Christmas angels from the farm: photos and music

To my friends near and far, I've put together some photos of Christmas on the farm and linked them with jazz singer Abbey Lincoln singing "Christmas Cheer." I wish you Merry Christmas, and as Abbey sings, Here's to love . . . now . . . and throughout the year.

You'll see a couple of angels given to me by my mom, the first at 0:28, a woodland musician I treasure. Another is the colorful grosgrain one at about minute 3:45, who looks a little worn, but still cheerful. Christmas and my mother are linked, with memories of sitting at the piano with her while she played carols from the big blue book, and I sang songs like "The Holly and the Ivy," "Go Tell it on the Mountain," and "Good King Wenceslas." Toward the end you'll see a portrait of my small mom with Matroyshka dolls. After the video, I'm sharing a new angel who flew in from my brother Nelson this week, too late to include in this slideshow. She is holding a red bird like the cardinals in the video and seems to have just alighted from the meadow, so beautiful.

Have a happy weekend, quiet or loud, at home or in someone else's, with all your angels large and small.

-

-

Dylan Thomas: A Child's Christmas in Wales

 -

-

Back in November I scanned a few of Trina Schart Hyman's illustrations of A Child's Christmas in Wales, by Dylan Thomas to share with you, and I had already typed up the start of the story, and loaded the YouTube. Bear with me as I nurse my hands a little longer. On the horizon: voice recognition software for my computer. Merry Christmas to me!

This is a boy's adventure I post, in honor of my soon-to-be-born grandson. Dylan Thomas's fantastically and mythically detailed descriptions should prompt us all to get our own memories of Christmas down, and giggle again and again. OK, on with the master.

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in my snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen.

Pull up a child, and continue reading here . . .

Listen to Dylan Thomas himself read the story in his lugubrious but simultaneously old-child-joyful voice below . . .

The audio recording of Dylan Thomas reading it, what a voice . . .

Text copyright 1954 by New Directions.
Illustrations copyright 1985 by Trina Schart Hyman.

-

-

Poem: the turquoise sea for Christmas

-

-

I read a billboard:

Gifting made easy.
I mourned suddenly
the loss of giving.

And I thought
of the green-glazed vase
curved like cupped hands
(or your opalescent cheek)
on top of the cabinet.

Or the perfect green field
and the turquoise sea.

I would like to give
them all to you.
But they
are already yours.

-

-

Merry Christmas

-
-

Come in from a cold deep walk in the night

Where stars and moon peg indigo with white 

Curl up by the fire or lounge by the tree

Drink from a spicy cup

Here next to me.

Let’s warm up together like birds on a bough

And remember the year we’ve shared until now

Our flights have been wild, our songs wide and clear

May we scout, soar and sing

Even freer next year!

Dickens' Christmas Spirit

-
-

Not having taken part in any of the true miseries known to man, I only know about them through words and images shared by others. The plight of the poor throughout history, and now on the very planet I inhabit, is beyond the comprehension of someone like me who lives in the best of comfort and health. As I prepared this post, I read about the Poor Laws in Britain’s history, fascinating and horrifying. (You can read a good wiki article about Britain’s Poor Laws here.) The New Poor Law of 1834, enacted a decade before Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, was a huge legislation to ensure that no one would receive relief from poverty outside the parish workhouses, which were intentionally kept miserable so that a person wouldn’t be tempted to rely on them out of indolence. Dickens himself had to work at a factory as a child, and the anguish he experienced remained with him his whole life, infusing it in his novels that are so poignantly sympathetic to the poor.

Earlier the same year that he published A Christmas Carol . . .

Dickens was keenly touched by the lot of poor children . . . In early 1843, he toured the Cornish tin mines where he saw children working in appalling conditions. The suffering he witnessed there was reinforced by a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several London schools set up for the education of the capital's half-starved, illiterate street children. Inspired by the February 1843 parliamentary report exposing the effects of the Industrial Revolution upon poor children called Second Report of the Children's Employment Commission, Dickens planned in May 1843 to publish an inexpensive political pamphlet tentatively titled, "An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man's Child" but changed his mind, deferring the pamphlet's production until the end of the year. He wrote to Dr. Southwood Smith, one of four commissioners responsible for the Second Report, about his change in plans: "[Y]ou will certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force – twenty thousand times the force – I could exert by following out my first idea." The pamphlet would become A Christmas Carol. (Copied from this wiki article)

After re-watching the 1938 film "A Christmas Carol" with Reginald Owen on the weekend, I was reminded what the magic and mystery of Christmas is. We have the Christmas energy inside us all the time, all the love we have ever encountered with family, friends and even strangers. The joy of human connection, even in the most dire of circumstances, even when we are surrounded by greed. The possibility that with the right outlook, joy is always possible, and can always be spread to another. At Christmas, we pull out our lifetime of stored love when we re-open Christmas boxes. White lights remind us of stars that have shone on every man and woman in history – the same stars. Imagine. We are all one human organism. The magic we share is available outside of Christmas! For some, it seems especially hidden at Christmas. What a shame, if we forget it after Christmas, or miss it during Christmas when it is eclipsed by commercialism.

For me, old decorations and illustrations bring out a special nostalgic feeling that makes Christmas special. I am a big fan of Arthur Rackham (good bio here), the British illustrator who was hugely successful at the turn of the 20th century known for his "depictions of gnomes, goblins, witches, and fairies, as well as his anthropomorphized trees," so I am posting five of his illustrations for the 1915 edition of A Christmas Carol, along with a few quotes from Dickens’ classic novel. Can you imagine a world without this story? Apparently the greeting “Merry Christmas” was first used after this novel. 

Bob Cratchit went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, 
twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve.

Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown,

which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall

"If I could work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

"How now?" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever

"What do you want with me?"

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us."

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in

restless haste and moaning as they went

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea -- on, on -- until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him.

Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig

The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner.


- ~ * ~ -

"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can."


- ~ * ~ -

"A merry Christmas, Bob!" said Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. "A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit."
-
-

The way I want Christmas

-

-

     The way I want Christmas is withdrawn, but attentive, and giving. Like a woman. During holiday hullabaloo the thrusts of commerce, and even sometimes of the church, impose upon the quiet of inner space. Any day of the year, whether in a state of joy, sorrow, or even turmoil, I want to rise and fall gently on the day's currents--nose flared, eyes raised, hands unclasped, ears unlocked. But some of the air is raucous, rank, deafening, false, and deadening. At home I pull down Christmas tubs and unsnap lids. Out with the ribbons and glitter spirals the remembered scent of oranges studded with cloves. It is a woman’s fragrance, the earth. My mother.

     And out comes the 1955 Christmas songbook, dull matte blue with worn embossed singing angels on the cover, its spine reinforced with duct tape by my father. Mom’s dark eyes ignite in candlelight at the mahogany piano, and blue-ridge vein rivers roll over her knuckles while she plays Go Tell It on the Mountain. Hip-to-hip on the needlepointed piano bench we sit where she has also taught me to play in hours of tearful frustration. But as if turning out the lamps and lighting the tree and candles illuminates a different piano and alternate faces, during these easy-going Christmas carol hours there is no tension, no mother-daughter resistance or pride. She plays and plays, and I sing, and turn the page to the next. The music floats in flakes of effortless snowfall. Many songs are foreign, strange, and special, never appearing in a church hymnal. They are haunting in their folk lyrics and minor keys. They are of woods and tender brown animals. They bloom with holly leaves and stars. They rasp with bagpipe and fiddle. They are blue, cold nights of Croatian shepherds, French rushes of wings, and a hand hewn rocking cradle of Czechoslovakia. They are whisper-sung by a woman in front of a fire, baby at her breast, fat cheeks aglow and rosy-warm, drinking the quieting calm that streams from inside a woman. Christmas is my mother’s lullaby.

TO SAY BEFORE GOING TO SLEEP

I would like to sing someone to sleep,

to sit beside someone and be there.

I would like to rock you and sing softly

and go with you to and from sleep.

I would like to be the one in the house

who knew: The night was cold.

And I would like to listen in and listen out

into you, into the world, into the woods.

The clocks shout to one another striking,

and one sees to the bottom of time.

And down below one last, strange man walks by

and rouses a strange dog.

And after that comes silence.

I have laid my eyes upon you wide;

and they hold you gently and let you go

when something stirs in the dark.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke
(from The Book of Images, translated by Edward Snow in 1991)

Sleep, little Jesus, my treasure, my blessing,

While Mary comforts Thee, tender, caressing.

Lullaby, little one, in loving arms lying,

Guarding my darling and stilling Thy crying.

~ Polish Lullaby
(translated by Henry W. Simon)
from my mom's Treasury of Christmas Songs and Carols,
which I posted about previously here

Please listen to Edyta Górniak tenderly whisper-sing this lullaby in Polish, 

called 'Lulajże Jezuniu', here

 and-

-

Christmas fires

-
We're closing the circle of the year. Christmas for me is a spiral of memories, unwrapping tree ornaments from worn and wrinkled tissue paper, laying out glass and glitter, like stars burning light years away. When it's time to rewrap them, clouds will cover them until next year's opening into another season of light in Nature's darkest days.

Besides personal memories, there is genetic memory. Don comes from Brits, and I come from Swedes, Brits, and maybe some Irish. Traditions from those ancestral families were not given attention when I grew up, and I felt the lack when I saw other families make German lebkuchen or Swedish papparkakor. Whatever European landscapes are in our past, I know in my blood that I am from old stone houses with ten foot hearths, where mutton from the moor bubbling in a pot fills the room with savory smells.

This Christmas, without our Lesley, Brian and Peter to celebrate with us - Don and I wanted to honor the day simply, in new Old World ways. We found three traditions.

1 We burned our first yule log Christmas Eve, cut from a fallen French lilac branch that I'm dragging, below. For centuries European barons had laborers carry in a felled tree to their hearth, sticking its end into the fire - the rest jutting out into the room. That night everyone was invited to party - servant and master together, equal and friendly. Old feuds were drowned in flowing wassail. Then a brand was taken from the fire and set aside as a talisman against fire and evil for the year ahead. This same remnant from the yule log was used to ignite next year's holiday fire.

Smoke from our lilac branch smelled like sweet pipe tobacco outside. Christmas evening, with fireplace tongs we grabbed a charred remnant from one of its pieces in the wood stove, cooled it in snow, then set it up on the mantel to be a symbol of safety and hope for the year ahead. We'll ignite next year's yule log with this year's piece.






The whole time we focused on this yule log thing, I had my mind on another Christmas fire - the devastation I'd driven up to going to town the day before Christmas Eve. A siren-screaming fire truck barreled past me on our country road, and there ahead I saw billowing smoke, and a little house in flames! Fire trucks blocked the road, so I had to turn around and go to town a different way.



When I returned home later in the day, I drove by the charred house and could still smell fire though there wasn't any smoke in the air. We read in the paper that two young men lived in the house, though only one was home and only had minor burns on his face. We were relieved but sad thinking of what gets lost in a house fire that can't be replaced. A nightmare before Christmas.


2 The second tradition we claimed was from Ireland, the country where we both have spent more time than any other in Europe.




For Christmas dinner we cooked lamb, carrots, onions, potatoes and turnips on top of the wood stove for stobhach gaelach, or Irish stew. The smell of thyme and all that goodness almost drove us crazy for two days, first cooking the bones for broth Christmas Eve, then the stew on Christmas Day. Christmas Eve Don had to run out for buttermilk when we suddenly decided Irish stew needed Irish soda bread. He got to the store (15 minutes away) one minute after closing (it only closes once a year, for Christmas), and the utterly worn out frazzled store lady at the door mercifully let him in when she heard his desperate plea for the soda bread. "Run," she said. He ran, picked up buttermilk, then grabbed a bottle of champagne, paid for them, and handed the merciful worn out lady the bag with champagne and the receipt (so no one would think she was stealing it) saying, "thank you, and Merry Christmas," and she wept.


3 On his way home from the store Don heard Lynn Rosetta Kasper rave about a French holiday cake on NPR. So, because I am a francophile and love to bring France to the farm, we added this Gâteau Basque for dessert: a shortbread type cake with Don's homemade blackberry jam layered in the middle. "It's a great cake to make for the holidays because it's sturdy and easy to transport and can be eaten at any time of day . . . it's a grown-up pop tart." Delicious!




When our grandchildren come on the scene one of these days, I want them to connect with their own memories, those of their parents and grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and also with those of their ancestors. Stone. Iron. Wood. Fire. Water. Bones. Edible roots out of the dirt. You know, they're just embers gone cold that get rekindled on our hearths, in our ovens and on our stoves. I am very thankful for what we have not lost.

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas.

Killarney, Ireland - 2006

-
-

A Christmas visit on Solstice Day

-

male junco

In the darkest day I looked for light. Shadows needed to be brightened
with divine announcements - to be redeemed in the filth and the hollows -
a chink of sunrise when starvation there
and fear here set the stone table.

Then a bird, fleeing the sparrow hawk,
flew against the window with his body, and fell, dazed.
He was invited in to perch in the eternal tree where an electric candle
on the bough's tip is a star in the tar of night.

Oh sweet birdie, warm up, calm yourself, catch your wits
in the Life of the star, the very one that bridges night to day.
Be revived, reborn, released - and fly away.


Listen to a podcast of this poem here.


Happy Solstice ◊ Merry Christmas ◊ Happy New year
To all of you, my dear friends -

be free, into a new day.

This writing began in inspiration from Elizabeth Jennings' poem The Annunciation, which I read in a small volume of Christmas Poems edited by John Hollander and J.D. McClatchy - which I won in a drawing at beautiful Pamela's blog From the House of Edward. Then, mid-sentence, the advent of this visitor.

-
-

self discipline & success

-
-

Luckily I had my camera with me walking to a meeting across campus on one of the coldest days a couple years ago. His nose and ears were as red as his shorts. I gave him a hat to warm his ears (in post processing, not for real, silly). He gets me thinking about self discipline, something I'm sure I could have developed if I'd had the willpower, ha. I have it in me in small spoonfuls. You know, one month on the treadmill, one month off.

Most of the super disciplined people I've met made me feel bad about myself. Well I guess they didn't make me feel bad, I just felt bad. I felt like they saw me as a slacker, and I didn't feel confident in slackerhood. You're a better person if you paint the peeling porch, take out the trash rather than let it overflow for two days, never eat Kentucky Fried Chicken, finish reading that book after several months, and visit all your blog friends regularly. (Oh, but some people think sitting on your computer visiting blog friends is slacking.)

Not to be a braggadocio, but I was voted Most Likely to Succeed in my high school graduating class. I know it sounds impressive. But actually, it's embarrassing, considering my high school career and my rather normal life now, and if you knew me then you might wonder about it like I do. I was an average B student, after four of my siblings before me were either valedictorian or salutatorian. Maybe if I'd actually studied I might have done all right, I mean high school isn't that hard. I was not involved in any student organizations, though I was a terrible class treasurer sophomore year who didn't do a single thing if I recall. It was risky electing me to that job, as you'll see below.

My co-recipient of the Most Likely to Succeed award was Frank Fitzgerald. Here we are in the yearbook photo. Someone thought it would be cute to photograph us sneaking money out of the cafeteria's cash register. See what I mean about risky?



Now Frank was a worthy recipient and a high achiever who didn't make me feel bad. A straight A student, he went on to be elected to the Michigan House of Representatives. Oh, I found him in wiki on his grandfather's page - his namesake Frank D. Fitzgerald who was Michigan's governor from 1935-36. Guess what, while he was Governor the state budget was balanced!

In our small town, Frank and I lived a few blocks apart, on presidential streets - I lived first on Harrison, then Lincoln, and Frank lived in a big red brick house on Jefferson (across the street from Loring!). Like Thomas Jefferson, Frank was a redhead. If he hadn't died suddenly at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, NY, on a business trip December 9, 2004, maybe Frank would have gone on to run for governor some day, following his grandfather's path. I heard an owl thrum the morning I read about his sudden death in the paper, leaving his wife Ruth and two kids. I think he was saying good-bye. Before our spree as criminal partners robbing the till, we started out as lil chefs side by side in kindergarten making applesauce and butter at Holbrook Elementary and went through every grade together until graduation.

I was never ambitious like Frank. No career goals. I was, and am, a starer out of windows. Why was I voted Most Likely to Succeed alongside the class valedictorian and future public servant? Was it because I was a non-rebellious PK (preacher's kid)?

I'm still an average person in the echelon of success, but I have a supremely comfortable, healthy and happy life.

Of course the question is, what is success and how is it measured?

Vincent van Gogh, also a PK, was a miserable failure in relationships with women and in various careers before he decided to create beauty. Famously, he sold just one painting to someone other than his dear brother Théo, who supported him. When I stood and turned slowly in the middle of the van Gogh gallery in the Orsay, surveying the bright palette and overwhelmed with blue, I wept. I bet no one voted him Most Likely to Succeed.

I think when you join discipline with passion, the world benefits - though when you're passionate the discipline doesn't really come hard. But self-control for its own sake, about the "shoulds" someone somewhere has written in the sky, just makes me feel like a slacker, 'cause I will always stare out of windows, whether or not the trash needs emptying or the book I've been reading for a year still has 88 pages to go.
-
-

-
-

Aşure - Noah's pudding

-
-

Pronounced AH-shoo-REH.

In İstanbul in the late eighties when Don was selling kilims and copper to the U.S. market hot for Turkish stuff, and we four lived in a "marble palace" apartment (Turkish homes are sparkly with chandeliers, marble floors and countertops; we broke a few milk bottles on that unforgiving marble), on a certain special day two or three neighbors brought a dish of Noah's pudding to us. Aşure günü (say the ü with your lips rounded and a u just behind your teeth) is the holiday celebrated in Turkey on the 10th day of the Islamic lunar month of Muharrem, this year December 27. Noah's is one of the biblical stories shared by Christians, Jews and Muslims. In the Qur'an, Noah is a prophet.

The story goes that when Noah's ark landed on Mt. Ararat (in Turkey), after so much time bobbing on water with no land in sight, the inhabitants celebrated by making a pudding out of the remnants of what lay in the hold: nuts, dried fruits and grains.



The apartment neighbors who brought our bowls of Noah's pudding took a bowl of it to every neighbor in the building. Tradition says that your "neighbors" are inhabitants in forty houses to your East, West, North and South. I imagine "everyone in the building" is the adaptation for modern times. When we explained this tradition to Inge and Lar when we served them some aşure for dessert Saturday (the first time I made it), Inge (of the German steel trap mind) asked, "you mean everyone took some to everyone else? Doesn't that sort of cancel the whole thing out?" Well since we weren't taking aşure to anyone, I never thought about it.

The aşure holiday is about keeping up good relations with neighbors no matter what their religion or beliefs might be. It is common Turkish practice to make big cauldrons of aşure to distribute to the poor. Everything goes into the pot, and what is in the pot goes to everyone.



Here, Neighbor, I am sharing a bowl of aşure with you. It's nice for breakfast. If you make it, share with your neighbors and tell them you appreciate them. You can do that with fruitcake too, which is sort of the same idea, but I like this better. No, that is pudding it too mildly. I would rather toss a fruitcake than eat it. I've co-opted aşure and sharing with neighbors as a new Christmas tradition at our house. Hey, Santa Claus started in Turkey too, and look how far he got!

Aşure - Noah's pudding

2 cups instant barley, it will be much more when cooked
1 cup canned white Northern beans, washed and drained
1 cup canned chickpeas, washed and drained
1 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
10 cups water
10 dry apricots, soaked in water overnight, cut in pieces
10 dry figs, cut in pieces
1/2 cup raisins

Garnish:
1/4 cup walnuts, crumbled, slivered almonds, currants, pine nuts, pomegranate seeds

Cook barley according to directions on package. (If using non-instant barley, get it to boil on high heat. Then as soon as it boils, turn it down to medium-low heat and cook for about half an hour.) Set aside 1-2 cups of cooked barley and put into a food processor or blender. To the barley in the pot add the beans, chickpeas, vanilla, apricots, raisins, figs, sugar and 6 cups of hot water. Simmer for about 45 minutes on medium to medium-low heat. Stir occasionally. Process 1-2 cups cooked barley that you set aside in a food processor or blender, mixing water if needed to make it pudding-ish. Add this to the pot to thicken it. Cook a couple more minutes, then pour into a large service bowl and let cool.

Keep Noah's Pudding refrigerated. When serving, garnish with crumbled walnuts, roasted slivered almonds, currants, pine nuts and pomegranate seeds. The garnish is the best part, and you might think of different ones.-
-
-

perfectly imperfect Christmas

-
-

I so loved reading the stories of how you named your blogs. Thank you for telling them, I learned some fun and important things about you. Also, some of you found each other across the planet through this worm hole. I love our community. Every connection shows that we are One human organ.

It snowed tonight, and after a warm November, now we move into a season of winter, which carries Christmas in a big festive mixed bag. In the bag are hugs, candlelight and warm fires. Squeezed in among those are intolerable front yard inflatable Santas and loop after loop of Christmas·carol·muzak. And because the bag is lined with a big fat assumption of festivity, it is also loaded with sorrow and pain - remembered or current. We ache in contrast to the glitter, and that twists the knife. Maybe a white feather boa snakily imitating snow on top of the piano brings a smile and eases the ache. But there is no automatic improvement to our lives just because we are surrounded by Christmas gloss and powder. It reminds me of the Nativity, a story of hope for deliverance born inside political unrest, fear, temporary homelessness and birthing pains.

Nothing as heavy as all that here today, but in a bit of sad irony we are able to put up a real, fresh Christmas tree this year.

For me it is a sweet moment in commerce when Home Depot and the farmer down the road set up a variety of evergreen trees on their corners for us Christmas lovers to paw over, tip up, spin, examine and eliminate until we find the One that sings carols in our ears. "Those sticking-up boughs will ease down when they get in our warm family room" we say. Fresh trees are not boxed or plasticked; they are irregular, pokey, sappy and messy. But we pile into our cars and trucks in the coldest weather and flock to those tree lots to pick the One - and welcome it with love into our home. Oh that reminds me of a couple we knew in Pasadena who alternated between flocked and unflocked trees each year. She liked flocked, he liked unflocked. Or was it the other way around? Flocked means the boughs are sprayed with fake snow. And I also remember how strange it was to live in a warm climate at Christmas, where poinsettias were outdoor landscaping plants.

IMHO the best tree for decorating with ornaments is a Frasier Fir. The needles are short and firm, letting ornaments actually hang between branches, and not just lie on top of the needles, yuck. (oh dear, I am a tree snob.) But the main reason they are perfect is that the branches are random and skew-jee. You can even nestle ornaments deep inside, on a bough right next to the trunk, so there are surprises. If a Christmas tree looks like a dense triangle with no dark recesses of mystery between boughs, it depresses me.

Not that I don't have a supreme holiday memory of spending hours folding each page of a Reader's Digest so that the upper corner folded down into a long ruler-straight angle, then fanned out in rotundity. Spray with canned snow (in this photo I found* it's sprayed gold, nice) - et voila! a 3-D triangular flocked Christmas tree. She would have liked it. Or was it he? I should mention that I nearly missed Christmas at age 7 when I leapt up to retrieve the canned snow and ran headlong into the French door standing open; stars and stripes later I gaped at my forehead's goose egg from a handheld mirror in my parents' bed. Could thith be from whenth my dithtathte for triangular Chrithmath treeth cometh?**

So yes, except for magazeeny trees, there must be perfectly imperfect gaps and caves to go spelunking in, with an overall symmetry when you blur your eyes.

And there has to be the smell of evergreen. Slightly astringent, and warmly cool. A pleasant tingle in the eyes and nose. Firs have it.

Always, with our children, we magnified the event of picking out the tree together. It was important for them to believe they were part of the decision, even though now looking back I see that Don and I, ok . . . I . . . had last say.

But Christmas before last when Peter and Don carried in the bare Frasier from the truck, within minutes of my stringing white lights, Peter was catapulted way beyond a cool tingle into a sneezing fit, and within an hour we realized his allergies had developed a hatred for our tree! The guilty tree was quarantined out on the deck, where it ended up looking pretty great with white lights sparkling in snow in the coming weeks.

So last year for dear Peter's sake we got an artificial tree with as many random gappy branches as we could find (I think it's a Martha Stewart one) and decorated it for the family room. When you turned out all the lights except the tree, you couldn't tell it was artificial. Except for the lack of fragrance, and well also being too symmetrical.

This year, and here's the sad irony, neither Lesley & Brian nor Peter will be home for Christmas, so we can get a fresh tree again. Even Don's parents are traveling to Colorado, so we won't see them either. I am not a woman addicted to holidays or believe that families must be present on them. We love each other every day, absent or together, birthday or no birthday, anniversary or not, Valentine's Day or the other 364. But when my nostrils fill with evergreen, and a sharp needle pokes into my fingernail's cuticle when I hang Peter and Lesley's paper stars they made one Christmas twenty years ago when we lived far away in İstanbul, I will feel the sting - while I inhale, ahhhh.

*I found the image of the Reader's Digest tree, along with instructions, here.
** Translation for non-native English speakers. These lispy wordplays can be a royal pain to you: Could this be from whence my distaste for triangular Christmas trees cometh?

MEMORY: Jacob Maarse - free luxury

I might live on a farm - scuttling around with chickens in the yard, hanging laundry on the line in bare feet, slopping leftovers onto the compost pile and digging up dandelions from between bricks in the walkway. I might be a cheapskate, a rustic, a bohemian wannabe. I might even romanticize all that for you, showing you just the right peeling paint on the porch floor but hiding the wrong chipped paint on the deck skirt. One looks "shabby chic," while the other just looks hillbilly. (How carefully and purposefully we blog.)

But while part of me wants rustic, frugal and simple, another part of me revels in luxury, through the eyes, fingertips, mouth. Paris kind of luxury. I am the first to argue that my life is full of luxury - of the "best" kind - ample feathers, weathered wood, fresh eggs and veggies and overflowing goodness and kindness are but a few, what Thoreau and Emerson might call "the art of living well" - but just humor me.

Jacob Maarse Florists in Pasadena, California was my second-hand luxury in a previous lifetime. We were in our twenties living in this neighboring city of LA, with a tiny toddler and a new baby. We had no money to spare. This would have been around 1982, it was Christmas, and in Pasadena that meant it was 70 degrees F (21 C) - poinsettias were growing as shrubs outdoors. It was the year we couldn't afford Christmas gifts, so friends loaned us their Playskool jungle gym for Lesley and Peter to climb on when they woke up Christmas morning.

One Saturday before Christmas I put on my nicest casual outfit, smoothed back my long wavy hair with a headband, left the babies in Don's expert hands, and escaped alone downtown for some holiday inspiration.

On display in Jacob Maarse were effusive dried flower arrangements as well as evergreen ones with red holly berries, silver candlesticks and frames, potpourris, bath salts and soaps, stiff linens with lace borders, red velvet ribbons and plaid pillows. The place smelled rich. The wood door frames were old but well hung. Older Pasadena money'd ladies floated through the store as they awaited a floral order. I tried not to feel out of place. I even worked up some courage to ask the florist who was artistically filling a dozen grapevine Christmas baskets who had ordered them? They were full of every good thing the store had to offer, and I imagined them to be worth at least $100 apiece - a fortune to me at the time. She replied, "Julie Andrews."

Julie Andrews. Suddenly all the floating women in the store looked just like her - aging gracefully (she was only 47 then, but I was 20 years younger!), smooth, simple hair around a pretty face, and modest but fine clothes only a woman with old money would wear.

I stared at those copious gift baskets and - in spite of my own personal lack of means - felt that something was right in the world. A successful woman remembered her friends at Christmas by sending a basket of luxury. Would I have liked to be one of the recipients?

Maybe in a way, I was. I received the visual exuberance and generosity and still carry it in my heart and mind 27 years later.

family photo

Between eating homemade chicken and noodles and Don's Bûche de Noël (Christmas cake), playing Settlers of Catan, romping in the snow, listening to music, and watching movies ("Iron Man" for one - it's good), we managed a family pic with the help of Mr. Tripod. Peter processed this one with an old look on his Mac. We all wish you a Happy New Year! Left to right: me, Don, Peter, Lesley, and Brian.

I wore the earrings Peter picked up for me in St. John, New Brunswick that Gwen made. Aren't they beautiful? They made me feel tres elegante, like when I was a little girl playing dress-up with bobby pins clipped together and dangling from my ears, only better.