Visions of Sugarplums

Before writing for the challenge, I wanted to share that my new blogging friend is Michelle, a young homeschooling mother, and one of the Compassion sponsors. Michelle works so hard finding sponsors for children and her family has sponsored many children. Her favorite is Precious, in Ghana. Through Precious, Michelle has developed such a love of the country and of the children there. She was recently able to send a package with another Compassion sponsor to her Precious and then came the opportunity to travel herself to Ghana with a group next year. Because finances are a problem for her, she decided to ask if people would be willing to help her make her dream come true. I encourage you to read her story and decide if this is something you might be willing to help, with a donation of any small amount.

Topic #7
Christmas Dessert / Treat Recipe

So many choices, so little time!

In my house when I was growing up, I remember my mother making lots of cookies at Christmas time. One of the ones I remember the most was a cookie which had an orange flavor to it, the dough was rolled into a ball and coated with chopped walnuts and then a candied cherry (or it may have been a bit of jam) was put in an indent in the center before baking. I loved those cookies.

Years later, when I thought to go to my mother for all of my favorite recipes that she made while I was growing up, I learned that she decided that she never cooked "like that" any more, she just threw the book away. This is the pain of being an Aquarian born to a Virgo! All of her special recipes, the ones that she hand wrote in there so she wouldn't forget them, just tossed in the garbage without a word to me. I have never been able to recreate the bittersweet chocolate frosting she made to go on the chocolate cream roll that I loved--and believe me I've tried (and I no longer cook "like that" either so don't bother sending me recipes!)

When I had my own apartment and my own office, I made a big deal out of Christmas and made lots and lots of cookies for a week-long open house. I made drop cookies, cut-out cookies, molded cookies...if it had "cookie" in the name, I probably made it at some time or other. My office was the most popular place in the building, and I probably gained 5 lbs myself, what with both baking the cookies and then eating them when nobody was around!

But the cookie that will always say "Christmas" to me, no matter what time of year it is served, are what my mother called "Goodness Sake Cookies" (because everyone who tasted them for the first time loved them so much they would say something like "goodness sakes, these are good!"). She had gone to a party one year and had these cookies and just loved them, got the recipe and came home to bake them. We all loved them.

Years later, when I went looking for a recipe, I discovered that they were really Mexican Wedding Cakes, but I still think of them as Goodness Sake Cookies. The recipe calls for pecans and you can substitute walnuts, but really they aren't the real deal without pecans.

Goodness Sake Cookies

* 1 cup butter, softened
* 8 tablespoons confectioners' sugar
* 2 cups all-purpose flour
* 2 cups chopped pecans
* 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C).
2. Mix all the ingredients together with a mixer until well blended. Roll dough into round small balls (you can place close together on a cookie sheet, because they won't spread)
3. Bake for 10-12 minutes.
4. Roll in additional confectioners' sugar while still warm (use two forks to roll the cookies so you don't burn your fingers) and put on rack to cool completely.

If you've never had these before, you will find yourself saying, "goodness sakes! these are so good!"

Why I'm a Lousy Writer

Oh, I'm not really a lousy writer. I can, on occasion, be quite good. But I remember when I started this little experiment in journal writing nearly 12 years ago. My goal was to learn how to become Erma Bombeck. In 12 years of writing what amounts to a daily Bombeck-length column, I still have never risen to what I consider the level of her most boring column.

I just finished reading a book by emmy-award winning television writer Merrill Markoe called "What the Dogs have Taught Me and Other Amazing Things I've Learned." She is my new hero. First, because I'm not entirely certain that we aren't twins separated at birth, if she weren't five years younger than I am, but mostly because while we live quite different lives, our reactions to situations are so similar (and her closets look a lot like my closets!)

This book has chapters like "Showering with your Dog," "Dominatrix 101," "My Romantic Dinner with Fabio," "My Career in Stun Guns," "Zen and the Art of Multiple Dog Walking," "Pets and the Single Girl" and "Things to Do While Waiting for the World to End," among many other topics.

Her conversations with her dogs are particularly wonderful, and every single one of them is a conversation I wish I had had with MY dogs. About why all three of them feel the need to accompany me everywhere all day long, for example. Only she devotes a whole chapter to it. A delightful chapter.

Anyway, the reason this leads me to the belief that I am a lousy writer is that she gets her material from the things around her. She took a course in being a dominatrix because it was the only one available, she interviewed Fabio, she learned how to use a stun gun for an article she was writing, etc. And each of these essays is rich with descriptions. Descriptions of her surroundings, of the odd people there, of the normal people doing odd things and odd people doing odd things, of the instructors (if such there be)...all told with such a richness of language that you just want to roll around in it and hope that some of it sticks to you.

But where was I reading this book today? I was reading it while sitting in the audience waiting for the start of today's Christmas play, A Christmas Carol (because I didn't get enough of that story last night!), I was totally engrossed in my book, and wishing that I could write like Merrill Markoe while in front of my nose a whole class or two of high school students from a school in the foothills came in to see the show. They had arrived, some of them, in a very, very long stretch limo, which I noticed when we got to the theate, because it was parked in the patio of the theater complex.

I barely glanced at the students all dressed to the 9s, the boys in tuxedos, the girls in formal attire, most of them wearing wrist corsages the size of bridesmaids' bouquets. But I didn't hang around to watch what was going on, I went into the theater, one of the first half dozen or so people entering, and I sat there so engrossed in this book by a woman who makes her living noticing things and wishing I had her gift of composition, and I didn't notice the students until one, wearing a very short sparkly net skirt poofed out so far it was almost a long tutu walked in front of me and nearly brushed my nose with the skirt as she passed by.

It suddenly occurred to me that if I really wanted to learn how to write like Merrill Markoe, I would have been better off shutting the book and just looking around me, absorbing all the details. The room was full of interesting people doing interesting things and I never even looked up from my book. Sadly, by the time I made this observation, the lights were going down and director Michael Laun was making his opening remarks to the audience.

The show was, as I knew it would be, quite good and I was too intent on getting out of the theater as quickly as possible after the lights came up so as not to embarrass myself by showing the effects of my tears on my face. I am a sucker for schlocky sentimentality, but it's hell on my face afterwards!

I've now finished the book. Maybe next time I'm in a public place, I'll think to look around me instead of going off in a corner to read. (But I doubt it.) It's probably too late for me to become another Erma Bombeck anyway.

A Bit of a Break, Sort of

Apparently the Amber & Neely's holiday challenge does not include weekends, because there are no topics posted for Saturday or Sunday, so I'm on my own to think about what to write.

Oh the pressure!

Today I wrote Christmas cards. Lots and lots and lots of Christmas cards. Christmas cards to people I don't know and who will know me only as "Bev."

The Red Cross runs a Holiday Mail for Heroes program that I only heard of this year, though this is apparently the 5th year it has run. This is the information, should you be interested:

Starting this fall and throughout the holiday season, the Red Cross is working with Pitney Bowes, a mail stream technology company, to collect and distribute holiday cards to American service members, veterans and their families in the United States and around the world.

The process is very simple and takes no time at all - All you need is a pen and piece of paper to share your appreciation for the sacrifices members of the U.S. Armed Forces make to protect our freedoms The Holiday Mail for Heroes mail box is open and ready to receive for your cards. Please send all mail to:

Holiday Mail For Heroes
P.O. Box 5456
Capitol Heights, MD 20791-5456

Sending a “touch of home” to American men and women who serve our country is the perfect way to express your appreciation and support during the holiday season.

Ya gotta be quick though, because mail must be postmarked by December 9. I have a big flat rate envelope ready to go out on Monday, using up a lot of cards that I have had around here, unsent, for years. They are perfectly good, but I just don't send that many Christmas cards through the mail any more. I was happy to see this program and to know that I could both get rid of the cards and maybe bring a tiny bit of happiness to someone else.

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Tonight we saw our second-to-last Christmas show. We started with Fruitcakes two weeks ago, moved on to White Christmas last week, and tonight was Every Christmas Story Ever Told. Tomorrow we will be seeing A Christmas Carol.

I have to admit that tonight's is my favorite. It's very funny, very clever, very well-written, and has three incredible actors doing it. I don't laugh as much as I did the first time I saw it because...well, it is the fourth time I've reviewed it.

As we sat down a man saw me reading from my Kindle before the show started. He asked me how I liked it, mentioning that his wife has the new Kindle Fire. I was telling him about the Kindle and the iTouch and why I wouldn't get a Kindle Fire (since it has only an 8 hr battery life). But the whole time I was answering his question, he was checking his e-mail on his iPhone and laughing at things he was reading. He occasionally looked up and apologized, but he didn't put the damn phone down.

I see that happening more and more often, people trying to carry on a live conversation, but unable to put down their electronic devices and responding more to the devices than to the person sitting in front of us. We are going to reach a point where we will be incapable of face-to-face interactions at all.

In back of me were women who were chatting, first about Tiger Woods, and then about equity actors. But the two topics seemed to be intertwined so much that I began to wonder if Tiger Woods is doing little theater in his spare time and perhaps that is affecting his golf game.

The women sang with the guys on stage, talked audibly throughout the first act about what was going on on stage and then one of them started kicking the back of my seat. Over and over and over again.

At intermission they were talking more about theatrical productions they had attended and congratulating themselves on being such suave, professional theater goers. It took all my willpower NOT to turn around and tell them what I thought about them, and how totally unprofessional and downright rude their behavior was.

But--holly in my heart 'n' all, I decided to be charitable in deference to the season of good will toward men...and in this case women.

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

Topic #5
Ideal outfit for Christmas/NYE festivities

When I started this Holiday Blog Challenge, I said that there would be some topics on which I would have little to say.

Behold! We have come to one of those topics!

I guess it's time to find my Santa sweatshirt. I can't remember how many years ago I bought it. It shows Santa peeking into a window at a dog sleeping inside. The paint has long since cracked on it and has the funny smell of something that has sat in a closet for too long. But it has been my Christmas outfit for probably 10 years. That and black paints. Sometimes sweat pants, sometimes velour, sometimes something else, but always black.

I brought out the sweatshirt today and will wear it to any social gathering to which we might be invited from now until Christmas and I will probably wear it on Christmas day. (I also made the Santa figure my profile picture on Facebook.)

I can't remember the last time I shopped for something to wear at Christmas time. I have probably saved Walt thousands of dollars with this one cheap sweatshirt, because it works and I'll look like shit anyway, so why spend money on new clothes?

I might wear something else for New Year's Eve. I don't have a special New Year's Eve outfit, but I do have one or two "good" shirts which do not have "t" as part of their description and they work just fine. They get good use going to stage shows, when I make an effort to dress up.

I was never fashion conscious, but I fear I have totally lost whatever remnant of that gene I ever had. Odd, because my mother is a fashion plate and always looks like a million bucks, even though she buys all her clothes at the thrift shop at which she volunteers for Hospice of Marin.

---

I had such a wonderful time today. It started with attempting to give blood, but since I had just received part 2 of my hepatitis vaccine, they told me I had to wait 2 weeks before I was eligible to donate, so I made an appointment for 2 weeks from now.

After I left, I went to my friend Joan's house. We were getting together with Nancy, the third prong of the triumverate. We used to get together regularly during the Bush Administration to let off steam. When Obama took office, we didn't feel the need as much and got out of the habit, but with all that is going on in the country at the moment we were way overdue for a coffee klatch.

I don't often get the chance to rant, especially with like-minded people, so this was like a breath of fresh air. We discussed everything from the Occupy demonstrations to the Pacific gyre to the Republican slate of presidential candidates, to books we are reading to ideas for celebrating 101 year old Herbert Bauer's 102nd birthday later this month, and lots of things in between. We even watched Jon Stewart's report on the $7.7 trillion the fed has loaned to banks that they just kinda forgot to tell Congress about. Everyone was suitably outraged.

I just had the best time and came home feeling heard, understood, and all that comes with the camaraderie of allies.

And just downright good women to boot!

(Plus it's always nice to be the youngest in a group these days--it happens so seldom!)

Scrooged

Topic #4
Favorite Holiday Movies/TV Specials

I don't remember the first Christmas movie that I ever saw, but it was probably Miracle on 34th Street, which remains to this day my favorite Christmas movie. It had everthing, especially magic that may or may not have been real. I still get chills at the end when they find the cane by the fireplace.

I remember when there was a station that ran It's a Wonderful Life in back to bakc showings from Christmas Eve through Christmas day. It's a good movie, but I have pretty much had it with that movie. I avoid it like the plague.

However, I can see White Christmas over and over again. I don't even mind seeing the stage production of it (which I just reviewed recently--stage show isn't nearly as good as the movie).

I love the old movies. Loretta Young looking luminous in The Bishop's Wife while Cary Grant plays an angel sent to earth to help her minister husband remember the real meaning of Christmas.

I love the original Christmas Carol story versions (I specify "original" because at their root, pretty much most Christmas movies contain all the same elements--a grinch, a good guy, a little kid, an element of magic, and a happy ending). From the Reginald Owen 1938 version down through the Muppet Christmas Carol they have all been good.

I even love the silly tear jerkers like Elf...though many wouldn't think of Elf as a tear jerker, but it has a tenderness to it that makes me tear up every time.

Nowadays we are flooded with Christmas movies, so many of them that they have to start showing them 24/7 on the cable stations to get them all in. Most of them are pretty schlocky and made for TV, but even among the schlock there are movies I will watch.

There is one called The Christmas Gift, which stars John Denver, the only reason I watch this movie. I do like John Denver, even though his acting talents were somewhat iffy. In this movie, he played a widowed New York City architect who takes his young daughter on a Christmas vacation and ends up in a small mystical town in Colorado where everyone belives in Santa Claus. That's the IMDb definition. Actually, this is just another version of The Christmas Story, where Denver's boss (Scrooge) sends him to buy up property in the little town, which will change it into some big metropolis which will make big bucks for the boss. There is a guy whose house is going to be foreclosed (the Bob Cratchit character). With the help of Jane Kaczmarek, who is certainly the ghost of Christmas present, Denver magically gains a spine, stands up to his boss, falls in love with Jane, and decides to settle down in the little town. And, like Scrooge's transformation, the whole thing takes place in 2 days. Magic.

There are all those other classic Christmas animated things that I watched because our kids watched them and didn't admit to watching them because I liked them too!

The grandaddy of them all, of course, is A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has to be on everybody's favorite. I believe this was the first of the Peanuts movies and I wasn't sure how I felt about having actual voices put to the characters I knew so well from the comics, but fell in love with it. And who can pass by a scraggly Christmas tree, left on an old tree lot without thinking that if you wrapped a blanket around it and gave it a lot of love, it would magically become a beautiful tree? God bless us every one.

But then there is How the Grinch Stole Christmas and sweet little Cindy Lou Hoo gathered with the other Hoos singing even though there are no Christmas presents.

And there is Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, which was a real favorite around here. How can you not like a story about an elf who wants to be a dentist?

I have the opportunity to see all of these movies and made for TV movies on Saturday night, when I shall be reviewing the stage show Every Christmas Story Ever Told. And it is. I've seen it three times now and am still looking forward to seeing Gustav the Green-Nosed Rein-goat (to avoid copyright infringement) again.

But (shhh...don't tell anyone)... I will be glad when I can surf through my ComCast directory and see something other than hundreds of Christmas movies from which to choose.

Deck Them Halls

Remember the eggs I said Jeri decorated for us, but which had all broken over the years? Well...they hadn't. A couple had, and some parts of others had broken, but Walt put them in a box in a drawer and I hadn't seen them for years. He brought them out today.

That is, from left to right Jack Point (Yeomen of the Guard), the Fairy Queen (Iolanthe), the Judge (Trial by Jury), Ralph Rackstraw (Pinafore), a what is either Josephine from Pinafore or Angelina from Trial by Jury, a Yeoman (Yeoman of the Guard), The Mikado, and Bunthorne (Patience).

Because you can't really see Bunthorne's feather quill in the group picture, here is a better picture of the "fleshly poet."

I hadn't seen these eggs in years and I'm so glad Walt remembered were he put them. They are so fragile, I hardly wanted to touch them. They are still very special and still rank among the best gifts I ever received for Christmas.

And I guess they also qualify as "holiday decor."

We've never done a lot of decorating around here. Each year the whole family decorated the tree together, while drinking the first egg nog of the season and listening to Bing Crosby singing. The tree was always decorated with home made ornaments, and ornaments that had been bought special for the kids (like 49er ornaments for Tom and David, a ballerina ornament for Jeri, a golden coronet for Paul the year he first did Music Man, and a drum for Ned)

In later years we began to collect what I came to call "the necropsy ornaments" -- our dog Seymour's collar and her favorite tennis ball, a black leather jacket ornament we bought the year David died and the smiley face necklace Paul bought for me that was such a joke between us and which I first draped across the tree the year he died.

And then, of course, it wouldn't be Christmas without the Starship Enterprise Shuttlecraft, with Spock's voice wishing everyone happy holidays and to live long and prosper.

We put up the wooden stable that my father made when I was a child. It has only the Holy Family, a couple of donkeys and a sheep and then an angel that goes on the top. She's holding a sign that says gloria in excelsis and when Jeri learned to read she decided that was her name, so she has always been referred to as "Gloria."

At one time everyone had a personalized Christmas stocking, which I knitted with my own hands, believe it or not. And I once made a big wreath out of scraps of material from all sorts of outfits that the kids had worn. We hung that over the fireplace for several years until it began to look a little "worn." (I had forgotten that I used to be "crafty")

But the crowning glory were the Nunu lights. Walt started out with good intentions and put lights up around the outside of the house, but we have a big house and not all that many lights and they went up one side of the house and across half of the roof and that was it. He kept them up all year for several years, but only lit them at Christmas time. One year he had actually taken them down and we decided that since we had so few lights, we would just drape them decoratively across the shrub in front of our house. When he got it all done and the lights plugged in, the kids decided that if you looked at it right, it looked like it spelled "nunu." So they became known as the Nunu lights and were a great joke each year.

The year Paul died, I decided I couldn't handle putting the Nunu lights up again, so they have not gone up since 1999.

We don't decorate at all any more, other than putting the diminishing number of Christmas cards we receive in a basket that goes on the kitchen table. (Reminder to self: clear off the kitchen table.) Without any kids in the house, and with the house not in condition to "entertain" there didn't seem to be much point and with Paul and David gone, I fear that decorating a tree becomes a painful thing for me, which is why it's such a joy to be able to celebrate Christmas with the grandkids now.

It is a chance to renew what used to be the joy of Christmas, by watching the joy in Brianna's eyes, and, as she gets older, in Lacie's as well.

Thursday Thirteen

Places I have no desire to visit

1. Iran
2. Iraq
3. Afghanistan
4. Japan (I don’t know why, but I have never wanted to visit Japan, even BEFORE the earthquake)
5. India (I got enough crowds in China!)
6. Haiti
7. Topeka, Kansas (home of Fred Phelps)
8. Siberia
9. Egypt (at least not now)
10. Tijuana (once was enough)
11. Greece
12. Nepal
13. Pakistan