Suddenly, it’s cold.
Not cold by Far North terms, and not even cold by winter-in-New-England terms. But cold for late autumn, which it technically is for another twelve days or so. I’ve been waking before dawn this week to temperatures still in the twenties; even in the middle of the day the mercury doesn’t hit forty. For early December, that’s chilly.
And I’m a little alarmed by how hard I’m finding it to adjust to cold-weather running, even for the twenty-five or thirty minutes I’m out doing my daily weekday two-miler. I’ve run in far colder weather than this, I remind myself. I’ve run in single-digit wind chills, blizzards, frigid temperatures. Two years ago, during a January weekend in northeast Connecticut, I ran five miles on a morning so cold my eyelashes froze.
This isn’t like that. Not at all. But somehow after the nine months of spring, summer and fall, I’ve forgotten the feeling of a chilly wind on my face, a cold breeze blowing down my neck. Even temperatures in the twenties feel startling to me right now.
But I know I have to get used to it. Winter hasn’t even begun yet, and with more than 1,200 days of consecutive running under my belt, I’m not planning to stop this winter unless unforeseen circumstances make it necessary. The cold weather is just setting in; I need to remember all over again how to layer the fleece and forge ahead into the wind. I need to renew the mindset that it’s good to feel a frigid wind as you start out because that means it will be behind you on the return, and I need to get reacquainted with the itchy, damp feeling of a sweaty wool hat on my head.
Besides, there are positive aspects to this cold snap. Once I’ve settled into the rhythm of the run, I find it invigorating. There’s a pure, icy edge to the air that makes each frosty breath feel cleansing. And the frozen ground is firm under my feet, even on the sections of the driveway that are muddy once the temperature rises into the forties.
So far, no snow has fallen, and that’s fine with me too. Snow is so pretty, but I’m not fond of the wet or slushy or slippery aspects of running in the snow. But that will come too in time, and then, just as with the cold, I’ll struggle with it at first, then remind myself I’ve coped with snow plenty of times before, and then gradually re-acclimate myself to its challenges and pleasures: the feathery fluffiness of snow beneath my running shoes, the muffled squeak as I run in tire tracks, the soft thump of running in powder.
Before I was a “streak runner” committed to running every day, I used to take the whole winter off. I’m glad that now I try to run through the cold and the snow. It’s challenging. It’s invigorating. And it reminds me that every condition – in running and otherwise – has its positives and negatives, its challenges and rewards.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
It takes a child (or several) to raise a village
To be sure, there is wisdom in the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. But last night at Carlisle’s Christmas on the Common, I couldn’t help but think it also takes a child to raise a village.
For the past several years, I’ve been on the serving crew for this annual event, meaning that I arrive early and help arrange cookies on platters and get the hot chocolate urns in place. While the audience is outside singing Christmas carols, admiring the town tree and awaiting Santa, I start pouring hot chocolate into Styrofoam cups to be ready for the crowds as soon as they pour in after Santa’s arrival by firetruck.
I used to feel important in this role. Not only did it involve the aforementioned tasks but also overseeing a small team of grade school aged children who every year asked to “help” at the event. Part of the work of the small crew of adults present was to supervise and oversee these young helpers.
But last night, I noticed something: the helpers I’d been working with for the past few years can pretty much run the show on their own now. They no longer need adult supervision and instruction; in fact, they no longer need adult assistance at all. Middle schoolers now, they know the ropes.
So they do their part by providing labor for the event, and the little kids, the grade schoolers and preschoolers and toddlers, do their part by adding enchantment to the evening. They stare at the tree, sing the carols, and watch with mouths agape as the processional heads up Church Street: first the police cars with blue lights flashing, then the antique fire truck, with Santa waving and his five elves posing. The kids cheer and yell, and then they pour into the church hall for hot chocolate and cookies and photos with Santa.
It’s a quintessential old-fashioned small-town event. Everyone who attends has a wonderful time, and it’s the kind of evening that underscores the ways in which Carlisle can sometimes – though not always – feel like a cozy village. But these events wouldn’t occur without children present, the younger ones and the older ones alike. So in that respect, it takes children to raise a village.
I don’t mean to suggest that communities without children don’t have their own rituals of cheer. Retirement communities, subdivisions restricted to adults, college dorms, even nursing homes and graduated care facilities: they too have their times of merriment. But in a case like this, it’s the children who bring the community together. During my stint serving hot chocolate alongside the middle schoolers who were really doing most of the work, I saw among the revelers three adults who do not have children. In a small way I was surprised they attended, but also not; it was a jolly evening for everyone. But it made me think about how the presence of the children had drawn out even these non-parents to join in the fun.
So it takes a village to raise a child, and it takes children to make a village. Community, in the most meaningful sense, happens best when all ages work together. Last night, that included babies to be admired; little kids thrilled by the holiday mood; older kids happy to help out (and happy to posture for each other as they did so); adults to pull it all together. At times like this, we are a community with the spirit of a small-town village. And sometimes it takes children to make that happen to its best potential.
For the past several years, I’ve been on the serving crew for this annual event, meaning that I arrive early and help arrange cookies on platters and get the hot chocolate urns in place. While the audience is outside singing Christmas carols, admiring the town tree and awaiting Santa, I start pouring hot chocolate into Styrofoam cups to be ready for the crowds as soon as they pour in after Santa’s arrival by firetruck.
I used to feel important in this role. Not only did it involve the aforementioned tasks but also overseeing a small team of grade school aged children who every year asked to “help” at the event. Part of the work of the small crew of adults present was to supervise and oversee these young helpers.
But last night, I noticed something: the helpers I’d been working with for the past few years can pretty much run the show on their own now. They no longer need adult supervision and instruction; in fact, they no longer need adult assistance at all. Middle schoolers now, they know the ropes.
So they do their part by providing labor for the event, and the little kids, the grade schoolers and preschoolers and toddlers, do their part by adding enchantment to the evening. They stare at the tree, sing the carols, and watch with mouths agape as the processional heads up Church Street: first the police cars with blue lights flashing, then the antique fire truck, with Santa waving and his five elves posing. The kids cheer and yell, and then they pour into the church hall for hot chocolate and cookies and photos with Santa.
It’s a quintessential old-fashioned small-town event. Everyone who attends has a wonderful time, and it’s the kind of evening that underscores the ways in which Carlisle can sometimes – though not always – feel like a cozy village. But these events wouldn’t occur without children present, the younger ones and the older ones alike. So in that respect, it takes children to raise a village.
I don’t mean to suggest that communities without children don’t have their own rituals of cheer. Retirement communities, subdivisions restricted to adults, college dorms, even nursing homes and graduated care facilities: they too have their times of merriment. But in a case like this, it’s the children who bring the community together. During my stint serving hot chocolate alongside the middle schoolers who were really doing most of the work, I saw among the revelers three adults who do not have children. In a small way I was surprised they attended, but also not; it was a jolly evening for everyone. But it made me think about how the presence of the children had drawn out even these non-parents to join in the fun.
So it takes a village to raise a child, and it takes children to make a village. Community, in the most meaningful sense, happens best when all ages work together. Last night, that included babies to be admired; little kids thrilled by the holiday mood; older kids happy to help out (and happy to posture for each other as they did so); adults to pull it all together. At times like this, we are a community with the spirit of a small-town village. And sometimes it takes children to make that happen to its best potential.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
The three o'clock mingle
I’m usually good at issuing a guilt-free “no” to my children. Amidst a generation of parents who are often accused of being unable to give an unequivocal negative response, and a generation of young children whom onlookers occasionally call “attorneys-in-training” for their skill at negotiating, I’m a stark voice of dissent among my parenting peers. It’s not that I enjoy disappointing my children any more than any other parent would, but for the most part, I can justify my negative responses to them with a simple explanation. Disney cruise? Too costly. Stop for a quick snack at Burger King? Can’t bear the fat content. Stay up late to watch Monday night football with Dad? Not if you want to do well on tomorrow’s math test.
But one question that arises in our household does generate a little bit of uncertainty for me: the kids’ recurrent request that I pick them up at school.
That’s a tough one. Most of the time I don’t want to, but unlike snacks with trans-fats or violent movies, I don’t have a really compelling reason behind my “no.” I have only “Because I don’t feel like it.” And I’m ambivalent as to whether a petulant “No, I don’t wanna” is a legitimate answer for a parent to give a child or not.
What my kids don’t see is that picking them up at school isn’t simply a short drive for me; it’s a social event for which I sometimes just don’t feel mentally prepared.
In Carlisle, picking a child up at school entails parking on the street and then walking a short distance up to the school plaza. In some ways, I love this arrangement: the idea of driving up to the curb and having my child hop into the car isn’t appealing to me at all, inasmuch as it represents just another emblem of our drive-through culture. I like the fact that we’re forced to walk and mingle.
At the same time, there are afternoons on which I just don’t feel ready for mingling. Carlisle is a small town, and I consider myself lucky to have so many friends and acquaintances. But a lot of days, the prospect of driving up to school gives me the exact same feeling I get when I’m dressing before a cocktail party. Experience reminds me that I’ll have fun once I’m there, greeting and chatting and meeting people and renewing old friendships, and yet the thought of walking in the door fills me with anxiety. Whether it’s a Saturday night cocktail party or the school plaza at three o'clock, certain anxieties prevail. What if when I arrive, everyone else is already engaged in conversation and no one talks to me? What if I don’t remember an acquaintance’s name, or run into someone whose last email I ignored because it was a request for some favor I didn’t want to do, like helping with a classroom papier-mache project?
Fortunately, both of my kids are generally happy to take the bus home. So once a week or so when they do ask to be picked up, I can usually psyche myself up sufficiently, reminding myself that after a long day of solitary writing, it’s actually fun to run into friends and acquaintances up at the school. I’m not the only self-employed or stay-at-home parent for whom the plaza is occasionally the only truly social event of the day, and it can be a quite convivial atmosphere, at least before the frigid days of winter arrive.
But for the most part, I tend to stick with “no” on this one. As taxpayers, we support the schoolbus system for a reason, I tell my children. It’s more environmental, and we don’t want to put the bus drivers out of a job, do we?
What my children don’t realize is that in another couple of months it will be a moot point. Our school is planning major construction starting this winter, and the result will be a redirected traffic flow and a reduction of parking spaces that will make it much more complicated to pick children up, deterring all but the most resolute parents.
And then? Well, naturally, I’ll tell my children that of course I’d pick them up if I could – but our obligation during construction is to avoid driving to school unless absolutely necessary. So it won’t be a “no” at all, and certainly not a guilt-inducing “Sorry, I just don’t want to.” For once, I’ll feel entirely justified in my recalcitrance.
Still, missing out on plaza pick-up time will significantly diminish my social life. It’s possible I’ll spend the whole winter and spring working all day and not doing any chatting or visiting at all when my work hours end. I’ll just have to hope that a few friends stop by as I wait for the kids at the bus stop, alone with my thoughts and free of my social anxieties for the time being.
But one question that arises in our household does generate a little bit of uncertainty for me: the kids’ recurrent request that I pick them up at school.
That’s a tough one. Most of the time I don’t want to, but unlike snacks with trans-fats or violent movies, I don’t have a really compelling reason behind my “no.” I have only “Because I don’t feel like it.” And I’m ambivalent as to whether a petulant “No, I don’t wanna” is a legitimate answer for a parent to give a child or not.
What my kids don’t see is that picking them up at school isn’t simply a short drive for me; it’s a social event for which I sometimes just don’t feel mentally prepared.
In Carlisle, picking a child up at school entails parking on the street and then walking a short distance up to the school plaza. In some ways, I love this arrangement: the idea of driving up to the curb and having my child hop into the car isn’t appealing to me at all, inasmuch as it represents just another emblem of our drive-through culture. I like the fact that we’re forced to walk and mingle.
At the same time, there are afternoons on which I just don’t feel ready for mingling. Carlisle is a small town, and I consider myself lucky to have so many friends and acquaintances. But a lot of days, the prospect of driving up to school gives me the exact same feeling I get when I’m dressing before a cocktail party. Experience reminds me that I’ll have fun once I’m there, greeting and chatting and meeting people and renewing old friendships, and yet the thought of walking in the door fills me with anxiety. Whether it’s a Saturday night cocktail party or the school plaza at three o'clock, certain anxieties prevail. What if when I arrive, everyone else is already engaged in conversation and no one talks to me? What if I don’t remember an acquaintance’s name, or run into someone whose last email I ignored because it was a request for some favor I didn’t want to do, like helping with a classroom papier-mache project?
Fortunately, both of my kids are generally happy to take the bus home. So once a week or so when they do ask to be picked up, I can usually psyche myself up sufficiently, reminding myself that after a long day of solitary writing, it’s actually fun to run into friends and acquaintances up at the school. I’m not the only self-employed or stay-at-home parent for whom the plaza is occasionally the only truly social event of the day, and it can be a quite convivial atmosphere, at least before the frigid days of winter arrive.
But for the most part, I tend to stick with “no” on this one. As taxpayers, we support the schoolbus system for a reason, I tell my children. It’s more environmental, and we don’t want to put the bus drivers out of a job, do we?
What my children don’t realize is that in another couple of months it will be a moot point. Our school is planning major construction starting this winter, and the result will be a redirected traffic flow and a reduction of parking spaces that will make it much more complicated to pick children up, deterring all but the most resolute parents.
And then? Well, naturally, I’ll tell my children that of course I’d pick them up if I could – but our obligation during construction is to avoid driving to school unless absolutely necessary. So it won’t be a “no” at all, and certainly not a guilt-inducing “Sorry, I just don’t want to.” For once, I’ll feel entirely justified in my recalcitrance.
Still, missing out on plaza pick-up time will significantly diminish my social life. It’s possible I’ll spend the whole winter and spring working all day and not doing any chatting or visiting at all when my work hours end. I’ll just have to hope that a few friends stop by as I wait for the kids at the bus stop, alone with my thoughts and free of my social anxieties for the time being.
Monday, December 6, 2010
Another year's holiday concert reminds me of how much music matters to the holidays
I hadn’t thought much before yesterday about the role of music in the holidays, but at some point during last night’s holiday concert at church, or maybe earlier in the day when I was listening to liturgical Christmas choral music on the radio while driving, I thought about how music was once considered one of the holiest ways to mark the presence of the spiritual and the belief in the Divine. The early Christian choral music I heard on the radio was written out of a sense of profound celebration. Music isn’t merely an element of entertainment marking holiday gatherings, I then remembered; it is in fact considered a means of expressing witness to the Divine.
The church concert last night included some elements of early Christian music and some elements of the more popular forms of holiday music: standard carols, jazz arrangements, a run-through of Jingle Bells that included all the children in the audience shaking various forms of percussives. It was a wonderful program, just as it is every year, and as I sat there I was conscious of the ways in which the concert carries its own set of milestones and markers of the passage of time. Two 13-year-old girls sang a duet beautifully, and as I listened, I could remember one of them singing in the family choir back when she was a kindergartner, and her earlier solo performances when she was 7 or 8, but I could also remember the very same duet she sang with a friend last night being sung years ago by a young woman who now attends a performing arts college program in New York. I remembered choir members and instrumentalists from years past who have died or left town, and sitting next to our minister reminded me of her predecessor, who loved holiday observances including this annual concert and died prematurely soon after leaving our parish.
But I also remembered how my own family has changed in the years I’ve been attending this annual concert. When we first moved back to town, I took Tim to the holiday concert with me; he was just three years old and a little too restless for my comfort. Holly came with me for the first time when she was two; something about the candles and the music had the effect of putting her into a sound sleep on my lap for the duration of the concert that year. The year after that, she and I had to sneak in and out of the Sanctuary at least three times during the one-hour program because she was at the peak of toilet-training, and it wasn’t going all that well.
Last night, there were other babies and toddlers whose parents were like I once was: far too preoccupied with keeping their small children quiet and calm to enjoy the program much at all. I knew how they felt, though: in those early years it seems so important to expose children to the special spectacle of live holiday music that you try hard to make it happen even when all evidence points to the fact that they probably just aren’t ready yet to sit through a program not specifically geared toward preschoolers.
But I’m at a different stage now. Tim opted not to come at all; at 12, his own interest in watching football overrules the novelty of being out at night, not to mention any priority on having time with Mom. Holly did come with me, but shortly after we sat down she moved to sit with four friends of hers. Suspecting that five 8-year-olds sharing a pew during a performance might not be such a good idea, I issued some stern words about behaving well; but I need not have worried; the girls all behaved beautifully, listening with rapt absorption except during the audience-participatory Jingle Bells, when they shook their maracas and bells along with all the other kids.
Some things haven’t changed; Holly still needed to leave halfway through to use the bathroom. But unlike during the memorable season of toilet-training, she slipped out on her own, after whispering to me where she was going; and upon returning to the Sanctuary three minutes later gave me a cheerful thumbs-up.
The experience reminded me that holiday significance doesn’t always appear where you most expect it. I would have expected to be most reminded of the passage of time when choosing our Christmas card picture, perhaps, or in selecting gifts for my kids, or maybe even in what we chose to do on Christmas Eve. (Do we still have to leave out beer and cookies for Santa? Really? Even though it’s just more dishes for me to wash?) I wouldn’t have expected being an audience member at a concert to have so much meaning to me. But the concert was wonderful as always, and meaningful as always. And I will try to remember in the future that music deserves a prominent role in our holiday traditions.
The church concert last night included some elements of early Christian music and some elements of the more popular forms of holiday music: standard carols, jazz arrangements, a run-through of Jingle Bells that included all the children in the audience shaking various forms of percussives. It was a wonderful program, just as it is every year, and as I sat there I was conscious of the ways in which the concert carries its own set of milestones and markers of the passage of time. Two 13-year-old girls sang a duet beautifully, and as I listened, I could remember one of them singing in the family choir back when she was a kindergartner, and her earlier solo performances when she was 7 or 8, but I could also remember the very same duet she sang with a friend last night being sung years ago by a young woman who now attends a performing arts college program in New York. I remembered choir members and instrumentalists from years past who have died or left town, and sitting next to our minister reminded me of her predecessor, who loved holiday observances including this annual concert and died prematurely soon after leaving our parish.
But I also remembered how my own family has changed in the years I’ve been attending this annual concert. When we first moved back to town, I took Tim to the holiday concert with me; he was just three years old and a little too restless for my comfort. Holly came with me for the first time when she was two; something about the candles and the music had the effect of putting her into a sound sleep on my lap for the duration of the concert that year. The year after that, she and I had to sneak in and out of the Sanctuary at least three times during the one-hour program because she was at the peak of toilet-training, and it wasn’t going all that well.
Last night, there were other babies and toddlers whose parents were like I once was: far too preoccupied with keeping their small children quiet and calm to enjoy the program much at all. I knew how they felt, though: in those early years it seems so important to expose children to the special spectacle of live holiday music that you try hard to make it happen even when all evidence points to the fact that they probably just aren’t ready yet to sit through a program not specifically geared toward preschoolers.
But I’m at a different stage now. Tim opted not to come at all; at 12, his own interest in watching football overrules the novelty of being out at night, not to mention any priority on having time with Mom. Holly did come with me, but shortly after we sat down she moved to sit with four friends of hers. Suspecting that five 8-year-olds sharing a pew during a performance might not be such a good idea, I issued some stern words about behaving well; but I need not have worried; the girls all behaved beautifully, listening with rapt absorption except during the audience-participatory Jingle Bells, when they shook their maracas and bells along with all the other kids.
Some things haven’t changed; Holly still needed to leave halfway through to use the bathroom. But unlike during the memorable season of toilet-training, she slipped out on her own, after whispering to me where she was going; and upon returning to the Sanctuary three minutes later gave me a cheerful thumbs-up.
The experience reminded me that holiday significance doesn’t always appear where you most expect it. I would have expected to be most reminded of the passage of time when choosing our Christmas card picture, perhaps, or in selecting gifts for my kids, or maybe even in what we chose to do on Christmas Eve. (Do we still have to leave out beer and cookies for Santa? Really? Even though it’s just more dishes for me to wash?) I wouldn’t have expected being an audience member at a concert to have so much meaning to me. But the concert was wonderful as always, and meaningful as always. And I will try to remember in the future that music deserves a prominent role in our holiday traditions.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Making latkes
Once a year, I make latkes. And normally not very well, either. I try, but the mushy, slightly soggy lumps that I’m able to pry out of the frying pan, leaving a thin coating of crispness stuck behind, have never reminded me one bit of the latkes that were a favorite food during my childhood. Back then my parents had a square metal electric frying pan that stood on the counter on its little legs, cooking potato pancakes to perfection after my mother had mixed the ideal batter. My yearly efforts didn’t even seem like distant relatives of those savory golden moons.
We don’t really celebrate Hanukkah other than stopping by my parents’ house once or twice during the eight-day holiday to witness their lighting of the menorah, and I usually don’t even think about latkes until I hear someone else talking about this.
But this year was different. A week ago, as I was drafting my weekly arts column, I included an item about a children’s museum that was hosting a Hanukkah party, and I started thinking, “Mmmm….latkes. This year I’m going to do it right.”
I didn’t do a lot of research, but through a stroke of serendipity, I got the date wrong: I thought Hanukkah started Thursday night rather than Wednesday night, and it was Thursday that I targeted for a latke dinner. The reason this was so fortuitous was that friends were posting on Facebook all day yesterday about the relative successes or failures of their latke-making efforts, and so even without setting out to do research, I was picking up helpful hints as the day went on: leave plenty of time for draining the grated potatoes, and use safflower oil heated to a very high temperature for optimal frying.
Ultimately, though, I think what made my latkes so successful this year was that I took all the time I needed to complete each step. In the kitchen, I have a tendency to scrimp on time, and my nonchalant willingness to improvise can cross over far too quickly into out-and-out sloppiness. Peel the potatoes? Who needs it! Grate the onions to a uniform size? Hey, the Maccabees had no Cuisinarts – just randomly chop! Applesauce? Sorry, didn’t think of it. Come on, latkes don’t really need applesauce, do they?
This year I started earlier and went through every step. I don’t mean I started days earlier, like the Orthodox Jewish housewives of a bygone day. I just mean I started an hour before dinnertime rather than the usual twenty minutes. I peeled every potato. I set the mixture in a colander over a bowl covered by a plate weighted down with a large can of broth in order to drain most effectively. I even chopped two apples, threw them into a saucepan with a little water and some sugar, and stewed them into applesauce. I didn’t cut corners.
And the payoff was irrefutable: by dinnertime an hour later, we had a platter of the most gorgeous, golden-brown, crispy, flat latkes I had ever seen. Even better than those I remembered from childhood (but that may have simply been because they were on a plate ready to eat rather than shimmering in my imagination).
From now on I’ll do this every year, I thought to myself. And I’ll do it the same way, too. I’ll leave enough time for every step.
It made me think about how one aspect of the holiday season that many of us tend to gripe about is all the cooking and planning. In general, no one needs more complicated rituals to add to their holidays. But this felt different, somehow. Unlike the arduous task of making homemade gingerbread houses rather than buying the pre-fabricated kind for the kids to decorate, this felt worth every minute I’d put into it. In the end, my latke-making didn’t feel like another stressful holiday exercise but rather an act of spiritual observance, almost. I’d taken time and care with every step along the way and created something wonderful, just as I’d done the night before in making chocolate truffles for gift-giving and would do later in the month when I chose photos for our annual photo calendars.
Ultimately, these are the holiday rituals worth retaining: those that soothe our souls and reassure us that the time we took and the attention we paid yielded beautiful results. Many of my friends have been searching for ways to make the holiday season less complicated and more enjoyable. And on the surface, making homemade latkes may not seem to be the answer. But I think yesterday it taught me something important about which holiday traditions to prioritize: those in which taking time to do it right seems to yield its own reward. As my family and I bit into our hot, crunchy, crispy, chewy latkes, I tasted every second of work that had gone into them. And at the same time, I knew I’d started a ritual that I would find worth keeping.
We don’t really celebrate Hanukkah other than stopping by my parents’ house once or twice during the eight-day holiday to witness their lighting of the menorah, and I usually don’t even think about latkes until I hear someone else talking about this.
But this year was different. A week ago, as I was drafting my weekly arts column, I included an item about a children’s museum that was hosting a Hanukkah party, and I started thinking, “Mmmm….latkes. This year I’m going to do it right.”
I didn’t do a lot of research, but through a stroke of serendipity, I got the date wrong: I thought Hanukkah started Thursday night rather than Wednesday night, and it was Thursday that I targeted for a latke dinner. The reason this was so fortuitous was that friends were posting on Facebook all day yesterday about the relative successes or failures of their latke-making efforts, and so even without setting out to do research, I was picking up helpful hints as the day went on: leave plenty of time for draining the grated potatoes, and use safflower oil heated to a very high temperature for optimal frying.
Ultimately, though, I think what made my latkes so successful this year was that I took all the time I needed to complete each step. In the kitchen, I have a tendency to scrimp on time, and my nonchalant willingness to improvise can cross over far too quickly into out-and-out sloppiness. Peel the potatoes? Who needs it! Grate the onions to a uniform size? Hey, the Maccabees had no Cuisinarts – just randomly chop! Applesauce? Sorry, didn’t think of it. Come on, latkes don’t really need applesauce, do they?
This year I started earlier and went through every step. I don’t mean I started days earlier, like the Orthodox Jewish housewives of a bygone day. I just mean I started an hour before dinnertime rather than the usual twenty minutes. I peeled every potato. I set the mixture in a colander over a bowl covered by a plate weighted down with a large can of broth in order to drain most effectively. I even chopped two apples, threw them into a saucepan with a little water and some sugar, and stewed them into applesauce. I didn’t cut corners.
And the payoff was irrefutable: by dinnertime an hour later, we had a platter of the most gorgeous, golden-brown, crispy, flat latkes I had ever seen. Even better than those I remembered from childhood (but that may have simply been because they were on a plate ready to eat rather than shimmering in my imagination).
From now on I’ll do this every year, I thought to myself. And I’ll do it the same way, too. I’ll leave enough time for every step.
It made me think about how one aspect of the holiday season that many of us tend to gripe about is all the cooking and planning. In general, no one needs more complicated rituals to add to their holidays. But this felt different, somehow. Unlike the arduous task of making homemade gingerbread houses rather than buying the pre-fabricated kind for the kids to decorate, this felt worth every minute I’d put into it. In the end, my latke-making didn’t feel like another stressful holiday exercise but rather an act of spiritual observance, almost. I’d taken time and care with every step along the way and created something wonderful, just as I’d done the night before in making chocolate truffles for gift-giving and would do later in the month when I chose photos for our annual photo calendars.
Ultimately, these are the holiday rituals worth retaining: those that soothe our souls and reassure us that the time we took and the attention we paid yielded beautiful results. Many of my friends have been searching for ways to make the holiday season less complicated and more enjoyable. And on the surface, making homemade latkes may not seem to be the answer. But I think yesterday it taught me something important about which holiday traditions to prioritize: those in which taking time to do it right seems to yield its own reward. As my family and I bit into our hot, crunchy, crispy, chewy latkes, I tasted every second of work that had gone into them. And at the same time, I knew I’d started a ritual that I would find worth keeping.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
A work in progress
Holly’s light had been off for fifteen minutes when I went into her room to tuck her in one night earlier this week, but she was still awake. “Mommy!” she exclaimed in a breathless whisper as I leaned over to kiss her goodnight. “I just came up with the best idea for my next book!”
“What is it?” I asked.
“Well, this is how the back cover will read,” she said, and rattled off a couple of paragraphs of nearly camera-ready blurb text to summarize her imminent work-in-progress.
I was simultaneously empathetic and envious. How well I know the feeling of inspiration striking, that electric buzz when you hit on the perfect idea for your next essay or article or book. But I also know how different it is at my age than hers. After two decades in the profession, my moments of brilliant inspiration are inevitably tempered by the reality of what experience has taught me. “That’s going to be really hard to research,” my conscience tells me. Or “You’ll never be able to find sources to talk to you about that.” Or “Okay, but what happens after the first three chapters?” Or “That could work if you actually had six months to spend in Southeast Asia. Which you don’t.”
But for Holly, there’s no tempering of reality. For her, there’s just that white-hot spark of inspiration. And falling asleep after it hit didn’t dull the impact at all for her; the next morning after breakfast she used the twenty minutes between breakfast and bus to start jotting notes about her characters, and she worked on it further after school. Now she’s two chapters in.
She may or may not continue with equal enthusiasm. A year ago she completed her first so-called novel, a 67-page, 17-chapter middle grade story about a ten-year-old girl and her adventures with home, school and friends. She composed that book in a fairly unusual way: lying on her back on the rug in my office, gazing up at me through the transparent surface of my glass desk while I sat at my computer taking dictation from her.
Since then, a couple of subsequent projects haven’t gone as smoothly. She’s had that problematic experience with which so many novelists are familiar: an idea that seems great at the starting gate turns out to just not have legs. She’s done four or five chapters only to realize the plot just isn’t going anywhere.
But she’s new to the practice of writing, and her enthusiasm remains unadulterated. So when she whispered through the darkness that an idea was hatching, I could sense her excitement. I remember being eight years old and staying up long after bedtime to work on a story that at the time seemed absolutely world-changing to me.
And in truth, I still do that sometimes. I still hit on an essay idea that I’m convinced will justify the late hour I’m staying up to working on it. “It won’t bother me in the morning if I’ve had only four hours of sleep; I’ll be so excited about what I wrote that I’ll feel fine,” I tell myself.
Not true when morning comes, of course. But nonetheless, I understand exactly how Holly feels. For someone who loves writing – whether it’s Holly, or me, or millions of other writers of every age and every walk of life – there’s nothing quite to electrifying as a great idea. I wish that I too had come up with an idea for my next book this week, but I didn’t; I’m still in the recovery phase from the last one.
Still, witnessing Holly’s excitement reminded me of what a great feeling it is. And it will come again, I know. For me as well as for Holly. Both of us still have a lifetime of writing to get to.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Well, this is how the back cover will read,” she said, and rattled off a couple of paragraphs of nearly camera-ready blurb text to summarize her imminent work-in-progress.
I was simultaneously empathetic and envious. How well I know the feeling of inspiration striking, that electric buzz when you hit on the perfect idea for your next essay or article or book. But I also know how different it is at my age than hers. After two decades in the profession, my moments of brilliant inspiration are inevitably tempered by the reality of what experience has taught me. “That’s going to be really hard to research,” my conscience tells me. Or “You’ll never be able to find sources to talk to you about that.” Or “Okay, but what happens after the first three chapters?” Or “That could work if you actually had six months to spend in Southeast Asia. Which you don’t.”
But for Holly, there’s no tempering of reality. For her, there’s just that white-hot spark of inspiration. And falling asleep after it hit didn’t dull the impact at all for her; the next morning after breakfast she used the twenty minutes between breakfast and bus to start jotting notes about her characters, and she worked on it further after school. Now she’s two chapters in.
She may or may not continue with equal enthusiasm. A year ago she completed her first so-called novel, a 67-page, 17-chapter middle grade story about a ten-year-old girl and her adventures with home, school and friends. She composed that book in a fairly unusual way: lying on her back on the rug in my office, gazing up at me through the transparent surface of my glass desk while I sat at my computer taking dictation from her.
Since then, a couple of subsequent projects haven’t gone as smoothly. She’s had that problematic experience with which so many novelists are familiar: an idea that seems great at the starting gate turns out to just not have legs. She’s done four or five chapters only to realize the plot just isn’t going anywhere.
But she’s new to the practice of writing, and her enthusiasm remains unadulterated. So when she whispered through the darkness that an idea was hatching, I could sense her excitement. I remember being eight years old and staying up long after bedtime to work on a story that at the time seemed absolutely world-changing to me.
And in truth, I still do that sometimes. I still hit on an essay idea that I’m convinced will justify the late hour I’m staying up to working on it. “It won’t bother me in the morning if I’ve had only four hours of sleep; I’ll be so excited about what I wrote that I’ll feel fine,” I tell myself.
Not true when morning comes, of course. But nonetheless, I understand exactly how Holly feels. For someone who loves writing – whether it’s Holly, or me, or millions of other writers of every age and every walk of life – there’s nothing quite to electrifying as a great idea. I wish that I too had come up with an idea for my next book this week, but I didn’t; I’m still in the recovery phase from the last one.
Still, witnessing Holly’s excitement reminded me of what a great feeling it is. And it will come again, I know. For me as well as for Holly. Both of us still have a lifetime of writing to get to.
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