6 posts tagged “christmas”

When I was a teenager, I was an insatiable writer.  I had many journals full of indulgent poems, each one teeming with loathing and complaints.  I'd scribble them down in too-thick handwriting from the safety of my room or bang them out on old-fashioned typewriters in semi-public spaces.  Typewriters were always optimally inspiring.  I've never gotten the hang of electronic composition.

Ten years later, I occasionally pull out my journals and read my bad poetry.  I see all kinds of things in my old musings -- scraps of insights, a surprising depth of feeling, and an occasional flirt with profundity.  Mostly, though, I see that I've been plagued with the same thoughts and feelings of self-doubt since I was 14 years old.  Consciously I feel different, wiser, better... but the proof is indisputable.  At least in part, I've been emotionally treading water for over a decade. 

To that end, I just re-read some of my blogging from this time last year:

"I wonder if I deceive myself when I look forward to feeling normal again?  That I hang in anticipation of those moments that are so consuming I don't bother comparing them to others I've had or might have in the future?  I can't help but feel that I'm in-between one place and another, and that there will be no rest for me until I arrive."

So here I am, with nothing new to say... yet again.  Perhaps I should just go eat some toast.

It's that time of year again, where the world is allegedly off somewhere falling in love and I'm dragging my Pigeon, kicking and screaming, into the holiday season.  I'm basking in the light of our majestic tree, Lonely Steve, sipping some Caramele tea from Lupicia, and considering the following holiday facts about my husband:

• He objects to sleigh bells in songs on principle.
• He's mentioned at least 5 times today that he bought me a present, that he won't tell me what it is, and that it will be arriving very soon.
• He was quite certain of imminent death while retrieving our Christmas decorations from the storage space in our garage, and told me so repeatedly.
• He's exceedingly proud of himself for naming our tree Lonely Steve, and for spotting said tree 30 seconds after we arrived at the lot.(*) 
  

And the way we spent our evening just about sums up the pervasive December dynamic:

ME:  Singing Christmas standards and bustling around the tree.
HIM:  Looking at photos of knives and drinking whiskey. 

Jingle, jangle, jingle.

* Note that we were at the lot for the better part of 30 minutes anyway, due to my Elaina-ness.

True to form, the commerce gods are pushing Christmas on me with a vengeance.  Don't misunderstand me -- I love this time of year -- but when the barista at Starbucks thrusts my latte at me with a "Merry Christmas!" the day after Thanksgiving, even I get a little concerned.  Would it be so terrible for "that time of year when the world falls in love" to last for just 30 days?  I perceive that every year it bleeds further back into November, and the shock wave ebbs further out into January.  Soon it will be either Christmas or bathing suit season all year long, and Hallmark will have a card and a holiday for all occasions in-between.

Also true to form, I spent around $500 this weekend.  All on myself.  "Oh boy!  Christmas time!  Let me go shopping... for me."  I don't know what to call this affliction, but it's happened every year since I first became gainfully employed.  Back in my Burger King days these sprees would be more along the lines of $25, but still.  It's the thought (?)  that counts. 

When I was younger, I'd at least maintain the delusion that the goal was to shop for other people.  I'd go out to the mall with the best of intentions and... you know, get distracted.  Somewhere along the way, though, I lost all the niceties.  I spent this weekend shopping for myself... do not pass go, do not collect $200.  I never once thought that I might pick up something for someone else, nor did I even look. 

The real mystery here is woven with some combination of the following facts: 1) I have plenty of stuff, and don't need any more, 2)  the people who love me would undoubtedly buy me -- as Christmas gifts -- all of these things that I buy for myself, 3)  these sprees greatly diminish the number of things I need or want, thus whittling my wish list down to scraps and gristle, 4) I love buying things for other people.

So yeah.  Not sure what to make of that.  And imagine how screwed I'll be when Christmas lasts from September 1st through March 30th, and how little money I'll have to spend on bathing suits once April rolls around.

Only now that Christmas is over can I bring myself to write about it.  This is the least Christmas-like Christmas I've ever experienced.  For my family, this still works out to be a fair amount of Christmas... but we had fewer presents, and in this new house we had even fewer memories.  We certainly did our best creating new ones, but that's not the kind of thing you tend to appreciate until later (or in some sad cases, too late).

The following made this a very normal, Christmasey sort of Christmas:

• my Uncle Jeff was the first to arrive
• I had to scramble into the shower when I heard Uncle Jeff's car pull into the drive, because I was still in my PJs
  
• it was loud and chaotic for most of the day
  
• there were children running amok, with exhausted adults hot on their tails
  
• the dog was very cranky (see him sulking below)
  
• we had too much food -- particuarly cookies -- and ate too much food -- particularly cookies
  
• we had no idea how to seat everyone for dinner
• my mother was the last person to sit down to eat, because she was trying to take care of everyone else
  
• several members of the family got drunk, and then subsequently got effusive
  
• several members of the family cried (this was my other uncle's fault)
• a little certain someone wet his pants, and in doing so wet our recliner
• my grandmother drunk-dialed people
• my cousin and I stayed up entirely too late, antagonizing each other and watching bad TV

bah humbug

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I am a cookie-baking machine... even with a hangover.

Chelsea came over around noon yesterday, and we set out to bake several batches of cookies.  Chelsea is one of four or five people in the universe with whom I can successfully navigate a kitchen.  Other people seem to be like cats: annoyingly underfoot, always where you don't want them to be, and inevitably doing precisely whatever you least want them to be doing at any given moment. 

As if we weren't a perfect enough match already, she's in the process of remodeling her kitchen and I desperately wanted to avoid baking solo.  Baking cookies is very much a team sport in my family, and I could never quite get into baking alone.

I endeavored to make three recipes that have been in my family as long as I can remember (and longer, no doubt): Swiss Almond Horseshoes, Nut Rolls, and Rum Balls.  Chelsea made little star-shaped Ginger Snaps, and also tried out a recipe she found for Stained-Glass Cookies (note that these little suckers are seriously high-maintenance cookies).  We rounded out the assortment with some plain-old decorated sugar cookies.

I temporarily converted my kitchen table into a cookie workshop.  While Shaun (Chelsea's hubby) soared to new heights of Wii tennis superstardom and The Pigeon caught up on some online reading and nursed a wicked hangover, Chelsea and I kneaded, rolled, and sprinkled like jolly lunatics. And yes, of course, the Christmas music was going all the while.

this - kids + hangover = cookie HQ west

Incidentally, my family was back in New Jersey baking cookies yesterday as well.  Six Martinelli women (technically three teenagers and three women, and not all of them Martinelli in name but all Martinelli in spirit) bustled around my mom's new kitchen making obscene amounts of cookies, while one Martinelli boy watched TV and sampled their wares.  I referred to them as "Cookie Headquarters East," and I freqently needed to phone-in from "Cookie Headquarters West" to fill in the blanks on the somewhat cryptic recipes my mom sent over earlier this week.  That's the thing with family recipes -- they're typically more like guidelines, with an awful lot of winging it in-between.

I don't think of myself as the domestic type, but I thoroughly enjoy being in the kitchen.  There all all sorts of explanations I could pin to it, but I suspect it's mostly because the kitchen was the social hub of my family's household.  Food, friends, and family are inextricably linked for me, which is why I end up eating things like carrot sticks, crackers, and peanut butter for dinner when I'm on my own.

I learned several valuable lessons while baking my cookies yesterday:

• flour gets everywhere when you bake, and is much easier to apply than to remove
  

  omnipresent powder stuffs
• there is something very satisfying about doing things the old-fashioned way -- like cracking 25 walnuts because you forgot to buy pre-shelled ones
• there is something very satisfying about doing things the modern way -- like chopping said walnuts in 10 seconds with a food processor rather than bruising your palm with 20 minutes of manual nut-chopping
• 

  simply mash down with palm, repeatedly
• you can, in fact, make dough with just flour, butter, and sugar -- but no promises on its ductility or cholestrol content
• it isn't as trivial as you think to smash hard candy into tiny pieces with a hammer
• ovens are hot, and they make everything around them hot
• my grandmother's famous rum balls really are awesome -- my seven-year-old palate was not a qualified judge

This past Sunday I subjected Richard to the many delights of making holiday merriment with me.  This exquisite, once-a-year sort of torture is typically inflicted by a parent or guardian, but seeing as we're on our own now I thought it was time to start a whole new tradition of pain and suffering. 

Ah, the fond memories I have:  lovingly placing ornaments on the tree only to have my mother move them to a more suitable location moments later, fearing for my life as I teetered precariously atop our feeble step ladder and attempted to correctly identify the staple end of the staple gun, cringing each and every time "Candy Cane Sugary Plum" scratched its way into my ears from the United-States-Airforce-issue LP that Pop inherited from his older brother Mike.

I pulled out my meager collection of decorations along with the 18 CDs of Christmas music my mom was nice enough to burn for me and set out to get my Christmas on.  I take it as a good sign, as I've been pointedly un-jazzed about Christmas since Pop died 4 years ago.

We were off to a promising start, as Saturday's impromptu massage trip to Watercourse Way unexpectedly led us to the perfect tree-topper:  a little silvered-glass bird. 

birdie

(For those who don't know, we have a weird thing for birds.  Not that weird, I suppose, relative to the whole wonderful world of weirdness... but it's a bit weird that we have any sort of thing for birds.  He's Pigeon.  I'm Dove.  Our house is the nest.  Our stuff is seed.  Seed is paramount.  It goes on and on, in a revolting couple-insider-joke kinda way.)

I dragged Richard to Target, where I tried to elicit his feedback on various things which were of absolutely no interest to him (e.g. what sort of stocking do you want, do you like this or that color bauble, should we try tying ribbons on the tree?).  He stayed buried in his phone as much as possible, finally fleeing for asylum in the portable electronics and gaming section.

2 hours and nearly $200 later, it was time to select a tree.  Unimpressed by the too-tall trees and too-large pricetags at Grandpa's Christmas Tree Lot (and, to Richard's point, the suspicious absence of anyone who looked even remotely like a grandpa), we headed over to the Summer Winds Nursery.  After establishing that there were no tree sizes between 1' Table-Top Trees and 6' Trees for Real Grownups That Probably Won't Fit In Your Small IKEA-Clad Apartment, we set out to pick "the one".  This easily took eight times longer than it needed to, and involved asking Richard many more inane questions to which he didn't know or didn't care to know the answers (e.g. is he too fat at the top, doesn't he look a little lopsided, are you sure he's not taller than him over there?). 

On the ride home (which offered no rest for the weary, because I insisted on playing Christmas music the entire way), we named our tree Phillip.  We then used him as a channel for slinging personal insults at each other on our way to pick up some hard-earned Starbucks.  For some inexplicable reason, Phillip has a voice like a girl.

Once the trimming and carrying and other man-jobs had been completed, Richard busied himself with work while I tore around the apartment like a maniac.  Lights went up, everyday knickknacks were swapped out for wintery ones, and the repugnant holiday classics blared from my JBL Creature Speakers.  There was bad singing and even worse dancing, and much serenading of Phillip.  There was also the breaking of two baubles in rapid succession, followed by me shrieking and Richard gently chastising.

I insisted that Richard help out on the home stretch, and I needed to restrain myself from relocating his ornaments just the way my mom used to relocate mine.  I did, however, make some casual placement recommendations.  :0)