About Packing and Unpacking

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An eerie depiction by artist Michael Johansson

So, in case I haven’t mentioned it already, we moved recently. Which means we are still in the throes of unpacking. And unpacking after the initial excitement has worn off is annoying. It’s like a game of Monopoly where you want to sabotage yourself and lose all your money to get out except people keep landing on your properties and paying you. And they’re paying you in unpacked boxes.

Moving, though somewhat of a monumental task, was facilitated by the adrenaline of the deadline. The packing, the cancelling and setting up of services, the praying for good weather in the middle of January – it’s all rather time-sensitive, so it gets done.

The packing has its own rhythm. A few weeks in advance, it’s like playing Jenga with your household items. It’s easy at first: I packed those things that were superfluous to everyday life or, at least, to my everyday January life. I easily boxed up things like fondue pots, swimsuits, CDs, weigh scales, Halloween decorations and our flip-flop collection.

The closer you get to the actual moving date, the trickier/Jenga-er it gets. Who knows what kind of cooking utensils you need to leave till the last minute? Or just how many clothes you will need for that first week because you won’t have the energy to unpack the rest of your clothes for at least another week? (Or two.) Or which books you need to leave out in case of a reading emergency? One false move and the whole thing comes crashing down as you find yourself rooting in ALL of your packed boxes for Post-It notes and leftover chocolate from Christmas. (Just kidding, there is no such thing as leftover chocolate.)

The day before moving, no matter your intentions of packing like items together for a seamless transition later, you start firing all manner of things into overly-large boxes whose weight will inspire colorful curse words, tying pillows and utensils and shampoo bottles up in bedsheets, and shoving furniture screws and such into your jeans pockets, confident you will remember where everything goes/went when you get to the new house.

You won’t.

Once all your worldly goods are finally at your new destination, the game changes to Tetris. Especially in the case of downsizing. It’s simple in the beginning because you start with the big stuff: for the most part, the table goes in the dining room, the beds go in the bedrooms, the desk goes in the office. Well, hypothetically the desk goes in the office. My desk, my overly-large-teenage-elephant-desk, went into the garage. Because when I bought it, I never envisioned the proper size necessary to fit into a tiny bedroom/office. Oh, the short-sightedness of empty-nesters! Silver lining: it classes up the garage.

But I digress. After the large pieces are in place, the game of Tetris starts coming at you faster and faster as you unpack your boxes and figure out what goes where. Our new kitchen easily has room for the forks and knives, a reasonable number of dishes, the toaster and the coffee maker. (Or even, the three coffeemakers. Because: coffee.)

Once the kitchen was unpacked, the linen closet filled and the bathrooms organized, I was pleased with the minimalist look our house exuded. THIS was before I started opening all the boxes of books and knickknacks. And extra kitchen stuff. And extra books and knickknacks. The clue that we have too much stuff: in the few short weeks since I packed some things, I lost all recollection of even owning them. Like, hypothetically: if a garbage bag full of, let’s say, Precious Moments statuettes accidentally was thrown away, I would be none the wiser. (This didn’t happen. I got rid of those several moves ago.)

I will continue with this game of Tetris because even though empty counters are easy to clean and restful for the eyes, the house doesn’t look like it’s been lived in yet. And I can’t get rid of things like my mom’s Royal Purple mug, the ornate jewelry box my Baba gave me for graduation, the birthday cards my daughter-in-law drew for me, the framed pictures of my boys in all their stages of growing up. I might work hard at being organized and clutter-free, but the “messes” that humans make in my home are still welcome, those messes that bear witness to life lived and not just displayed.

And besides, I wanna know what’s still in all those unpacked boxes.

About Moving Margaret

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So, we moved a couple weekends ago. And while the new house has quickly taken shape, Rick and I are bent out of it. As I regaled all our many former moves in my last post, I honestly thought I was ready for this one.

I wasn’t.

It’s not that we didn’t have everything packed. It’s wasn’t that I wasn’t ready to feed our hard-working crew on Saturday – I got up early to start the crockpot of hot dogs that is part of our moving tradition. (Because, as I told my sister-in-law, we have moved enough to have a moving tradition.) It’s just that we didn’t factor in that we are older and therefore the recovery from moving a mere 6 blocks west was going to take a couple chiropractors, massage therapists and a lot of time.

Another hazard of getting older: moving beyond the typical IKEA cardboard furniture. This genre of house furnishings remains popular despite the wordless and sometimes fruitless instructions that accompany its assembly. It’s cheap(ish) and usually light and therefore, easy to move. But what we noticed this time is that alas! we had invested in some actual wood furniture since the last move. And wood can be, well, heavy.

And then, there was the piano. The move to our former house eleven and a half years ago pretty much also marks the beginning of our three boys’ musical careers. We already had purchased a keyboard in 2007 when the Radio Shack here in town – a.k.a. L&K Television – shut down. Piano lessons with the amazing Luis Guarnica started soon after in September and by December, he had them playing Christmas carols.

And then some friends were moving away to a temporary location and asked: Would we store their piano for them? Storing: meaning in our living room where three young men could plink away on it daily. It was a win-win situation. Until they wanted their piano back.

And so, it was back to the Radio Shack special.

That year, at music festival, the astute adjudicator, after listening to the boys play their pieces, commended their efforts but then called out to the crowd, wanting her remark to land on my ears: “Mom, these boys need a real piano.”

It was our luck that my ears weren’t the only listeners. A lady from our church heard this message as well. And so it was that a few nights later, we got a phone call from Bill, who summoned us to visit him in the hospital. Would we, he asked, be interested in “hanging on” to his late wife’s piano for awhile? And so “Margaret” – named for her former owner – came live at our house.

Just say the words “move a piano” and you can quickly clear a room. Pianos are just heavy. And awkward. And big. It usually requires a lot of muscle, followed by a lot of pizza afterwards. Margaret signified the end of the move as it was the last thing to go a couple weekends ago, when she went to live with two of the boys in their home in Edmonton. After all, Rick and I only know how to play the radio – it made much more sense for the piano to be where the music makers live.

And so our rural piano moved to the big city, took a trip up an elevator and hopefully will live there for at least another eleven and a half years. Which should be enough time for all of us to forget how hard it is to move a dang piano. Even one with a disarming name like Margaret.

About That Time We Moved (Which Time?)

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People say that we move a lot.

I guess if you consider that Rick and I have lived in 7 different homes since we got married over 27 years ago, mayyyyybeeee that’s a lot? Two of those places we lived in for less than a year. The house we are moving from this weekend has had our longest run: 11 and a half years. But those moves that happened so close together? Family members whose muscle we call upon to help – they still think we move too much.

I was recently explaining this to a friend and said that really, they weren’t all our fault. And then when I started recounting the houses to her, I realized: it’s all our fault. Really. We could have stayed put more after we initially moved from Edmonton out of our honeymoon apartment that didn’t allow kids. (But then we had a kid. Our fault.)

The first house that we rented when we moved to Vermilion we “showed” to a retired lady from our church who wanted to move to town to be closer to her husband in the nursing home and couldn’t find anything suitable. We solved that problem for her. We thought our house was pretty nice and, alas, so did she. Our fault.

That was one of the less-than-a-year houses. The next one – our first house purchase – was a little less than five years. But then we started to get ideas about living on an acreage and we moved. Oops, our fault.

We lived on “Coyote Acres” for over 5 years – the second-longest stint. And it was a wonderful place to raise three little boys where they could play and explore outdoors, where we had our one-and-only-ever dog, where we started reading the Harry Potter books out loud together as a family and where Daddy built the coolest ever basement fort for the boys. But then we realized we couldn’t afford the acreage anymore and we traded houses with someone back in town, seriously downsizing ourselves and circling the wagons. But pretty much our fault.

The next house was another short stint: only ten months. We put some sweat equity into the house and liked it so much, we decided to sell it. By this time we had the fixer-upper bug, so we found a deal of a house to move to. The deal being it needed a lot of work and we considered entering one of those ugliest-kitchen-in-Canada contests. But the buying and selling and fixing? Our choice, our fault.

At the three year mark, we moved again. It wasn’t our fault that our best friends in Vermilion were moving overseas and needed to sell their house. We were just helping, right?

It’s been a pretty great house, this one that we’re about to leave. It’s was big enough to accommodate our extended family gatherings – including 3 graduation parties and one wedding for our kids, plus lots of Christmases. It was a great landing spot for all the teenage friends the kids brought home. And we loved the location: on the provincial park that you could get out and enjoy in less than a minute or just open up the blinds and enjoy the view.

But then it got too big. It’s not our fault the kids moved away. (Is it?) It’s not that we stopped liking our house – on the contrary, we fixed it so much to suit us that we liked it more and more each year. Is “too big” a good enough reason to move? Maybe. Probably. It’s kinda our fault we didn’t realize that our house would someday outgrow us.

And so we are moving again. Although I am one of those weird people who actually likes packing and unpacking, it’s a bit stressful as we get close to the actual moving day – did we do everything we needed to do? Where can we find another 30 boxes? Did I pack the packing tape? Where are we gonna sleep tonight? But the adventure of going someplace new, setting up new routines, figuring out where everything goes and what we can get rid of – I (and I think, Rick, too) like that challenge. It’s our fault. And that’s okay.

About Shovelling Snow

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For this month and the last one, we own two houses in Vermilion. We are downsizing from our current 4-bedrooms-are-empty-why-are-we-still-cleaning-them house to a much more manageable 4-bedrooms-still-are empty-but-one’s-an-office-and-one’s-a-closet-so-not-really-as-bad. And we are losing a whole floor, so there’s that.

With said early acquisition of the new house – for purposes of painting and re-carpeting BEFORE we move in – there’s an extra two month burden of mortgage payments, taxes, utilities – but we went into that part knowingly.

But maybe I forgot about the snow.

Yes, with two houses, there’s two driveways. Granted, the downsized house has just a teeny-tiny driveway compared to the old house. But it also has a sidewalk that must be shovelled or else People Get Mad and you become A Bad Neighbor and A Lousy Citizen. (Also, I learned this week, that dog-owners don’t retrieve their dog’s poop from deeply snowy sidewalks because it just disappears down into the snow and freezes to the sidewalk, irretrievable and undetectable, until my snow shovel hits it and I nearly go end-over-end like hitting my brakes too hard on a bike. That stuff sticks.)

If it was summer, we would have two lawns to mow. But grass grows in a rather predictable fashion and usually one budgets once a week to keep the blades at bay.

Snow is a much more arbitrary foe.

Granted my new driveway is teeny-tiny. The first couple skiffs of snow were easily managed in record time. But a small driveway makes no difference when Canada decides to bless us with frozen moisture. It can PILE UP. And so I find myself getting a workout of workouts when I let it do just that.

There’s really no getting around it. Like dirty dishes or laundry, sooner or later, chores have to be dealt with or else you commit to living in a pigsty or getting stuck in your own driveway. It’s one of those “life things” and having a good attitude about it just feels better than crabbing about it. But if I do descend into the woe-is-me’s, I try to remember my mom.

A few years ago, Mom moved from farm to town and she, too, had a driveway that she needed to keep clean for the above-said reasons. And the winter after she moved in was a snowy one. Never one to shirk work, that winter, however, Mom wasn’t able to get out to shovel the snow. A couple of carpal-tunnel surgeries and the worst flu she ever succumbed to kept her in the house. We kids and grandkids would all take our turns cleaning her very long driveway.

One day I sent Tim over to Baba’s house to do the job. He told me later that for the entire time, she presided at the window, vicariously shovelling snow with him. When Tim went in after for the usual Baba-mandated-snack, she told him a story about how her neighbor across the street threw a bag of garbage in his bin every day. Amazed, she asked Tim, “Who has that much garbage?”

She had become a watcher. But she didn’t like it. She would have given anything to go out and shovel her own snow and be otherwise too busy to notice the neighbor’s garbage idiosyncrasies.

And so I think about Mom when I shovel snow. I try to be thankful for what I can still do because someday it might be taken away from me. I try to see snow and work as a blessing and not a necessary evil. And I even try not to go too fast.

Because trust me: that frozen dog poop will kill you.

About Happiness

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In July of 2012, I found myself in a bookstore in an airport en route to Haiti. We had an eight (!) hour layover and I had made the mistake of not bringing along a book, not just to while away the hours in the airport, but on the plane itself, which to me is prime reading time. I mean, what else can you really do on a plane, except sleep or get annoyed by the in-flight entertainment system? My eyes landed on the bright blue cover of The Happiness Project and dare I say? – the rest of my life changed.

What could Gretchen Rubin, an New York lawyer-turned-writer, who lives on the Upper West Side of New York City – arguably the most affluent neighborhood in Manhattan – have to say to me about happiness? And how would this edify my trip to Haiti, which was still reeling from the devastating 2010 earthquake?

As Rubin points out in a subsequent book, Happier at Home, we can actually learn a lot from one person’s idiosyncratic experiences than from more general or philosophical treatises on such subjects as happiness. And it turns out, it’s actually the little things – maybe only important to us – that can make us happier.

Although Rubin structures her project over the year, each month tackling an area of her life for improvement and awareness, I think it’s in the overarching principles in the two lists at the beginning of the book that I learned the most: Gretchen’s Twelve Commandments and her Secrets of Adulthood.

The first commandment? Be Gretchen. This in and of itself absolves her of any need to write this book for Everyman. While she is very good at acknowledging that most other people are not like her – quirky, un-adventuresome, and, pretty square actually – she is unapologetically Herself. I like that so much. One listen to the podcast she hosts with her sister Elizabeth and you can quickly pick up her enthusiasm for the most mundane aspects of life (like going to bed early) and other people’s happiness idiosyncrasies (like learning Latin – for fun.)

Hot on the heels of that sentiment is one of her Secrets of Adulthood: You can choose what to do; you can’t choose what you like to do. Wait, what? I always thought that with a good attitude you could learn to like anything. But the truth is, a good attitude will help you get through Latin lessons even if you hate it, but nothing can make you like it if you just don’t.

This was revolutionary for me to admit to myself. I always thought that if something was good, you were supposed to like it, or else it signified a flaw in your character. But not everyone – thank goodness – is the same. Why can’t we dislike things that may seem good to someone else?

Take my trip to Haiti. As a church group we participated in two activities: visiting and playing with kids at an orphanage and working in 90-plus-degree weather building a cinder block wall on the site of the new orphanage. On our last day, we were given the choice: go for one last visit with the kids or stay and work the rest of the (hot) afternoon on the wall.

I chose the wall. It was exhausting work, but physical labor has always been a preference for me. The kids were lovely when we visited – I had several “hairdressers” preside over me and cornrow my hair in a matter of minutes and some kids just wanted to be cuddled or play soccer. But it just wasn’t my wheelhouse. I still believe pouring into the kids was more valuable, but I couldn’t make myself like it more.

Happiness, as Gretchen Rubin found out, is not something that just happens. Maybe instead, it’s already there inside of us and we just need the right focus to recognize it.

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.

About Christmas Eve and Perogies

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It’s Christmas Eve and that means…perogies.

Well, yes, I know that’s not all it means. But in my family, it’s certainly one of the “non-negotiables” of Christmas Eve. Rick and the kids and I have our traditions that we dip in and out of depending on the year: a candlelight Christmas Eve service at church, driving around town looking for Santa, Tim-Tams and hot chocolate or playing Gift Trap – one of those strange games no one else has ever heard of that we don’t even remember where it came from. But, perogies – as Severus Snape would say – Always.

Or pyrohy, as my Ukrainian side would assert. Being both Ukrainian and Polish, I can claim ownership of either way to name the potato-and-cheese-filled dumplings that we make and eat every Christmas Eve. There are other variations, of course, filled with sauerkraut, or even blueberries, as my niece is making this year, trying for a more vegan – and sweeter than sauerkraut – version. But potato-and-cheese is my favorite so in my house, since I make ’em, I get to decide what kind we have.

Perogies are part of our pared-down version of the twelve dishes of Christmas Eve that Ukrainians would traditionally eat. My mom had already moved past the original idea of the meal being traditionally dairy-free – hence, the cheese in the perogies – but her Christmas Eve table was filled with many of the usual Ukrainian suspects: kutia – or wheat pudding to start the meal – then fried fish, mashed beans with garlic and pickled herring, to name a few. But there were the not-so-traditional dishes, like steamed broccoli with lemon – a family favorite – and Jell-O for dessert. But always – always – perogies.

Maybe the reason the perogies figure so largely in my Christmas Eve psyche is because when I was growing up, making them was a big part of Christmas Eve. It was sort of a holy endeavor, all of “the girls” preparing and consecrating this bread-like thing for the meal we were going to share together. Making it all the more mouth-watering as we rolled and stuffed and pinched was our family’s observance of Christmas Eve as a fasting day (well, at least we ate a lot less than usual) in anticipation of that evening meal.

When I no longer spent Christmas Eve with my mom, I would make a date with her sometime before Christmas to have a perogy-making day. I would go to her house and she would have the filling and possibly the dough already made – she was terrible at procrastination – and we would spend the subsequent hours visiting and, factory-like, cranking out hundreds of perogies for her freezer and mine.

It’s been five years this Christmas that Mom has been gone. She passed away on December 15, 2014. Most of us had squirreled away some of Mom’s perogies that we had made with her at some other time during the year prior to her getting too sick to make them anymore. It was a bittersweet communion on Christmas Eve, eating some of the last of her perogies that year.

And so, it surprised me the next year when Christmas Eve was almost upon me and…I had no perogies in the freezer. Luckily, I had taken good enough notes and had badgered Mom for specific amounts for her dough recipe and her fillings – because she didn’t have it written down. It always just came out of her head and her heart and her hands. Which was probably why her food tasted so good.

But it’s really not about the food. Yes, the idea of Christmas evokes visions of “sugar-plums” – turkey and trimmings, shortbread, gingerbread, eggnog, even Christmas oranges – things that we may not only have once a year anymore, but at least have a strong association with Christmas and, I hope, with happy memories. Like in Dr. Seuss story of the Grinch, Christmas would still come, and has come, without perogies or turkey or Tim-Tams.

Perogies taste good. But the things I savor even more are in the making – of the perogies with mom, of the memories of Christmas Eves past and of the meal I will share with my husband and kids tonight. In the making of something concrete, we can create something ethereal and even – dare I say? – heavenly. That is what Christmas Eve is all about (Charlie Brown). Not to say that the baby Jesus is like a perogy, but a flimsy analogy can be made of the reverse process: Christmas is when the heavenly was made concrete.

And maybe, just maybe, the humble perogy can help us remember that.

About Me and Santa

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Dear Santa,

Hey there Santa, how you doin? I know it’s been awhile. In fact, I think it’s been like, forever, since I sat down to write you an actual letter. But you know, Christmas makes me a little nostalgic and I thought that maybe I should touch base with you. I really would prefer to be able to text you, but since you have your own postal code and everything, I assume that snail mail is your preferred method of correspondence.

I suppose the real reason it’s been so long is well, because I’m not even sure you are, you know, alive. Like alive enough to receive mail. Oh sure, I know that Saint Nicholas or Kris Kringle or Sinterklaas or whatever you used to be called was a real person way back in the day. But as for whether you are actually bunkered down somewhere in the North Pole making lists and bossing elves around, I’m just not so sure about that.

I don’t know exactly when it was that I decided to put such childishness behind me. Maybe it was when it dawned on me that we didn’t have a fireplace. Maybe it was because all my presents were wrapped and under the tree well before Christmas. Maybe it was that time when I was sleeping on the couch in full view of my stocking hung with care on the wall unit and I woke up early enough to see that my stocking was Still Flat. So I stayed in bed (well, in couch, actually) and pretended to sleep until mom came along and filled it up with grapes or something. It was pretty anticlimactic. But it was also pretty obvious that you weren’t the responsible stocking filler that rumor had said you were.

Mom never really did put much stock in perpetuating the idea of you flying around on Christmas Eve delivering packages faster than Amazon Prime. I think it was pretty much my idea to hang up a stocking. Did my six siblings preceding me ever do it? Maybe you would know, but I have no idea. As the baby of the family, all I knew was, much like Sally in A Charlie Brown Christmas, all I wanted was what I had coming to me and hanging up a stocking was like an insurance policy. And so Mom sewed me a stocking at my request- she was so good at that – and thus unintentionally set it up for me to expect someone to fill it. Maybe you.

I wasn’t expecting grapes.

To be fair to Mom, I think this was probably when I was around twelve and maybe she thought I was just too old for stockings but dang it, I had hung it up anyway. I could hear her in the kitchen, making cooking noises that Morning of the Flat Stocking. Because it was, after all, Turkey Eating Day and she had a lot to do before we went to church that morning. I didn’t understand that then, but I sure do now.

Maybe that was why I laughed at my older cousin when he adamantly insisted that Yes, Bonnie, There Is A Santa Claus and then presented to me the Encyclopedia flipped open to the page about you, Saint Nicholas, complete with a photograph and everything. I was pretty sure that there weren’t cameras in the fourth century so I just quietly concluded to myself that both the Encyclopedia and my aunt and uncle were doing a good job of lying to my cousins. Or to put it in a nicer way, perpetuating the story.

When I had kids of my own, it wasn’t long before we put the kibosh on believing that you were the one bringing them presents – we didn’t want to get them all hung up on you when it was Jesus’ birthday that we were celebrating. But ironically, that didn’t stop us from showering our kids with gifts, thus emulating your rumored generosity. And we made those presents magically appear on Christmas morning – the magic being that Rick was able to make me stay awake long enough so that we could escape them detecting us putting their gifts under the tree. AND we filled their stockings.

I still fill their stockings. Oh yeah, you probably know this, but Gil, Tim and Simon are 26, 24 and 22 now. And Tim is married! And I fill a stocking for Sharlie, too – that’s Tim’s wife. But stockings are important to me – probably even more than they are to them. If you are real, you must know that. And not just because my Mom wasn’t really into them, but because to me it’s part of the waiting, the expectation, the magic, the hope fulfilled that Christmas is so famous for. That you’re so famous for.

It was nice that you waved to us in the mall last weekend. (If that really was you.) We saw how happy you made all those little kids. And their parents. I think a lot of the times the parents were more excited to introduce their kids to you than the kids were to meet you. You do, after all, dress kinda weird, and have an entourage. Sort of like Lady Gaga.

It’s less than a week now till Christmas, so I know you must be busy. Make sure you load up on Cold FX and stay healthy for the big night coming up. I’m sure it’ll be a doozy, as usual. You know, like it will be for the rest of us – a little happy, a little sad, a little busy, a little lonely. It must be kind of a long night hanging out with all those reindeer and flying all over the world. Thanks for staying faithful to the job or the story or whatever. You are an inspiration for the rest of us.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Love, Bonnie

About Dave Barry

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I’ve mentioned before that growing up, my family always got the daily Edmonton Journal newspaper. It was a different experience getting a daily newspaper in a small rural town, over 100 miles from where it was published. The paper would arrive late in the evening on the Greyhound bus and Dad would pick it up the next day. It was literally yesterday’s news.

But although we would already know the top news stories (my family being avid listeners of talk radio and watchers of the evening news) there was plenty more in the Journal to round out our reading. For me, it was first the comics. Then it was the Lifestyle section. The Lifestyle section is where I first discovered syndicated humor writers like Erma Bombeck and later, Dave Barry.

Dave Barry, like most humorists, has a great deal of intellect behind the silliness. He earned a bachelor degree in English and then was hired as a journalist which opened the door for his humor column to get published and then he got syndicated and then he got a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. (So, I guess I like some Pulitzer Prize winners after all.)

I fell in love with Barry’s nonsensical and hyperbolic style the first time I read him. For instance, here’s his take on the Christmas season:

“Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space. “

I think Barry’s magic comes in being relatable. The subjects he exaggerates and pokes fun at come with not a small nugget of truth. We were at THE MALL last weekend and were summarily stalked when we went to drop off some packages in the car. This was followed by the screeching of tires as the cars honed in on other prey when they realized we weren’t giving up our spot just yet.

And take for instance, one of the many fiction books he’s penned, The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog. Last weekend, after we left THE MALL and all the Christmas shoppers (and parkers) behind, I finished reading this book out loud to Rick as we travelled the two hours home. Barry tells a story that strikes a chord for nearly everyone: it’s got dogs, death, church, puberty, bat poop, a Christmas pageant, a high-strung Christmas pageant lady and to top it off, the hero, probably modelled on Barry himself, actually saves a damsel in distress. Not only does he serve it all up with plenty of humor, he can make you cry, too. You have been warned.

It’s not a long book to read and it nicely sets the stage for Christmas. It’s probably sitting on the Christmas display rack at your local library right now. There’s something about this time of year that makes you want to feel all the feels, which is why those dang Hallmark Christmas movies are so popular. So tune in the Yuletide Log channel and snuggle in with a good book like this one instead. It might be a little predictable (like a Hallmark Christmas movie), but maybe that’s just one of the things we like about Christmas.

About God and Christmas

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Circa December 2004: Every Sunday School play needs a wise man (Simon), Joseph (Tim) and, of course, a Russian named Boris (Gil)

[Because I love this story from 2002, it’s another Throwback Thursday. Enjoy.]

Some of the most interesting discussions can be overhead from the backseat of a minivan. Sometimes parents are even invited to contribute. The other day as we were on our way to our Sunday School Christmas concert dress rehearsal, my ears perked up at the conversation that was going on behind me. Gil had taken that moment to educate his brothers about what mammals were.

“We’re mammals, aren’t we, Mom?” Gil called for confirmation. Tim, who was in Christmas concert mode and not quite following the conversation, gave the two of us a confused look when I confirmed Gil’s statement. The confusion became obvious to us when he protested, “But I thought we were shepherds!”

Gil responded by telling Tim that people were mammals. But Tim wasn’t leaving Christmas concert mode that easy. “So are shepherds mammals?” he queried. In the qualitative style of a scientist, he then proceeded through the entire cast of nativity characters, asking if each one in turn were also a mammal. Yes, sheep were mammals. Camels, too. No, not angels. And then came the inevitable question.

“So is Jesus a mammal?” By this time Tim was enjoying his goofy repartee immensely. But when Gil answered Tim by saying, “No, Jesus wasn’t a mammal. He’s God,” I had to gently correct our little theologian. Yes, Jesus is God, but when he was a man on earth, he was a mammal, too. 

What parent on their way to a Sunday School Christmas concert could pass up a teaching moment like that one? I explained to the boys that the whole reason we celebrate Christmas is because Jesus came down from heaven and became a mammal just like one of us and that even though he is God, he knows what’s it’s like to be a human being, too.

The boys gave me their token attention, and then digressed into what the difference was between mammals and birds. Gil’s qualification, which for some unknown reason involved the number of times a day a bird goes “poop”, had me making a mental note to spend more time on Science after Christmas.

As Gil continued to “educate” his younger brothers, I marveled at how easy it is for the little ones to believe. In their childlike way, they have the faith to accept that Jesus, who is God, was also once a man. By that same token, it is sometimes impossible for adults to acknowledge the same fact.

Whether it’s Jesus or Santa Claus, Adam and Eve or the Big Bang, everyone wants to believe in something. And when you think about it, maybe the whole idea of Jesus being born a child of poverty in a stable, the humblest of births, is not such a far-fetched idea after all. God made his Son accessible to everyone by making him a mammal, in his own way like both a lamb and a shepherd. During this season of wonder, it’s time to enter into the amazing reason we celebrate Christmas in the first place.