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.

Question #6:
In your opinion, what is the most timeless toy?

There’s something special about the smell of wooden blocks. It’s different from the scent of freshly cut lumber, different from the smell of any other wood blocks. It’s sweeter, earthier, darker and lighter at once, as if somehow, wooden blocks, and especially wooden blocks that have been handled (sometimes rather roughly) by the tiny hands of more than one generation, hold within them the essence of youth, the spirit of play, the kernel of imagination, and the garden of dreams, all compressed, folded in on themselves time after time, until what remains is a fairly innocuous object.

But what possiblities are in that object!

We talk about metaphorical building blocks all the time, protein, fundamental education, basic cooking skills, these are the building blocks of bodies, intellect, life skills.

Just as important are the building blocks we once used to actually, you know, build.

I remember sitting on the rug in the den near the ghastly yellow recliner my grandfather so loved, arranging blocks into different configurations. The same collection of rectangular and square bits of wood would form in rapid succession: the cages in a zoo, a sky scraper, a tree house, a log cabin, a ship, a town square, a mansion, a thought, a hope, a dream…

I remember the alphabet blocks, with their paint faded, chipped and worn, so the letters on them were as much as mystery as whose hands held them first. (Perhaps my mother, or her older brother, or one of my cousins?)

I remember a faded green rectangular block so old it’s edges had softened, rounded, blurred. It was the size of a bar of soap, a matchbox car, a wish.

I remember my grandfather insisting I sort the blocks by color, shape, and size before I could build (he was just as anal with the tinker toys, with the train sets, with everything). “Lay out your lumberyard,” he would coach, and I would tuck my braids behind my ears and willingly comply.

I remember feeling wistful, when I was too old for blocks, and passed them down to a younger cousin, a child who couldn’t possibly have appreciated them the way I did. The way I do.

I remember my grandfather’s hands, calloused, gnarled, thickened with age, when he would help me build, and I remember his regretful expression the year he could no longer hunker down on the floor and play with me, the year he was relegated to the sidelines of building block play.

We switched to breadmaking after that. I always thought it was because he just liked to bake. Now I wonder if maybe something in those golden loaves, rectangular, firm, loaves, reminded him of blocks.

DecQOTD #5: What is your favorite Christmas (Winter/Holiday) scent?

Even though I’ve lived in homes with fireplaces more often than not, the scent of burning pine has never been a particularly strong holiday memory, largely because my mother is extremely allergic to it. We’ve had plastic trees for as long as I can remember, and even though I’ve had my own tree for more than ten years now, that trend continues, partly out of respect for her, and partly because I’m afraid of what the dogs would do to an actual tree in the living room.

No, the scent of Christmas, for me, is not pine.

But what is it?

Well, sometimes it’s rain, as December tends to be rainy in both California and Texas. There’s something cozy about the faintly metallic ozone taste after a particularly close lightning strike, something tangy about the air just before a storm, and, by contrast, something so fresh and pure about it just after.

It’s also the scent of paperwhites. I love forcing them during the holidays, as they tend to perform reliably, and their essence wafting across the room never fails to improve my disposition.

THe cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger combination that is ubiquitous at this time of year is also a favorite. It doesn’t matter if it’s ginger snaps, pfefferneusse cookies, pumpkin pie, or just fresh nutmeg sprinkled over cocoa, eggnog, coffee or chai, that trio of spices is instant comfort. They’re all “sweetening” spices, by the way – flavors that bring out the natural sweetness of whatever they’re mixed with – and I rather think they sweeten the season itself as well.

Question #4:
Do you have a traditional Christmas (holiday) dinner that you prepare year after year? If so, what is it?

In honor of Thanksgiving, I posted my family’s turkey and stuffing recipe, as invented and perfected by my grandfather. I’ve heard two stories about it’s origin, one that he invented it while overseas during WWII, when supplies couldn’t get through, the other that he created it much later. In either case, it’s the ultimate holiday flavor for me.

And yet, there are others. Pfefferneusse cookies were introduced to me by my mother, and at dinner, along side the turkey and cranberry sauce (always fresh, never from a can), there was always lasagna. It’s a rule, you know, that Italian families cannot have a big meal that doesn’t include pasta. My grandfather introduced me to coconut macaroons, and they’re still a favorite, and peppermint stick ice cream is just too cool to miss (no pun intended).

It’s aglio e olio, however, that brings back the most memory. Literally meaning garlic and oil, this is a pasta sauce of diced garlic and olive oil, sometimes with other herbs and lemon – but NOT a pesto – and NO pine nuts. It’s simple peasant food, and we always had it on Christmas Eve, and Easter. In my family, with their New Jersey Neapolitan accents, the Italian pronunciation has morphed to the very East Coast “Ahlya Awlya,” though the recipe has remained largely unchanged.

Food, like music, has the ability to transport me to different times, different places. Aglio e olio makes me an innocent seven-year-old, ice skating with my mother on weekends, or meeting her after school for cocoa in the vault-turned-sewing room at the back of her store. It is loud, boisterous family parties, and quiet contemplative evenings in the glow of the Christmas tree lights. Mostly, though, it is the warmth of my mother’s love, and her tireless work to make every Christmas magical.

Studio 60 made me cry this week. I don’t generally get so invested in television shows that I’m moved to tears by anything that occurs, though I’m perfectly capable of willfully suspending disbelief when I choose to, but this was special. It was, in fact, a magical moment in a medium that has largely forsaken magic in favor of money.

I’m writing, of course, of the four minutes at the end of the show, where musicians from Tipitina’s played an instrumental version of “O Holy Night” on an empty stage, with b roll footage of New Orleans playing behind them, and faux snow falling only at the end. Was it part of the story? Yes. It wasn’t the a-plot or even the b-plot, but there was an on-going thread about studio musicians all over the city calling in sick and letting musical visitors from New Orleans sub for them, thus earning union cards and Christmas paychecks. Was it hokey? Maybe a little. Was it effective? Absolutely.

We’ve long known that music can heal, that music can unite, that music can educate, but seeing it in action is vastly different from the purely intellectual “knowing.” I’m reminded by something that either Peter Yarrow or Noel Paul Stookey said during one of Peter, Paul and Mary’s concerts, years ago, that we are all adept at lying when we speak, but that it’s impossible to lie when we sing.

I’m not the most knowledgable person about jazz and blues. I know I like the genre, I have artists toward whom I gravitate, and favorite cd’s, but I learned Monday night, that just as you cannot lie when singing, you cannot hide your heart behind a trumpet, a sousaphone, a saxophone. The men on that stage played from the heart, and invoked the kind of magic that is found in the best performances, the kind that makes you cry real tears even though you’re not sitting in a concert hall, but curled up with your dogs on a plush red sofa, watching network television.

It was holiday magic, in the best form.
And I feel changed, improved, and more whole because of it.

(NBC is offering free downloads of the mp3 here.)