Category Archives: Holidays

About Coloring

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It used to be that around Easter, every grocery store would sponsor something called a Coloring Contest. A parent could pick up a photocopied coloring page of an Easter bunny or a decorated egg or – jackpot! – both (see above) and take it home for their child so they could enter the realm of arbitrary competition by coloring the picture and then dropping off the completed masterpiece back at the grocery store. Odds of winning substantially increased if your parent dropped it off at the same store. You could check for yourself if you went before the specified holiday and found yours among the multitude of identical holiday icons, taped into place like another brick in the wall.

The week after Easter you would find out who won the contest when you read the Vermilion Standard where we went for all the latest tweets before the advent of smart phones. I never knew how first prize (a bike), second prize (a ham) and third prize (an Eastalta Co-op-logo-emblazed t-shirt that would never be worn, ever, except maybe to paint the barn) were awarded. I assumed, at the tender age when coloring pictures was a passion, that it was because of serious coloring skills. Alas, I realize now that after Easter, someone probably crunched every last page into a ball, threw them into a bingo barrel and picked out three AT RANDOM.

Or maybe (more likely) someone from the store chose their three favorites, perhaps because The Winning Color-er used a particularly lovely shade of yellow for the Easter chick. Or because they painted their bunny rabbit the sanctioned brown or white, the usual bunny colors. (But not purple or blue or black. You probably couldn’t win with a black Easter bunny. Not when I was a kid.)

I harbour particularly bad feelings about a particular substitute teacher when I was in grade five surrounding a memory about coloring pictures of Easter bunnies. I probably thought it was pretty lame that IN GRADE FIVE we were given pictures to color for “art class”, but I this was also back when I was in Obedient Student mode. If you gave me an school assignment, I was on it. (Well, except for maybe gym class.) So, I colored my Easter bunny some very lovely shades of violet and mauve, thinking I could at least go the avant garde route.

I probably still hadn’t recovered from The Yellow Submarine Fiasco of Grade One when I discovered my picture pinned up on the back bulletin board with a mark (a mark!!) of 55% on it – for everyone to see and to compare. Oh, and I compared! My coloring was impeccable! I had added tufts of grass around the bunny’s feet! I used gold-leaf to embellish the Easter egg! This was a travesty! Meanwhile, my academic rival, who happened to be this teacher’s neighbor and favorite, colored his rabbit plain old Laurentian number 10 brown and got 95%.

The angst is not unlike that of this comedian – skip ahead to time 2:47 when his father derides him for coloring a monkey purple. (Purple is obviously the choice of us “artistic people”.)

I suppose that it’s these kind of childhood events that “build character”. For sure, they build grudges memories. But even more, I like to think that this was when I started to call out the status quo, to contest the idea that “teacher knows best” if only in my mind. What’s wrong with a purple cartoon bunny anyway? Where’s the creativity in everyone’s picture looking exactly the same?

I’m a big fan of creativity. And sometimes that looks like standing out and looking different from everyone else. And it’s definitely not something that should be marked and compared. Just sayin.

About Romance

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[Photo by Edward Howell on Unsplash]

[Another throwback: here’s what Valentine’s Day looked like for us twenty years ago!]

My husband and I are approaching a benchmark in our marriage. With nearly ten years behind us since we uttered those fateful words, “I do”, you would think that the idea of romance has been crystallized in our mind. After all, we’ve been living together for a decade. We should know what turns one another’s crank. And for the most part we do. Rick cleaning the bathrooms in our house is infinitely more romantic to me than say, laying down his coat over a mud puddle for me to walk over. (Don’t forget: I still do the laundry.) And if I would just sit next to my husband on the couch for an entire hockey game and actually pay attention, he would consider himself the luckiest man in the world.

What’s that? That doesn’t sound very romantic to you? Ah, well, don’t you remember? We have three small children. When it comes to romance, our paradigm has definitely shifted from the days of dating and smooching and holding hands. Not that that stuff is unheard of around here. Let’s just say we’ve become a lot more, uh, efficient. The trouble with Valentine’s Day is that it’s all about someone else telling you what to do and what to say in order to guarantee the appropriate swooning from your mate. And the flower and chocolate shops aren’t completely to blame. Let’s take a look at the origin of Valentine’s Day.

Although many myths surround this lovers’ day, Valentine’s Day is named for a priest, the patron saint of lovers, who secretly married couples against the wishes of the emperor. Erroneously, Mr. Emperor thought that this ban on marriage would encourage more men to join the army. It’s sort of a tragic Romeo-and-Juliet-forbidden-love-thing, which incidentally was also set in Italy. Hello? Italy? How are we supposed to get to the birthplace of romance if we’ve only accumulated 157 airmiles in the last 10 years? And no wonder those personal ads seeking romance always claim an affinity for candlelit dinners and long walks on the beach. Italy is surrounded by water! And Valentine’s Day was invented in the Middle Ages. They didn’t even have electricity back then! Clears things up a lot, doesn’t it?

You have to give credit to those Italians, though. Notorious as they are for their romantic reputation, they also have big families. Maybe we have the whole idea wrong over here in North America. Romance isn’t for twitter-pated teenagers. It’s for the seasoned veterans of love who know romance doesn’t have to fall between the confines of red roses and serenades. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) Romance CAN fit in between the laundry and the bedtime stories. But sometimes, a babysitter is a pretty good thing.  

About Nothing

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Picture by Nathaniel Bowman on Unsplash

Wishing you all a lovely day to commemorate what is good about this country and how to keep it that way for all of our diverse citizenry.

From one hoser to another: “Take a day off, eh!”

About Mustard on Eggs

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            In our home, whenever we had hard-boiled eggs, the kids always thought that it was just hilarious and maybe a little gross that I put mustard on mine. Never mind the fact that I always put mustard in egg salad sandwich filling or in devilled eggs. I suppose in that case the joke is on them if they choose to stay out of the kitchen during meal preparation. But to me, mustard and hard-boiled eggs go together just like strawberries and cream or Ritz Bits (cheese-filled) and Nutella. (Try it. I’m not wrong.)

            I have a pretty good idea how the mustard first got on my eggs in the first place: it has to do with Easter. Coming from a Ukrainian and Polish household, it was tradition on Easter Sunday morning to wake up to a breakfast of paska (egg bread), kobasa (good old garlic sausage) and, of course, hard-boiled eggs. All these tasty things had survived a trip to and from the church in a basket on Holy Saturday, where it had been blessed for our breakfast the next day. And nestled among the pussy willows nearly hidden from view would be an unobtrusive jar of mustard. Just a little bit, recently removed from an indelicate yellow French’s jar.

            Since it was breakfast and you didn’t want to overdo it for Easter dinner after church, a small plate was in order. The blob of mustard at the side was originally intended for the kobasa, I think. But with the bread, meat and egg placed so closely together on a saucer, the inevitable would happen: the egg, so round and slippery, would get a mustard bath. At any rate, since we had fasted the two days before (another tradition, but more spiritual than mustard on eggs), it didn’t really matter what was on those eggs before you scarfed them down. The wonderful thing was that it was really good. So good that, Easter or not, I still put some French’s on my hard-boiled eggs.

            This Easter breakfast is more of a tradition to me than the ham or turkey afterwards or even those one pound bunnies lurking around the house just begging for their ears to get gnawed off. This became painfully aware to me the first time that I had Easter away from home. At sixteen, I participated in a school trip to California and Mexico. In my excitement, I only gave fleeting thought to the fact I’d be away from home for the holiday. But once on the bus, I realized that my Easter was not going to be what it usually was. Some friends thought I was weird when I ordered oyster soup on Good Friday, but my conscience kept me from eating meat that day, knowing the rest of my family wasn’t. We arrived early enough at our destination that same day for my teacher-chaperone to find me a church service, especially since our travel plans would preclude me attending on Sunday. But I hadn’t solved my Easter breakfast dilemma yet. Did hotels in San Francisco carry kobasa on their menu?

            When I went to the dining area for a continental breakfast that Easter morning, I had made up my mind to just imagine my toast was paska and be happy with that. But I never had to do that. You see, in our small high school, we weren’t able to fill up our tour bus with enough students so our “Myrnam to Mexico” club opened up the rest of the bus to any senior citizens who wanted to accompany us. And that morning, when I greeted two of the Ukrainian ladies with the traditional Easter greeting, “Christ is Risen!”, they invited me to join them for their breakfast of paska and kobasa. Obviously, they had planned ahead and smuggled the stuff along in their suitcase. So, together that morning we enjoyed a transcontinental breakfast.

            There was no mustard on eggs that day, but hey, half a tradition can be better than nothing. And that was a great deal of comfort on my first Easter Sunday away from home.

About Spookiness

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It’s that spoooooooooky time of year again. The weather gets colder and everything around us just dies (or hibernates – which can look pretty much the same). The shadows become murkier as the sun disappears earlier and the setting becomes perfect for an eerie holiday.

Things that are innocent can get a little twisted. That creepy cat on a broomstick? It’s just a medieval feline on a Roomba.

That being said, I am not immune to getting goosebumps when my brain decides to play tricks on me. Many moons ago, Rick and I were in our minivan when we noticed a strange thing up in the sky. It was an odd shape, it was glowing, mayyyyybeeee it was moving? We were partly apprehensive and partly excited as we wondered what in the world this unidentified flying object was?

And then the clouds parted. And it was, in fact, the moon.

Oh.

Other-worldly, yes. But not unidentifiable. MOMENTARILY, however, it was deliciously scary.

Generally I don’t like to be scared unless it comes at me in ways I can control. Like rollercoasters: a nice dose of adrenaline within the confines of a super-seatbelt.

I suppose that metered scariness is the attraction about Halloween. If the masked strangers at my door are under 5 feet tall, I will reward them with a treat. Anyone bigger than that might get the 5th degree before we open the door wide and offer up a bag of potato chips with barbeque tongs.

This year, of course, I’ll be wearing a mask myself at the door, albeit a disposable medical one. Maybe I’ll dress up in hazmat suit, too. You can never be too safe this time of year. Or this year, actually.

It is 2020, after all.

Happy Covid Halloween!

About A Month Later

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It’s been officially a month since we moved into a smaller home and I have to say: it’s been a busy one. Here’s my one-month recap in no particular order…

  1. Packing, moving, unpacking and ALL that goes with it really can mess with a person’s good intentions. Hence no blog post AT ALL last week. I told myself that I was taking spring break, maybe because the weather was so nice? But then, right smack dab in the middle of the week and despite the near-zero temperatures on either side of Wednesday, we got a blast of minus 30. It was just one day but I got to wondering – was that my fault? Did my smugness about the weather produce a smackdown? Oops. For insurance purposes, I have decided to get back to my two-blog posts a week. If March comes in like a lamb, you have me to thank. You’re welcome.
  2. My bookshelves are still in flux. (See above.) Because, reading emergencies besides, organizing my books is just not as important as work and sleep and feeding ourselves. (Oh, and Amazon Prime as we take our near-daily dose of re-watching The Mentalist from the beginning.) But also, I am trying a new thing with my books – shelving them by color. I’ve always filed my books in a particular order that allowed me to easily track them but author/podcaster Anne Bogel of What Should I Read Next? inspired me to go this crazy route. Crazy also because I’ve always been someone who kept the jackets on the books and now that I’ve removed them all, I don’t recognize any of my books anymore. It’s like going to a family reunion with amnesia.
  3. Remember how we cancelled Christmas? And New Year’s? And basically the first couple weeks of January because everyone around us (but not their dog) got sick? Well, Family Day weekend we had a do-over at my sister-in-law’s with turkey and taters and games and some general holiday hanging out followed by turkey sandwiches and two Oiler wins to boot. A very merry February Christmas indeed.
  4. My article Mom in the Driver’s Seat came out in the February/March 2020 issue of Our Canada magazine. It feels good to get some publishing traction again. But it also was good to remember the story of my mom finally getting her driver’s license when she was well into her fifties! I knew the story, but her grandchildren didn’t. (This is why we need to tell stories.) What a testimony to keep doing hard things even as we get older and “the things” get harder.
  5. I finally got to see the new Little Women movie with my dear friend Rhonda in a quaint little original theatre in Vegreville. Living 40 miles apart, we have no qualms about meeting anywhere within a hundred-mile radius for some good story telling like that, especially if Meryl is in the lineup – and she is the best Aunt March ever. And bonus: Rhonda introduced me to a gem of a restaurant in Veg: Loco Burro Fresh Mexican Grill. Yum. Go eat there now.
  6. And speaking of YUM – we used a gift certificate last weekend with two of our boys for a restaurant whose very name made them happy: MEAT. It was a seriously fun eating experience (not to mention the food was DELICIOUS) and our server Andrew6167 made it even better. (Thanks for the MEAT, Sydney! You always know the best places to eat!)
  7. Strathcona is such a fun place on a Saturday night and after our MEAT, we walked down the back alley and then piled in with all the other late night fans for some Made By Marcus ice cream. The. Best. Ever. Ice. Cream. Ever. Period.
  8. We went to Vegas in Vermilion with our good friends Cliff and Caroline (THE MAYOR) McAuley which was hosted by the Good Life Institute. A fancy meal followed by some fake-money gambling – but the chips made it look like the real thing. The highlight of the evening for me was hanging out with the group of senior ladies that hired Len’s Party Bus to ferry them to and from the event! What a fun bunch!
  9. I went to the Inspiring Women Conference in Lloydminster and was…well, inspired. My favorite: the panel session with Canada’s first female professional chuckwagon racer Amber L’Heureux, silk artist Bonny MacNab and the first female CEO of Lloydminster & District Co-op Leanne Hawes. Not to mention the keynote with Carrie Doll, brilliantly timed just when the afternoon sleepies want to hit – but Doll kept me very entertained and interested. She has a great story and a great podcast, The Inner Circle, where she gets many other Edmonton locals to tell their stories.
  10. My husband and I are enjoying a blast from the past as I am re-reading the Harry Potter books out loud to him every night. We started reading them aloud as a family in 2003 so a revisit is long overdue. We’re just getting into The Prisoner of Azkaban – Large Marge has been deflated and Harry has escaped the Dursleys for another year. Yay Hogwarts!

Okay, I didn’t know I did that much stuff. What a fun re-cap! See you Thursday!

About Church and Christmas

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In the very small town where I grew up there were two churches, one little and one big. My family went to the little church.

And when I say family, I mean it. Not just my immediate family but aunts, uncles, cousins. And neighbors that were like family from our very small town. And when I say little church, I mean that, too. We filled up that very small church every Sunday.

On Sundays, we entered quietly, reverently, craning our necks to look back to see who was whispering so loud before the service started, or worse, laughing. Not that laughing was bad, it just wasn’t part of the proper preparation in waiting for the priest to parade from the back of the little church. But talking, visiting and yes, laughing, were definitely heard after we had paid God his attention, after the climax of the Sunday story – holy communion – had taken place. First communion with God, then with our family and friends.

Going to church was a part of the fabric of our lives, but living in a very small town, the church building itself belonged to us in special way. It was very normal to enter the church on a Sunday, but if we were to go in on another day of the week, it felt different to me, like I wasn’t sure where to stand or what volume of voice to use. But I welcomed it, those odd times of meeting there and the feelings it created in me.

Every year before Christmas, my mother and aunties and almost-aunties would get together to clean the church, enlisting any of their children who were around to help wash the windows and polish the pews. I’m sure it was done more often, but perhaps I remember this best because it preceded decorating the church for Christmas. It was exciting to change the landscape where we worshipped, to anticipate the birthday of the Christ child once more.

I loved being in that church on not-Sundays – the weightlessness of standing around the altar where usually only the priest and altar servers walked and the giddiness of being somewhere sacred and secret. And at Christmas, we would descend into the old basement to retrieve the annual decorations, the most fascinating being the small nativity scene that would be set up on the communion table, the small figures watching as parishioners came in and placed their host in the cup, like the taking of attendance.

It was my first nativity set that I remember. Long before Christmas decorations started multiplying in stores like Helga Hufflepuff’s cup in a vault in Gringotts, the same precious decorations were brought out year after year, with no thought of replacing them. Because they were part of the tradition itself, not just decorating, but remembering, cherishing. Maybe it wasn’t my first nativity set that I saw, but it was the first one I was allowed to touch, as we set it up on the table.

One of the wise men had lost his head. (Well, wouldn’t you if you met God in a manger? Though it seems rather funny – a wise man without a head.) No matter, he still counted – his body was there. It was small, but the whole set was small. Not much shuffling on the table was necessary to include this stable scene that reminded us all of Jesus’ humble beginnings as a man-baby.

The placement of the figures was important, it was part of the alchemy of Advent: the wise men three at one side, shepherds and sheep to the other. The angel with a tiny hook on a tiny nail at the apex of the stable roof. Mary and Joseph flanking the tiny little babe, center stage, like God is supposed to be. I was very young, but I always remembered how it was supposed to go.

I have two nativity sets now and I use the same guiding principles when I set them up. I take attendance as I pull them out of the boxes where they live hidden but waiting. I love how they represent everyone – families, blue collar workers, professionals, animals – and God. Everyone may not be related, but they come together in small spaces and represent the same thing every time: a family.

God’s family. Everyone is included. Even if you lost your head – you are welcome, you are part of the family. Even if you are dressed kind of odd or shabby and you stink like sheep poop – you are welcome, you are part of the family. Even if your beginnings aren’t perfect – that’s not his real dad, you know – you are welcome, you are part of the family. And yes, sheep and camels and all manner of animal friends are part of the family, too.

Angels above us. God with us. In a very small stable in a very small church in a very small town, but representing Everywhere.

About Two Christmas Stories: Part Two

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Mr. Edwards meets Cowboy Santa. (illustration by David Lockhart)

There is something about finding a familiar story in an anthology that makes me happy. Kinda like, I knew this was good! The second story that I loved from Treasure of Christmas Stories was one called Mr. Edwards Meets Santa Claus, excerpted, of course, from The Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Prairie is actually the second of several books that Wilder wrote about her family experience that bounced between homesteading and moving on in the late 1800s of the American frontier. I loved those earliest books best that showcased littlest Laura with her affinity to her Pa and to always striving for, but never quite matching, perfect older sister Mary’s attitude and behavior. (I won’t touch the un-PC-ness of Wilder’s books as they read in this day and age. For now.)

Ahem. Back to Christmas.

Before Disney Plus and YouTube, before smartphones and separate rooms for every activity, the winter months on the prairie allowed for huge swathes of time for the Ingalls family to sit before a roaring fire in their open-concept home and. . . sew. Or make bullets. Or listen to Pa play the fiddle or read the Bible (on Sundays) and then go to bed.

And so, we find Laura and Mary in the days before Christmas staring out the window at the rain wondering if Christmas will come that year. Because Santa is the one that brings Christmas and snow brings Santa’s reindeer and Santa’s reindeer bring the jolly old elf. And for some reason (probably because of some well-intentioned Ma-and-Pa propaganda) Santa’s reindeer could not come across the roaring creek that was being fed by the constant rain. Like some magical Texas gate.

This is confirmed by Pa when he comes in with a wild turkey for Christmas dinner. The creek is not abating. And here we find out how the propaganda found its footing: Ma and Pa agree that their friend Mr. Edwards, a fellow homesteader who had been invited to Christmas dinner, would not be foolish enough to risk crossing the wild creek for a wild turkey drumstick.

“Of course, that meant that Santa Claus could not come, either.”

And so for a whole page we have to endure the girls going to bed unhappy and Pa so disheartened that he can’t even play the fiddle and Ma suddenly, in spite of all reason, hanging up the girl’s stockings and whispering to a protesting Pa that she could give the girls the last of the white sugar. I repeat: MA HUNG UP ACTUAL SOCKS THAT ACTUAL FEET WENT INTO, PLANNING TO FILL THEM WITH A BAKING STAPLE.

We are so freakin’ spoiled these days.

All that foreshadowing had to lead somewhere and, you guessed it, a cold and wet Mr. Edwards suddenly shows up on their doorstep. When he confesses to Ma and Pa that it wasn’t Christmas dinner that compelled him, but the thought that the little girls would have no gifts on Christmas Day, an eavesdropping-and-supposed-to-be-sleeping Laura sits bolt upright in bed and demands to know if he saw Santa Claus.

While Ma fills the stockings, Mr. Edwards distracts the girls, answering all their questions about him meeting Santa on the streets of Independence, Missouri: how Santa was too old and fat to swim across the river himself, how Santa recognized Edwards from when he was a little boy sleeping in a corn-shuck bed in Tennessee, how Santa led Mr. Edwards over to his pack-mule to retrieve gifts for the girls who lived yonder on the Verdigris River. (Thus solving the snow problem, reasoned Mary.)

Here’s where the real magic happens: as a young girl myself, I would pore over the description of the simple gifts the girls received, as if they were as valuable as those the Magi presented the baby Jesus. A glittering new tin cup. (“Now each had a cup to drink out of.”) A long stick of peppermint candy. (“Sucked…till each stick was sharp-pointed on one end.”) A heart-shaped little cake. (“Made of pure white flour, sweetened with white sugar.”) A shining bright, new penny. (“They had never even thought of such a thing as having a penny.”)

And then, the piece de resistance. Mr. Edwards starts pulling sweet potatoes out of his pockets, nine in all. At that point in my life, I had never eaten a sweet potato before (and did not until I learned their magic firsthand at the Christmas table of my husband’s family.) But surely, they must have been better than regular un-sweet potatoes.

The ensuing description of the Christmas meal was not so compelling because I wanted to eat their food. It was because I wanted their delight, their satisfaction, their wonder. And yet it was generated by such simple things like sweet potatoes you can now find in any grocery store and pennies which you could now find discarded on the ground because they aren’t worth anything anymore.

Now I am not particularly fond of camping. Transport me back to Little House on the Prairie and I would probably be more whiny than a rusty door hinge in a haunted house. But I don’t have to go back in time or take a vow of poverty to appreciate the good messages that Laura Ingalls Wilder has sown into her story.

Things are sweeter when they are unexpected and rare.

Holidays are best celebrated with friends and family close.

The simple things really are the best.

I am thankful today for good stories that help me remember this as December rushes onwards to Christmas Day.

About Two Christmas Stories: Part One

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At this time of year when I was a kid, I loved to read a little Scholastic anthology called Treasury of Christmas Stories.

It held all sorts of important Christmas readables: Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of The Fir Tree (spoiler alert: it ends badly for the title character), the words to carols like Deck the Halls (half of which I already knew for sure – fa la la la la, la la la la) and Clement C. Moore’s precedent-setting poem that taught everyone what Santa really looked like (‘chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf’).

Two stories were my favorites.

The first one was called Christmas Every Day written by W. D. Howells. It’s a story within a story – an impudent little girl asks her father to tell her a Christmas story and, perhaps sensing a learning moment, he relates to her a cautionary tale of sorts. The little girl in the story petitions the Christmas Fairy, begging her to have Christmas every day. (Fairies have always been powerful females.) After many, many pestering letters, the Fairy acquiesces, with the caveat that “she might have it Christmas every day for a year, and then they would see about having it longer”.

You can imagine how it played out. Regular Christmas came: full stockings followed by presents followed by too much candy followed by a full turkey dinner extravaganza followed by sledding until the little girl came in with a stomach-ache and then everyone in the family went to bed early, cross.

But then the next day, it happened again. And the next day after that, and so on and so on, for the entire year.

Turkeys went up astronomically in price, then became scarce. Cranberries cost a diamond apiece. The woods became stubble fields, all the trees cut down to be decorated indoors. And people became poorer and poorer, buying presents and serving up Christmas the way Christmas was supposed to be done, day after day after day, ad nauseum. Well, except for the storekeepers and delivery persons – they were making a killing.

It was intolerable, but unstoppable. All the other holidays were obliterated, except April Fools’ Day, when everything was fake, which actually provided some comic relief.

It’s not that far off from where we are now, with Christmas creeping into the stores sooner and sooner. It used to be that Christmas displays went up sometime after Remembrance Day and it was exciting to see. Then we started to get confused in October when the Halloween treats were juxtaposed with candy canes and chocolate Santas. Now people are tripping over each other trying to snap up Costco’s newest Christmas offerings – in July – because once they’re gone from Costco, they’re gone.

I don’t like the stores messing with my calendar in this way. And I don’t like them telling me how Christmas is supposed to be done. I will never understand who shops in those “Christmas All Year” stores, much less what ______________ individual owns them. (You can insert your own adjective – I didn’t want to be too disparaging.) I like Christmas music to stay in December and even for snow to stay the heck away until then, too. (But that might be asking too much of the Christmas fairy. Because: Alberta.)

A very telling part of the Christmas Every Day story is when people get so tired of giving each other presents that they aren’t even nice about it anymore – they just fling them over fences and into windows saying, ‘Take it, you horrid old thing!’

The impudent little girl gets what she wants. (illustration by David Lockhart)

Ouch. Getting a present “thrown” at you can hurt. But it’s a lot like getting a gift that was shopped for under duress, given because they “had to” and, to add insult to such injury, was paid for with a 22% interest-bearing credit card. Someone I follow on Instagram, a well-known, not un-rich person, was recently advocating a gift-free Christmas, as she has done for the last thirteen. But not just gift-free: debt-free and guilt-free, to boot.

I have to admit, though I am averse to the commercial Christmas that is peddled these days, I still like giving gifts to people I love and appreciate. I like receiving them, too, if the same sentiment comes with them. I like to buy or get a new Christmas decoration (or two) each year. And I embrace the Christmas transformation that happens in my house, in town, on television, on the P.A. system in stores – in December. Just the opposite of it being the same thing every day, it’s nice to embrace the different-ness of Christmas. A weary world rejoices.

Ironically, in the story, the Christmases stop on Christmas Day the following year. People are relieved, then ecstatic. They throw out the candy and burn all the presents. The different-ness that has come is celebrated.

The little girl pays a visit to the Christmas fairy to thank her and this time to make sure that Christmas will NEVER, EVER come again. To which the Christmas fairy very wisely says that “now she was behaving just as greedily as ever, and she’d better look out.” They finally agree to go back to good-ole-once-a-year Christmas in the end.

There’s a lot to be said for the special-ness of things that come once a year, the excitement of revealing things that have been hidden for a long time, that you almost forgot. My little story book is fun to revisit when it comes out of its Christmas box where it lives for the other eleven months. It can even be surprising like a visit from Santa in a little house on the prairie when you didn’t think he’d make it.

But that’s another story.

About The Time My Mom Went to a Halloween Dance With Me

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This one time, when I was in high school, my mom went to a Halloween dance with me.

It wasn’t strictly a high school dance or anything – anybody could have dressed up and gone to the dance in our local community hall and danced to a deejay who played actual cassette tapes.

My mom loved to dance. And maybe the opportunity was just too good to pass up so she cobbled together a costume from our tickle trunk. It was kinda weird – a zebra head and an elephant suit. But it was the perfect disguise: she was unrecognizable.

I don’t think we went together to the dance. I’m pretty sure she walked the two-and-a-half blocks to the hall by herself. I found my own way with my friends. I don’t think I particularly wanted to go with my mom and I think part of her strategy of anonymity was not to tag along with me either.

My mom wasn’t discriminatory when it came to dancing – the rock-n-roll music of the ’80s suited her just fine when she wanted to bust a move. And seriously, she got on the dance floor that night and barely left. (She left the slow dances to twitterpated teenage couples.)

My mom wasn’t a particularly playful person. She wasn’t uber-serious but she wasn’t one to act goofy, either. And I really don’t remember her dressing up before that or ever again.

For one night (and one night only!) she let her inner zebra/elephant take over.

If you happened to watch her, you could tell she was having a ball. She never spoke to anyone. I danced with her a couple times and people asked me who she was but I never let on. I just shrugged my shoulders and acted like I regularly boogied down with hybrid animals.

At the end of the evening, when the lights turned up, she took off her mask and just laughed when people recognized her. And then like Cinderella, she slipped away home.

If there was one thing my mother knew, it was that she knew what she liked. She loved her family, her garden, her home. She loved being a farmer. She loved the good old days that she grew up in.

And definitely, she loved to dance.