I am not, by any means, a curmudgeon. I remember many totally enchanted Christmases, particularly my ninth. My parents’ friend Mr. Hammond had, a week before Christmas, delivered to me a hand-crafted, very simple dollhouse. It was one story, and roofless, but for a child who had previously named and played with families of marbles and buttons, it offered endless possibilities. Mr. Hammond also gave me a vial of gold glitter, and instructed me to sprinkle it onto the dollhouse every night and say “Wiffle Dust, Wiffle Dust, make this dollhouse grow!” Although I was old enough to be skeptical, I was still highly susceptible to all things magical. I wanted to believe. Every night up to and including Christmas Eve, I sprinkled the glitter, incanted the appropriate words, and went to bed.
On Christmas morning, in place of the small house was a three-story Victorian dollhouse made by my father. It had brick detailing etched on the dark red exterior walls, shingles on the roof, and trim on the windows. My grandmother had made curtains for every room; bright cotton for the kitchen, red satin for the library, and pink dimity for the childrens’ room. She had also made bedding for all of the beds, and a braided oval rug for the attic floor. The house was full of furniture, all purchased in England the previous summer – a brass bed for the master bedroom, a piano with a music box in it for the living room, and a full set of dishes, silverware, glasses, pots and pans. A chandelier hung from the dining room ceiling. The house came complete with a proper English family, although by the time their coiffures had been destroyed by attempts at styling, and the patriarch had mysteriously lost his left foot, I preferred that the estate be inhabited by a collection of small toy animals who, along with the collection of my best friend Isabel, had marriages, divorces and rivalries worthy of “Dynasty.” I had been completely unaware of the construction or outfitting of the house, and while I now realize the amount of hard work and planning that went into such a gift, at the time, it was just…magic.
I also remember warmly the early Christmases of my own child. I have pictures of him beaming amidst a pile of discarded wrapping paper and ribbon, crawling beneath the tree, and discovering the rideable Jeep he received when he was three. He was too little to beg for anything, delighted with our choices, and constantly in genuine awe as a real tree was brought into the house, Santa was explained, and gifts appeared in his stocking on Christmas morning. Like my parents before me, I set out cookies and milk on Christmas Eve, ate the cookies, and penned a note to Sam from Santa using my left hand to disguise my handwriting. (A hand mysteriously similar to those of the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny). It is corny but true that the real magic of Christmas, apart from its tremendous significance for Christians, is the purely decanted joy of children, untainted by greed or cynicism.
This year, I am afflicted with S.A.D. (Seasonal Apathy Disorder). The seeds were planted years ago, when I spent several Christmas seasons working in retail establishments. Christmas music (particularly Mariah Carey singing “Santa Baby”) was played from open til close in a continuous and grating loop, and customers were stressed, impatient and often unkind. When I managed an elegant store in Boston’s Copley Place in the early 1990s, we were expected to wrap gifts in front of customers, using a complicated method of laying perfect rows of accordion-pleated white tissue under, around and over the purchased object. It made a beautiful presentation, but more than once a customer’s temper flared as he waited through this process, asking repeatedly why we couldn’t just “put it in a box.” My staff, particularly the dreamy and artistic Roxanne, would answer that we were “not allowed” to do such a thing, and continue to pleat and place at her own speed while the person across the counter grew increasingly belligerent and demanding. There was nothing either “silent” or “holy” about the conversations by the time I stepped in to defend our policy and attempt to defuse the escalating Wrapping War.
Given this rocky history, and the fact that I am no longer a child (even my child is no longer a child) it is no wonder that I have trouble getting into the Spirit of the Season. My dour view of the seasonal cash-grab is not enhanced by what is apparently called “Christmas Creep,” the practice of retail establishments to begin pushing Christmas merchandise earlier and earlier. Shortly before Halloween, on an unseasonably warm day, I walked into Target to pick up a prescription, only to be greeted by Christmas decorations. I like Christmas decorations, I really do, but there is a kind of naturally-unfolding anticipation that should take place during the fall. Long before discount tinsel is hanging from hooks, there should be time to enjoy the spookiness of Halloween, and the gratitude and family gatherings that mark Thanksgiving. I am not, and will never be a “Black Friday” shopper; I feel the same way about reducing Thanksgiving to The Day Before Shopping that I do about re-casting Veteran’s Day and President’s Day as days to buy cheap furniture.
I am particularly bothered by the extension of Christmas Cash Grab season this year, because it so clearly pits desperate retailers in a bad economy against families struggling in the same, dark waters. Although we are advised to teach our children not to nag for things, and to understand, in a general way, the realistic gift-giving limitations imposed by family circumstances, it’s a tough battle in the face of ads and store displays that begin, in October, to make all things seem possible. I cannot imagine having to explain to a small child that Santa will probably be less generous than he was last year, because a parent has lost a job. I am also haunted by the specter of families fighting to save their homes from foreclosure, or to pay medical bills, making the necessary decision to cut back on previous Christmas spending. It may be bad parenting to try to create a reasonably bountiful and joyous Christmas for one’s children. I think it is not, and that unless one has raised children in a firm regime of austere simplicity where the family has always given a donation to The Humane Society in place of personal gifts, it is terribly difficult to make the shift from the full-on Christmas seen in every store and television show to the budget Christmas that may be required by a pile of past-due bills.
I am not, frankly, in the mood to decorate the house, buy a tree, haul ornaments and angels and santas down from the attic, buy gifts or sing carols. For the past several years (mostly because of my own sentimentality) I have also trimmed and then taken down my parents’ Christmas tree, baked their Christmas cookies, and decorated their house. I am having real trouble seeing past the presentation of “The Reason for the Season” not as the birth of Christ, but as a retail bonanza, and an endless source of work. About that: while some aspects of the celebration are undoubtedly Pagan, and the holiday has been commercialized to the point where it might appear completely secular to a Martian, “Christmas” is, by definition, recognition of Christ’s birth. Whether one is or is not a Christian, if Christmas is celebrated, its basic import should be acknowledged. My Jewish mother acknowledged it, and we were always perfectly clear about the fact that while she did not personally believe in the Christian religious tradition, we had family and friends that did (including her mother-in-law) and we were to respect and honor their beliefs. It would, I think, help to counteract the selling out of Christmas if we could all find something genuinely spiritual in the season, whether that “something” is religious faith or recognition that we are blessed to have the family and friends that surround us.
My sermon having concluded, I will confess that I am caught, at the moment, between my serious disenchantment with this whole Christmas thing, and the fact that others in my family, those of sunnier dispositions, will be anxious for decorations, cookies and mysteriously shaped packages. (Not under the tree because the dogs eat them). I have to do this thing, and, as my father says, “anything worth doing is worth doing well.”
I’m going to start slow. I am going to make a choice, right now, that no matter how many news stories I read about dwindling supplies of Scotch tape, or the projected unavailability of silver PS370s after November 28th, I will not begin Christmas until Thanksgiving has been thoroughly and graciously enjoyed. I will, instead of sweating the sending of cards, acknowledge that I have failed to send them for twelve straight years, and forget about the whole thing. I will use the money I would have spent on cards and stamps to buy food for the local Food Bank. I will shop when I want to, at small, local stores that are grateful for my business and have not spent their money on Assault Advertising. I will stop and savor the things that I really love about this time of year, from the first snowfall, to the intoxicating smell of our tree, unreproduceable by Glade’s best scientists. I will stop. When I am overwhelmed, overplanned, and slipping into panic, I will stop and try another day. Or not. No one ever died from having only one kind of Christmas cookie, or a tree from a tree lot instead of the idyllic tree farm in the woods with $3.00 cups of spiced cider.
If we are all together, healthy and able to relax expansively into a break from school and work, we will be fine. I will have to work at shutting out the ads, and take deep breaths when Martha Stewart attempts the Vulcan Mind Meld from her Connecticut farmhouse. If I can focus on relaxing, no, wait, that sounds wrong. If I can relax, and let things be as they are, maybe I can reclaim the joy of this season. It’s worth a try.
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My belief in myself as a fundamentally kind creature is, and has long been, complicated by the spectre of “tattling.” In general, it is an unnatractive characteristic in children; everyone remembers the perpetual carrier of tales who reported every playground infraction and instance of excess crayon consumption to The Authorities. Mostly, we all hated that kid. From that early fear and loathing, most of us come to accept a standard and unspoken “No Ratting” rule which we carry into adulthood. One does not, as a rule, “tell” on friends who leave the high school grounds to smoke, on colleagues who punch in late, or on family members who call in sick to attend the opening day of baseball season. It’s not that there’s nothing to report; it’s just that everybody hates a rat, and our response to behavior that is, strictly speaking, “wrong,” but which appears to do no serious harm, is to look the other way. If tattling were a positive behavior, we would call it “fluffy bunnying,” or “kittening,” rather than “ratting.”
About my more recent snitchery, I haven’t yet cleared my conscience. The other person was not doing anything dangerous or illegal; the transgressions were merely disorganization and fairly shocking unkindness directed towards people about whom I care a great deal. I do not particularly enjoy the person, and admit that I would not have reported on the behavior if the guilty party was a friend (although I would certainly have tried to mitigate the damage in a private conversation). I also admit that it was cowardly of me to turn the situation over to a third-party rather than trying to resolve it on my own. It would have been painful, messy and miserable to have handled things on my own, but I could have made the effort. In my favor, I can state with some certainty that the behavior in question was harmful to the business of the workplace, and that I had nothing to gain, personally, by bringing it into the light of day. Based on this calculus, I can clear myself of throwing my coworker under the bus, which, by definition requires some element of personal enhancement, but I was definitely tattling, based on my own moral conviction that the Wrong should be Punished.![beerpong-2[1] beerpong-2[1]](http://imagineannie.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/beerpong-21.jpg?w=462&h=449)
In the middle of all this, lives my family. We are one of only two owner-occupied houses on a street of student rentals, a street of beautiful houses built by the original Pillars of the Community at the turn of the last century, and presided over by towering trees on both sides of the narrow street. During the 1970s, due to a combination of urban flight and improvident licensing laws, all of the houses around us were snapped up by landlords, turned into duplexes, and gutted, or otherwise violated on the inside, while the exteriors remain largely as they were. The average age of our neighbors is 20, there are no other families on the street, and, for the most part, there is complete turnover once a year. There is an annual period of rapprochement, during which I bake cookies or brownies, we deliver them to our new neighbors as they carry in furniture and high-end electronics, and we are then treated with great respect when we have to deliver the news that the bass on their stereos is causing our house to shift on its foundation.
As I waited for the cat last night, I had a front-row, center seat for Life’s Rich Pageant. Next door, a birthday was being celebrated. This involved a trip to the bar, and a young woman who was wearing a typical outfit for such an outing: a tight, strapless black dress which began just below the cleft of her cleavage, and ended just south of her posterior, and stiletto heels at least 3 inches high. Dresses and skirts short enough to make it potentially illegal to do anything other than stand still or walk (slowly) are legion in these parts, as are the stilettos; we have witnessed more than one artificially heightened beauty wiping out on the climb up our hill, engaging in a frantic and hopeless scramble to prevent the
From their earliest incarnations, I was sucked in by the “reality” series genre in which two families trade mothers for a couple of weeks. In order to heighten the drama, the selected families must be not mere diametric opposites, but so different as to defy the laws of probability.We have seen rock and roll families v. fundamentalist Christian families, orthodox Jewish family v. redneck hillbilly families, vegetarian v. carnivorous families, and (most frequently) disciplined/ultra-neat/rigid families v. laissez-faire/messy/bohemian parents. In the end, regardless of the bitter arguments, the weeping and the threats of abandoning the experiment, both families are somehow better for having Seen A Different Perspective, and we are all reassured that however we live, even if we are circus clowns or orthodox jews, it’s all good.
I could be persuaded to enjoy two weeks in the home of a family in which the parents were artists. Deep in the woods, with walls of glass, a pot-bellied stove and constant classical music, the house would be equipt with a vegetarian family, a well-stocked library, and no television set. I might miss watching “House” for a while, but I could get over it while lying on a well-worn leather sofa reading “Paris Match” in French and drinking espresso fresh from the machine on the counter. Besides a little Schubert, he only sound in the house would be the crackling of the fire, and the whisper of pages turning as I read, the (handsome and generous) father painted in his studio, and the (quiet, intelligent) children drew clever pictures at the kitchen table and fixed their own healthy snacks.
I’d miss my life, though. After a week or so, I’d be itching to jump up and fix a bowl of ramen noodles for Sam. I’d miss the comforting lump of beagle next to my leg under the covers, the rap music and engine noise of “Need for Speed” on the computer and especially the sound of my husband and son laughing as they played. I’d like to think that after a little anarchy (or martial law) my family would miss me too. We all want good things for our spouses and our children, but the little differences in how we make life “good” can add up to an infinite number of different lifestyles, tastes and choices. Like snowflakes, no two households are really alike, and I think there really is “no place like home….”
I may possibly be the only living college-track student ever to graduate from my high school without taking either chemistry or physics classes. I did complete the required Freshman year of something called “CP Science,” a physics and chemistry mashup from which I remember only that there are protons, neutrons and electrons, and that…there are protons, neutrons and electrons. I think that’s chemistry; physics was about arrows.
That year, I could have become a Science Student, a Biology Major, or even a Scientist, but that potential was dealt crushing blows first by the incredible tedium of CP Science, and then by an unimaginative martinet of a high school biology teacher whose main skill in the teacherly arts seemed to be the use of the “ditto” machine to make endless worksheets, pale blue on white, and redeemable only because I liked the way they smelled when they were fresh from the machine. The excitement of learning about how the Mourning Doves digested, reproduced and flew was replaced by “mitochondria is the ____________ of the cell.” (The answer, by the way, is “powerhouse”).
Yesterday, sitting in a restaurant with my husband and my parents, I happened to mention that I didn’t know anything about physics, except that there was something called a “vector.” My father, a teacher by nature and profession, took the twin straws from his iced tea and told me that he was going to teach me what a vector actually was. Placing them in a “v” on the table top, he asked me to imagine that they were chains, one attached to an ox, and one to a truck. My questions about the age, gender and size of the ox, and the make, color and model year of the truck were ignored. I was, he instructed, to imagine that the two sources of power were being used to move a large rock, located at the joint of the “v.” I was distracted by the fact that the putative “chains,” were very clearly cocktail straws, and tremendously bothered by the absence of ox, truck or rock, but I focused very hard on following the next part of the story. In order to pull the rock in the desired direction, my father explained, it would be necessary to adjust the “v” in some way, due to the relative force of the ox and the truck. The line in which the rock traveled was The Vector.
While I was still constructing a visual in my head (the velvet-nosed ox with his wooden yoke worn smooth by the years, or could the ox be a “she,” or if it was a she, would she not be an “ox” at all, but something different, like “bulls” and “cows?” Was s/he well-treated? Was the truck one of those really cool vintage models with the cute front-mounted headlights that looked like bug-eyes, maybe in a faded pale blue?) my father and husband had gone on to other examples, one involving my brother flying his small airplane and forming a “v” with the wind, followed by an entirely incomprehensible example related to sailing into which I interjected my sailing vocabulary (“tack”) and was, again, ignored.
So I kind of get it. I even see a real reason to understand what a vector is. If, for example, one was moving a large rock, flying an airplane or sailing, one would need to have a firm grasp on the use of vectors, on “vectoring,” as it were. I have no plans to move large rocks or to fly an airplane, and I have long ago proven myself an incompetent sailor (in an incident in which my father had to row a boat into the middle of a lake to retrieve me and the boat I was attempting to sail, because I could not…tack). The laws of physics and chemistry are important things to understand, things that are fundamental to comprehending the workings of the world in which we live, but for the most part, I plan to continue being glad that other people understand them and feel willing to dole out tidbits of information to me on an infrequent basis. A very infrequent basis, if you please.![0811835707_large[1] 0811835707_large[1]](http://imagineannie.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/0811835707_large1.jpg?w=328&h=475)
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Letting go of personal mythology is a difficult thing, particularly when the stories are thirty-five years old, and have been cherished, embellished, and embroidered to the point where the Bayeux Tapestries appear to be mere hand towels in comparison. I’m pretty sure that I responded to cruelty, real and imagined, by developing layers of cynical, suspicious protection that gave out signals of rejection and moral superiority. I can’t, otherwise, explain the fact that girls heavier than I was were popular, had boyfriends, and generally believed that they were entitled to sit at the table for life’s rich banquet. They didn’t care, they laughed it off, or they were so confident about their intrinsic value that they could take a little teasing in stride, possibly giving back as good as they got. I lacked that confidence, and developed a set of defenses that could have repelled even the most determined teenager. Particularly towards attractive or popular boys, I am now certain that I directed Death Rays of pure, unmitigated contempt. It wasn’t conscious, and I don’t imagine they would have been beating down my door with invitations to Homecoming in any event, but it was a social “Stop” sign. I admit that to this day, when dealing with a particularly handsome man at a car dealership or parent meeting, I still find myself fighting the urge to cut and run because I am certain that I am being assessed and found wanting.
I always hated sports. As a child, I played outside, swam all summer, rode my bike, and sledded and skated in winter, but I was not interested in playing or watching organized sporting events. I grew up in a Big Ten town, and was constantly bombarded by games on TV, games on the radio, and the difficulty of driving anywhere on the day of a home football game. I also hated the interpersonal heat and mayhem when my Michigan State University family traveled to Ohio for Thanksgiving with my mother’s Ohio State University uncles and cousins. I was completely horrified that grown men could get that upset because some big idiot dropped a ball or got knocked down. As far as I could see, football involved a bunch of thugs running at each other and falling in a pile. Basketball made more sense, but was still just a bunch of taller thugs with fewer clothes. I attended precisely one football game in four years of high school, and cleverly found a college at which football existed, but was really kind of a joke in the greater world of college sports; it was the “Anti-Big Ten.”![i1749-5[1] i1749-5[1]](http://imagineannie.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/i1749-51.jpg?w=190&h=209)
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