Category Archives: Christmas

About the In-Between Time

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Photo by Moritz Knöringer on Unsplash

Anytime my weather app informs me of temperatures in the -40 degrees Celcius range, three things immediately come to mind: 1. Gross. 2 Why do we even live here? and 3. I ain’t going anywhere. Well, not if I can help it. With a car safely ensconced in the garage, I know it will probably start if it has to, unlike all the poor, angry vehicles hiding under their snow blankets like hibernating bears. They just want to be left alone until the spring.

Of course, not everyone has the luxury of time off in the in-between of Christmas and New Year’s. Work still happens – especially emergencies like busted water pipes and furnace breakdowns and cars that need to be boosted. But during the Christmas season – at least in non-Omicron variant times – we sometimes need to PARTY even if the temperature registers stupid.

When I was a kid, the in-between time stretched all the way to January 7 which was Ukrainian Christmas or maybe even the 14th, the Eastern calendar’s New Year’s Day equivalent. At least once a year, during that time, there was always a family party to go to. Most often, I remember it at my grandparents’ house – my Baba and Gigi’s. For most of the year they lived in a few rooms in what was the old post office in Derwent, but for family get-togethers we overflowed into the large back room lined with couches and chairs. But the family get-together also cirulated from year to year: I remember at least one party at the homes of each of my mom’s five sisters and one brother.

My mom and my aunties all potlucked a turkey roaster full of something – cabbage rolls, meatballs, cheese stuffed crepes – and loaded it onto the table in the middle of all the sofas and chairs. Us kids always went last but we never minded because once we had our plates full of our favorites, we got to sit around the kids table and talk turkey, away from the pesky adults. It was a chance to compare what we got for Christmas and show off new Christmas clothing but most of all, we just loved to hang out together, laughing and sharing stories. After dessert, which was left out for the rest of the night – score! – we found every house’s hiding spots and board games, we practiced swear words with each other and tried each other’s new jewelry and Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers.

I don’t remember how cold it was outside because we were inside – safe, warm, very full and happy. I do remember at the end of one of those nights exiting the house into a blizzard and my Uncle John blazing the trail for us in his four-wheel drive Bronco. The Chevy Impala would never have made it otherwise. It was probably pretty nerve wracking for Dad the driver and Mom the worrier, but I was probably asleep in the back seat, oblivious until someone carried me into the house and dumped me in my bed. What a life!

The in-between is a time to stay home if you can or to go if you must and hopefully the weather won’t get you down either way. Let your memories warm you. And may you make new ones that are just as good or better to keep going you all the new year.

About What’s Good

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Photo by Valentin Petkov on Unsplash

Yesterday I had a good 3-hour pre-Christmas phonecall with one of my dearest friends. She’s the kind of friend where we don’t need to talk every day or every week or even every month, but when we do, the three hours feels like ten minutes. I count it a good good blessing to have friends like that.

Three hours on the phone does give you a lot of time to discuss what’s new and also, as good friends will do, rehash what is old. Especially since we are getting old or – at least – old-er. We talked about how we are celebrating our respective Christmases – what’s the same and what’s different from the usual: her mom is in Mexico, mine is in heaven. Her grandchildren will be with her ex-son-in-law, I haven’t got any (yet). We both get to spend most of it with our best friends (our husbands), but there are other things that are different because the one thing you can count on is change.

And then, maybe around hour two, when we had pretty much solved the problems of the world – according to us – she quoted something she heard from Oprah that had stuck with her, something like: enjoy what’s good while it lasts, because it won’t last forever. And – know that what’s bad also won’t last forever.

It’s the kind of wisdom that at first blush, sounds icky, like a parent admonishing a child: Be THANKFUL, dammit! But then, the wise-ness seeps in, especially if you’re not a toddler or a teenager, because growing older teaches us the hard and the good way that this piece of advice is TRUE.

Do I wish that my mom, gone these seven years now, was here so we could enjoy another one of her special Christmas Eves? Or that, for heaven’s sake, we could go back to proceeding as normal without masks and admonitions, that Covid and all its iterations would just skedaddle already? Or even that it might warm up to oh – minus 5? – so that my front door would shut properly again and my kids don’t have to worry about their cars starting?

Well, sure. But in the grand scheme of things, I wouldn’t know such goodness if I hadn’t already witnessed it for myself, in all its smallness and bigness.

Here’s wishing that your ten minutes of goodness this Christmas feels like three hours – and even more.

About Not Giving Christmas Presents

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Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Sitting in a hair salon yesterday, I overheard a conversation from the next chair. The patron was telling his stylist that he and his wife don’t exchange gifts anymore at Christmas – that they just didn’t see the point of it. He said he didn’t like the shopping and, I suspect, the subsequent wrapping and quite possibly, the not-knowing if the gift will be “a good one” or “a bad one”. This was an agreement that was made amicably between the both of them.

He said that instead they chose to go somewhere or do something together, no wrapping necessary, just packing. And he also said his Christmas lights had been up and on since the warm snap in early November. So, not bah, humbug at all. Obviously, he and his wife were keeping Christmas in their own way.

About the gift-giving, the stylist said that she thought that Christmas presents were only fun for little kids, anyways. Hmm, I wondered: What about all those people who still are children in their hearts? What if your loved one really does want the flourish of paper and bows and maybe a new little thing that would not show up any other time of year?

And what about the givers? What if you really love to give other people presents? In the minimalist/environmentalist atmosphere we live in, is this wrong?

One of my first favorite stories about Christmas was O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi. It’s an old enough tale that I can spoil it: in the story, a newlywed couple, desperately in love, finds themselves destitute at Christmas. The husband decides to sell his prized heirloom watch in order to buy some beautiful combs for his bride’s long lovely tresses. The wife cuts said long tresses, sells them and buys the husband a chain for his watch. It’s Christmas giving at its sacrificial best.

Of course, as a young girl I always thought that the wife got the better gift – after all, her hair would grow back and she could use the combs. But the story wasn’t really about the hair, the combs, the watch or the chain. It was about the giving something away that mattered to you so that you could make someone else happy. Even if the gift made no sense in the end, it really was the thought that counted.

But thoughts are hard to wrap. Sometimes they need to be conveyed in gift bags and boxes – or sometimes, suitcases. Gifts don’t need to be extravagant, and the suitcase doesn’t have to travel far either, to mark the occasion, to show someone else that you love them – with a bow on top.

About Putting up the Christmas Tree

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Photo by lasse bergqvist on Unsplash

Although I would probably never entertain not having a Christmas tree as part of my December seasonal decor, the chore of putting it up every year is something I do not get excited about. However, like a good workout or sometimes church, I may not be anxious to do it but am usually happy once it’s done.

I do love a Christmas tree, even those of the Charlie Brown genre, but I really lollygag at putting it up. Perhaps it’s the residual argument memories about getting the lights just right or dealing with burnt out bulbs or (yikes!) serial string lights. But that problem has been solved – we now have a pre-lit artificial tree. Yes, we did the live tree thing for awhile. The smell is nice – well until your olfactory senses get used to it and you just don’t notice it anymore. A trip to a flower shop in December or a conifer-scented candle work just as well to satisfy that pine-y craving.

And then there’s the whole watering-the-tree-while-lying-on-your-stomach-and-getting-water-everywhere-but-in-the-tree-stand thing. I’m loathe to buy one of those new-fangled waterers that eliminate such a problem because it’s just something else I have to store unused for eleven months. Now, there’s no buying-and-hauling of said tree in 20 below weather (because it’s always 20 below when we go to acquire a real tree) and the subsequent 2-hour vacuuming session to clean out my car of tree debris. The car does smell nice afterward, but like the conifer-candle, an old-fashioned Little Tree air freshener does the trick without clogging up your vacuum hose.

For our first Christmas together, Rick and I did have a real tree. We were on a pretty tight budget but had decided to squander $20 on a cut tree from Superstore. We brought it home to our apartment – blissfully unaware that real trees were probably against the rules, a fire hazard – and unwrapped it to find out a quarter of our tree was missing. We should have only paid $15. No matter, we turned that part to the wall and decorated the heck out of “the good side”. And then we left for two weeks. When we returned – now wised up to the fact that the tree was in fact verboten – we had to adios that tree without anyone noticing. Rick quickly hauled the tree down the long hallway to the back of the building while I followed with the vacuum to eliminate the tell-tale trail.

It’s a fun memory, along with the those of unpacking decorations one by one and handing them to the boys to hang up – and then later rearranging them – on the many trees we’ve had over the years. One year – again on a tight budget – our second-hand artificial tree simply did not work anymore and so we made do with a tiny clothes-hanger-and-tinsel tree. Santa still came. And the decorations themselves – a pineapple from Hawaii, a covered bridge from Vermont, the clothespin soldiers the boys made – they evoke their own stories.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever get past procrastinating at putting up the tree. But it’s non-negotiable, so it will get done. And, once up, it will be enjoyed.

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.

About the Mail

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So, do you have your Christmas cards ready to get mailed out? Are you looking forward to an avalanche of cards and packages (that you didn’t order from Amazon) to pour forth from your Superbox when you insert that magical key to reveal the wondrous contents inside?

Yeah, no. Mail really has changed in the last twenty or thirty years. It’s rare to open up my mailbox and see handwritten addresses in the to and from spaces. Occasionally there’s a birthday card or a thank you. But mostly the mail is a never-ending invitation to recycle a bunch of paper that I never asked for. Even bills don’t come in the mail anymore unless they’re from my offline plumber or some magazine that I never subscribed to telling me to “Pay Now!”

When I was a kid I so loved the idea of getting mail that I was okay even with getting junk mail sent to me, thrilled because it was addressed to me. In a magazine I discovered the answer to my quest to be noticed by Canada Post: a sign-up form with circles to fill in if you wanted to be “contacted” by multiple retailers. Little did they know that I was twelve years old and had no money or no idea what an onslaught of mail I was setting my parents’ mailbox up for. Not unlike my inbox when someone sells my email address without my permission.

It was mostly junk, yes, but I think I must have received occasional free samples of brand new products like cereal that I didn’t like or dishwasher soap for an appliance we didn’t own. I even became a Regal Catalog representative and pored over their magazines like they were Christmas catalogs, blissfully unaware that most of their stuff fell apart moments after you purchased it or was “not exactly as advertised”.

I did, however, also receive actual letters back then, because I also collected pen pals along with those free samples and catalogs. The Edmonton Journal had a kids page where you could get your name and address published if you were interested in writing to someone across the province or across the world. I had several “first-date” letters that never went anywhere – kind of like the swipe left of my time. But I also had a lasting correspondence with two girls, one from Winterburn, Alberta and the other from Belfast, Ireland. One taught everything about the horses she was so in love with, the other about punk rock and what it was like to have bombs blow out the windows in your living room.

Although I bemoan the fact that I don’t get any letters anymore, I’m not exactly writing them either – it’s just too easy to slough off the job of hand-writing anything to anyone anymore. Gone are the days of having to decipher someone’s handwriting, of pressed flowers or photographs falling out from between the leaves of paper, of saving such things in shoeboxes for all eternity. Because they are saveable: they’re usually thin, unique and can contain valuable information.

And so sometimes I will even print up a memorable email and paste it into a journal or fold it up like a letter and second it in a shoebox. And you can bet that I save any Christmas letter or card that I receive, for at least a little while, and if it has a handwritten note all the better. These things might take time, but then those messages can last for a lifetime.

Here’s wishing that your mailboxes will all be full of only good stuff this COVID Christmas.

About Waiting

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Christmas was a weird one this year. It started out with one of the kids getting sick the weekend before and then one by one, each of us succumbed to a very nasty and long-lasting flu. Rick got it a couple days before Christmas, I got it Christmas Day and everyone we “celebrated” with that day got mowed down as well.

Sickness is no respecter of persons or calendars.

As much as you can dose yourself with Vitamin C and Oil of Oregano or feed a cold or starve a fever or whatever conventional wisdom would suggest you do, at some point with illness, you just have to buckle in for the ride.

And wait.

There are, of course, tried and true methods of trying to make the waiting more bearable. There’s moaning. There’s napping. There’s trying to decide if you want to eat in spite of your taste buds having gone AWOL. There’s Netflix and now, Disney Plus.

But mostly it’s waiting.

Christmas itself can kind of be a holding pattern. At the end of the year, along comes this day at which point, unless you shop for Christmas gifts at 7-Eleven, you can no longer do anything to prepare. All the flurry of the previous month’s shopping and baking and pre-Christmas revelry comes to a grinding halt and we enter into The Day.

Oh sure, I know it’s not like this for everyone. There’s Christmas travellers and there’s holiday workers like nurses and snow-removal crews that, God bless them, have places to go and things to do. But I’ve always noticed that in general, at Christmas we move into a suspension that if we hold our breath, we can find at least one moment to keep still and enter into the giant snow globe of our memories.

And then after Christmas, the world bounces back into normalcy and it’s over again for another year. The New Year looms, spring-loaded with all it’s potential of days and months “with no mistakes in it yet” as Anne Shirley used to say. We start to make resolutions and workout goals and everyone on the internet wants to sell you their planner that comes complete with unicorns and fairies.

This year sickness has made me press pause a little longer. The snow-globe moments were tinged with the green of sickness this year, but they still happened: all the kids around the table, laughing and playing games when the worst of it let up, going to see the new Star Wars movie. Waiting is hard, but waiting always gives its gifts.

I hope you all had at least one snow globe moment to carry you through to next year.