Question 15:
Other than “jolly,” in your opinion, what word(s) would best complete the following phrase, ” ‘Tis the season to be…” ?

Deck the halls with boughs of holly.
Fa la la la la, la la la la.
Tis the season for dead bodies.
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Wait a minute…dead bodies?

Well, yes.

My parents, my aunt, Fuzzy and I spent much of the day at the Museum of Science and Nature, in Dallas’s Fair Park. We began with a guided tour of the original Natural History museum, from curator Becky Rader, who also took us down into the admin offices, where we hung out with a real-life paleontologist, an incredibly handsome and gregarious fellow who talked to us about visits to various digs in Alaska, and also got to see the Jar Room (which is, just as it sounds like, a room full of specimens in jars.) Severus Snape would have felt quite at home in the jar room, with its shelf after shelf of pickeled snakes, skinks, turtles, frogs, and other such creepy crawlies. On the way to the jar room, we brushed past the Live Animal Room , with it’s warning sign: CAUTION: Poisonous Arthropods Within. We take no responsibility for your safety. Do I need to mention that we did NOT enter the poison bug room?

But we did visit the climate controlled Collection Room. A room full of amazing deep-drawered file-cabinets and coolers, all on rollers so that you could create aisles where you needed to be. Young Kelly, intrepid keeper of the collection, walked us in and said, “What do you want to see? Bird mounts we don’t use? Bats and mice for skin studies? Minerals? ” And let us look at whatever we wanted, rolling open aisles with as much magical aplomb as ever witnessed in a J.K. Rowling novel. And so we indulged ourselves, looking at geodes, and shark jaws (“Large shark jaw,” said my aunt looking at a blackened shark tooth easily three inches long. “It certainly is.” “Don’t worry,” I told her, reading the label, “It’s megalodon. They’re extinct.”

She showed us a stuffed owl and offered to then open the paleontology drawers, but we were running out of time, so we browsed the top floor of the museum without a guide, then walked along the lagoon to the The Science Place, which has merged with the Natural History museum to become one unit.

We had a quick lunch, then moved along to the Imax theatre, where we saw a six-minute flyover of Dallas and had fun trying to find the ComedySportz Arena, among all the other buildings, and then a BBC co-production about the human body. There was collective laughter during the bit where the soundtrack played “Let’s Get it On,” while the video was sperm valiantly trying to fertilize an egg, and collective oooh-ing at the images of newborns swimming in a “Mommy and Me” aquatics exercise. We left the theatre glad that none of us had to deal with a five-year-old that evening.

And then we went to BodyWorlds, the controversial exhibit featuring the anatomical display of real human bodies (you can see it, sort of, during one sequence in the latest James Bond film, I’m told). Even after browsing the website, it was difficult to know what to expect with all the hype. “It’s corpses,” was the first assumption, and while technically that’s true, it’s not at all what the exhibit really was.

First, you are eased into the exhibit gently, with a series of quotations about the wonders of the human body. Then you see the first specimen case, cross sections of human bones. If you’ve never seen the inside of a bone, it looks a little like layers of dense gauze. After the case, was the ligament skeleton, a human skeleton with most of the ligaments still intact. It was not in a case, merely arranged on a platform, with a caution sign warning, “Do not touch.”

The warnings were in no way ironic, because the prevailing sense was WANTING to touch. The crowd, allowed into the exhibit gallery in small controlled groups, entered laughing and talking, and was hushed almost instantly, with the general tenor of the group being reverence, awe, profound wonderment. As we walked through the various rooms, each displaying bodies, body parts, or in some cases, cross=section slices of bodies, we all – my group, and everyone around us – would look at a posed skeleton showing the lungs, say, and then breathe in, breathe out, try to correlate the placement and process of our OWN lungs with what we were seeing. At one point, looking at the ribcage and hips and pelvis of one of the bodies, my aunt paused, and felt along her own side, prodded her own hip. “I have to find this on my own body,” she said softly. “Find the correllation, see where the matches are.” At another display, focussing on the respiratory system, I stopped next to my mother, and realized we were both doing the same thing. “You’re suddenly hyper-aware of each breath, aren’t you?” I asked her, and when she said yes, I admitted the same thing, and we smiled at each other.

It should be noted, because I was asked this, that the only smell in this exhibit was that of the staffers eating Thai food on the other side of the curtains, out of sight. This is because the preservative method used on these bodies, all of which were people who volunteered to donate their bodies to science, and all of whom were kept anonymous so people would focus on the visual and not the backstory, is a type of modern mummification called Plastination. In some cases, colored dye was used to highlight certain things – blood vessels, for example – and there was labelling of specific parts, but not obtrusive amounts of labelling, and the entire exhibit was just…well, we’re back to profound.

Almost as amazing as the bodies themselves, many of which were posed to highlight certain things – strength, flexibility, etc. – was the crowd, which was multi-ethnic, and multi-generational. Staring at one of the posed bodies, a young girl asked her grandmother, “Is this a man or a woman?” And the grandmother replied gently that it was a man, and showed the girl the penis, the testicles (which, sans scrotum, looked like play-doh eggs on cords). “Oh, cool,” she said, and moved off to the next display.

Near the end of the exhibit, in the last gallery, was a curtained off section focussing on childbirth, with a collection of preserved human fetuses from 16 – 33 weeks of gestation. (It was noted that some were over 80 years old, and all had died of ‘natural’ causes). Most powerful was the posed body in this exhibit, that of a woman who died while eight months pregnant, her unborn child perishing with her. She was in a reclining position, with her abdomen windowed to display the fetus pushing her internal organs up toward her heart and lungs, and it was beautiful, and poignant.

Before leaving the galleries, we were given the opportunity to write in a guest book, and I confess that before I wrote my brief entry, I read some others. Overwhelming numbers of them had words like, “haunting” “amazing” “wow” and “cool.”

We were all very quiet on the way home, digesting what we had seen, moved and changed by the experience. We all came to the conclusion that this exhibit should be required viewing by all biology students and medical students. And we all agreed that it was fascinating and overwhelming and intense.

The museum states that it takes about 90 minutes to explore the galleries. I’d allow more time, because it’s truly intriguing, to see the human body, the thing we all inhabit, the one common element we have across ethnic, culture, and gender lines, so exposed. Seeing this, you would never want to take a life again, never want to cause harm, never want to overlook the tiniest moment of a long and fruitful life.

One of my favorite things about The West Wing was the attention to detail. If you watched the show, and especially if you’ve watched the special features on the dvds, you know that schedules actually had schedule information, and that when they needed a bill or any other document, there was real text for them to look at. And there was CJ’s goldfish. (Gail) It’s not so much that the fish remained on her desk from the time it was given to her to the end of the season, as that – and you couldn’t always see it – the aquarium was always decorated for the season.

Which brings us to today’s QotD:
Question 14:
Suppose you have a 50-gallon aquarium in your home. How will you creatively decorate it for the fish this holiday season?

I’ve never really been a fan of fish-as-pets. In fact, my philosophy has always been that fish are furniture, but if I had an aquarium, I’d certainly decorate it. After all, my dogs wear bandannas in their signature colors (blue for Zorro, red for Cleo) on special occasions, and they have their own Christmas stockings, in which Santa generally leaves bully sticks or pig’s ears.

The question then, is how would I decorate it. Well, I’m fairly certain you cannot convince fish to wear tiny Santa hats, but I do know that a wide variety of tiny aquarium ornaments exist. How cool would it be to have a sleigh pulled by eight seahorses, and a Santa sporting a Neptunian trident? How much fun to have white gravel along the bottom, so that the inside of the aquarium looked like a snow globe.

I could, of course get one of those aquarium screens that looks like a snowy sky, but really, less is more.

And the sleigh…that’s really the thing I’d want to see.

If, you know, I ever had fish.

It’s been the perfect rainy day. Soft light, Christmas music, and even though I got off to a slow start, some Breathe Easy tea and the lighting of the arched dining room window have improved my physical and mental well-being.

Right now, there is three-bean chili simmering on the stove, and there are two dogs snoozing in my office. The sky is dark, both from cloud-cover and just from the fact that it’s night, and the neighborhood is lit up like faerie-land. My plan for the evening is to write the last few Christmas cards – those that are meant for folks whose addresses I didn’t have – and finish folding metric assloads of laundry, which I meant to fold last night, and somehow didn’t. Probably beause we ended up doing the Holiday Grocery Shopping Extravaganza.

I’ve been woefully behind with my Questions of the Day – I wasn’t, until this weekend, and then I was, which is why I posted the last six questions all at once. This month, which seemed endless three weeks ago, suddenly seems to be racing by. My parents will be here in less than 48 hours, and the house isn’t yet Mom-ready. (No one else would find fault, mind you, just Mom. It’s how mothers are.)

Anyway, today’s question:
Question 13:
You’ve been chosen to host a sensational Christmas/Holiday celebration on TV. What three guests (living or deceased) would you have on the show to make it the best special EVER?

My guest list:

• The Fantabulous Klae, media mogul, and all around creative guy. I’d have him lead the audience in improv games, and then chat about whatever project was foremost in his mind.
• Alexandra Stoddard, interior designer, writer, and fellow stationery-holic. Her books are amazing, and she exudes graciousness.
• Margaret Maron. Her Deborah Knott books are delightful, and her Sigrid Harald series is just plain cool. This woman of mystery (novels) is one of my favorite to read, and I’d love to question her about her process, and just get to know the woman behind these amazing characters.
• My musical guest(s) would be The King’s Singers, a vocal group I’ve loved since they visited our high school and did a brown bag conference/performance/thing.

With the return of damp grey weather, I find myself more into the Christmas spirit, as if the relentless warmth and sunshine we’ve been having had somehow diminished the Christmas magic. It’s silly, really. I’ve had perfectly good Christmases involving white sand and sunny weather, and certainly California wasn’t always cold and grey in late December, but I was spoiled by my first Christmas in Texas, when I was presented with a dusting of snow, and now, nothing quite measures up.

The muted colors of the cloudy day outside serve their purpose however. Colors contrast more, and the moisture in the air makes lights seem to twinkle just a bit more. It’s as if some produce-department worker misted the neighborhood, as one does vegetables to make them glisten with crisp, fresh health.

On days like this, I turn the outside lights on before dusk, and let them shimmer happily in the fog. Every glance out the window brings a smile to my face, and the Christmas cd’s I play in the house sound sincere again.

I’ve been in a bit of a funk, despite choir and comedy, and today, the funk has lifted. Let the lights shine, the music play, and peace and joy come to us all!

Question #12:
What aspect of preparing for Christmas do you like the most?

I come from a family of letter writers. As far back as I can remember, fat envelopes from my grandfather, painstakingly printed so that my pre-cursive self could read them, would arrive in the mail, or nearly illegible cards from my grandmother, these addressed inside to “Hi Darling!” or “Hi Doll!” because she was never certain which daughter or granddaughter she was addressing.

And at Christmas there were cards, many cards. Some were from Germany, from my Aunt and Uncle, stationed there with the Air Force, others from California, which was a far away place at the time. Many were from friends and family in New Jersey, or new friends and neighbors in Colorado. Some were random, some were filled with pictures. Some had long type-written letters, and some had no signatures at all. As a child I made the decision that if an envelope either mentioned my name, or was addressed to my mother “and family” I was allowed to open it.

With each card came the ritual of taping them to the back of the front door. First, there would be the early arrival, from the one friend who actually knew how to organize. It would sit at the top of the door looking lonely, and a little forlorn. Then, slowly at first, but speeding up as the month progressed, more would show up, and the door would fill.

And of course, each day the house would have more and more Christmas – the mantel, the lights on the window, the small candles here and there as we followed the family tradition learned from my grandmother, of bringing Christmas through the house.

It was the cards then, and it is Christmas cards now, that really are the essence of preparation though. These days I write as many as I receive, and both the sending and the reading are parts of my Christmas preparation. It’s as if the act of putting pen to paper transports me from the mundane to the magical, as much as it does when fiction is involved.

Question #11:
During the holiday season, what specific aspect of being a young child do you miss the most?

When I was very young, I would wake on Christmas morning to find a trail of red construction paper footprints leading from my bedroom door to wherever my stocking was waiting. Usually, it would be so stuffed with tiny packages, that it would have fallen from its hook and sometimes this made me sad. Mostly, though, I looked forward to discovering what good things would come from those tiny boxes.

That anticipation hasn’t completely disappeared, but it’s waned a lot as I’ve grown older, and the unwavering belief in Santa and Magic has transformed to fleeting moments of complete suspension of disbelief, and the limited ability to turn off the jaded part of my brain.

I miss the innocence of childhood. I miss looking forward to those paper footprints. I miss the bubble of delight that would form in my chest when I saw packages labeled “To Melissa, from Santa” in red or green glitter. I miss the security of knowing my mother would always be my fiercest protector, and I miss the dreams of seeing a reindeer-powered sleigh cross the night sky.

When I was six, I believed it when the folks at channel 9 said they were tracking a UFO coming from the North Pole on Christmas Eve. Thirty years later, I watch the news and wish for such stories.

This doesn’t feel like it should be a Holidailies post, because there’s no seasonal content, but that’s not really a requirement. So it is.

Sometimes, you just have to give up on productivity and spend the day in bed, which is what I did today. It wasn’t so much that I was up late, as I was asleep by 12:30. It wasn’t that I was up early – I got up to use the bathroom a bit before 8:30, then went back to sleep while Fuzzy went through his morning routine. While we can share a bathroom, and often do, the advantage of me working from home is that I can sleep til 9:30 and still get up and do my morning routine, because my new employers are in California. Time differences are your friends.

But I was groggy all day. Kept thinking I should just give up and nap, and didn’t. My tivo was on TBN, which is scary, but the ultra-Christian Harry Connick Jr. wannabe was adorable and talented even if he did turn traditional Christmas music into scary praise music, so I let it play for a while. I wonder if half an hour of TBN earns me any indulgences. If not, it totally should.

From there, I had breakfast, which was an oh-so-nutritious bowl of Grape Nuts Flakes, with organic milk. I like organic milk, but it confuses me that it has an ex date that is generally two weeks beyond the normal time on chemically enhanced milk. Today, however, I was more interested in the fact that the folks at Horizon have decorated their milk cartons for the holidays. It was adorable. Or at least it was adorable for the first minute and then the coffee kicked in and it was just there.

I wrote some cards for soldiers, and wrote some stuff for work, and cuddled the dogs, and generally felt kind of hazed over and drowsy all day. At 1:00 I had lunch with Commander Data and his brother Lore and the rest of the folks from the USS ENterprise. Thank you, SpikeTV, for running eps of TNG every afternoon. TNG is comforting television. So is the West Wing, but in a different way.

At 2:00 I went back to bed, planning to nap til 4 or 4:30, then take a shower and get ready for ComedySportz, except that when I checked the forum, there was a warning that the show might be called. Which it was, as I found when I woke up a couple hours later. On one level, I’m disappointed – we need the audiences, and I wanted to play, because I’ve had a paradigm shift since our last workshop. But I was also relieved, because I just wasn’t feeling connected to myself. Anyway, I play tomorrow night. And next Friday. IF YOU LIVE IN DFW, COME TO COMEDY SPORTZ ON DEC. 22.

Fuzzy was home early (for him) tonight – by 9 – he brought home food for the dogs, and for us. Bad processed food, but I was in no condition to cook. I started the process of decorating the tree, but am still feeling sleepy, and now that I’ve posted, bed seems like an amazingly good idea, as I have a full day tomorrow.

Fuzzy said, sometimes it’s good to just spend a day vegetating.
Sometimes, he’s allowed to be right.

I’m not really in the mood to do essay length questions today, and so I offer a two-fer instead:

Question #9:
If you were going to write an editorial column for your city’s newspaper covering any Christmas (or other winter holiday) topic of your choice, what would you write about?

Personally, I think the ultimate Christmas editorial has already been written. I refer, of course, to Frank P. Church’s editorial which appeared in the New York Sun on September 21, 1897, in response to an eight-year-old girl’s letter. We know it by it’s signature phrase, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.” (And, by the way, Ed Asner does a reading of this that is just amazing.)

I’ve just reread it (and you can, too) over at Newseum.org (direct link: Yes, Virginia), and I think it not only withstands the test of time, but is not just readable, but relevant to today’s world. After reading it, I always want to clap my hands together, and answer Peter Pan’s plea, crying to the world, “I do believe in faeries!” Because, deep down, a part of me still does.

So if I were to write an editorial, not that I could top Mr. Church, it would have to be all about the death of hope, and the loss of childhood innocence, and how we MUST reclaim those elements of childhood as adults to prevent ourselves from being bitter, sad, lonely people.

Question #10:
If you had to receive the same gift year after year, what would it be and why?

Actually, I do receive the same gift year after year. I always get a small wheel of brie in my stocking. Oh, it’s chilled up to the point of stocking placement, of course (and brie is served runny, anyway), but ever since I was about seven, and was introduced to said cheese, it’s been showing up on Christmas morning. I’m generous though. I share it. Well, usually.

Seriously though, and assuming that money doesn’t count, I think if I had to pick one non-food tangible item, it would be something like a bottle of Clinique’s HAPPY – something I love, but never buy for myself, and would last about a year.

Welcome to the December Question of the Day. Please post your answer in your own journal or blog, and comment here.

Question #8:
(Paraphrased because the book is upstairs, and bed is warm.) If there is one person whom you haven’t been in contact with in a while, and chose to get in touch with over the holidays, who would it be, and how would you start the conversation?

I spent yesterday writing Christmas cards to friends and family, and didn’t finish til well after midnight, so was too tired to write. Sometimes even I get behind on my own meme-things. This should make the rest of you feel better :)

Today, I want to talk to you about Ben, the first boy I ever loved.

I don’t remember how I met him – if it was at Palo Alto preschool (in Arvada, Colorado), or if it was through our neighbors and mutual friends, Heather and Kerry who lived in the big yellow house up the block, that reminded me of the Murray home from A Wrinkle in Time. I loved that house. I still lust after that house.

In any case, we did meet, when we were both at the advanced age of five and ripe for true love. He was sweet, not like the other boys, and he and his mother lived with our preschool teacher, Ray, over on the next block. I never knew the story there, but it didn’t matter. Ben and I bonded instantly, and our mothers became good friends.

We had many adventures together, like tobagganing down upper 16th street in Golden, Colorado, and not getting killed by the traffic on the main road at the bottom. Or climbing to the top of the small hill outside Georgetown, CO, which I suspect was a popular make-out spot for older kids. We learned to ice-skate together, but I graduated to single blades before he did. He let me sing at him a lot, and said he liked it. We shared peanut-butter-and-honey-on-pita sandwiches, and shared his trundlebed, or my bunkbeds, during sleepovers.

One night, in the totally innocent way that little kids do, he offered to show me his penis. “Sure,” I said, curious. Later, I think I said it was stupid or gross or some other five-year-old girl word that means, “Um, okay, and what am I supposed to do with *that*?” On an afternoon in the back of my mother’s blue VW bug – the classic kind, which was the only kind in 1976, we shared our first kiss. Chaste. Quick. But neither of us said “Iewww.”

He always smelled like cinnamon and soap and vanilla and grass (the lawn kind, not the kind you smoke.)
He always held my hand like it was – like I was – a treasure.
I lost track of him when we were both eight.

If my life were a romance novel, I’d have found him right before I met Fuzzy, and we’d have fallen in love and lived happily ever after, but my life isn’t a romance novel. Or, well, it IS, but it’s not that predictable. Fuzzy isn’t Ben, Fuzzy’s himself, and he understands me, and puts up with me, and grounds me when I’m in need of that, and spoils me as much as he can, and our hearts beat together.

But you can’t help but wonder. I can’t help but wonder.
And if I ran across Ben, on the net, in person, I know just what I’d say: “So, I never returned your etch-a-sketch.”

Question #7:
What is one thing you’ve always wanted to do during the holiday season, but haven’t done thus far?

Every year as winter approaches, I receive the Stars on Ice pre-sale email from Ticketmaster, and I am drawn back to my childhood.

I learned to skate on those double-bladed kids skates that Donny Osmond wore on the Donnie and Marie show, on a pond, in winter. Skating then meant layers of mittens and coats and socks inside too-large skates. I vaguely recall a pond under the Navesank Bridge, but that can’t be right, and is probably a mix of memories.

As I got a little older, and we lived in Georgetown, my skating venues expanded. There was the reservoir, where it was so cold the ripples would freeze into the ice, and, in February, when it had frozen a foot thick, there would be Porsche rallies, but there was also the baseball diamond. They would put a liner on it, and a foot-high fence, and make a skating rink, and we kids would walk there after school and skate til our fingers turned blue and our chins were numb, and the sky was beyond twilight and into full dark. We would sit under the streetlamp that shone on the bleachers and un-tie laces that were crusted with snow and ice, and then we would walk home to waiting mothers and steaming mugs of hot chocolate. Life was innocent in that time and place. We second graders could walk from the baseball diamond at the park, through town, to our homes, and never worry about being stolen or molested.

It wasn’t all great, of course, because most of us had to wear these scratchy silvery socks that were just itchier than anything had ever been or could ever be itchy. Imagine the itchy sort of wool woven with tinsel, and that’s what they felt like. Oh, sure, our feet were warm, but we scratched them raw when we got home.

Well, once we could feel our fingers.

I haven’t skated outdoors (the faux arena in downtown San Jose notwithstanding) since I was seven. By the time I was ten, we’d already moved to a real city, and while I still went ice skating with my friends after school, it was at the rink attached to the Y. Better ice, hot chocolate right there, but not as much fun at all. The magic was missing. I haven’t skated AT ALL since before I was married, when my mother and I took lessons in San Jose. It was fun, but again, inside. No magic.

(Somewhat ironically, I never went skating at all in South Dakota either, as it was usually TOO cold, and no one else knew how.)

The thing is, winter isn’t winter without ice skating. And as much as I hate the cold most of the time, there are moments when I want the scratchy silver thermal socks, when I crave the cold air freezing my nose as I race around the rink, when nothing could possibly be better than coming home to a warm fire and hot cocoa, after a day on the ice.