over every surface; no cookies cooling on racks. Most of my candy recipes take minutes to stir up, and use fewer than half a dozen ingredients.

So last night I swung into action. By the time I went to bed, one hundred cocoa-dusted truffles were cooling in the fridge. And this was only the first day of the month. True, I have nothing to wear to holiday parties this year and I’m feeling a little sad that both my sisters will be in Europe rather than at our house for Christmas as they and their families usually are. But my kitchen is already filling up with candy, and just falling into the familiar rhythms of boiling and stirring reminds me of this most beloved yearly tradition.

Because time would not stop for me...

The subject line of the email from the cooking website caused my eyes to narrow as it flashed across my inbox yesterday afternoon. “Thanksgiving menu: it’s not too late to start planning!”

Of course it’s not too late, I muttered to myself irritably. It’s not even close to being too late! Thanksgiving is still eight days away.

But in truth, I know it’s also not too early. In fact, I myself should be planning my Thanksgiving menu. And on some level I am. Kind of, In the back of my mind. But not with the zeal I usually plan Thanksgiving.

And when a friend said today that she was already humming Christmas carols and basking in a Christmas mood, I told her I was still in an October mood and working hard to get to a Thanksgiving one. I’m doing everything I can to make time stand still, and yet strangely enough, it’s not working.

I just feel that this autumn is going by too fast. There’s no reason I feel that way this particular year, except that this autumn has allowed me to become so immersed in my writing and the kids’ new school year and some new article ideas and the publication of my book and getting to know the area around my parents’ new vacation home and a host of interests and activities to which fall lends itself. And all of that somehow seems to come to a screeching halt once the holidays approach. New school year? Try Thanksgiving vacation followed three weeks later by winter break, with report cards in between the two to remind you that the year is already exactly one-third over. One-third over? But I’m just getting used to the idea that Tim is in middle school. I don’t want to hear that seventh grade is already looming. I want it to be the first week of school for as long as possible.

But it’s not, of course. It’s seven days ‘til Thanksgiving. I love cooking Thanksgiving dinner. I’ve done it yearly since 1999 with only one exception. For that matter, I like cooking and menu-planning at any time of year. It’s not the domestic side of the situation that’s causing my agitation this year; it’s simply the chronological part. Winter holidays? Really? But I was so happy watching the leaves change.

It’s inevitable, and fall more than any other season seems to bring out the resistance in many of us to see time pass. So I’ll keep writing, keep finding time to walk in the woods, keep up everything that made this fall such a resonant time for me, and also nudge myself onward to the preliminary steps of holiday planning.

After all, no one says that has to mean six different pies on the Thanksgiving table or hours of Christmas shopping at the mall. Holiday season can mean whatever you want it to mean, including writing, reading and walks in the woods. But regardless of what it may mean to different people, simply as a function of the sun rising and setting, Thanksgiving will soon be here, and I have a menu to plan. Fortunately, as the email I received yesterday assured me, it is indeed not too late.

Favorite traditions: Making candy for Christmas

This weekend we’ll start making Christmas candy.

Well, I will, anyway. My use of the plural first-person might be a little optimistic. I’m hoping that the kids will find it enough fun that they’ll want to help out, but if not, I’m happy to do it on my own.

December is the only time of year that I make candy, and I make a lot of it, because it’s my favorite gift to give. I’ve never been a big fan of cookie assortment plates as gifts, although I do think they look very nice at parties. Last week I gathered with a dozen friends for a cookie exchange; everyone went home with numerous varieties of cookies that other people had made, and I’m going to use my take to make up a plate for an event we’re hosting this weekend. But in general, I find cookie plates kind of unappealing if they require packing and transporting. I don’t like the way the cookies all slide around on the plate or the way the flavors mix: peanut butter next to mint next to almond next to molasses.

What I do like about candy is that it feels so genuinely festive to me. I do far more baking all year long than I probably should from a caloric standpoint; we’re almost never without a batch of homemade cookies or brownies in the house, and it’s not unusual for an afternoon snack or weeknight dessert at our house to include cupcakes, biscuits, muffins or any number of other rich treats. But I make candy only during the Christmas season.

I make truffles from a recipe we’ve had since my childhood. Really they are faux truffles, more like little balls of fudge: chocolate and butter and confectioner’s sugar. But they look so pretty rolled in cocoa and tucked into a small candy box. My mother gave me a new recipe last year for peanut brittle which takes five minutes to make and is delicious, so I’ll make that as well. Two years ago a friend who made the best toffee I’ve ever tasted for our church fair gave me her recipe for that, and I added it to my repertoire. The Crate & Barrel holiday catalog gave me the idea to make white chocolate bark studded with chopped candy cane pieces, which adds some variety of color for my candy medley. Then maybe some peanut butter buckeyes to round out the collection.

None of these is complicated or even necessarily very authentic within the realm of candy making. None even requires a candy thermometer. But candy is a novelty to me, one of the few culinary treats that I restrict myself to once a year. In the past, I’ve made baked goods along with candy for gifts for my kids’ teachers; we’ve filled baskets with cookies, breads, scones, muffins. This year I think we’ll skip the baked goods. They’re more time-consuming and require more clean-up. (For some reason I cannot seem to take out flour in my kitchen without creating an instant mess.) Not everyone necessarily likes candy, but I figure the people we give it to can enjoy it or serve it to guests or regift it.

So it will be a candy-making weekend, no doubt full of sampling since that’s an integral part of the cooking process for me. Once a year it can’t hurt too much. We’ll find holiday-themed containers to pack them in and the kids will take them to school the day before vacation when everyone brings in teacher gifts. I acknowledge that I may enjoy the candy ritual far more than any of the beneficiaries do, but that’s okay. Part of what makes this time of year special is returning to favorite traditional annual activities, and for me, rolling 300 truffles in cocoa is all part of the merriment of the season.