Terrible/Perfect

Happy Christmas!

There was a good night's sleep for the girls, a not-too-early morning, and a little gift giving that turned out to be just right. We're having a good day and I hope you do too, my friends!

The shortest day

Oh my goodness. Today was great. Even with Big Kid in some crazy-horrible behavioral place and me and Mr. Terrible (I'm calling him that from now on) being yell-cranky parents and Baby being, uh, Baby, it was great.

I had planned on making little bird feeders from peanut butter, pinecones and bird seed and strewing them about the forest whilst gentle woodland creatures shyly emerged from their hiding places to light on our outstretched hands and nibble from our baskets, but I'm going to be very honest here: in this particular little window of my life, messy projects more often than not enrage me. They are typically pretty miserable. I have a 23 month old child. Peanut butter + bird seed + both of my children = MISSION FAILURE.

So that never materialized, and instead we bought some shelled nuts, cranberries and bird seed and went out into the wildish winter woods to leave food gifts for the invisible life of the forest. I have no clue who is going to eat this stuff...birds, maybe, possibly squirrels, but likely also, or entirely, rats and racoons.* It's something we will never see, which made our little foray positively magical. I loved thinking about whether and how our gift would be eaten, when, and by whom, and about how touched and delighted I would be as another human walking those woods and seeing that kind of offering.

Big Kid was in a beautiful place during the whole thing, noting when she heard birds up in the trees, choosing the best places to leave little caches of food, singing made-up quiet songs about the joys of Christmas, sharing, and being an animal, naming the whole thing "Summer Cake Diner" (!?). 

We found a great deal in the woods to notice and appreciate, from the glossy wet salal to a little mossy house made by someone else some time before us. On the way back up the trail she filled her little basket with pine cones, fallen leaves and bark, twigs and sticks. 

Later in the evening we had dinner, made a fire out of last year's Christmas tree (it had been drying in the garage all year in the misguided hope that it could be chopped up for natural wood blocks for the kids...too soft, too sappy, too split. Yule log!) and the girls opened their Christmas books.

We had never celebrated Solstice before, but despite the general shitcrapulousness of the parent-children dynamic of the day, it was wonderful.

Now I just have to explain why we can't haul ten pounds of nibblins into the woods every time we go.

*Please let me know if there is any reason why nuts, berries and standard wild bird seed mix might be problematic in a forest setting. This is a second or third growth non-protected forest on a college campus that is used heavily for recreation. I'm guessing the squirrels get a Twinkie now and then, but maybe pecans are bad anyway.

Moonshine monkeyshines

I'm trying on "optimist" as a personality trait, so, again, I'm trying to avoid whining about things like "teething" and "wildly unpredictable sleeping patterns" and "living in an enraging shithole of a house that looks like a bomb's went off" and "being so tired you almost fall asleep in the bath". 

There are pretty much always silver linings. I mean, not always. I think sometimes truly horrible things happen to people but as of yet nothing truly horrible has happened to me. So I'll take the half full cup.

I was awake last night with a fussy, disruptive Baby until 1 a.m., but that means we got to take her outside and point out the vanishing moon. Which she didn't understand, but she saw it, which is cool. It turns out that sans seriously telescopic lenses, tripods, huuuuuuuge apertures and filters of some kind, it's hard to photograph the moon.

Sunglasses held over the normal lens will do in a pinch.

And flash photography does have to happen sometimes. Grudgingly.

Anyway.

My children are shrieking and my husband is angry and we have anniversary breakfast to eat and Solstice critter feeding to accomplish, but I wanted to wish everyone a happy new year, at least according to the way the sun-Earth relationship functions in this particular place.

Enjoy.

Ook.

Baby's Christmas gift is taking me forever. Forever and ever and ever and ever, amen.

Today, new experiments in the placement of safety eyes and embroidery under extreme conditions (At the top of K2! While skydiving! During a space walk! Inside of a volcano!)* produced the finished head of one crooked little dude. But a cute crooked little dude (I hope).

And you know, we're all kind of crooked, right? And cute.

*In real life, I was trying to embroider the mouth on after I'd stitched the head mostly closed. To be completely frank the process seemed like potentially helpful practice should I ever need to deliver a calf.

Homemade

I have a quiet house for once, so I can hang here for a moment or two. Not too many moments, though, because I have a rather full plate. I'm hoping to make some miracles happen this next week, and with my dude home from work on vacation for pre-Christmas chillaxing and to celebrate our Solstice wedding anniversary I might be able to actually make some of the things I bought supplies for.

This is the project for tonight and tomorrow:

All cut up and already being stitched, huzzah huzzah.

Less pressing on my agenda were cupcakes, but I made those, too, and they are Red Velvet, except they're not red, because I refuse to put red #40 in food that I give to my children. So they're vanilla cupcakes that happen to be brown. And tasty.

These will get the cream cheese frosting treatment in a little bit NOM NOM NOM.

While I haven't been anything resembling productive recently (Molars. All we have left are those two year molars. And then the teething is over.), Big Kid has been busily working away at her little table. It's inspiring, actually. She just goes for it with scissors and paper and tape and markers and now needle and thread and felt and buttons and turns out all manner of funny little objects.

I showed her how to piece for a quilt today, using felt that she cut into squares (more or less) and a little running stitch. She's doing great.

She also rolled some beeswax candles this week all on her own to give to her ballet teacher. She drew a bow on paper, wrapped it around the candles and tucked a little note in. I don't know that her ballet teacher has all that much affection for her (they're only in there 30 minutes a week), but she could not wait to go to ballet so she could give it to her teacher. It was incredibly sweet.

Lately she's been making things to put in Baby's stocking. We have a book (it's like this, only the first volume) that collects some of the Christmas stories from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House series, and in one of the stories Laura and Mary make a "button string" for Baby Carrie. Big Kid decided that Baby needs a button string of her own, and despite the fact that Baby will be allowed to have the button string for all of two minutes before it gets tucked safely away, I think it's lovely that she thought to make one and took the time to do it.

She also made her a ball. Out of a sheet of felt.

These little treasures are now down in the toe of Baby's stocking.

There are SEVEN. DAYS. LEFT. until the big day, so I'm sure she'll be putting together all sorts of other silly/sublime gifts for people. 

Creativity and generosity are pretty great.

Give a shout out in the comments if you're making something (food? drink? toys? clothes? soap? hot buttered rum?), I'd love to hear what other folks are up to.

Happy week, all!

Happy box

I really need to start embracing more frequent, shorter blog posts. I spend a significant amount of time plotting posts in my head, and then when it comes down to it I realize I don't have the hour-plus it takes in the evening to trot out anything coherent, but I do often have something a little sweet or funny to share. Or stupid. We don't say "stupid" in our house (or "fat" or "ugly" in relation to living things or "shut up", the list goes on) but I do like the look of "stupid", the written word, and, if I'm honest, the sound of it. Stupid. It's nearly onomatopoeic, innit.

Tonight I am making more peppermint bark, which is very tasty. I've made this three times now, but tonight I ran into a snag while I was melting the dark chocolate with the peppermint oil and the heavy cream. At the point that it melted, the oils all separated out and I was left with grainy cocoa solids floating in a sea of oil. Blech. I'm suspicious that it's because I used extremely dark chocolate (Green & Black's 85% cocoa bar) and possibly there isn't enough cocoa butter in that to melt properly with the added fats? Or I overheated it? I have no idea. I wasn't willing to potentially ruin another two bars of it to try again, so I just smooshed the mushy stuff down on top of the first white chocolate layer and am hopeful that it will be close enough to okay once the whole thing is assembled. If not, it should taste fine and we'll just become muy gordo (see how I used the Spanish for "fat" there?) eating funky yet delicious peppermint mash by ourselves this week.

I'm hoping to make some gingerbread tomorrow. I cannot express how much I love ginger, and I like traditional gingerbread (not ginger cut out cookies, although those are pretty good, too), but I had been poking around for something that took the spices up a few notches and not having any luck. Lo and behold, Cook's Illustrated Holiday Baking issue for this year has exactly the recipe I (think) I have been looking for! I even went into Target at 10 p.m. to buy a bundt pan for it and ran into my midwife, which is always nice and awkward at the same time. She has seen me give birth.

My bundt pan is exceptionally nice. Apparently is was made by Vikings! Very exciting.

Oh, and ginger! The glaze for the cake calls for ginger ale, which means I get to buy a pack of Reed's. If you haven't had Reed's before, you need to. The Extra Ginger Brew is the shit. I feel like my friend Sunday over at Anger Burger had some kind of discussion about ginger ale once, and Reed's didn't come out as favorably as something else, but maybe not. In any case, in my heaven there are fountains flowing with bammed-up spicy ginger ale made with about 2/3 of the customary amount of sugar. Mmmm.

And!

It's two weeks from Christmas and I completely stalled out on what to give Big Kid. I'm utterly purchase fatigued. It's not that we've bought too much, but I have been spending a lot of time looking without finding anything I'd feel any joy in giving her. Fortunately today I recalled that as a child I adored old fashioned white cotton nightgowns (but never had one!). She also adores old fashioned white cotton nightgowns. Oh ho! So I'm hoping to sew something along the lines of these for Big Kid and the doll she was given for her birthday, in heavyweight cotton with a lot of drape if I can find it. I'm going to roll with a sewing-for-stupid-people pattern I already have for the kid and wing it for the doll. Woo hoo!

I also have developed the totally batshit notion that I'm going to finish a knit project for Baby and, possibly, one for my dude. Probably won't happen, but whatever. Onward!

You know, though, I'm not even sure why I worry about these things at all. My dude really just wants to be able to be in very close proximity to me without a small person shrieking for attention, and the kids?

Card. Board. Box.

Happy.

Dear Santa

Oh, Christmas.

You used to be so uncomplicated.

I remember so much of you from my early childhood: the twisted red and "white" (it was dough, folks...dough's not truly white unless there's a serious problem) candy cane cookies my mom made, the Care Bears Christmas record my sister and I put on while we ran around like maniacs in the living room, the cookies we left for Santa that I somehow always understood my father ate, the morning I came downstairs into the quiet mystical darkness of a tree-lit room to find ROLLER! SKATES! next to my stocking, the time I expected a bicycle and didn't get one and I cried and then my dad rolled the black and yellow BMX out from the other room and it was perfect (although I would develop the notion that bees were attracted to it and would, at some point, remove the yellow padding to avoid being swarmed by them).

Christmas!

So much tied up into the sweet cinnamon bow of it, nestled into its felted wool tip toe, wrapped up in its shining crinkling paper heart.

I had good parents, and we had more than enough to go around, and so my Christmases were wonderful.

And then I grew older and the game of it all became something more like greed, or rather something very, very much like it, and then I grew older again and ashamed and it became something different altogether: a chance to mark the subtle, or not so subtle, changes in the landscape of my family.

It was a chance to dust off old stupid affectionate taunts, to note the comforting familiarity of the knicknacks and the manger scenes, the plastic baby Jesus that always fit so perfectly in the crook of the goose girl's arm. It was the time to let the gifts mount up next to me while I drank my sparkling cider too fast and saw, loved to see, how we could not let my grandfather open a book or he would never finish opening his gifts, the gifts that always made him so uncomfortable and grateful at the same time.

There were more of us for a long while, burbling Buddha babes in ridiculous red and green one piece suits, newly minted fiancees and, once, a brand new bride and groom.

And then there were fewer. First the bachelor great uncle who sat in the back room watching the football game died, and his was the first and only corpse I have ever seen. And then my grandfathers, beloved, beloved, and never again. And we lost marriages. And dogs. 

The scene has changed, too, as the family celebration moved from a grandparents' house to an aunt and uncle's, and finally to my own parents', and as dear ones have moved from one house to another or away and back again or just away for good. 

And we ourselves have grown taller or fatter or both. The child who screeched the Care Bears songs has two coarse colorless hairs that peek out from the crown of her head and two screeching children of her own.

Now I'm making that childhood Christmas for someone else, and it has muddled me horribly. I'm grappling with how to help my kids make some meaning out of this season that, obviously, means a very great deal to a great number of people, in good and bad ways.

My husband and I settled on some ground rules early on in our lives as parents. We buy our children some, but not a lot. Overwhelmingly, our purchases are made from locally owned businesses. We eschew large quantities of sweets. We strive for traditions of family and community connection, not consumption. So that's fine. Or rather it had been.

Up until this year we hadn't bothered with the Santa myth, in part because it made me very uncomfortable to actively build up a falsehood for my child, and in part because it seemed fine to let her make whatever assumptions she wanted to. She woke up to a filled stocking and gifts under the tree. Ta da! Then last year she said that Santa brought gifts to other children but not to her. We hadn't told her explicitly that Santa filled her stocking, but we hadn't told her explicitly that Santa wasn't real, either. I felt awful. So this year we have stepped into the Santa myth more fully, because she wants to have that. We've left windows open in this construct, though, so a little light of play shines on all of it.

As part of the whole thing I encouraged her to write a letter to him, mostly to practice her writing, which was incredibly sweet. Unfortunately, as part of the letter I reminded her that she can ask Santa for a gift. And unfortunately, the gift she asked for is something we can't realistically afford to buy her. I found myself in a serious conundrum.

What do you do when "Santa" is not going to bring what a child specifically asked him for?

This problem sits right at the heart of my muddle over the whole season. To try and distill the essence of my discomfort, my feeling is that as a society we are trapped in an incredibly toxic economic situation where we have to spend a lot of money that, in many cases, we don't even have just to keep everything in motion. So in a bad economy, and a good economy, the "right" thing to do is spend a lot of money. That is also very much the wrong thing to do, because many people don't have much extra income to spend and debt is a life destroying force. There is nothing good about it. 

This isn't even touching on my concerns about fair compensation for labor, the funneling of wealth out of communities and the human health and environmental impacts of extraction, manufacturing, use of a given product during its lifetime and ultimate disposal.

But sitting there with her little eyes lit up is my kid, who just wants to experience Christmas.

I had to be realistic and make the determination that we aren't going to buy that doll. It's beyond our budget, and, this is essential, she has far too many dolls.

That's how I found myself today carefully discussing with my daughter what Santa might bring for her. I told her that what Santa wanted for her was a nice surprise on Christmas morning. And I told her that Santa doesn't want her to feel overwhelmed with her toys and games. He just wants her to have warm feelings on a special day. So he will fill her stocking (she made sure to confirm that it will be full), but whatever else he brings will be an elf-made surprise. Honestly, she was pretty okay with that. That made sense to her: Santa wants to stop by and sprinkle her life with some magic and wonder. He doesn't want to check off a shopping list.

I think that squares us up. As far as gift giving goes, the rules stay, and they stay simple: don't overspend, welcome the experiences and don't chase the stuff quite so much. The kids get a few toys that we feel comfortable with from cradle to grave.

For next year, I've learned that we need to steer the kids away from specific requests from Santa. Santa will be Magical Surprise Man. If they want to ask for something specific, they need to ask us so that we can tell them "no" up front if we need to, and give them a reason.  

By taking the burden of wish fulfillment off of poor Santa, we've also made room for some really exciting possibilities. Without the checklist (did anyone else used to go through the Sears toy calatog obsessively as a child?) Santa and his elves can, you know, make stuff.* 

Fun!

See, I am fun. I do not obsess over Christmas all day long. I have been experiencing a significant shift in my worldview, my moral compass, my relationship with money and material goods and my parenting philosophy, all at once, around the whole Christmas deal. It has not been particularly merry. Actually, that's not true. It's been a growth process. Those always kind of suck, but then you're really glad they happened. It's called disequilibrium and the more you experience it in your life, the less likely you are to be a jerkwad. Changing your cognitive structures is a good thing. Word.

Now! Stuff. Because it's Christmas and I feel like I'm constantly shopping for something even though we're doing it "simple" style.

That shit looks so seasonal. Big Kid made the bean heart in preschool prior to Thanksgiving and it makes me happy happy. The tablecloth is pretty groovy, too.

This is super groovy:

I found him lurking in the antique mall and he was crazy, ludicrously inexpensive. Cheap. I felt kind of guilty buying him for so little, because he is fancy, and I have to guess that the vendor didn't know how fancy he is. But, now he is ours. I was hoping to sneak him past the kid for Christmas love but that didn't work out so he was Highly Unusual Unexpected Toy Purchase dragon. 

Now I feel all weird for sharing my overwrought thought process around mundane topics.

Go watch this. It's adorable.

*Have you noticed that in recent Santa movies the "workshop" is basically a factory floor with marked, licensed toys rolling by on conveyor belts? That is some f-ed up shizz right there.