I seem to always look back on the year gone by on December 31 and look forward to the year ahead on January 1 – even knowing the artificiality of these arbitrarily designated days. Does it really mean anything to say that one year has ended and a new one is beginning, when were it not for the calendar we’d probably see no difference upon waking tomorrow morning compared with waking today?
But in a way, I do sense a palpable ending/beginning rhythm to the year. Christmas vacation involves such a build-up of activity; now we clean up the mess, enjoy a couple more days of sleeping late, rally to complete those household tasks put off for the past ten days (my kids really need to find time to clean out their school backpacks and put away their Christmas presents between now and bedtime Sunday), and look toward the coldest, bleakest part of the winter – a perfect time for hunkering down and regrouping on projects, resolutions, plans, goals and hopes.
Today, though, I’m still thinking about 2009. Every year at this time, I’m a little bit amazed to look back at the variety that the past year contained. This might not be apparent from an outside view of my life. I continue living in the same house with the same people, writing for many of the same publications, involved in many of the same activities and groups. But to me, it still feels like the past twelve months encompassed a lot of different elements. I didn’t expect to have such a wonderful time in New York last February; the 48 hours of fabulous dining, sightseeing and Broadway exceeded my expectations in every way. And I never imagined when 2009 began that I’d spend a week at the Aspen Summer Words conference, nor that the experience would prove to be so rewarding: during my six days there I made new friends, read a lot of interesting work, networked with other writers, and learned a lot about the craft. Also influencing major shifts in my work during 2009 was my new agent, who prodded me to get with the social media program, so now I blog and Twitter as well as just writing.
The year included many interesting article assignments for the various publications I write for, and I have a new editor at the Globe who’s terrific to work with. I picked up a few new corporate clients and made a few new friends. Our community suffered some significant losses but my closest circles, mercifully, did not. We hosted some fine events and attended others. The kids learned, played and thrived. Rick started a new job; Holly learned to ride a bike. I ran at least a mile all 365 days. I neither gained nor lost weight (though I did lose some night vision. It happens). I attended my twenty-fifth high school reunion, which while not the peak experience it might have been was still a convivial way to spend a Saturday. I read some magnificent books and articles, and put my own manuscript through several revisions before offering it to a few friends to read and critique. I didn’t give enough to charity, but I tried to help out when and where I could.
It was a good year, a fortunate year, a blessed year. I’m looking forward to the next one. And I’m realizing that just like a year ago, I simply have no idea what the upcoming 12 months will turn out to hold for us.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Does self-publishing my 7-year-old's book make me the Biggest Helicopter Parent ever?
In my experience, children learn very young that it can be more fun to give than to receive, even around Christmas time. Children love to make projects and present them to adults, buoyed with pride at their artistic accomplishments as well as the excitement of surprising a parent or grandparent with something special.
Even knowing that, I admit that what we did this holiday season was a little bit extreme. After Holly spent several weeks this fall dictating a chapter book of her own invention to me, I was faced with the decision about what to do with the final, 11,000-word, 72-page, 19-chapter opus. I decided to self-publish it on Lulu.com. Giving copies of her newly published – and absolutely professional-looking – novel to librarians, teachers, friends and family this month was surely a thrilling experience for Holly, and I admit that I looked on with plenty of pride of my own. But I also have to admit that in some ways, I feel like this makes me the biggest helicopter parent ever. Holly made up some stories, like lots of kids do. But I paid money to have her stories cooked into a professionally produced book, and in all honesty it does feel a little weird.
Primarily, I wonder if it gives her the wrong idea about what it means to write a book. I’ve been writing stories since I was her age and have been a professional journalist and copywriter for nearly twenty years – and I still don’t have a published book to my credit, though I’m working hard at it and so’s my agent. But in a way, that’s why it feels all the more duplicitous. I spent two years writing and revising a book, signed with a terrific literary agent, and am still seeking a publisher – whereas Holly wrote a book and two weeks after finishing it had a box of ten beautifully styled copies arrive in the mail. We cheated, I sometimes feel like telling her. It’s not really that easy.
And I can’t help but wonder if some of the other kids who have seen her book – or their parents – wonder at our ethics. In an informal discussion recently about the popular second-grade trend of eraser trading, her teacher referred to the “haves and the have-nots,” and I have to admit those words are echoing in my head as Holly proudly wraps and distributes copies of her new book. The cost really wasn’t much – with shipping, it comes out to about $8 per copy – but the fact remains that this was something we were able to pay for; we paid for the opportunity to have our child feel like a published author, where other parents possibly couldn’t spend money on that particular luxury.
In the end, my defense is that I’m rewarding not Holly’s talent but her effort and her commitment to this project. Lots of kids write stories – in my experience, just about all kids her age like to write stories – but not many are able to stick with one (albeit loosely formed) plot and one set of (albeit highly derivate) characters for two months as the nineteen chapters unfolded. And true, not every seven-year-old has a mom willing to sit at her desk night after night taking dictation, but the whole process was so delightful for me – I have a glass desk, and Holly lay on her back under it, staring up at me and letting the narrative bubble forth so that I had to type my fastest to keep up with her dialogue and plot turns – that I know I’ll remember those evenings for a long, long time.
Yes, it’s a charming but not brilliantly crafted book. As my twelve-year-old niece, a budding book critic in her own right, pointed out, the main character wishes she had a dog on the first page, doesn’t say a word about dogs for the next 71 pages, and then gets a dog on the last page. And those familiar with children’s literature will probably be able to guess with a significant degree of accuracy what three books Holly read most recently before she started writing “Louise and Mindy” (Did I already say ‘highly derivative’?).
But I think in the end, it’s okay. Holly has started her next book, but not with the same passion; we work on it a couple of times a week, not every night, and I doubt we’ll turn it into a published masterpiece when we’re done. In fact, we might never self-publish another work of hers. But this time it was worth it. For one thing, I’ve been casually investigating the idea of writing a commemorative volume for a corporate client, and it was useful for me to learn how to work with Lulu.com. Holly has a keepsake to remind her of fall of the year she was seven, and so do ten of her closest relatives, friends, teachers and librarians. Self-publishing is controversial in the literary world for these very reasons: in some respects it bestows professional status on a work that hasn’t earned that status, although in many contexts it certainly has an appropriate role. But for Holly, I’d like to think it’s a taste of things to come. Someday maybe she’ll get published for real, and if that happens, my hope is that she’ll look back and see this as at least part of her motivation for reaching that milestone.
Even knowing that, I admit that what we did this holiday season was a little bit extreme. After Holly spent several weeks this fall dictating a chapter book of her own invention to me, I was faced with the decision about what to do with the final, 11,000-word, 72-page, 19-chapter opus. I decided to self-publish it on Lulu.com. Giving copies of her newly published – and absolutely professional-looking – novel to librarians, teachers, friends and family this month was surely a thrilling experience for Holly, and I admit that I looked on with plenty of pride of my own. But I also have to admit that in some ways, I feel like this makes me the biggest helicopter parent ever. Holly made up some stories, like lots of kids do. But I paid money to have her stories cooked into a professionally produced book, and in all honesty it does feel a little weird.
Primarily, I wonder if it gives her the wrong idea about what it means to write a book. I’ve been writing stories since I was her age and have been a professional journalist and copywriter for nearly twenty years – and I still don’t have a published book to my credit, though I’m working hard at it and so’s my agent. But in a way, that’s why it feels all the more duplicitous. I spent two years writing and revising a book, signed with a terrific literary agent, and am still seeking a publisher – whereas Holly wrote a book and two weeks after finishing it had a box of ten beautifully styled copies arrive in the mail. We cheated, I sometimes feel like telling her. It’s not really that easy.
And I can’t help but wonder if some of the other kids who have seen her book – or their parents – wonder at our ethics. In an informal discussion recently about the popular second-grade trend of eraser trading, her teacher referred to the “haves and the have-nots,” and I have to admit those words are echoing in my head as Holly proudly wraps and distributes copies of her new book. The cost really wasn’t much – with shipping, it comes out to about $8 per copy – but the fact remains that this was something we were able to pay for; we paid for the opportunity to have our child feel like a published author, where other parents possibly couldn’t spend money on that particular luxury.
In the end, my defense is that I’m rewarding not Holly’s talent but her effort and her commitment to this project. Lots of kids write stories – in my experience, just about all kids her age like to write stories – but not many are able to stick with one (albeit loosely formed) plot and one set of (albeit highly derivate) characters for two months as the nineteen chapters unfolded. And true, not every seven-year-old has a mom willing to sit at her desk night after night taking dictation, but the whole process was so delightful for me – I have a glass desk, and Holly lay on her back under it, staring up at me and letting the narrative bubble forth so that I had to type my fastest to keep up with her dialogue and plot turns – that I know I’ll remember those evenings for a long, long time.
Yes, it’s a charming but not brilliantly crafted book. As my twelve-year-old niece, a budding book critic in her own right, pointed out, the main character wishes she had a dog on the first page, doesn’t say a word about dogs for the next 71 pages, and then gets a dog on the last page. And those familiar with children’s literature will probably be able to guess with a significant degree of accuracy what three books Holly read most recently before she started writing “Louise and Mindy” (Did I already say ‘highly derivative’?).
But I think in the end, it’s okay. Holly has started her next book, but not with the same passion; we work on it a couple of times a week, not every night, and I doubt we’ll turn it into a published masterpiece when we’re done. In fact, we might never self-publish another work of hers. But this time it was worth it. For one thing, I’ve been casually investigating the idea of writing a commemorative volume for a corporate client, and it was useful for me to learn how to work with Lulu.com. Holly has a keepsake to remind her of fall of the year she was seven, and so do ten of her closest relatives, friends, teachers and librarians. Self-publishing is controversial in the literary world for these very reasons: in some respects it bestows professional status on a work that hasn’t earned that status, although in many contexts it certainly has an appropriate role. But for Holly, I’d like to think it’s a taste of things to come. Someday maybe she’ll get published for real, and if that happens, my hope is that she’ll look back and see this as at least part of her motivation for reaching that milestone.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Another annual tradition: Thankyou notes at Starbucks
Three years ago, in an office gift swap, I received a $10 Starbucks card, and so was born one of my favorite Christmas traditions. Actually, it’s a post-Christmas, pre-New Year’s tradition: sort of a Boxing Day tradition, or a Gap Week tradition, one that falls sometime in the lazy, unstructured days between Christmas and New Year’s. We used the gift card that first year and have done it on our own dime ever since, but it’s well worth the money I spend. For a couple of hours one afternoon in the days following Christmas, the kids and I head to our local Starbucks with stationery and pens in hand, buy ourselves cups of hot chocolate topped with whipped cream, and settle in at a table to write our thankyou notes.
For Christmas season of 2009, yesterday was official Thankyou Notes at Starbucks Day, and I was amazed by our productivity. Accessories always help: this year Santa had brought each of the kids personalized memo pads. Tim’s notes were yellow and blue, with a catcher’s mitt and baseball next to his name at the top of each sheet; Holly’s depict a slightly hallucinogenic garden scene, with oversized butterflies and ladybugs wending amidst Technicolor flowers and her full three-part name, just the way she likes it, printed across the top. I had my list of whom to thank for what faithfully recorded on my Palm, which I put in the center of the table for all to consult, and we got to work.
The kids write very simple thankyou notes, but I can’t blame them much. They were lucky to have received presents from a lot of different people, and it was more important to me that they get a lot of notes written than that each one be a gem of creative self-expression. As long as they get one or two sentences past “Thank you for the blank,” I consider it a job reasonably well done. Halfway through the ten or so notes they each needed to write (Holly had one more than Tim because her teacher had given her a gift), they finished their hot chocolate, but I was so impressed with their dedication to the project that I let them each return to the counter for a pastry. A cup of cocoa and an apple fritter versus not having to nag about thankyou notes for the rest of the season? No contest, in my mind.
I like to think that this yearly exercise imparts to them not only that thankyou notes are important but that they are an inevitable part of celebrating Christmas and receiving gifts. We don’t spend a lot of time discussing it; we just go do it. But I also like the thought that the hot chocolate and pastries makes it more fun than tedious. And I like the idea that maybe they’re absorbing some of the pleasure of sitting at a Starbucks to read or write, one of my most treasured but least often experienced indulgences. I dream that someday they’ll ask to come back to Starbucks to sit quietly and read or write even when it’s not Christmas gap week.
Instilling the idea that there’s far more to Christmas than Christmas presents is something a lot of parents struggle with, and I always say the best way to do it is not to downplay the gifts but to “up-play” the many other traditions of the Christmas season. For us, Starbucks Afternoon is one such tradition. Today, I’ll address the envelopes and mail off all their notes, plus the few that I wrote, having not taken in the haul my kids did. I have no illusions that the recipients of the notes will be bowled over with the kids’ writing talent nor even necessarily with their sincerity; these are very rudimentary expressions of gratitude. But I do think the kids are learning about an important part of basic etiquette, and I hope they’re learning that the basics, like thankyou notes, can even be fun.
For Christmas season of 2009, yesterday was official Thankyou Notes at Starbucks Day, and I was amazed by our productivity. Accessories always help: this year Santa had brought each of the kids personalized memo pads. Tim’s notes were yellow and blue, with a catcher’s mitt and baseball next to his name at the top of each sheet; Holly’s depict a slightly hallucinogenic garden scene, with oversized butterflies and ladybugs wending amidst Technicolor flowers and her full three-part name, just the way she likes it, printed across the top. I had my list of whom to thank for what faithfully recorded on my Palm, which I put in the center of the table for all to consult, and we got to work.
The kids write very simple thankyou notes, but I can’t blame them much. They were lucky to have received presents from a lot of different people, and it was more important to me that they get a lot of notes written than that each one be a gem of creative self-expression. As long as they get one or two sentences past “Thank you for the blank,” I consider it a job reasonably well done. Halfway through the ten or so notes they each needed to write (Holly had one more than Tim because her teacher had given her a gift), they finished their hot chocolate, but I was so impressed with their dedication to the project that I let them each return to the counter for a pastry. A cup of cocoa and an apple fritter versus not having to nag about thankyou notes for the rest of the season? No contest, in my mind.
I like to think that this yearly exercise imparts to them not only that thankyou notes are important but that they are an inevitable part of celebrating Christmas and receiving gifts. We don’t spend a lot of time discussing it; we just go do it. But I also like the thought that the hot chocolate and pastries makes it more fun than tedious. And I like the idea that maybe they’re absorbing some of the pleasure of sitting at a Starbucks to read or write, one of my most treasured but least often experienced indulgences. I dream that someday they’ll ask to come back to Starbucks to sit quietly and read or write even when it’s not Christmas gap week.
Instilling the idea that there’s far more to Christmas than Christmas presents is something a lot of parents struggle with, and I always say the best way to do it is not to downplay the gifts but to “up-play” the many other traditions of the Christmas season. For us, Starbucks Afternoon is one such tradition. Today, I’ll address the envelopes and mail off all their notes, plus the few that I wrote, having not taken in the haul my kids did. I have no illusions that the recipients of the notes will be bowled over with the kids’ writing talent nor even necessarily with their sincerity; these are very rudimentary expressions of gratitude. But I do think the kids are learning about an important part of basic etiquette, and I hope they’re learning that the basics, like thankyou notes, can even be fun.
Monday, December 28, 2009
One great run
On Saturday, I finally broke out of my one-mile running rut. Each winter, as soon as we get measurable snowfall, my running routes become more restricted because the footpaths don’t get cleared, and although running in the roadway isn’t out of the question, it doesn’t work with the dog on leash, and it’s feasible really only in broad daylight and not during rush hour. So the recent snowstorms have kept me running up and down our (fortunately long) common driveway and logging barely over a mile per run. Before starting the running streak, I didn’t even bother to run in the winter once the snow fell; now I often do only the minimum one mile necessary to maintain the official streak.
On Saturday, though, enough melting had taken place that the roads were down to bare asphalt, and I guessed there would be little traffic, so I took the dog and headed to a nearby neighborhood, and it felt so great to be out running a normal distance again. It was a gray, raw afternoon. No precipitation was falling but the air was damp, the temperature in the high 30’s, and although I always claim my favorite weather for running is the end of a hot summer day, in the past couple of years I’ve come to realize that physically, there’s actually nothing more invigorating than a day like Saturday; there’s something about the cool damp air that feels so good to inhale. After all the time indoors on Christmas Day, all the rich food, all the sitting around (at parties, in the car, at home afterwards when we were worn out from celebrating), it was the most wonderful feeling to be out running in the cool air.
I was listening to a podcast of “Science Friday” in which Dr. Julie Holland (“no one but my mother actually calls me Dr. Holland”) talked with Ira Flatow about her memoir depicting her years as director of emergency room care at Bellevue Hospital. Again and again, she returned to the theme of spending time outdoors as an essential factor in mental wellness – she actually thinks she might see more mental illness working in New York City simply because it can be harder for people to spend time outside – and her words dovetailed so beautifully with how I was feeling on that afternoon as I ran.
Bill McKibben wrote in Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas that what most people crave over the holidays is more quiet time and more time in nature, and as much as it makes sense that those should be elements of the holiday, it can be so hard to fit in solitude, quiet, and walks in the snow amidst the parties, baking, wrapping and errands. Saturday’s run, at 3.1 miles, restored my spirits more than anything else could have. The time alone, the time in the fresh cool air, the exertion, and the fact that it was the first time in a week that I’d run for more than 15 minutes at once got the week after Christmas off to a healthy, rejuvenated start for me, and I was so grateful for that half-hour of running.
On Saturday, though, enough melting had taken place that the roads were down to bare asphalt, and I guessed there would be little traffic, so I took the dog and headed to a nearby neighborhood, and it felt so great to be out running a normal distance again. It was a gray, raw afternoon. No precipitation was falling but the air was damp, the temperature in the high 30’s, and although I always claim my favorite weather for running is the end of a hot summer day, in the past couple of years I’ve come to realize that physically, there’s actually nothing more invigorating than a day like Saturday; there’s something about the cool damp air that feels so good to inhale. After all the time indoors on Christmas Day, all the rich food, all the sitting around (at parties, in the car, at home afterwards when we were worn out from celebrating), it was the most wonderful feeling to be out running in the cool air.
I was listening to a podcast of “Science Friday” in which Dr. Julie Holland (“no one but my mother actually calls me Dr. Holland”) talked with Ira Flatow about her memoir depicting her years as director of emergency room care at Bellevue Hospital. Again and again, she returned to the theme of spending time outdoors as an essential factor in mental wellness – she actually thinks she might see more mental illness working in New York City simply because it can be harder for people to spend time outside – and her words dovetailed so beautifully with how I was feeling on that afternoon as I ran.
Bill McKibben wrote in Hundred Dollar Holiday: The Case for a More Joyful Christmas that what most people crave over the holidays is more quiet time and more time in nature, and as much as it makes sense that those should be elements of the holiday, it can be so hard to fit in solitude, quiet, and walks in the snow amidst the parties, baking, wrapping and errands. Saturday’s run, at 3.1 miles, restored my spirits more than anything else could have. The time alone, the time in the fresh cool air, the exertion, and the fact that it was the first time in a week that I’d run for more than 15 minutes at once got the week after Christmas off to a healthy, rejuvenated start for me, and I was so grateful for that half-hour of running.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
A goal reached: No work over Christmas week!
Late last week, I looked at my roster of work in progress and upcoming assignments and realized something tantalizing: it would be possible for me to wrap up all open assignments before Christmas and not have any new ones before New Year’s. And thus I set the goal of doing just that: turning around every undone work-related task within the next several days and seeing nothing on my work-to-do list by the time the kids’ school vacation began, which is a little bit after noon today.
And I did it. What’s remarkable about this to me isn’t that I managed to get through my list but that I was even able to acknowledge that as a goal. As a freelance contractor, my work life is generally devoted to the pursuit of accruing ever more assignments. Because my freelance salary will never match what I made as a full-time corporate employee, it never seems like I’m doing enough. And I never turn work down. As a result, I never quite reach the bottom of the pile.
Until now. There’s one corporate assignment I’m still in the middle of, but I turned copy over to the project editor and I don’t expect her to review it before Christmas, so even though revisions might be waiting for me by next week, there’s nothing more I need to do on it right now. I have one story under way for the newspaper, but it involves a school that is on break until after New Year’s, so there’s nothing much I can do on that one either.
In general, I like to keep busy professionally. A freelancer must by nature be greedy about work and feel that enough is never enough. Unlike when I was a corporate employee and was all too happy to snap my laptop shut on Friday at 5 and walk out the door, I like knowing there’s always a bit of a backlog waiting for me; with this kind of work, it’s not a desirable thing to see the well run dry.
But the past two months have been robust for me in terms of work, and it will be okay to have a week or two with no new assignments. I’m excited to have the same vacation schedule as my children. Normally when they are home from school during vacations or professional days, we have a good schedule worked out: I work during the morning and then devote the afternoon to them. But this week and next, I won’t even need those mornings. They neither need nor expect my undivided attention every minute of the day – they are old enough and independent enough that they both have things they like to do on their own, or with friends – but what a luxury it will be to make myself available to them without the stipulations of needing just an hour to get this article done or just a little time this morning to conduct phone interviews.
Psychologically, the situation of being deadline-free just puts me in a different frame of mind than usual. Even the projects that are awaiting information from other people – like my manuscript, in search of a publisher – isn’t on my mind this week, since it’s easier to just assume that everyone else is taking the week off as well and won’t have any news for me until after New Year’s. In the past, time away from work tended to involve thinking about more work: drafting new pieces or seeking out article ideas. But for now, I’m sated. I’m simply not going to think about work this week, or partway into next if possible. I’m even going to take the next two days off from daily blogging.
Instead, along with having time with my children, I’m looking forward to some household projects, visits with friends, maybe snowshoeing. (Getting the kids out on snowshoes would be an astounding feat, but a mom can dream.) Maybe in a few days I’ll have recovered from the mad dash of holiday baking and cooking enough that I’ll want to do some more cooking. Probably the kids and I will observe our annual tradition of going to Starbucks to drink hot chocolate and write thankyou notes one of the days following Christmas.
At the moment, I have three more hours while they are still at school, so I think I’ll use the time wisely by wrapping their presents. They can help me with other wrapping when they get home. And maybe, as I resolved in this blog yesterday, I’ll try to do some housecleaning.
It’s wonderful to be on vacation. I feel like a college student done with finals. I’m really grateful for all the work I’ve had lately. And I’m equally grateful to be taking a short break from all of it.
And I did it. What’s remarkable about this to me isn’t that I managed to get through my list but that I was even able to acknowledge that as a goal. As a freelance contractor, my work life is generally devoted to the pursuit of accruing ever more assignments. Because my freelance salary will never match what I made as a full-time corporate employee, it never seems like I’m doing enough. And I never turn work down. As a result, I never quite reach the bottom of the pile.
Until now. There’s one corporate assignment I’m still in the middle of, but I turned copy over to the project editor and I don’t expect her to review it before Christmas, so even though revisions might be waiting for me by next week, there’s nothing more I need to do on it right now. I have one story under way for the newspaper, but it involves a school that is on break until after New Year’s, so there’s nothing much I can do on that one either.
In general, I like to keep busy professionally. A freelancer must by nature be greedy about work and feel that enough is never enough. Unlike when I was a corporate employee and was all too happy to snap my laptop shut on Friday at 5 and walk out the door, I like knowing there’s always a bit of a backlog waiting for me; with this kind of work, it’s not a desirable thing to see the well run dry.
But the past two months have been robust for me in terms of work, and it will be okay to have a week or two with no new assignments. I’m excited to have the same vacation schedule as my children. Normally when they are home from school during vacations or professional days, we have a good schedule worked out: I work during the morning and then devote the afternoon to them. But this week and next, I won’t even need those mornings. They neither need nor expect my undivided attention every minute of the day – they are old enough and independent enough that they both have things they like to do on their own, or with friends – but what a luxury it will be to make myself available to them without the stipulations of needing just an hour to get this article done or just a little time this morning to conduct phone interviews.
Psychologically, the situation of being deadline-free just puts me in a different frame of mind than usual. Even the projects that are awaiting information from other people – like my manuscript, in search of a publisher – isn’t on my mind this week, since it’s easier to just assume that everyone else is taking the week off as well and won’t have any news for me until after New Year’s. In the past, time away from work tended to involve thinking about more work: drafting new pieces or seeking out article ideas. But for now, I’m sated. I’m simply not going to think about work this week, or partway into next if possible. I’m even going to take the next two days off from daily blogging.
Instead, along with having time with my children, I’m looking forward to some household projects, visits with friends, maybe snowshoeing. (Getting the kids out on snowshoes would be an astounding feat, but a mom can dream.) Maybe in a few days I’ll have recovered from the mad dash of holiday baking and cooking enough that I’ll want to do some more cooking. Probably the kids and I will observe our annual tradition of going to Starbucks to drink hot chocolate and write thankyou notes one of the days following Christmas.
At the moment, I have three more hours while they are still at school, so I think I’ll use the time wisely by wrapping their presents. They can help me with other wrapping when they get home. And maybe, as I resolved in this blog yesterday, I’ll try to do some housecleaning.
It’s wonderful to be on vacation. I feel like a college student done with finals. I’m really grateful for all the work I’ve had lately. And I’m equally grateful to be taking a short break from all of it.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Housecleaning for the holidays
Last fall, while writing an article for NorthBridge Magazine about holidays, I interviewed a recent immigrant from India about the traditions behind Diwali. One detail she shared with me keeps ringing in my head like an insistent wind chime now that Christmas is just three days away: for Diwali, at least in her family, the first step of the preparations is a thorough house-cleaning. Because that’s how you make the house ready to honor the gods of Diwali: by being clean and orderly.
I love this detail. I love the notion of starting the holiday with, first and foremost, a clean house. Rudimentary research has led me to believe that housecleaning is a typical preparation for the Chinese New Year as well, but I’ve never heard of housecleaning as directly associated with any Christian holiday. To be sure, lots of people including me clean their house before Thanksgiving or Christmas if they are hosting houseguests or having a party, but I don’t think the practice of cleaning the house simply for its own sake typically figures into any Western holiday rituals.
But this year, I’m finding myself drawn to the idea of cleaning my house before Christmas. For one thing, I have time this year. For the past several years we’ve had guests – some staying with us and some staying at my parents’ house next door but spending plenty of time over here – during Christmas, and my preparations have centered more around making up beds and stocking the fridge than dusting or mopping.
But this year it’s just the four of us on the farm, and I managed to plan out my work this month so that I hit all necessary deadlines by yesterday and am essentially deadline-free from now through New Year’s, which gives me some time to tidy and clean. But mostly, I just like the idea of greeting the holiday with the serenity of a clean, neat house. It’s so different from the bustle-bordering-on-chaos that frequently marks the holidays for us. When Rick and I were in our twenties, we would often be in such a last-minute rush of shopping, cooking, and wrapping presents before traveling to wherever we were going over Christmas (which often involved day trips to three different households) that we’d leave our own home an absolute mess. I’d rationalize that once all the presents we were giving people were out of the way, it would be easy to pick up, and after Christmas was over we’d have more time for it too. In recent years I grew less accepting of leaving a messy house behind when we walked out the door, but we still tended to leave a small whirlwind of shopping bags, unwashed cooking implements and half-opened mail in our wake as we embarked on our Christmas festivities.
This year I have the urge to make things really tidy before Christmas day arrives. I’m running the washing machine right now and trying to wrap up my holiday baking tonight so that I can clean the kitchen thoroughly. I’m hoping to vacuum and clean the bathrooms even though with no guests this year, there will be no one but the four of us to notice (which, let’s face it, really means just the one of us – me – to notice, since no one else actually cares if the sinks are scrubbed or the rugs lint-free). I’m planning to wrap presents tomorrow so that I can get all the paper and tape picked up right away. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting older, but I no longer have the same merry tolerance for cheerful holiday mess that I once did. Furthermore, a decade of parenthood stands behind me to remind me that once the kids have opened all their Christmas presents, there’s more mess, not less, to deal with.
In a way, this pre-Christmas clean-up has a certain intrinsic symmetry. I’ve long appreciated the European observance of Boxing Day because of the purging effect of getting rid of any excess – clothes, toys – when Christmas is over. It seems therefore to make sense to want to start the holiday as well as end it with a level of emptiness, of clean surfaces and an absence of clutter.
Of course, intending to clean the house is a lot different from doing it. But I still have two days, and having just returned from yet another fairly dreadful shopping excursion, I have no desire to take to the roads again between now and Christmas. So maybe over the next two days I’ll do the scrubbing, dusting, sweeping and vacuuming that I’m dreaming of. If not, I’ll continue to make it a goal for future Christmas celebrations. And if not Christmas, there’s always New Year’s. I like the idea of starting the New Year with a neat and well-scrubbed house.
In the Diwali tradition, as I understand it, it’s to welcome godliness into the home for the holidays. Whether as a spiritual practice or just a way of making the household feel more serene at a generally less-than-serene time, I like the idea, and I’m going to do my best to honor it.
I love this detail. I love the notion of starting the holiday with, first and foremost, a clean house. Rudimentary research has led me to believe that housecleaning is a typical preparation for the Chinese New Year as well, but I’ve never heard of housecleaning as directly associated with any Christian holiday. To be sure, lots of people including me clean their house before Thanksgiving or Christmas if they are hosting houseguests or having a party, but I don’t think the practice of cleaning the house simply for its own sake typically figures into any Western holiday rituals.
But this year, I’m finding myself drawn to the idea of cleaning my house before Christmas. For one thing, I have time this year. For the past several years we’ve had guests – some staying with us and some staying at my parents’ house next door but spending plenty of time over here – during Christmas, and my preparations have centered more around making up beds and stocking the fridge than dusting or mopping.
But this year it’s just the four of us on the farm, and I managed to plan out my work this month so that I hit all necessary deadlines by yesterday and am essentially deadline-free from now through New Year’s, which gives me some time to tidy and clean. But mostly, I just like the idea of greeting the holiday with the serenity of a clean, neat house. It’s so different from the bustle-bordering-on-chaos that frequently marks the holidays for us. When Rick and I were in our twenties, we would often be in such a last-minute rush of shopping, cooking, and wrapping presents before traveling to wherever we were going over Christmas (which often involved day trips to three different households) that we’d leave our own home an absolute mess. I’d rationalize that once all the presents we were giving people were out of the way, it would be easy to pick up, and after Christmas was over we’d have more time for it too. In recent years I grew less accepting of leaving a messy house behind when we walked out the door, but we still tended to leave a small whirlwind of shopping bags, unwashed cooking implements and half-opened mail in our wake as we embarked on our Christmas festivities.
This year I have the urge to make things really tidy before Christmas day arrives. I’m running the washing machine right now and trying to wrap up my holiday baking tonight so that I can clean the kitchen thoroughly. I’m hoping to vacuum and clean the bathrooms even though with no guests this year, there will be no one but the four of us to notice (which, let’s face it, really means just the one of us – me – to notice, since no one else actually cares if the sinks are scrubbed or the rugs lint-free). I’m planning to wrap presents tomorrow so that I can get all the paper and tape picked up right away. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting older, but I no longer have the same merry tolerance for cheerful holiday mess that I once did. Furthermore, a decade of parenthood stands behind me to remind me that once the kids have opened all their Christmas presents, there’s more mess, not less, to deal with.
In a way, this pre-Christmas clean-up has a certain intrinsic symmetry. I’ve long appreciated the European observance of Boxing Day because of the purging effect of getting rid of any excess – clothes, toys – when Christmas is over. It seems therefore to make sense to want to start the holiday as well as end it with a level of emptiness, of clean surfaces and an absence of clutter.
Of course, intending to clean the house is a lot different from doing it. But I still have two days, and having just returned from yet another fairly dreadful shopping excursion, I have no desire to take to the roads again between now and Christmas. So maybe over the next two days I’ll do the scrubbing, dusting, sweeping and vacuuming that I’m dreaming of. If not, I’ll continue to make it a goal for future Christmas celebrations. And if not Christmas, there’s always New Year’s. I like the idea of starting the New Year with a neat and well-scrubbed house.
In the Diwali tradition, as I understand it, it’s to welcome godliness into the home for the holidays. Whether as a spiritual practice or just a way of making the household feel more serene at a generally less-than-serene time, I like the idea, and I’m going to do my best to honor it.
Monday, December 21, 2009
The shortest day, the longest night
"On this longest night of the year, before the light overcomes the dark, sit in the dark (alone or with others) and think about the importance of darkness. ...Be grateful for the darkness that soothes us to sleep, the darkness that animals require for hibernation. Give thanks for sheltering dark places: the rich earth where seeds germinate, the caves that harbored our ancient ancestors (and where some of our sun gods were born), the cellars that keep us safe from tornadoes, the wombs that provide our first nourishment. Acknowledge the darkness of suffering, which can deepen our appreciation of life and strengthen our connection to one another."
In Nature’s Honor: Myths and Rituals Celebrating the Earth, copyright 2005 by Patricia Montley
My friend Sue sent me the above meditation on the Winter Solstice this morning. Also this morning, the comic strip Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson depicted a sequence in which Arlo is frantically shaking a sleeping Janis awake, imploring her to hurry. Did we oversleep? she asks, alarmed. No, he answers. It’s the shortest day of the year.
The latter perspective makes me laugh, reminding me of my attempts over the years to explain “shortest day of the year” to my children, and long before that my effort to understand it myself. I still remember being frightened at my sister’s explanation, when she as an all-knowing 8-year-old took the reverse perspective and told me it would be not the shortest day but the longest night of the year. I feared lying in the dark for hours and hours and hours, listening to every knock and creak as the long night wore on and on.
But Patricia Montley’s meditation resonates more with how I really feel about the Solstice these days. I’ve learned to welcome deep winter as a time more conducive to internal growth, introspection. In the summer we spend so much time outside and active, biking or swimming; in the fall it’s all about activities, from school starting up to fall sports to get-togethers with friends we didn’t see during the summer. And then in late October begins the steady series of holiday festivities.
Winter, after Christmas, lends itself to quieter pursuits: more reading, more writing, even more cooking and housecleaning. Quiet indoor activities, more meditative in nature than those we pursue during warmer weather and sunnier days.
At the time of year, with the nights so long and quiet, I stand outside in the dark, thinking about the frozen earth drawing inward into itself, and I think about the Pagan roots of Yule, the craving for warmth and light and abundance that led ancient celebrants to light fires and commence with revelry just around the date of the longest night of the year. Although my family is fortunate in that light, heat and food are available to us throughout the winter in abundance, those same urges resonate with me. As the long dark cold nights settle in, I find it uplifting to think about the ancient Pagan rites of staving off winter with burning logs and loud singing.
And I wonder if those ancient people always knew that the shortest day of the year would come and go and the days would grow longer again. Were there some who didn’t trust that it was cyclical, who worried that the days might just keep growing shorter, the nights longer and colder?
The ebb and flow of daylight give us reason for optimism. Although the long nights of darkness don’t especially bother me and are in some ways a comfort, my 11-year-old has a harder time in the winter months; he tends to grow a little dispirited as the days shorten. So as we face the Solstice, I look forward myself to another month or two of hunkering down in the darkness with soup recipes and good books. But I also look forward to spring, when Tim will get out his baseball glove and his disposition will start to brighten again.
In Nature’s Honor: Myths and Rituals Celebrating the Earth, copyright 2005 by Patricia Montley
My friend Sue sent me the above meditation on the Winter Solstice this morning. Also this morning, the comic strip Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson depicted a sequence in which Arlo is frantically shaking a sleeping Janis awake, imploring her to hurry. Did we oversleep? she asks, alarmed. No, he answers. It’s the shortest day of the year.
The latter perspective makes me laugh, reminding me of my attempts over the years to explain “shortest day of the year” to my children, and long before that my effort to understand it myself. I still remember being frightened at my sister’s explanation, when she as an all-knowing 8-year-old took the reverse perspective and told me it would be not the shortest day but the longest night of the year. I feared lying in the dark for hours and hours and hours, listening to every knock and creak as the long night wore on and on.
But Patricia Montley’s meditation resonates more with how I really feel about the Solstice these days. I’ve learned to welcome deep winter as a time more conducive to internal growth, introspection. In the summer we spend so much time outside and active, biking or swimming; in the fall it’s all about activities, from school starting up to fall sports to get-togethers with friends we didn’t see during the summer. And then in late October begins the steady series of holiday festivities.
Winter, after Christmas, lends itself to quieter pursuits: more reading, more writing, even more cooking and housecleaning. Quiet indoor activities, more meditative in nature than those we pursue during warmer weather and sunnier days.
At the time of year, with the nights so long and quiet, I stand outside in the dark, thinking about the frozen earth drawing inward into itself, and I think about the Pagan roots of Yule, the craving for warmth and light and abundance that led ancient celebrants to light fires and commence with revelry just around the date of the longest night of the year. Although my family is fortunate in that light, heat and food are available to us throughout the winter in abundance, those same urges resonate with me. As the long dark cold nights settle in, I find it uplifting to think about the ancient Pagan rites of staving off winter with burning logs and loud singing.
And I wonder if those ancient people always knew that the shortest day of the year would come and go and the days would grow longer again. Were there some who didn’t trust that it was cyclical, who worried that the days might just keep growing shorter, the nights longer and colder?
The ebb and flow of daylight give us reason for optimism. Although the long nights of darkness don’t especially bother me and are in some ways a comfort, my 11-year-old has a harder time in the winter months; he tends to grow a little dispirited as the days shorten. So as we face the Solstice, I look forward myself to another month or two of hunkering down in the darkness with soup recipes and good books. But I also look forward to spring, when Tim will get out his baseball glove and his disposition will start to brighten again.
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