Yep, I’m one of those people who have abandoned the ritual of paper cards. I know that this kind of greeting seems thin and impersonal to some people, but to me, a blog is a warm handshake, an open front door. So here is ours:
So Merry Christmas, best wishes for the new year – may your hearts and families and homes and futures grow and thrive and bring you great joy, health and safety.
And in case you find us just too serious:
Okay. Pretend it’s yesterday. I lost a day this weekend, somehow. So this is the day of the giveaway. I have just one little blessing bird left to send flying. It was a very, very small flock to begin with, and all her family has been sent to live with friends of the heart. As I can’t do enough for everyone I love, I am resorting to this little game. In the end, one bird is looking for a dear home of her own.
And here are the rules: make a comment, and in that comment, show me one enduring (for you) image of Christmas (or whatever is your holiday) – as in: when I close my eyes and dream of this season, I see the lights in my library, the tree lights, and the window lights and the lights outside the windows that are three sides of the room – all those tiny points of color, brave against the darkness, ricochetting back and forth from window to window till the room is more like walking through stars than standing on earth.
Or like this: I see my kids, all perched on my bed one Christmas morning, reading the messages I’d sewed into the gift quilts they’d found on their beds.
Or like this: flour on the noses of four young kids, making cookies at the dining room table.
Or like this: the smell of pine.
And here is the prize:
She’s what Chaz calls an LLB (a little brown bird). G and I made her together.
She’ll be claimed on Christmas Eve. Just after dark.
[And if you’re a knitter, Linda has a wonderful giveaway of her own. Please go and look at her stuff, but be sure you don’t enter. Because I did.]
And here is one more little gift (brought to Chaz by an ill-fated boy, but a glowing truth in itself):
Lo, how a rose ‘er blooming . . .
Or
The solstice passed, there is still life to come~
Part Two: the party.
As I have explained, probably once a year for the last almost twenty years I’ve been tell you these tales, this is a very old party. The same people have been coming to it since the second year we lived in this house. The first year, we had just moved in – having almost finished the house in time to live in it. G’s family was coming up from LA to stay with us for the holidays; some of them brought the carpet up with them. Up to the day before his parents got here, we’d been sleeping on a mattress in the den, on the carpet pad, trying not to lacerate our feet on the tackless strip on the way to the bathroom, which had ceased to function anyway because the pipes, uninsulated in the doorless garage, had frozen.
So we didn’t have a party that year.
But every year after. It started with good old friends we’d had for a long, long time. Not many of them that year – Beesons, Tricia, Hoffmans, Williams, Louks, Paynes, Kews – friends we’d known in college, from missions, people we we’d worked with in the studio, and one person who would soon enough help deliver our first baby. Over the next few years, we added to the list and pretty much topped off what the house could handle. The guest list has changed a little – family has come up here for college and then gone away again, giving up their place (can you believe it?). Friends have moved, ditto. But every year, the house is full to bursting, and the people who can barely wedge themselves into the living room too often sacrifice themselves in the game and wander off to wider spaces and the rest of the food. We hope to build on to the house sometime soon, and then we can add a few more beloved family without having to kill off the old friends.
And over the years, we have gone from being new and starting out to old and established. None of us can figure out exactly how that’s happened. The interesting thing about this group is that many of them didn’t know each other in the beginning. Thirty years later, they’re friends.
Anyway – the party rules demand that each person make a handmade ornament, wrap it and bring it, along with some fancy-dancy holiday food. Then we eat and talk and get raucous. Then we play the ornament exchange game (no weapons are allowed inside the house, and crying is against the rules). After that, we sing carols, talk and eat some more. And I write about this here because of the ornaments, because they are so cool, and I want to share them. My kids have watched this party all their lives; now they are old enough to play. This party marks the years as they have gone by. And ends each one with rejoicing—in friends, the beauty of Christ’s celebration, and the delight of laughter. You should make a party like this; it’s so worth it.
So I present to you pictures of this year’s ornaments, with commentary:
The first ornament comes out of its box, shimmering its very natural shimmer in the Christmas lights –
Ginger’s feather ornament.
Steve’s (Johanne’s) Christmas ham. Once rejected by his maker, taken up and given character by her man. What a story. And the dang pig looks just like Steve.
Marvin’s ornament – with a story. This was hand carved by Marvin out of the headstock of a – what was it, 1954? Martin D28 – that once belonged to Bob Dylan, much later to Marvin, and which was murdered by the baggage machinery at Ohare. The noble instrument reduced to this little disk, and brought here in hopes G would win it. Which he did. And no, they didn’t pay Marvin half what it was worth in compensation.
Hand carved by Bob, who always carves some show-offy thing. The green ball is free inside of its ornament cave. And if you don’t think it’s hard to carve something INSIDE of something else, try it. Gin won this one, all the way from RI.
Tricia specializes in “found” ornaments. Especially “found” materials that come from the mountains up by Sundance. This is a Rudolph with a button and bead hat.
This was my bird. G’s bird is different, but you will see that later.
Lori (how do you spell your name? Who knows how anybody’s going to spell their name these days? Lhorrhi?), not Lorri, made this little puppet guy with the sweet face out of I think Fimo or Sculpy?
Melanie’s Ornament Lady, won gratefully and with delight by Chaz.
Meridee’s felted baby Jesus.
Danny’s top. First try at turning, wasn’t it, Dan? Fought over fiercely by Rachel and Mel.
Lynn’s Victorian angel. Did Gaye win this first? And Johanne stole it? I can’t remember. Johanne kept getting robbed all night –
Terry’s (spelled that wrong, too, probably. How can you know somebody for 33 years and not know how to spell her name?) petite point. For scale look just above it – those are normal size clothing stitches in the purple. I don’t even know how the woman can see her own work as she does it –
Rachel’s lovely little stocking.
Johanne’s elf came with her own One Clear Voice soundtrack.
Ginna’s bird flew all the way here from the presently buried in snow east coast. C won her. I will steal her from him later.
Steve K’s annual wood carving. Except, we don’t actually know what this is. It purportedly started out as one thing, then turned into another. Dan thought it was a tuning fork; Chaz figured it was a Japanese bunny. It was also fought over fiercely and ended up with Rachel, who loves weird things. I think. Now I can’t remember. It was an ugly fight.
Debbi makes these beautiful little brass hung mobiles. Always perfectly balanced. The black sheep rests confidently in the shepherd’s arms.
The little white sheep gambols alongside.
Cam’s foam sheep, sleeping beside the fireplace, all hung with stockings. The fireplace is hung, not the sheep. And the sheep is not a penguin, lying on its back, thank you very much Dick. Dick’s ornament in not actually pictured in this group because he did not make one. Instead, he brought a See’s candy gift card, which is against the rules – but then Dick’s whole mission in life is to break the rules, especially at my house. So I am not showing you a picture of it.
Gay’s quilt wreath.
Lind’s carved spoon Santa
with detail. I have a collection of stuff he’s carved santa on. If I were married to him, I’d be very careful of the furniture.
I think Rebecca felted this bird. Oh, phooey. Now I’m getting confused. It was a bird sort of night.
And Brian’s zinc coated crane. I think I’m missing three. Oh, Chaz’s. Danny – take a good picture of it and schlep it to me, will ya? A nice close one. Chaz is sad at me.
There were several bums who came without gifts to offer this year. They are allowed to stay, even allowed to Kibitz, but only with the understanding that I may use them poorly in return, as they deserve.
And finally, the cast of characters:
C set up the camera and refused to use the flash, which I strongly suggested that he do, so it took me half an hour on my crippled Photoshop to turn this into something less (more?) than sepia. So now, you see a nice gradient from the WAY tuned down tungsten yellow right by the lamp to the nice, cool compensatory ice blue on the other side. But they are nice people, no matter what color they end up being.
A seriously intellectual group, too. I am hoping to include a link to the video C shot with his Canon Whatever (still camera) all night for Gin – if anybody wants to remember exactly what happened at any point during the three hours of the game??? Or wants to see what they look like on the net? Also fun for people who want to see what happens when a bunch of LDS people gettin’ jiggy on hard drinks like caffein free Coke. Like, I talk WAY too much.
And where, you may ask, were the dogs during this whole bruhahahaha? In their crates.
Fast asleep. Snuggled cheek to cheek.
Give me about fifteen minutes to get up the link for pt 1 and pt 2 of the party vid.
If I can bring myself to do it, the giveaway will be tomorrow.
Dec 20
How to get ready for a party.
This is pretty much the only party you ever have, and it’s at Christmas, so you have plenty of leisure time to get ready. No pressure.
1. First think to yourself, “Shoot. These are all my buddies. All I really have to do is vacuum just before they get here.” Then, a week before the party, look around at your house – the stacks of books in every corner, the dust bunnies stuck to the lamp (nostalgic for the old, richer days when we had somebody come in to clean every two weeks), the festoons of cobwebs hanging from the ceiling fan – and realize it’s going to take a leeetle more than vacuuming.
2. Clean the house. Do it at the same time you are doing the year end accounting. But first, install a new operating system that renders all your good old familiar software witless. And get puppies. You have to get puppies to really make all this work. And forget to call your good friend, the caterer, with whom you have an under-the-table arrangement that allows you to provide YOUR part of the fabulous party spread without entering the kitchen. Oh yeah – and finish up all the Christmas details you kept thinking you’d do later – because you suddenly realize that later is now yesterday.
Really, this part of the thing isn’t so bad, because it turns out that you don’t get much done till the night before, and then the whole thing becomes, per force, a fun family project. Maybe just fun because everybody else has to be with you while you’re balancing at the top of the step ladder, vacuuming the ceiling fan. Do not ask everybody else if they thought it was fun.
3. On the afternoon of party day, go out to feed the horses with full intentions of coming home to take a shower in plenty of time for your hair to dry before the party starts. For a change. Get to the barn and start slinging hay – and only realize after about fifteen minutes that your gigantic colt is not only not interested in food, he’s hiding in the jail, sort of half-heartedly kicking at his stomach. Which means he is colic-ing, which means he could actually be dead in three hours. Or not. Depending – which depending you could kind of work out if you had three hours to hang around and watch him and walk him.
Consider how long it will take to hitch up the trailer and drive two towns south to the vet. Consider that the puppies are still out in the yard at the house and that nobody is home to watch them or help with the trailer because everybody else is out running last minutes errands. Call the vet and be surprised and almost moved to tears when they say that they’d be GLAD to send out Dr. Mike for a farm visit. And he actually shows up within twenty minutes and in typically good spirits, sedates the colt, runs one inch plastic tubing up the colt’s nostril all the way into his stomach and pumps the colt full of oil and water.
“I think he’ll be fine!” the good Doc says as he and his cheerful assistant jump into the huge red truck – which might as well be a sleigh today—and takes off down the driveway, waving. As it turns out, he is right.
4. One hour later, your hair will be dripping wet, but your daughter will have set the table like a pro, and the under-the-table food will have shown up at your door in the hands of beautiful young friends, and the house will shine like a Christmas jewel – as long as you leave the ceiling lights off and depend heavily on several strings of Christmas lights.
And that’s how you do it.
First of all – is anybody else having problems with the header not popping in, or with comments disappearing?
Second: I believe that I may have lost about an inch or so on my waist, just high stepping it over the baby gates we’ve had blocking the kitchen and the den and the stairs and the library. I am thinking of leaving the gates up indefinitely. Disadvantage: I was reading something the other day, on my way into the den, and completely crashed, ended up splayed all over the floor with the gate between me and the carpet, hand all scraped up, pride deeply dented. “What happened?” somebody yelled from the other room. “Nothing,” I said.
Third: we had our one, single grand party of the year last night, and it was wonderful. But it will take longer to show you the spoils than I have right now (gotta watch Battlestar). So we all have that to look forward to. Or not.
Fourth: I was on my way out to the barn early last week, just after a pretty good little snow. Clambered over the gate, dropping – big boots first – into the perfect snow on the long driveway, and sadly started making prints in it, quietly as possible, off to the side. But I was captivated by somebody else who had left prints. I had to go home and get the camera so I could show you. Note: I have left a lot of the blue in these shots, because the snow kinda is blue, you know. In a white sort of way.
And this is what I saw. Like somebody had dropped an ancient sea creature into the snow from several feet up.
Or maybe an alien.
This is so beautiful. The quail lands cleanly in the snow, stumbles, catches herself and bustles toward the fence – where she launches herself into the air (don’t you wish you could?), the tips of her wings raking the feathery snow.
The rest of the driveway, and a peek at the back of the forlorn, garageless tractor.
Fifth: Gin, who crochets— not to be confused with Rachel or Julie, who knit— sent me a none to subtle hint the other day about wanting THIS: part of Alan Dart’s Christmas advent project.
He’s tiny, and I was afraid I couldn’t do it, and I couldn’t get around to it for ages, but I bought the fabulous pattern and did him, then had to fight the maternal tendency not to let go, and now he’s in the hands of my beloved girl.
I made up the lumpy tail.
So there. That’s five things. Tomorrow, after the SS school lesson is done, maybe I’ll do the shindig.
Oh, and Monday, there will be another give-away. I think, a kind of cool one.
And here is a shot I took, forgetting that you can’t shoot in lowish light with a 5.6 lens. Still, I like the warmth of the light. And you get a feeling for the time and the room. Chaz is busily packaging up little squares of fudge for friends, thus the red foil pile. We can’t eat at the table because it’s the operations center of the house. And as you can see, there are plenty of operations going on. Guy is wistfully sad about this, traditionalist pragmatist as he is.
Add the flash. Not so romantic, but a bit clearer.
But sometimes we sneak in a meal on the fly. Like last Sunday when C dropped in with Scooter in tow, allowing Mom an extra lie-in. G had promised pancakes, and so we had them, scrambling to set the table with holiday flair. I need to do more of that, going out of my way to remember to be festive.
See that look on the Scoots? He’s wondering if Chaz has lost her mind with that bottle of diet cola for breakfast. It’s the kind of look you get when you’re not going to say anything, but you’re sure as heck thinking it.
Did you want a bite of this?
Wow. You grab the jar of syrup, and when you finally pull your hand off, it really pops!
Here you see the whole room, snow outside, tree lit up, dog jail (now grown out of – yep, two days later) and I don’t have any idea what Chaz is doing.
Another angle on the room, I really like this room. Especially at Christmas.
And there we are. Peppermint dishes full of pancakes and syrup, good company, and a young woman whose mind is elsewhere. What are you pondering, my sweet chatelaine?
First thing in the morning: let the tide of puppies out of their crate. Allow yourself to be carried along with the rolling surge: down the hall to tumble down the stairs, finally pooling – whirling around and around at the door in a cacophony of bells. You open the door, and out it rushes, into the dark, freezing morning.
A minute and a half later, there is howling at the door. Back in they gallop, you’d think: looking for breakfast. But in reality, it’s you they want, on the floor. If you are brave enough to sit, they lavish on you frantic love, gnawing affectionately on your arms and feet, gazing briefly but soulfully into your eyes before finding something fresh to gnaw or lick or roll on.
If after that, you don’t know that life is worth living, you need to go back to bed.
Odd thing yesterday. My horse neighbor to the east—every year he buys a calf and brings it over the summer. Sometimes two. These cattle lead a lovely, peaceful life—untroubled by dogs, consorting with horses to the south and to the west. Plenty of food. And entire little pasture of their own. The only sad thing about it is that often they are Only Cows, not a comfortable situation for a herd animal. But the horses seem to help with that.
And every fall, he turns his cow(s) into meat for the winter. The process is professional – quick and without drama. The cows suffer not even apprehension. They are at home, for one thing.
This is as close to the reality of my long life as I have ever gotten, I think. I have to name the cows things like “short ribs” in the spring. That reminds me. I actually met my own cow this year, and Stan had named him “chuck.” The first odd thing is that I am not horrified by the situation. Few creatures on earth lead as pleasant and undemanding a life as these cattle do.
(Interjection: 2nd stage of the morning—an inundation of Chaz energy)
But here is the oddness, and I think I have told you about it before – it’s the horses. Especially Dustin. They are the reason I know that cow-harvest day has come; they utterly refuse to enter the east stall of the barn on that day.
When the cows are taken, there is no brouhaha. It’s a silent process, a classic case of not knowing what hit them. There is nothing brutal or bleeding about it. I could see no signs in the snow yesterday when I looked, except to note that the pasture gate was now open.
But the horses always know. It’s not like the neighbor is just gone on a trip to the vet; that wouldn’t shake them this way. First, Dustin wouldn’t even enter the arena. Zion, evidently a much more pragmatic guy (and can afford to be, as he owns the west stall) seems untroubled. But Dustin stands and stares into the pasture next door, unwilling to be tempted into his middle stall, even by his beloved alfalfa. And Sophie, whose stall is the east one, is equally shy of that side of the property.
Out of focus and season – it’s really supposed to be a shot of Hickory. But you can see, anyway, how lovely Dustin is, and how statuesque when his attention is taken. And how hard it might be to lead him anywhere he is disinclined to follow.
I wonder at this. I wonder what they feel or smell. And I can’t ask them. I can only keep up a litany of human assurance – nobody will EVER eat you, only over my own dead body. Finally, I put a halter on Dustin, lead him over to that side of the fence and gave him something else to think about, little tasks, moving his feet – all of which he did with his face to the east, a nervous flurry of worried feet.
At last, I had reassured him somehow, or the last trace of cow spirit had drifted away, pushed along by the edge of the northern breeze. Dustin settled down to eat. Which means that they all did, in almost their proper places. But why? Why do they react this way, as though there were a palpable and disturbing presence in that eastern edge of their home?
In a way, I find this reassuring – that even in the non-verbal, business-like world of nature, there is fellow-feeling between unlike creatures. And far more under heaven than we realize, Horatio.
Holy cats. I thought I had lost a finger to frost bite this morning. Six degrees in the barn, horses covered with frost, tiny icicles hanging in their hair like silver tips at the end of corn rows. I was wearing these black neoprene-looking gloves I thought were supposed to be insulated.
Evidently, I was wrong about that.
So today, as I raged around trying to gather last minute Christmas secrets and fretting over what to do with Miko (the rejected book) next, I went to the farmer store and bought two pair of gloves I KNOW are insulated. Elk skin with fuzzy stuff inside. And my hands still nearly froze off tonight. Try picking up a seventy pound bale of hay by the twine with ice fingers. Just another reason never to get horses—if you don’t have to. Which I did. Have to.
But you don’t care about this – what you care about is:
WHO WON THE RAINBOW FLUTED FANTASMIC GIVEAWAY STAR????
And there were more than three entries (the puppies appreciated that), and the comments – which I meant to answer today, and did not, but will tomorrow, because I am never going outside again – were really beautiful. So I made up the numbers and threw them in a basket and asked Tucker to choose one, which he did. Then I looked over all the other now damp number slips, trying to figure out which one was actually missing, and it was:
#10
The lovely and gracious and pure hearted and adventurous
(sound of swords clashing against shields, bells, trumpets – and birds singing in the dawnlight)
I do have to say that the entries all made me want to make another fifteen of those things and send them out, so some day I might do it, when the house is clean after Christmas and Miko has a publisher and the puppies can be put outside in the yard with no danger of their becoming pupcicles, which is, at the moment, undeniably imminent.
Tomorrow, my plan is, as it has been for about five weeks, to finished the accounting, then read every blog of every person I love and answer every comment, and find a new printer with a driver that will actually work with Snow Leopard, and put the last beaded draped garland up in the den.
Which is more, I’m afraid, than you ever wanted to know.
~Don’t miss the tiny giveaway at the bottom of this link. Tomorrow’s the day!~
2 degrees below last night. But this morning there were diamonds on the driveway, whole unbroken fields of diamonds. For a moment, I was sad I hadn’t brought the camera (picture me fully dressed and stuffed into my insulated overalls with my insulated LLBean denim barn coat over that, big boots, two scarves and a hat – with a camera strap around my neck – “Have fun,” my mother said to me after she’d stuffed me into a snow suit that made it impossible to move arms or legs – and shoved me out the back door). But then I remembered that these diamonds don’t translate well into flat media. Maybe a star filter?
Some things can’t be captured. Sometimes you just have to suck up a breath and live in the awe of the moment.
Once inside the barn, I was sorry again; there was a marmalade cat, Mrs. Norris in short, all fluffed out with the cold, lazily perched on the very narrow rim of the water trough. For a moment, I wondered if he had simply frozen, balancing there, he looked so permanent. It would have made a great shot. But the horses came and ran him off.
Then I had to haul some yucky hay out across the arena to our soon-doomed cows (not “our” as in just mine – two neighbor cows; half of one will fill my freezer some day in the next few weeks). I looked up from my trudging pull and saw an entire covey of quail lined up along the bottom rail of the fence, fat globs of bird, seeming disgruntled with the cold. I was sorry to have to impose on them. They huffed off into the snow, grumbling. They had looked like fat, black Christmas balls against the snowy pasture.
That’s all. Now four freezing dogs are demanding entrance to my house. The puppies have a new beloved tradition: when they come in from the snow, the run straight to the hearth where the drying towel is warming. Then they turn and look at me. So now, drying off is de rigueur around here. Luckily, drying snowy puppies is more productive than being dried by otters.
~Don’t miss the tiny giveaway at the bottom of this link~
It snowed on Saturday, I think it was. During the night. And when the puppies got up at six, as they almost always do, they raced down the stairs (which always scares me), threw themselves on the bells hanging from the doorknob, and then danced until G got the storm door open for them. They tumbled outside into the alcove and were just on the point of leaping onto the deck when they noticed the three inch deep blanket of snow. G says he smelled rubber on the road when they put on the brakes, staring at the stuff and wondering what the devil had happened to the world.
I took these later, after the first shock and subsequent exploration and delight had worn off a bit. I was not in a position, at six o’clock, tucked into my warm bed, to be out in the snow barefoot with the camera ready.
As I was following them around, waiting for something cute to happen, Toby – at G’s feet in the front yard – suddenly took a literal nose dive (you know, the way fishing birds just suddenly drop beak first into the water?) into the snow. This is how he came up.
Skye. I have so many shots like this. Some, you’d think he was a sheep.
Tuckered out.
Just corners of the house. The light is so low with the lowering clouds outside, but the color is so delicate –
Chaz, putting up the inside lights.
G, fixing the dining room light. We did not switch operating systems on it; it just quit all on its own.
Puppy in the jail.
Puppy in the privileged side of the jail. Ya think we over-do the toys?
And another first:
Chaz with her first college Visiting Lecturer stipend. Yeah, she was made for this. She really gives a great lecture. That’s why they pay her the Big Bucks.
. . .
