Monthly Archives: December 2020

About 2020

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https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/edmonton-ad-agency-sums-up-2020-with-xmas-dumpster-fire-channel-1.5224958

This year, on Christmas Eve, instead of tuning in our television screen to the standard fireplace channel to set the mood for a magical evening, we opted for a dumpster fire that we queued up on YouTube which had been produced by an Edmonton graphic design firm.

And so we come to the end of The Year That Nobody Expected, Not In A Million Years. Let’s see: there was a world-wide pandemic, premature death, economic chaos and, ugh, social distancing. You mean to say that throughout this sh*tstorm, we don’t even get to cry on other people’s shoulders, pull them in close for a hug or sit side-by-side just to have the feeling that someone else is with you? Isn’t that what shoulders are for? So, yes, the appropriate response might be to throw it all into the dumpster and, for good measure, douse it in gasoline and light it up.

Is it possible that there’s another response?

Easy for me to say. Yes, there have been difficult moments for me this year. There was uncertainty, there was frustration, there was fatigue with the whole dang situation – and that all continues as we move into a new year. But I/we have been “lucky”: our business has survived and none of my immediate family got “The Vid”. (Although Simon claims he can still feel the swab they stuck up his nose to test him back in May.)

The last few months of 2020 I’ve been reading through Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World about different ways to practice faith…well, practically. The last chapter is about pronouncing blessings, which is something that anyone can do. BBT says she’s not even sure you have to believe in God to pronounce something blessed, that “it may be enough to see the thing for what it is and pronounce it good.”

AND THEN she goes on to say that you blessing something doesn’t confer the holiness – it already is just there – that maybe we have no business deciding if something is a blessing or not. One can say a blessing “when you break a bone the same as you do when you win the lottery. The two events may be more alike than you know.“

Hmm.

I remember the first time I was challenged with this concept. It was while I was attending university and had stopped in to visit my spiritual mentor at the time. I overstayed my parking welcome and when I found a (not-a-lottery) ticket on my windshield, he called out from the front door where he and his wife were waving goodbye to me: “Call it a blessing!”

Okaaaaay…how could I do that? Well, first of all, it wasn’t enough to erase the happy feeling I had of the good, long visit we had just enjoyed. I got a ticket, but I was also lucky enough to own my own car. I got a ticket but I probably didn’t starve to pay it. I got a ticket and it taught me to be more careful next time. Apparently, there were myriad blessings in the thing.

The dumpster fire can consume a lot of crap. But it can give off a lot of warmth and light, too, which is Not All Bad. Wishing you a Happy New Year and pronouncing it Already Blessed, No Matter What.

About Me and Santa, Again

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Thursday, December 24, 2020, 6:04 a.m.

From: bonnie@bonniedonily.com

To: santa@northpole.ca

Santa!

I really meant to get this message off to you sooner, but since Canada Post is up to their earballs with round-the-clock deliveries in this package-laden-pandemic-pandemonium, I thought I’d shoot you an email instead. Feel feel to wait until Boxing Day to open it. I know you must be busy right now.

Or are you? I mean, Covid has really changed the definition of “busy” for a lot of people. Things certainly don’t look anywhere near the same as they did when I wrote you last year. Well, my tree is up and the presents are wrapped and the perogies are tucked into the freezer with care in hopes that my children soon will be here. But, riddle me this Santa? When exactly is that going to be? When will we be all together, under one roof, free to hug with abandon, again?

As much as Amazon and Etsy are getting all the love this year, I think a lot of us aren’t really wishing for material things as much as we are wishing that our loved ones would materialize in front of us. How crazy that we took that in stride last year, the gift of presence. If Covid has gifted me anything, it’s the realization that I actually like people and I wouldn’t mind hanging around them more, without the worry they they are contagious. It’s just too dystopian for me, all the masks and the not-touching and the Zooming.

I don’t want to mix you up with God, asking you for things that I know it’s more in His Department for me to ask for – namely for the end to this pandemic and for things to be “normal” again by next Christmas. And far be it from me to threaten your job security – there certainly is enough of that going around – but I don’t think I need much right now.

BUT, just in case, I will let you know that I still haven’t stopped thinking about that set of toy pots and pans with the happy faces on them that I wished for so badly when I was a 6-year-old paging through the Sears catalog. I’m thinking you must have had shares in that company – at least the Christmas catalog part? Glad you’re still around even if Sears isn’t.

Merry Christmas, Santa. Make sure you have lots of hand sanitizer and extra masks with you as you make your rounds tonight. And above all, stay safe. We want to see you again next Christmas.

XO (the only kind that are ok right now),

Bonnie

About Tradition

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It sort of goes without saying that this will be a different kind of Christmas.

“Normally” what we do every year is pretty much the same. Christmas Day is at Rick’s parents’ house, New Year’s Eve and Day is at our house, in between we get together with my siblings and their families. Plus there are three birthdays in between Christmas and New Year’s, one of which is celebrated with Chinese food, a nice change from the turkey and chocolate overload. It can be pretty busy and leaves me sometimes wishing for just a little bit of time to work on a dang jigsaw puzzle and watch some Mr. Bean.

Sometimes you HAVE to be careful what you wish for.

The temptation this year might be to treat Christmas Day like just any old day. Because if we can’t have Christmas the way we want, if it’s not going to be the way Christmas “normally” is, well then: forget it. Maybe I’ll just open up a bag of turkey-and-mashed-potato-flavored potato chips and scroll through “The Best/Worst 2020 Pandemic Memes” on Buzzfeed.

Nope, not gonna do it. I am determined to keep Christmas in my heart like Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge vows in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

And anyways, is there really such a thing as a “normal” Christmas? Things just keep changing from one year to the next. Fake Christmas trees get more real looking than real ones. Abnormal frosts wipe out entire mandarin orange crops. A freak storm on Christmas Eve leaves somebody stranded in a motel in Vegreville. Someone usually has the flu, or everyone, like last year in our family.

One year, after saying goodbye to our mother ten days before Christmas, we all retreated to our respective corners and agreed to celebrate Christmas together in January. One year, we watched Rick’s parents’ shop burn down on Christmas Eve, our spirits dampening as the firemen extinguished the flames. One year, we spent too much time in the hospital and Christmas really didn’t feel that merry.

Some years we coupled the joy of a new baby with the fatigue to barely enjoy Christmas. Years later, we welcomed those babies’ girlfriends as happy new additions to the crowded table.

Oh sure, we usually eat the same things (unless there is a mandarin orange shortage) and play games and open presents, as usual. But one of the traditions of Christmas is to take the time to notice the changes and the speed of life and hold your breath for a moment, before the moment of Christmas passes.

As Scrooge said to his nephew before his fated ghostly visits, “Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine!” It really is up to you how you will keep your Christmas this year, but don’t forget to watch. It won’t be the same next year.

About The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

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Christmas pageants and plays, populated with preschoolers and preteens, have perennially caused problems for pastors and play-directors. Well, maybe we can be a little more generous and just call them “memorable experiences”.

Unfortunately, this year, a.k.a. The Year That Covid Killed Christmas, there won’t be any opportunities to watch your kids have a live meltdown on stage at school or at church or at a recital or ANYWHERE. Thankfully, we still have plenty of ways to recreate moments like your preschool daughter flashing her underpants (repeatedly) at the entire church congregation (because fancy skirts can be so much fun to flip up and down). Or like when your usually sunny son stands front and center on stage with his arms crossed, scowling at the crowd and refusing to sing in spite of every other rehearsal going as smoothly as possible.

Remember Kevin McAllister’s rotten brother Buzz? He expertly (and blatantly) antagonizes his little brother during an angelic solo and then absolves himself of all of the blame after the entire show’s scenery comes crashing down around Kevin’s lit-up ears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT7-T-pqCCs

And there was story I reviewed last Christmas on this blog, The Shepherd, The Angel and Walter the Christmas Dog, where (spoiler alert) the entire choir loft ceiling came crashing down. There’s just too many variables in a live performance with unpaid and underage amateurs amid poorly anchored scenery for Christmas plays to go exactly as planned.

[Side note: When I was a youngster, I went with my mom to a Christmas concert at Derwent School and watched while my big brother was “operated on” with a carpenter’s saw behind a backlit curtain after a scene where he ate too much pie. I bawled my eyes out thinking that something had gone horribly amiss. But no, the play went exactly as planned and it did look like they killed him. And that’s why you shouldn’t eat too much pie at Christmas, especially if someone wants to try out some new tools.]

The title of Barbara Robinson’s classic book The Best Christmas Pageant Ever appears, at first blush, to be ironic. The Herdman kids, notorious for wrecking everything in their path, bully their way into all the lead parts for the church’s nativity play which were (in this story) traditionally held by the milder and meek of the Sunday School crowd. The initial attraction for the un-herded Herdmans, whose mother works double-shifts and has essentially given-up, is a rumored abundance of food at the church. Much to the chagrin of the kids who previously enjoyed a Herdman-Free-Zone at their Sunday School classes, the hungry Herdmans decide their omnipresence is called for, even here in the church where the oldest Herdman, Imogene, mutters unhappily that apparently “everything” is about Jesus. You can imagine how it all plays out: near disaster, followed by unforgettable redemption. That’s my kind of Christmas story. You can download it to your Kindle or listen to it on Audible or even watch the movie on YouTube featuring Loretta “Hotlips Houlihan” Swit of M.A.S.H. fame. You’re welcome.

And finally, for who those of you who agree with me that this is the best Christmas play ending ever (even if it is animated, Charlie Brown and Snoopy will always be real people to me), heeeeeeeeere’s Linus!

About Finishing

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new years eve celebration
[Photo by olia danilevich on Pexels.com]

I am a finisher. Oh, not necessarily of marathons or anything like that. No, I am more the kind of person who gets a weird satisfaction out of finishing the last cracker in the box or making someone eat the last pickle in the jar. Then I can recycle the box or wash up the jar and feel strangely that I completed something and all the detritus has gone to its rightful place: the recycle bin, the storage room, someone’s intestines.

I have to admit that I’m a little (okay, a lot) like this when it comes to the end of the year. On December 1, I look longingly toward my new planner (that I ordered in September) and get “excited” about penciling in all the birthdays and paydays and Canadian holidays that my American planner doesn’t have the good sense to include. Making the first mark in it is difficult for me, however. I subscribe to Anne Shirley’s philosophy: “Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”

It is nice to think that, but it is also a little naive. Turning the page to January 1, 2021 is not a magic spell, except in my brain, which is a real place and I can’t wholly discount the power of the mind to create something tangible. And 2020 has been – shall we say – a little surreal. To quote Barbara Poelle in the latest issue of Writer’s Digest: “This year there was a global pandemic, a sonic boom of needed steps in social and racial justice…an election cycle that is rocking the foundation of (their) nation…and murder hornets.”

And so I find myself once again in The In Between. I don’t think it’s any mistake that we celebrate Christmas at the end of the year – there’s all sorts of circumstantial evidence that Jesus was born around this time – but also Christmas makes us sloooowwww down, before we start mistaking up a whole new year. Oh, sure, it may feel like your days are whizzing by with the extra chores of shopping and baking and wrapping and decorating – or whatever extras you assign to December. These things keep me grounded firmly in the present, away from wishing away the time and also, away from that spanky new planner.

Last weekend, Rick and I put up our Christmas tree. We enjoyed it unadorned except for lights for an evening and then, on Sunday, as we pulled out the boxes of decorations, I groaned and wished that the Christmas Tree Decorating Fairy would show up and do this for me. But I knew that She/He didn’t really exist and I might as well “get it over with”. Because I do like me a decorated tree to look at every day of December. And Fairies, though prodigious in their powers, probably do not know how exactly I like the ribbon to go around my tree and which decorations need to be relegated to the backside because I love them less than others that deserve front-and-center prominence.

And it was a lovely afternoon: just me and my husband and Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey engaging in a tradition that is timeless and ever-new. And it was nice to get it done before December 1 – a little less rushed than if we squeezed it into a weeknight in the middle of the month and a little more special because we did it together.

As much as I like to Finish Things, there’s a lot to be said for Holding Off, Slowing Down & Pausing. After all, it’s not really good sense to eat twenty Oreos just so I can recycle the box. It’s also not good sense to waste all my December days wishing for January 1. The shopping, the baking, the wrapping, the decorating are ALL GOOD THINGS. I will try to savor my Oreos one at a time and give thanks for all the days that I get to have.