The Last Christmas

Well, first I must offer an embarrassed apoogy.  Turns out yesterday's entry ws NOT the 5000th.  Somewhere I got my numbers confused and I actually wrote the 5000th entry on December 3rd, so I am now well into the 5000s...5027, to be precise.  I guess it's even more impressive.

Today we finally had the LAST Christmas celebration (the party tomorrow and the one on New Year's Eve are not Christmas parties).  We drove over to Atria at 11 a.m. to start the celebration with Ned & Marta and my mother.  While we were waiting for Ned & Marta, Jeri showed my mother videos from our time with the great grandkids in Santa Barbara.

Ned and Marta showed up with some gorgeous roses for my mother, which she just loved.

Cut flowers are SO much better for her these days.  She still loves flowers, but she has totally lost the desire to garden anything.  I must start buying her fresh flowers every week or so because she loves having plants and flowers to look at.  I also think that as her plants continue to die, I will replace them with good artificial ones.

We went off to the Atria dining room and enjoyed their huge Sunday brunch.  We were joined by a couple of other people, which made "family talk" awkward, mostly for me because I was sitting with them and everybody else was at the other end of the table.

But I was able to get a nice "family" picture after they finally left.

We went back to the apartment for presents.

Jeri played Santa, handing out the few gifts that were there.  My mother was upset that people had given her things because she didn't have anything for anyone, but when she saw her gifts  -- a calendar for next year, Laurel's annual great-grandkids calendar, and especially her favorite gift, a puzzle with the girls' photo on it -- she stopped complaining.

I was tickled with my new 4 gig flash drive from Ned and Marta.

I think it's so cute.  Jeri also got one which is a giraffe.  

And I am very relieved that the book I ordered for Jeri, which had not arrived by the time we left for Santa Barbara, was here when we came back, so I was able to give it to her today.

We made a video to send to Phil, who was sorely missed, and then headed off for home.  My mother was eager to get started working on her new puzzle.

When we got home, Walt was feeling sick, with slight fever, headache, and upset stomach.  He has gone to bed for the night.  Jeri has gone off to Ned and Marta's with their friend Greg and who knows when they will be back again.  I am sitting here, about to dive into the holiday episode of Call the Midwives, so all is calm, all is bright and tomorrow we'll have two more gatherings of people who want to see Jeri before she returns to Boston!

Playing Santa

It looked like a gift train down the front hall this morning.  Today was the day to deliver the gifts we'd collected for the family we adopted.

The Davis Crisis Nursery put out a call for sponsors for their clients for Christmas.  I always figure that we don't have Dave and Paul to buy gifts for any more and we could put the money we would have spent on them to make the holiday a bit happier for someone else.

The Crisis Nursery is a very private place.  They don't let you know the address until you are signed up to become a sponsor.  And of course, you don't have a clue about your family.  You just get names and genders and ages and likes.

Our family, the Elf Family, consisted of a mother, a daughter 18, a daughter 14 and a son 2.  It was fun shopping for them.  I got a lot for the kids, especially the little guy, at the Dollar store and then did a "big shopping" at Target, picking up odds and ends in other places (like the 18 year old wanted a gift certificate to Jamba Juice, which I bought yesterday.  She is also a reader and so I filled a box with books from Logos).  The 14 year old is into crafts and cosmetology.  I left a big MasterCard bill at Michael's, but got some cute stuff I think she'll like, and a SwapBot partner, who is a cosmetologist, gave me some suggestions for things I could get for her and I managed to put goether a cosmetology package for her.

Today was delivery day.  Walt helped me load up the car and I knew vaguely where the street was, but forgot the specific directions he had given me.   Fortunately, it's easy to find streets in Davis if you know the area where they are located, and I managed to find the nursery, a nondescript home in a nondescript neighborhood with no hint whatsoever what it really is.

It felt good to drop off all the gifts and I hope that we helped the kids and mom have a happier Christmas.  The two year old didn't have it on his list, but I included a teddy bear.  All 2 year olds should have a teddy bear!

I stopped off at Atria for a quick visit with my mother, but this was one of her negative days.  I didn't want to hear about all the crap in her apartment or how glad she'll be when all that Christmas crap was taken down, the stuff my cousin so lovingly brought to her and decorated for her.  I swear she'll only be really happy if she is in a room with two chairs, a TV and a separate bedroom where she can sleep.  Bare shelves.  No photos.  But I'm sure she would find some "crap" to complain about even then.

Instead I went to the store and bought the rest of the ingredients to make biscotti this afternoon.  I've had it all my life, of course (having grown up in the shadow of North Beach in San Francisco and working for an Italian woman who made it every Christmas), but I'd never made it myself.  i was inspired by Giada deLorentis giving a demonstration of how to make it on The Today Show a couple of days ago.   It's amazingly simple.

By the time I got home, my no-sleep night had caught up with me and I needed a nap, which I took.  I didn't exactly get around to the biscotti until about 6 p.m.. It's a time consuming task because you make kind of a loaf, which bakes for 40 minutes, then you cool it, then slice it, then put the slices back into the oven for a second bake to dry them out.  Giada made hers festive for the holidays.  The ingredients added to the basic stuff were pistachios and cranberries (red and green) and when they were finished, she dipped them in white chocolate and then dusted with red sugar.  I was very happy when they were all finished.

I'm having lunch with a friend tomorrow and I want to bring her a bag of cookies, so I was glad I was able to get these all finished in time to include.   And BTW, Walt asked about that biscotti which has frosting all over it.  He wondered if it was like catching the brass ring on a merry-go-round.  But I had to admit that all it meant was that I dropped the biscotti into the melted chocolate when I was trying to just dip it.

I have to admit the little buggers are kinda tasty.

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I had wonderful news from Compassion Int'l today.  I finally wrote to see if there was any news of Fred and they reported that though several of the projects they oversee in the area had hurricane damage, Fred and his family (and presumably their house) were OK.  I am SO relieved and thank everybody who reads this journal for their prayers and good wishes.

It was fun playing Santa today, but the best part of the day was getting the wonderful news of Fred's safety. I was afraid I was going to have to wait a few more months before I knew if he was still alive.

Holly in My Heart

We definitely live in an era of instant gratification and I have such wonderful friends.

The time between Thanksgiving and the anniversary of David's death, a period which takes in 2 holidays, four birthdays and two death dates is always kind of an emotional roller coaster for me.  It has been 17 years since our son David died (14 since his brother Paul died) and, not surprisingly, it's so much better than it was in 1996, but as I have learned, you never "get over" a death, it just becomes part of the new person you now are. The pain is significntly less, but it's like a scar that you may not look at every day, but are aware of when you happen to think of it.

In fact, I've really pretty much stopped thinking of this as an emotional period, but invariably there will come a day or two or three when I'm just blindsided, gobsmacked, and hit upside the head for no particular reason at all.   Just all of a sudden, I realize that I have taken a plunge into the emotional depths.  I've been at this long enough now to know that the plunge won't last long and that probably before anybody notices, I'll be fine again.

I had one of those plunges this morning.  I was sitting here getting postcards ready to send out for a SwapBot postcard swap, cleaning off my desk a bit, writing in the "Who Am I?" journal that needs to be sent to my Swap Bot partner next week and all of a sudden that familiar rocks-in-the-stomach feeling hit me again.  

It's the kind of feeling where you have to get up and walk around, do whatever you do to treat it (something bad to eat, if you have it--I didn't, so it was worse).

My plan for the day had been to go have lunch with my mother and before I left, I put a message on Facebook.

Down in the doldrums.  Don't know why.  Just the usual holiday funk, I guess.  Must go find some holly for my heart.  (Don't think I'm going to find it at Atria)

"Holly in my heart" has been my watchword for the Christmas spirit ever since I heard Cary Grant say it to Deborah Kerr in Affair to Remember, as he explains why he gave one of his paintings to a crippled girl.  It's the sentence that starts what turns out to be the sappy, happy, tear-jerking ending.

In truth, the last thing I really wanted to do was to go to Atria to have lunch with my mother.  Just what I didn't need on "doldrums day" was a visit to Assisted Living, and a reminder that my mother can't remember her great grandchildren's names and that she has lost her zest for life and only wants to sit in her apartment.  I was not looking forward to the daily "I'm old, Bev.  Do you think I'm going to live to a 'hunnert'..." discussion today, but I had told her I would have lunch with her and, even knowing she wouldn't remember that at all, I felt the need to stick with the schedule.

God must have had some holly for my heart in mind today because it was the first day that there was no parking.  None.  Zilch.  Nada.   None in the Atria lot, and none on the street for two blocks in either direction.   I finally pulled out my cell phone, called her, and told her I'd come for lunch tomorrow.

With my lunch hour now free, I decided to drive downtown to run a quick errand and I plugged in my iPhone to continue listening to my book.  I had tried doing that yesterday, but the battery was dead.  Now it had a full battery and I listened to the book, got my errand done quickly (thank you, Gilbert [my parking angel] for giving me a spot in front of the door to the book store) and then decided to have lunch somewhere.  

Nothing in town appealed to me and if I drove to the far end of town, and across the freeway, I would have lots of book listening time.  So I headed off to McDonald's for my usual $3 lunch (plain cheeseburger small fries and, today, a diet Coke because we had run out of bottles of water in the car).  

I parked in the McDonald's lot and listened to the book while I ate, then headed home.  I could feel that the brief doldrums slide was already lifting.

As I pulled into the carport, there was a big box sitting outside the front door.

In it were several stalks of beautiful English holly, covered with plump bright red berries.

I didn't need to come to Facebook and find the message to know that it could only have been left by one person, Evelyn, who has been so amazingly kind and thoughtful to me over the years.

I came into the house and put the holly in a big vase and stuck it on the window sill of the kitchen, where I can look at it while I'm working.

The doldrums are gone and, for today at least, there really is "holly in my heart" as well as holly in my kitchen.

Thank you so much, Evelyn.