It's That Time Again

It's time for Holidailies again, when a group of bloggers try to write an entry a day through the month of December.  This is the 17th year that this project has been running and I have participated in most of them.  Since I update daily any day, it's no stretch to try to update daily throughout December.

Holidailies draws participants from all over the world, from a variety of ages and walks of life, covering a wide range of interests. Some participants share stories about their daily life, others write in themed blogs about everything from hiking to homeschooling, from knitting to alternative lifestyles. Some write about Christmas, some about Hanukkah, and some about ways to avoid the holidays as much as possible.

I sometimes write on a Holidailies theme, but mostly I just write the kind of entry I would write anyway, discussing the highs and lows, the good and bad, the frustrations and satisfactions of our everyday life.

What I love about Holidailies is that universality and checking other bloggers each day to read their thoughts, often finding good writers I had not encountered before and I often add that blog to those that I regularly check.  I learn things from other bloggers, sometimes information I never knew, sometimes a new way at looking at things, sometimes I am inspired by the writing of a particularly talented blogger.

I am always inspired by good writing.  John Steinbeck always affected my writing when I was reading him.  Pat Conroy held my interest in a way that few other authors can do.  Erma Bombeck was my heroine and I still aspire to be a latter day Erma, but have discovered over 6,093 entries in the past 16 years that it's more difficult to be Erma than it would seem.  There are bloggers out there who inspire me the way these authors do and I look forward to finding them on the Holidailies links throughout the month.

It's traditional to post an introduction in your first Holidailies post, which is totally unnecessary for my loyal readers who are here every day, but for those who are new to Funny the World, here is a little bit about me...

I'm 73 years old, retired medical office manager working part time as theater critic for two local newspapers.  I was born and raised in San Francisco but now live in Davis, California, a university town 80 miles east of San Francisco.

Walt and I have been married 51 years.  We raised five children.  We have two lovely granddaughters and two obnoxious dogs whom I have started referring to as my "pet" peeves.  Lizzie in particular is our dishwasher's "pre-wash cycle."

My 97 year old mother has dementia and takes a lot of my time.  She lives in her own apartment in a senior facility, but I visit her almost every day and she has lots of doctors' appointments lately, though she is healthy as a horse (just this little fainting problem they are trying to identify).

I am an avid reader, though lately have not had time to read anything and I miss it very much.  I am also a TV addict and watch a lot of crime dramas (like NCIS and Criminal Minds) and dramas like Designated Survivor, Scandal, and pretty much any medical drama.  I also watch a lot of the Food Network, which has helped my cooking techniques immensely.

Walt and I have been fortunate to do quite a bit of international travel in the past several years, but I'm reluctant to leave my mother alone for too long now.  Also, the world is too unsettled right now and I'm content to stay at home for now.

I started this journal in March of 2000 and have written 6093 entries as of today.  It is very rare that I do not post an entry a day.

I write an annual Christmas letter, which I have been working on now for two days.  You'd think it would be easy, but the computer has been giving me fits.  I finally got it finished and am starting to send the link out to friends and am also posting the link here, for anyone who likes Christmas letters (I do), or who just wants more information about the family and our past year.

Looking forward to reading more good bloggers this December!

Tell Me a Story

Holidailies provides prompts for its participants to keep the entries on a Christmas theme.  I haven't used them for several reasons, but having participated in Holidailies since it began in 2003, I have written on most of them, I think.  But I think this one was new for me:  "What is your favorite holiday story or book?"

I don't know how old I was the year that my mother decided to read "A Christmas Carol" to Karen and me.  When I hear Laurel talk about reading "chapter books" with Brianna, it takes me back to that year, because she read one chapter a night.  She sat on the couch in the living room.  The tree lights were on, there were packages under the tree and the air was filled with the smell of the that tree, which I just can't seem to find these days.  Do trees still smell?

Anyway, Karen and I each sat at my mother's side while she read the night's chapter.  It is perhaps one of my favorite Christmas memories of my childhood.  I hoped she would read the book again the next year, but she did not.

I never did read the story to our kids, but Walt read "The Night Before Christmas" to the kids every Christmas Eve as they got ready for bed.  They would all dress in their matching pajamas and crowd around him, the youngest ones in his lap, the dogs at his feet.  When we were hosting foreign students and had someone from another country living with us, they joined in the group too, while Walt read the story.  The tradition continued into their adulthood with whichever of the kids was living at home at Christmas time.

That was one of the family traditions I loved that died when David and then Paul died.

There are lots and lots of Christmas movies out there, but most of them are a variation on A Christmas Carol.  There is a curmudgeon who hates Christmas. It may be a man or a woman...or a Grinch, young or old, disgruntled about the approaching holiday and how everyone else is celebrating.  Some kind of a being enters the person's life, whether a ghost or a little child, a little dog, or a romantic interest, and in the end the curmudgeon's heart, like Dr. Seuss' Grinch's grows three sizes and we see everyone smiling and celebrating the holiday.

If you watch The Hallmark Channel, you can see a different Christmas movie, back to back, pretty much 24/7 through the month of December.  I don't watch them because they are often not well made and, as I said, they are all variations of the same story.

I prefer the classics, with Miracle on 34th Street my all time favorite.  I've already seen the movie twice and the musical version once this year.  I loved Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle and 9 year old Natalie Wood as the little girl who doesn't believe in Santa.  By the end of that movie, the first time I saw it, I truly believed there was a Santa Claus and that Gwenn was he...and he left behind a cane to prove it.

In all the talk of the "war on Christmas" these days (which seems to be fading this year, thank goodness...many more important things to worry about!), when we come to discussing Christmas stories, we forget the original one, the meaning of the holiday to begin with.

But as my friend Jim Brochu says "I was Catholic--I knew nothing about reading the Bible" so Bible reading was not big in my house, but we did have a manger scene that we set up under the Christmas tree each year.  It was a rough hewn building that my father made with a hole in the back, so we could stick a Christmas light in it to light up the holy family.

On the top we had a ceramic angel holding a sign that said "gloria in excelsis deo" that was attached to a nail that you could stick into the roof of the barn.  When Jeri got old enough to read and we were setting up that same manger scene here in our own home, she decided that the sign meant that the angel's name was Gloria, so we have called her Gloria ever since.

But we don't do Christmas any more.  When you have no church affiliation, you aren't part of the ceremonials that accompany the holiday season, and when you have no children to be with you and two nosy dogs who get into everything, here doesn't seem to be a good reason to set up either a tree or the manger....and a lot of good reasons not to get a tree!

I keep thinking that I should do "something" for Christmas, but the heart just went out of me when David and Paul died...and the others lived far away.  This year, with my mother thinking it's April, despite the holiday decorations my cousin put up for her and with Ned & Jeri headed off to Jamaica on Christmas Eve, there is even less reason to make the house look festive.  

I've decorated by putting a carton of egg nog in the refrigerator and figure that's about the extent of my Christmas decorations this year....but I have watched not only Miracle on 34th St. but also White Christmas (another oldie I like) and am stealing my holiday spirit from them.

Prompts

One nice thing about Holidailies is that it provides a prompt a day for participants to discuss, if they have no other topic to discuss.  The problem is that if you do Holidailies every year, you've pretty much discussed most of those topics ad nauseam....what more can I say about Christmas carols, parties, baking, decorating, family traditions, etc.  

The prompt for today was a new one:

Today is Worldwide Candle Lighting Day. Around the world, people will be lighting candles for 1 hour, starting at 7pm local time, to honor the memories of those we have lost.
Who, or what, did you lose this year?

It's a good prompt and I look forward to reading what others write, but my God, it seems like I have been discussing death in Funny The World for months.  While newcomers here, who come through Holidailies, may not realize how much death has preoccupied my thoughts since October, regular readers here, I am sure, are sick of hearing about it.

In all honesty, since my computer is in the shop and I don't have my WordPerfect files on this laptop, I don't remember who died the first months of this year, but the death of one of our best friends, Mike Blackford, who died while on vacation in Germany, has occupied entirely too much space here, and too many tears.  His memorial service will be held two days after Christmas, which does put a kind of damper on the holiday.  His obituary was in the San Francisco Chronicle this morning.

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This was another Holly Housekeeper day.  First there was The Nap.  I took a 2 hour or so nap this morning, since I'd had nearly no sleep at night (fell asleep sometime after 4 and woke up in time to watch Dick Cheney--and get a bit ill about it--on Meet the Press).  But I woke up with cookies on the brain and so set about making another batch of cookies.  Peanut butter this time.

It's crazy.  I now have 3 batches of cookies in the freezer and other than Ashley and David, who will be here while we are in Santa Barbara, and a batch to Atria, I really don't have any idea what I'm going to do with these cookies.  I will take some to my mother (who won't eat them because she has no taste for food any more, she tells me) and probably take some to Santa Barbara, though I find when I bring a batch of cookies, there are oos and ahhs over how nice they look and then I eat most of them.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

But how can I not bake cookies at Christmas time, the only holiday that gives me permission to do so!
I also made a beef stew for dinner.  Weekends are my time to watch cooking shows and all of the cooks become my friends and give me ideas for what to cook.

The stew is from Paula Deen's recipe, altered to fit the ingredients I have.  I may have ODd on Ms. Deen herself and am just as glad she's not dominating the Food Network airwaves any longer, the recipe sounded good.

To go with the stew we will have Pioneer Woman creamed herb potatoes.  I made them yesterday and there is enough left over to feed a small army.

After that is done, maybe I'll have time to make Trisha Yearwood's Snickerdoodles.

But now it's 7 p.m. and it's time to light a candle to represent all of our losses.

I think we're going to need a bigger candle.

Tsatskes and then some

After reading my entry yesterday, Lisa wrote that I should explain what is on all of those shelves.

Well, that is overkill, to say the least, but I have long thought that I should have a record somewhere of what is what and why I have it, so perhaps over the coming weeks I can make that record here, a shelf at a time. Perhaps one a week or so. So let's start with the middle shelf on the left. This is the left side of it:

OK. Lets start with the back. There is a glass dome jar which Walt's mother once bought for him so he could put his father's (or maybe grandfather's?) watch in it. He never did and I had a little kangaroo left over from the souvenirs I brought back from Australia, so the kangaroo now lives in the dome jar.

Next to that is a ceramic Santa. It's a Christmas ornament which Walt's mother gave to us in 1985 (the date is printed on it). Santa has a camera around his neck and a boombox up to his ear. I also presume that the Beefeater is from England, and something else Walt's mother gave us after one of her trips. The two bottles next to him are sand art from Brasil. I think that Ned brought one home from his year there and a Brasilian guest brought the other. Or perhaps guests brought both. Pretty amazing stuff, anyway.

In the middle on the left is a little figure of the entrance to Hampton Court, Henry VIII's former home. I bought that when we visited Hampton Court with my CompuServe friends. Next to that is a blue hippo that I bought at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. And then there is a set of salt and pepper shakers that I bought in England somewhere. Sadly, I can't use them for their original purpose because one is cracked at the top.

To the right of the shakers is my little Viking that I bought in York. I saw it the first time we were there but didn't buy it and always regretted it, so when we went back the second time I remembered where the shop was and found it still on the some shelf and bought it. You can see it better in the next picture. Next to him is a Chinese Santa which Walt's mother brought back from a trip to China.

In the front, on the left, is a model of the York Minster, which I also bought in York because I wanted to remember the glorious evening we spent listening to the choir rehearse Christmas music.

Next to that is a little thing that I think someone gave me...it represents all the people who have lived with us.

Then there is a little Taj Majal which Walt's mother brought to us from India, followed by a tiny little black bull on a ribbon, which was attached to some bottle of beer that one of our foreign guests brought. I think it was someone from Chile. and finally there is a little adobe church which I think also came from one of the guests, thought I'm not sure about that.

The right side of that shelf is here:

You can see the sand art better, and also get a look at the Viking and Chinese Santa. The boy at the back was a gift from my friend Pat. It is a music box and plays "The Happy Wanderer." I don't remember where that white shell-like thing with my name on it came from, but since it has my name on it, it made the cut.

In front on the left is one of those Pueblo story teller figures. I bought that somewhere, but I don't remember where--I always wanted one because it reminded me of me, always covered with children. They are usually quite expensive, but this one was reasonably priced, so I was happy to buy it.

Next to her is a decorated glass votive candle holder filled with two Wisconsin cheesehead erasers. Don't ask me why!

And finally there is my favorite thing on my shelf, a delicate little unicorn figurine that broke once. Jeri painstakingly put it back together again. I love it because of the care that she put into getting it as right as she could

So there you have it. Shelf 1. I will do more later, but not right away. As you can see, my tsatskes are all cheap trinkets, but they have meaning to me.

This doesn't take much explanation.
They are papier mâché figurines which my friend Olivia
brought back from Mexico for me.
They have their own shelf.

Delicate Pooh is Home Again

You would have thought that with the new Pergo all in and installed a couple of months ago that we would have quickly put back the furniture and all the stuff was in the living room.

Unless, of course, you have been reading this journal for any length of time, in which case it will not surprise you that none of that was done until today. (In fact, if you have been reading this journal for any length of time, it might surprise you that we started putting things back as early as today!)

It took awhile for Ned to have free time to help Walt move the furniture back in, but he did that the day they started working on the puppet stage for Brianna.

But even with the furniture back, we didn't exactly leap up instantly and move all those boxes back into the room and start putting all the tsatskes back on the shelves. In truth, we were enjoying the unusual stark, Ikea-like feeling of the room.

In fact, everything might still be in boxes in the guest bedroom but I suddenly realized several days ago that we are going to Santa Barbara for Christmas and that Ashley and her dogs are going to move in here. And at the moment there is no place for her to sleep, and you can hardly even walk through the bedroom, much less lie down (glass shelves rested on the bed). It brought a sense of urgency to the "put the stuff back" project.

I couldn't do anything until Walt moved all the glass shelves down and put them back in the Gilbert's etageres. That in itself was a monumental task, which involved moving nearly 20 heavy glass shelves down from upstairs, cleaning them off, and putting them back.

But when that was done, I started with the first box and returning stuff to the shelves. I plugged in my iPod and started listening to a new book as I worked. My idea was to throw away some stuff -- anything that I had no sentimental attachment to -- in the hope of reducing the clutter, somewhat.

I remembered when Walt started packing things up, I was very efficient and photographed all the shelves, to make it easier to put it all back when the time came. But when I checked my camera, I could not find those pictures, so I just started working away, box by box, hoping to approximate what had happened before. This was complicated by the fact that when we put the etageres in here originally in 1986, one of them was put in upside down and we didn't notice it until all the shelves were filled--it didn't really show, so we just left it. But now I wanted them both to be right side up, which changed the configuration of the shelves.

Anyway, I started working and was soon hopelessly lost. I knew what some shelves should look like, but I have so many little tsatskes that I couldn't remember. I took a break for lunch and drove Polly nuts. I was eating cottage cheese in the living room and Walt was eating his lunch in the kitchen and Polly kept racing back and forth between the two rooms, hoping for a treat from one of us (I don't think she got one for either of us.

I finally decided to take a break and see if I could find some pictures anywhere with a picture of the etagere, which would help me somewhat.

Well, kudos to me. Not only did I take pictures of the etagere shelves, but I actually made a special file on my computer to put them.

With the help of those pictures, which I copied onto my laptop and put in the living room as a guide, I was able to almost effortlessly put back all the stuff.

I got about 2/3 of it done before deciding to call it quits for the day. But the important part was done: Delicate Pooh was back on his perch on the top of the etagere.

I still have a bit more to do tomorrow and then tackle the bookcases and all the junk that goes there, but it's staring to look more like it used to.

Oh. And I decided to keep the punch bowl after all.

I need to get some SuperGlue so I can put the fruit back on her head. Oh, and that other sculpture is one of my uncle's monsters. We each got our pick of the work he left behind after he died.

(I should also add that I unpacked 6 of 9 bankers boxes and discarded the equivalent of half a box. Well...it's a start, at least!)