Exile's Return

Friday Five: Recommendation Edition

2012-01-13T06:49:00.000-05:00

revkjarla at RevGalBlogPals posts:
"So, it's the time of year I get inundated with requests for recommendations for students that are looking to be camp counselors. So in honor of camp counselors everywhere, today's Friday Five is the Recommendation edition (which has nothing to do with camp or summer or anything--work with me, it's late....)"

1.   Recommend a favorite worship resource or devotional book.

I move around a bit and don't normally need worship resources since I'm a layperson. I keep coming back to Phyllis Tickle's three books on praying the hours, though.

2.   Recommend a blog that you like to read that you think others might find enjoyable.
Here's one you probably don't know: Music You (Possibly) Won't Hear Anyplace Else. Old vinyl records, including Sunday Morning Gospel -- the blogger is an Episcopalian with a secret love for old time gospel groups.
3.   Recommend a fiction book that you think people might like.
Plainsong by Deborah Grabien. A different take on the Jesus story that you may love or hate, but which will give you a lot to ponder. She's a good writer, too, who also writes some great music-themed mysteries.
4.   Recommend a favorite recipe website.   O.k., if you aren't into cooking or food, then just recommend a random website that you find useful, hilarious, mind numbing or thought provoking.
Boringly enough, I generally use Allrecipes.com when I need to remember how to make something or come up with a way to use ingredients on hand -- that feature is quite useful.
5. And for the last recommendation--it's bloggers' choice! Make a recommendation for anything!
Sisterfilms and I really enjoyed a made-for-BBCTV movie called Nativity! with Martin Freeman. An English schoolteacher must direct the school Nativity play and tells people his old girlfriend is coming back from LA to film it. Hijinks ensue, and the film is both funny and inspiring. Good one to watch when you're planning next year's Christmas pageant.

Apologies and a Christmas Carol Booklet for you!

2011-12-19T17:26:00.000-05:00

I can't even explain what happened, I just ran out of steam. However, as a consolation prize, my sister-in-law asked me to share her compiled booklet of favorite old Christmas carols, complete with links to some nice renditions of them to be found on the Internet. It's a PDF file so should be easily readable by anyone. Here it is: http://www.mediafire.com/file/yx86daow8oy7o65 I hope it works! We'll be singing from this carol book at my niece's birthday caroling party tonight.

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime/Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories: December 4

2011-12-04T20:31:00.000-05:00

Today is St. Barbara’s Day, which is celebrated (according to Mimi Sheraton’s wonderful Christmas cookbook, Visions of Sugarplums) in the Levant by Christian Syrians, Lebanese, etc. and also in German-speaking countries. Look back to my post of December 4, 2008 for more information about St. Barbara and tonight’s story and song. I’m really glad I have a backlog of recorded stories to use because I have a dreadful cold and can’t go two minutes without coughing!
Tonight’s story, Schnitzle, Schnotzle, and Schnootzle, is from The Long Christmas, a book of tales collected and told by Ruth Sawyer, the master storyteller and writer.

Her book, The Way of the Storyteller,
is still a great manual of instruction and inspiration for anyone who wants to be a storyteller. She was also the mother-in-law of Robert McCloskey,

of Blueberries for Sal fame. (I’m supposed to be writing about Holiday Foods today but I used up all my thoughts on the subject last year. We had blueberry pie at Thanksgiving, so does this count?)
The song for tonight, to go with the story from the Austrian Tyrol, is “Aba Heidschi Bumbeidschi,” a rather eerie lullaby sung in the Austrian dialect by the Konrad Plaickner Chorus and Orchestra. The words of this lovely song are so disturbing that many modern singers (Nina Simone, for one) have recorded it with changed words.
Since I did get a request from a Mac user, I’ll post links to individual files as well as the zipped files which I’ve compressed using the WinZip program. Be aware that the Mac-compatible (I hope) files will take longer to download since they are not compressed.
DOWNLOAD TONIGHT’S ZIP FILE HERE
DOWNLOAD INTRO FOR MAC HERE
DOWNLOAD STORY FOR MAC HERE
DOWNLOAD SONG FOR MAC HERE

Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories/Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: December 3

2011-12-03T18:37:00.000-05:00

One of our Christmas trees this year will be decorated with handmade ornaments. Some have been made by us, some by friends and family members, and some were bought at church Christmas fairs or brought as gifts from foreign lands. I don’t remember having homemade ornaments on my childhood trees, although my siblings and I may well have made some in school or Sunday school. Onkel Hankie Pants’ family at least had the Danish paper hearts,
and in later years we learned to make these and various other ornaments at West Denmark Family Camp.
Tonight’s story is more about the absence of ornaments: The Tree That Didn’t Get Trimmed by Christopher Morley. It seems to have been published first in a book of essays, later as a stand-alone book, and on GoogleBooks I found it in an issue of Boys’ Life from the mid-50s. Morley was “a man of letters” who did not confine himself to one format. His first novels, Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop,became cult classics among a certain bookish crew; a later novel, Kitty Foyle, was made into a movie. Morley also was one of the first judges for the Book-of-The-Month Club and edited two editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations; he was a regular contributor to the Saturday Review of Literature, a magazine with which I whiled away many hours while I should have been studying. In Nassau County, New York, there is a park named for him where his “writing cabin,” The Knothole, is preserved.

The songs are a Norwegian song to the Christmas tree, Sang til Juletraeet, by Mike & Else Sevig, and a humorous song, Revenge of the Christmas Tree, by Erik Darling.
DOWNLOAD TONIGHT’S STORY HERE

Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories/Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: December 2

2011-12-02T15:38:00.001-05:00

Once again, I find I have nothing further to report on the writing prompt for today in the Geneabloggers’ Advent Calendar: Holiday Foods. Since I went on and on about them last December, you should look there if you want to know about some of our food traditions. Or, you could listen to tonight’s story, Robert P. T. Coffin’s Christmas in Maine. Robert Peter Tristram Coffin is one of four literary figures memorialized in the sidewalks of our town, and the only one who is a native of this area (the others, who all sojourned here for just a few years, being Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.)

Coffin not only grew up on a farm in Harpswell, he stayed around as a professor at Bowdoin College, while also writing Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry as well as memoirs and other works. I wrote more about Coffin in the blog for December 21, 2008.
I chose the song “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” as sung by the BBC Welsh Chorus to accompany this night’s reading because it sounded to me like something the Coffins might have sung on their sleighride. According to both William Studwell in his useful The Christmas Carol Reader and Walter Ehret and George K. Evans in The International Book of Christmas Carols, the melody dates from at least the 18th century and probably earlier; the words are probably 18th century and may have originated with the London Waits, carolsingers of the time. This carol is even mentioned in DIckens’ A Christmas Carol when Scrooge nearly assaults a carolsinger who dares to serenade him.
The recorded introduction was for 2006 when Sisterfilms was still living in City of Lakes and was flying out to be with us for Christmas.
DOWNLOAD TONIGHT’S STORY HERE

Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories/Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: December 1

2011-12-01T19:48:00.000-05:00

Today’s writing prompt for the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories is the Christmas Tree. Now, I think I said just about everything I can recall about our Christmas trees last year, on December 2. So rather than repost, I’ll just send you there.
We have two Christmas trees at our house this year. One is the traditional balsam fir and the other, as best we can determine, is a hemlock (more on this anon.)
Sisterfilms has just unformed us that what she’d really like is a Scotch or

Norway pine with long needles.
Perhaps next year our woods can at least provide a white pine.

For tonight’s story, I had several Christmas tree stories to choose from; I picked one of the oldest, The Peterkins’ Christmas Tree by Lucretia P. Hale. Here’s the book it comes from – one of the Junior Deluxe Editions I used to get in the mail. I’ve had this book for about 55 years!

Lucretia Peabody Hale came from old Boston stock, and literary stock at that. Her father, Nathan Hale (named for his famous Revolutionary uncle) was an editor, and her mother an author. One of her many siblings was Edward Everett Hale, author of The Man without a Country, which I remember being assigned to read in junior high. And on her mother’s side, Lucretia could count as a relative the orator Edward Everett, now famous chiefly for being the “main” and lengthy speaker on the occasion when Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address.
Lucretia, who was born in 1820 and died in 1900, saw the introduction of the Christmas tree into New England. In Germany, Austria, and Scandinavia, Christmas trees were a long tradition by the 19th century, when Ernst Anschutz wrote some new words to an old tune, O Tannenbaum. I’ve selected a version by the Wiener Sängerknaben (The Vienna Boys’ Choir). Although Tannenbaum means “Fir Tree,” this is where we get back to our hemlock, for Maine’s own Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, apparently in the throes of unrequited love, wrote a non-Christmas poem, The Hemlock Tree, which is obviously meant to be sung to the Tannenbaum melody.
DOWNLOAD TONIGHT’S STORYTIME HERE

December Blogging Plans

2011-11-30T20:23:00.000-05:00

Strictly speaking, I should have begun my Advent blogging last Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent. But since Advent calendars usually start on the first of December, I'll begin tomorrow.

Those of you who are my friends on Facebook may have noticed that I promised myself to check Facebook only once a week starting December 1 (and for as long thereafter as I can hold out). Instead, I'll be spending time blogging, reviewing, and reading blogs. I have two specific projects for December, both of which I also attempted last year. One is the Geneablogger Advent Calendar of Family History; the other is Auntie Knickers' Advent Storytime.

Geneabloggers is an aggregation of people who blog about genealogy and family history. Each day from December 1 through 24 has a writing prompt. The prompts are the same as last year's, so if I can't think of anything different to write about I'll skip a day here and there. I thought it might be fun, when possible, to coordinate my read-aloud stories with the family history tales, so I'll be doing that when it's appropriate.

As I did last year, I'll be posting my readings of Christmas stories to a filesharing site where readers who wish can download them. I'm using MediaFire this year. The Sendspace links from last year are no longer active; if anyone requests it, I can repost them on MediaFire. Since Sisterfilms, for whose benefit I did this last year, is now in residence here, I'm not going to post individual files for Mac users unless someone else asks me to. The files I'll post are Self-Extracting Zip Files and seemed to work fine last year. After I've posted the first one I'll possibly have a few more instructions for you.

I've written at length about some of the stories and songs before, and I'll point you to those posts in the blog archive, but I'll also try to find some more information about the authors or anything else that seems interesting.

I hope a few people will enjoy these stories. One last note: there are a few tales that are a little more adult in nature; on those days I'll include two stories so there'll be one for kids too.

See you tomorrow!

Friday Five: The Season You’re In

2011-09-02T08:44:00.003-04:00

kathrynzj at RevGalBlogPals writes:

“Headquarters for me is the northeast of the United States. Here school is getting back in session, the tease of autumn is in the air (or the hope for the tease of autumn is in the air) and church life is gearing up to full throttle.

One thing I've learned with blogging and social media is that the where I live is not necessarily where you live. And so I want to know what September means to you, in your place of the world and time in your life.

This week's Friday Five is:

What are 5 things that the beginning of September mean to you?

1. Putting up a new desktop wallpaper! I got this pretty one from www.kate.net. It’s a misty moisty morning today, just as in this photo, although I’d have to go inland a bit to see mountains like this.

2. Back to school: this is the first September in many, many years that none of my kids are in any kind of schooling, but Onkel Hankie Pants and I will be starting weekly tax classes next week so in a way we’re the ones going back to school. No new clothes are required, however. Back to school also means the return of the college students to our town, just about the time most of the summer people leave. We grumble, but we’re grateful to have them.

3. I love the cooler weather – the shortening of the days, not so much. Soon we will be seeing the autumn leaves, and the air is already crisper.

4. September means it’s time for the autumn playlist. One of my favorite fall songs is “Fall Is Here” by Charlie Maguire, the Singing Ranger of Minnesota. You can hear a sample and buy his recordings by going to www.charliemaguire.com. And then there are the classics like this one:

Les Feuilles Mortes by Yves Montand, 1951.

5. Apples! And the return of Maine apple cider – the last few weeks the market seems to have run out and Onkel Hankie Pants has had to buy New York State cider.

Bonus: Something I don’t like so much: the consciousness of time passing and time getting away from me. It seems only yesterday I was enjoying the first forsythias and daffodils, now we are seeing some leaves beginning to change, soon it will be winter. I’m hoping the autumn of my life can last a while longer.

Rainy Day Friday Five

2011-08-26T08:17:00.002-04:00

Sally at RevGalBlogPals, who lives in the UK, has a day off, but it’s raining.Instead of an outdoor activity she will be heading to an art gallery. So she asks:

What do you do on a rainy summer’s day?

1. At home?

We had a rainy day yesterday, and are in for some more this weekend as Hurricane Irene is expected to pay us a visit. I think we are all more likely to take naps on rainy days, and to put off outdoor projects and even indoor projects in favor of reading or watching a movie … or napping. But the dog still must be walked, rain or not – and he doesn’t seem to mind it, or any weather, much.

2. In your local area?

Here’s what I wouldn’t do: go shopping, at least not at Outlet Shopping Mecca in the next town. Because that’s what the summer people do when they encounter a rainy day during their Maine vacation. If we needed entertainment, we’d probably go to a community theater production or a public supper.

3. If you are away on holiday?

Mosrt of the things I would enjoy doing on a holiday are not weather-dependent; I’d put off the outdoor sight-seeing and enjoy being with people, reading, cooking if facilities were available, or visiting some kind of museum.

4. Name a rainy day read.

Well, yesterday I finished reading Gardens of Delight by Erica James. It’s a “women’s fiction” novel set partly in Cheshire and partly at Lake Como in Italy, and most of the characters are keen gardeners. So there are descriptions of both rain and sunshine, and lots of flowers, trees, and fruit, as well as the multiple human interactions. I rather like rain so reading about rain when it’s raining doesn’t depress me. Then in the evening Sisterfilms and I watched It Happened One Night, which has some great scenes with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert getting thoroughly rain-drenched.

5. Is there a piece of music/ a poem/ story that cheers you up?

I have a long playlist of Rainy Day Songs. I’m thinking now of all our friends in Texas and other places who would love to see a rainy day, so here’s a song for them,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFNRglWwcKg&feature=related
Bonus: post a rainy day photo!

Had I but known, I could have taken one yesterday! Instead I’ll post one of Onkel Hankie Pants’ photos from a long-ago trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Our friends are looking at a rainbow, so the caption is Genesis

9:13-17.

Friday Five: Road Trip

2011-08-19T11:22:00.002-04:00

Jan at RevGalBlogPals writes:

My husband and I just returned (on Wednesday night) from a long road trip up the middle USA to Canada, going through various national parks, and on to the Puget Sound of Washington State. This brought back memories of family road trips with my children and when I was a child, so the idea of today's Friday Five arose.
Tell us about five road trips--in your childhood, in your family, in your recent past, with friends, and/or hoped-for-places-to-drive-to. Don't forget the one that stands out as the BEST or as the worst time.

1. The first road trip I remember was in the spring of 1955 when my parents, four younger siblings, and I drove from El Paso, Texas to Bowdoinham, Maine, with a stop in Norwalk, Ohio “on the way.” My father had orders for Germany, to which we’d follow in about 6 months, so he ws taking some leave time to take us back to our little house in Maine where we’d await our port call. I don’t remember what kind of car we had other than it was a sedan of some kind. My eldest younger brother sat in front because he had a tendency to get car-sick. I was in back with the twins, who were about 2 1/2, and baby brother who was just about to turn one. The space between the front and back seats was filled with footlockers padded with blankets. I’m not sure about the diapers – I think disposables were just becoming available and we may have used those some of the time, but I also seem to recall a diaper pail and occasional stops at laundromats.

We did some sight-seeing along the way – I remember a stop at a scary snake farm – and sampled indigenous cuisine such as catfish-flavored grilled cheese sandwiches in the Ozarks. The visit to Norwalk was to see my aunt’s family, which included my one same-age cousin, and was a welcome respite from the road. When we arrived back in Maine at last, I remember my parents pointing out damage from the previous fall’s hurricane. I think it was a good trip.

2. After our return from Germany, we lived for several years in southern Connecticut, about a six-hour drive from home in Maine, so there were several trips a year. My mother would make sandwiches (to this day I dislike egg salad; I preferred when she would make “Italians” as we call them here); my parents would have a big thermos of coffee, and I suppose we kids had something to drink too. The clearest memory of these trips is the landmarks we looked for – East Rock and West Rock in New Haven, which meant we were really on our way; the various giant billboards and advertising statues just north of Boston; the fourteen (I think( underpasses of New Hampshire, and then the bridge across the Piscataqua from New Hampshire to Maine, which cost a dime. I would begin to feel at home as soon as the first toll-booth attendant said “Thank YOU sah!” but the twins did not ever believe we were in Maine until the smell of woodsmoke wafted through the car windows. When we got to our road, since nearly everyone who lived on it was a relative, my father would honk the horn at every house we passed until we arrived at my grandparents’ house, where Grampie’s dog Dinah would rush out to welcome us.

3. When we went to Germany again in the mid-60s, I hung out at the post library a lot. The librarian and I became friends and the summer before my senior year we took a little road trip in her VW Beetle. Since we were in Stuttgart, we took a wonderful trip around Bavaria to the south, visiting Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Oberammergau, and two of Mad King Ludwig’s castles, Schoss Linderhof and Schloss Neuschwanstein (the latter the model for Sleeping Beauty’s Castle). We also got as far as Lake Constance and looked across to Switzerland. At night we would stop wherever we were and find a Gasthaus mit Zimmer Frei – I just remember one town, Bad Kohlgrub, the name of which my parents found hysterically funny. Riding through the Bavarian Alps was a bit scary for me but we sang folksongs and musical theatre numbers which distracted acrophobic me at least a bit. It was a great trip.

4. Our third Christmas together, Onkel Hankie Pants and I headed for Maine from southern Minnesota, in our little Austin America. Our first child was on the way. I had checked out the Mobil Travel Guide from the library and planned a route through Toledo, Ohio (our first stop) and then a stop in Fairfield, Connecticut to see my friends whose families still lived there. In Toledo we even had a motel reservation – unfortunately in the same motel where some bowling club was having a loud Christmas party. Not much sleep there. Driving through the Poconos in a slushy snowstorm was interesting, to say the least. Also, the muffler gave up the ghost so our stop in Connecticut included a visit to the muffler shop; as I recall, the repair didn’t exactly work and the Wisconsin-Minnesota portion of our return trip was a little noisy. However, we had a fine time in Connecticut even though we all went to see a Bergman film, and a wonderful Christmas in Maine.

This is a picture of the Austin; imagine it bright orange.

5. I’ve enjoyed many road trips since, and hope to have a few more, but the one that stands out is a “shunpike” tour we took when our son was 4 years old. With the help of Jane and Michael Stern’s book Roadfood and a few other guidebooks, we planned a fun and educational trip. (And I know my daughters are jealous now. There are advantages to being the eldest.) Some highlights of the trip included visiting the reproduction of the Ingalls family cabin in Pepin, Wisconsin (we had already read all of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books to SonShineIn), followed by riding the ducks at Wisconsin Dells. We went swimming in Lake Michigan at Indiana Dunes State Park, rode a barge on the Erie Canal (where SonShineIn covered himself with glory by loudly bursting into “I’ve got a mule, her name is Sal, Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal” unprompted); and on the return trip, Niagara Falls. Below, a few photos from that trip.

Indiana Dunes State Park

Onkel Hankie Pants and SonShineIn at the Ingalls cabin reproduction in Pepin, WI.

Looking back, I can’t remember a road trip that I didn’t enjoy most of the time. I’ve been fortunate in my traveling companions!

Christmas in July and a neat giveaway

2011-07-29T09:50:00.002-04:00

It's been a long time since I've posted and I really need to get going on this again, especially since I'll be guest blogging at Kaye Barley's blog in a little over a week! It's "Christmas in July" at some of the other blogs I frequent (Ernie (Not Bert) for example) and while looking at a few of them I came upon one that's new to me, Joanna Wilson's Christmas TV History. Since our cable company just did away with our "limited cable" option and we now get a lot more channels, I expect I'll have a lot more chances to watch Christmas TV old and new when the time comes, so I'll definitely be following this blog. This month (and there are only a couple of days left), she and her publishers are having a giveaway of her books and a lot of other swag. I'm entering by posting this and, even though it would reduce my chances, you are encouraged to do so as well. Go to her July 1 post to see the procedure. Happy Christmas in July! (Sisterfilms points out, it is now less than 5 months to her birthday!)

Friday Five on Sunday: Five Verses

2011-01-30T09:07:00.002-05:00

Songbird, over at RevGalBlogPals, writes: “Twenty years ago, I was on a Pastoral Search Committee, and one of the questions we asked the ten candidates we interviewed in the first round was to tell us their three favorite passages of scripture. I loved hearing the variety of verses quoted and even learned some that I didn't know, such as the last line of one of this week's lectionary passages:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8)

For today's Friday Five, list your five favorite passages/verses from the Bible and tell us something about why you love them.”

I had a very busy Friday and haven’t even been able to read others’ Friday Fives yet, but this one seemed appropriate for Sunday morning! So I’m chiming in a bit late.

I’m in the cohort that has seen lots of new Bible translations. When I was a child, the Revised Standard Version was new and controversial; the first Bible I bought for myself was the New English Bible; and I’ve collected a number of other translations and editions since then. When I participate in a Bible study I like to compare them to see what different insights may come from different wording. But when I think of Bible verses, the ones that stick in my head come from the King James version. So that’s the version I’ll quote here, realizing its many flaws but still reveling in its resonant language, in this, its 400th anniversary year. This is a picture of my favorite King James Bible, the one illustrated by Barry Moser.

On to the verses!

1. Psalm 30:5. For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favour is life; weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

I’m generally an optimistic person, and a fortunate one, and this has been my experience. I’m also a morning person, and even in dark days I cherish the hope and possibility that comes each time the sun rises, so the last part of this verse is almost like a mantra for me.

2. Matthew 10:29. Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

I love this verse because of its use of what must have been a very common activity in Jesus’ time to describe God’s care for all God’s creation; and because it is the source of one of my favorite Gospel hymns, “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” And, having read a lot of pre-decimal British fiction, I’m comfortable and comforted in a way by farthings, shillings, sovereigns and so on. The classic versions of “His Eye is on the Sparrow” are by Mahalia Jackson and Ethel Waters, but today I’ll give some men a chance to chime in – the Soul Stirrers (later to be joined by Sam Cooke, but not in this video) and Marvin Gaye.

3. John 14:2. In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.

Nowadays this is usually translated “many rooms” rather than “many mansions,” which probably makes more sense, but the idea of a house that contains mansions has always helped me imagine the unimaginable vastness of God. I have heard this verse at many funerals and memorial services and hope it will be read at mine someday. To me, it says that God has room for all God’s children, whatever their beliefs, worship styles, etc. This verse is also (I think) connected with a favorite spiritual, “Plenty Good Room.” I couldn’t find a video of my favorite Marian Anderson recording, but here’s a great rendition by an African group.

4. John 1:14. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.

If I were forced to choose between Christ’s humanity and Christ’s divinity, (an impossible choice for a Trinitarian), I would have to choose the humanity. I’ve read in many places that the literal Greek translation of “dwelt among us” is “pitched his tent among us,” which is a phrase that calls up many associations and mental pictures for me. I find John’s Gospel helpful in synthesizing God as Man and God as Spirit.

5. Genesis 8:22. While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.

This is part of God’s covenant with humankind after the Flood in the story of Noah. I love the seasons, the “ceaseless round” of night and day, and the rolling cadences of this verse fill me with joy that these things endure. I also love the following verses, where God sets the rainbow to remind us of the covenant.

Friday Five: Books!

2011-01-21T06:55:00.010-05:00

Jan at RevGalBlogPals says: "I hope some of you received books for Christmas presents; I did and have been reading ever since. Then I discovered a new author from those recommendations that pop up on Amazon.com. Instead of buying those books, I've been checking them out at the library, which will not help Amazon's future recommendations for me at all.

So tell us what you're reading, what you would and would not recommend--five books or authors! "

I'm currently reading mostly mysteries, and as a relaxation method after a day doing taxes, I recommend the "cozy" kind. I read Roberta Isleib's first in a series, Preaching to the Corpse, as the Connecticut entry in my "A Mystery for Every State" project, and just finished her second in that series, Asking for Murder. The protagonist is a psychologist/advice counselor, Rebecca Butterman, who lives in Guilford, CT and works in New Haven. I thought I'd guessed "whodunnit" and was completely wrong!

I also enjoyed Mary Stanton's Angel's Advocate, which is set in Savannah and has a bit of "woo-woo" (supernatural) about it as well as Southern charm.

A very different type of book was S.J. Bolton's third thriller, Blood Harvest. Like her previous ones, it's set in an isolated rural area of the British isles and there is local folklore and some heavy-duty

dysfunction and just plain scary stuff. I also enjoy police procedurals and in this country Michael Connelly is one of the best writers of those -- I recently read his third Harry Bosch novel, The Concrete Blonde. I do read non-fiction, and am currently making my way through John Keegan's The First World War. As Keegan is a military historian, there's a lot about troop movements which my poor grasp of spatial relations makes problematical for me, but it's still good. I received James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, about the Civil War, for Christmas, so that will be my next Big History book.

I did not read every word, but skimmed through Molly O'Neill's One Big Table, a huge American regional cookbook and food history. I was ambivalent. It's got lots of great stuff in it, but it's just too darn big to read comfortably (weighs 5 1/2 lbs!!) and the recipes were a little quirky for my taste -- aebleskiver with blue cheese??? -- and often called for ingredients that are hard to find if one doesn't live in NYC or whatever particular ethnic enclave might have, say, pomegranate molasses on every store shelf. I wouldn't spend the $50 for it but might check it out of the library again -- it's a good book for libraries to have, I'd say.

I do post reviews of my reading on Goodreads.

Friday Five: Here Comes 2011!

2010-12-31T09:25:00.002-05:00

Singing Owl at RevGalBlogPals says today: “I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions, but it does seem a good time for some reflection and planning. For the last few days I keep thinking of Psalm 90:12 So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Among other things, that seems to say that reflection is in order if we want to learn and grow.

For some of us, this has been an incredibly difficult year; for others it has been a year of many joys. For all of us, there have been challenges and questions and there have been blessings and--maybe even an answer or two! As we say our goodbyes to 2010 and look towards 2011, share with us five blessings from 2010 along with five hopes or dreams for 2011.”

Hmm, Singing Owl, that sounds like a Friday Ten to me! But I’ll play anyway.

First the blessings:

1. Being part of my daughter’s ordination this past October. I might say with the Grateful Dead, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” I’ve heard ministers say that they felt their call very early in life; I don’t think this was the case with Cordeliaknits, but I do know that spiritual matters have always been a concern of hers from earliest childhood. I’m grateful that after exploring other ways, she returned to the path we raised her in for her ministry, but I know she would have served God and her fellow humans one way or another.

2. Celebrating the centennial of the church we belonged to for nearly 30 years. This was a wonderful mixture of old and new. It was great to see old friends and past ministers, but it was also heartening to see the changes in the five years since we left for Maine: a beautifully renovated sanctuary, a new young minister settling into his pastorate, and best of all, active new members. Of course, the highlight of the celebration service for me was the premiere of an anthem and hymn composed by a friend with text by Onkel Hankie Pants, and the warm reception it got.

3. Now for something more mundane: seven months of work with the Decennial Census, in the office in Portland. Not only did it help pay for the travel to #s 1, 2, and 4, but we met a lot of interesting people and enjoyed listening to audiobooks during our daily commute. It did cut into the blogging and reading time, though.

4. A yearly blessing that I hope will continue for years to come was my week at the beach with my oldest friends in May. Sun, shrimp, strawberries and good talk; watching the sun rise while listening to birdsong; and a week with a very UN-full agenda – priceless.

5. So many more I can’t count them! My family and friends; the town I live in, with all its troubles, yet filled with hope for the future; my town’s great public library, in walking distance; year-round farmers’ markets, a great local meat market, fresh seafood; the theatre of seasons; the rich cultural life of Midcoast Maine, including the chance to see OHP in a few productions every year; public suppers and good restaurants when we don’t feel like cooking; yes, even the dog.

Hopes and dreams:

1. That our younger daughter Sisterfilms, who’s moving in with us next week, will find both paying work and her creative voice here, and not get too exasperated with her aging parents and their unruly dog. (And that her 16-year-old cat will find some accommodation with said dog.)

2. That I live life more intentionally each day. This doesn’t necessarily mean a daily to-do list, but I would like to end each day feeling I’ve accomplished something. For me this would include some blogging, some reading and reflecting on what I’ve read, some genealogy research and, more important, sharing that research with my family. I’m not planning on checking out any time soon, but I’d like to leave something behind when I do go.

3. Health. This is one of the things I really need to be intentional about: checking blood pressure, remembering to take my medicine, exercising, more careful eating, making doctor, dentist and vision appointments, etc. I’ve got a lot yet to accomplish and need good health to do it.

4. Divesting and simplifying is an ongoing process with which we’ve had some success before, during and after the move from Minnesota to Maine. We’re not completely there yet, though, and I know Sisterfilms is going to help us with this.

5. Rudolph Day! I’d like to spend at least a day each month preparing for Advent and Christmas. Recording stories, picking up or making little presents, organizing, just so I can concentrate more on the spiritual aspects of Advent and still enjoy and share the traditions of Christmas in 2011.

Friday Five: Christmas Past

2010-12-17T08:10:00.002-05:00

“Tell us about five Christmas memories you have,” says Jan at RevGalBlogPals, who must be just as frazzled as I am by now. One of the reasons I’m feeling as though it will never all get done in time is just that – since I’ve been trying to blog Christmas memories as well as post readings of Christmas stories, and I’m three and two days behind, respectively. I’ll share some briefly, and you can read my “Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories” posts for more.

1. Waking up on Christmas morning 26 years ago. Not just waking up, but realizing that labor was beginning and the doctors had been right – our third child would be a Christmas baby. I woke my husband and the older children (not unusual, I’m always the first one up that day), we had stockings and then brought them, still in their new pajamas, to their grandparents’ house and went to the hospital. At 1:30 pm we got our best Christmas present. Big sister and Bedstemor meet her for the first time in this photo. Note the stocking in which she was presented, which became her birthday stocking.

2. The skating Santa. A week or two before the above events, I was feeling a bit nervous about the upcoming addition to our family and how we would all deal with it – financially and otherwise. I worked downtown then, in a job-sharing situation where I worked all day, every other day. One day I was riding the bus home and as we passed Peavey Plaza, near Orchestra Hall, where there was a skating rink, I saw Santa Claus walk up to the rink, remove his boots and put on ice skates, and begin skating. It was such a lovely sight that it made me feel everything would be all right, and it was.

3. A starring role. Our first child and only son was a June baby, so on his first Christmas he was the perfect age to portray the infant Jesus in our church Christmas pageant. As we then lived in a farming community, the manger was handmade and filled with real hay. SonShineIn did a great job – no crying he made, but waved his hands and feet charmingly. I just hope that hay wasn’t what gave him hay fever!

4. Christmas Eve church. Specifically, the 5:30 pm service during the years when we had many responsibilities both at home and in church – after my in-laws moved to Wisconsin and we began hosting the Christmas Eve dinner, and while spouse and daughters sang in the choirs and I read the children’s story. It was always a rush to get there on time for choir warmups, while making sure the dinner preparations were well underway; snow and cold often complicated things. The beginning of the service would find me still jittery, but once I had read my story I was filled with a sense of peace and contentment. I could enjoy the beautiful music, the candles and poinsettias, the lighted tree and pews crowded with festively-dressed friends and their visiting families, and best of all that moment when our minister read the words: “In the beginning was the Word….”

5. A special gift. In 1964, my father was transferred to Stuttgart, Germany by the Army and we, of course, went with him. We arrived in August and by Christmas, although I was making some new friends, I was missing the friends I’d left behind a lot. My friend The Boss sent me a Christmas present which was probably the start of my large and still-growing collection of Christmas literature. It was the beautiful little paperback edition of Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I’m not sure I was even aware of that piece before then, although I did know of Dylan Thomas. It seems that each year, there is one gift received or given that stands out in the memory, and for that year, this is the one.

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 15

2010-12-16T12:48:00.003-05:00

Tonight we have a couple of poems which are more serious. One is short, one longer; one written by a late Victorian (Thomas Hardy, ) and the other by a twentieth-century British poet (John Betjeman, 1906-1984). One commentator in Wikipedia noted that “Unlike Thomas Hardy, who disbelieved in the truth of the Christmas story, while hoping it might be so, Betjeman affirms his belief even while fearing it might be false.” (The commentator was obviously comparing these two poems.)

The first poem is Thomas Hardy’s “The Oxen.” Written in 1915, in the second year of the Great War, and when Hardy himself was in his 70s and seeing change all around him, the poem aches with loss. There’s a very good essay on it here. In the last stanza there are a couple of words from Dorset dialect, “barton” – usually meaning a farmyard, but in Dorset also referring to outbuildings on a farm – and “coombe,” a narrow valley between two steep hills. Just yesterday I found a musical setting of this poem performed by the Swingle Singers; the setting is by one of the singers, Jonathan Rathbone (Before Straight No Chaser, before Manhattan Transfer, there were the Swingle Singers, and they continue today.)

John Betjeman (1906-1984) flunked out of Oxford (his tutor, whom he detested ever after, was C. S. Lewis) but ended his days as England’s Poet Laureate. He described himself as a “poet and hack” in Who’s Who. His poem “Christmas” is beloved by many and widely anthologized. I found a beautifully calligraphed and illuminated version in Images of Christmas, which also contains “Oxen” and some of the other poems I’ll be reading. A used copy can be found for as little as 73 cents (plus shipping) and would be well worth seeking out. A few of Betjeman’s allusions may be unfamiliar to American readers/listeners, so I looked them up.

A tortoise stove is a small coal-burning stove, suitable for heating a hall or a single room; the name probably comes from the round/cylindrical form. Crimson Lake and Hooker’s Green are Betjeman having a little fun; of course both are colors:

although he seems to suggest that they are locations. Crimson Lake was the color used on certain railroad cars in London, and Hooker’s Green is said to be the color of English foliage.

Yew, with which I associated death because of its frequent occurrence in English murder mysteries, is used for Christmas decorating too and this picture shows why:

And the Dorchester Hotel remains to this day a residence for “shining ones”; the least expensive room available for Christmas Eve through Boxing Day this year, if purchased as part of a “Festive Shopping Package” will run you 255 British pounds a night.

Amazingly, the Swingle Singers also recorded “And Is It True?”, the last three stanzas of Betjeman’s poem, to music by Ben Parry.

If you’re looking for a children’s story, in 2007 I recorded A Letter from Santa Claus, by Eleanor Estes, from one of her stories about the Moffat family. Since it’s set during World War I, John McCutcheon’s “Christmas in the Trenches” seemed an appropriate choice to go with it.

Individual Files for Mac Users

Introduction Dec 15 2010 The Oxen Surprise 1 Christmas Surprise 2

Introduction Dec 15 2007 Surprise A Letter from Santa Claus

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

December 15 2007 December 15 2010

Updates, Fruitcake, and Technical Tips

2010-12-15T22:00:00.002-05:00

I don’t think I’m going to get the Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 15 posted this evening, as it’s already quite close to old Auntie’s bedtime. I’m two days behind on my Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories. The prompt for yesterday, December 14, was “Fruitcake: Friend or Foe?” I really can take it or leave it; fruitcake doesn’t stir any particular emotions in me, nor do I have any family memories about it. I tend to like the “ethnic” fruitcake varieties which usually seem to have more cake and less fruit, such as the Italian Panettone ,

the German Stollen,

or the Norwegian Julekage.

I did want to update a couple of prior posts with new information. On December 7, I shared a story in verse, The Year without a Santa Claus by Phyllis McGinley, and I said it had nothing to do with the television special. Just a day or two later, Sisterfilms was watching that very special while decorating cookies, and called to tell me that it actually was based on the book, which I would have known had I only checked iMDB. The screenwriter, William Keenan, added the characters of Snow Miser and Heat Miser, which is why I didn’t think the two works were related.

Speaking of Santa Claus, I have some more information relating to my December 6 post in the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories. My uncle Carl tells me that it was probably either my uncle Ellis or his brother Hank who came to the window as Santa Claus, as Ellis had had a Santa Claus suit several years before when Carl was small and used to dress up in it for him and Ellis’s own son. Here’s a picture of Ellis. He and my grandmother are the ones who are responsible for my love of mystery stories; the story was that he would read all but the last few pages of a mystery so he could read it again and still have the suspense. I also talked to my brother and he says that, although he only has the image of the Santa face in the window in his memory, he remembers our mother telling him that he was the one who wasn’t afraid of Santa. Just as I feared.

One technical tip for anyone who hasn’t learned by trial and error: to connect to the link, left-click on the blue words of your choice. That will take you to the download site, where a button will await you. The individual files will download individually; the Self-Extracting Zip Files will have everything for that day in one folder. Some browsers (Google Chrome for example) will give you a scary message because of the Self-Extracting Zip Files which include a small .exe file. You do not need to be afraid of these. They are produced by WinZip, a very reputable company, and I use an anti-virus program daily to make sure I don’t spread anything bad.

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 14

2010-12-15T21:17:00.002-05:00

(Yes, I’m still a day behind. I hope to get the Day 15 post up tonight; I have the recordings done, but it’s the research and writing that take more time.)

For a change of pace, tonight, and for a couple of nights more, I’ll be sharing some favorite Christmas poems. The first two are story poems, somewhat (but not entirely) humorous.

”King John’s Christmas” was written by A. A. Milne (1882-1956) and appears in his collection Now We Are Six. Milne, as you all know, was also the author of the Winnie the Pooh books (Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner), as well as another book of children’s verse, When We Were Very Young. He did not confine himself to children’s books and indeed was rather miffed that those were what he was best known for. He wrote many plays, essays, and even a murder mystery. King John himself, the only one of that name to wear the Crown of England, was indeed rather a bad man, as those of us who are familiar with the Robin Hood stories know. To go with this poem, which has King John writing a letter to Father Christmas, we have “When Santa Claus Gets Your Letter,” from the prolific Christmas songwriter Johnny Marks. (“Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Run Run Rudolph,” and “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree” are but three of his other songs.) This song is sung by “Cactus Jim and the Wranglers,” a 50s studio band.

Ogden Nash (1902-1971), a mid-20th-century American poet, wrote primarily light humorous verse and was known for his skillful wordplay. (Notice his rhyming of “kittens” with “Admittance” for example.) His cautionary tale, “The Boy Who Laughed at Santa Claus,” is accompanied by a fine example of doo-wop, “I Don’t Believe in Santa Claus,” by The Boulevards. But don’t worry – both these poems prove that Santa Claus really does exist!

Up to this year I had only recorded a couple of other poems for Christmas. One of them forms part of tonight’s alternate reading. “Jest ‘Fore Christmas,” by Eugene Field, is a poem I first encountered in the Book of Knowledge, a wonderful children’s encyclopedia/anthology I had as a child. And I still have it, except for one volume which mysteriously disappeared. For more about “Jest ‘Fore Christmas” and its accompanying story and song, go here.

Individual Files for Mac Users

Intro Dec 14 2010 Surprise 1 King John's Christmas Surprise 2 The Boy Who Laughed at Santa Claus Intro Dec 6 2006 Surprise 1

Jest 'Fore Christmas Christmas on an Island

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

December 14 2010 December 6 2006

From Atlantic to Pacific, Gee, the Traffic is Terrific

2010-12-14T21:59:00.005-05:00

(I’m concentrating this post, which deals with Holiday Travel, the writing prompt for December 13, on one particular Christmas. I can’t warrant that everything took place in the order stated or even that it took place on that particular Christmas, but it’s all true one way or another.)

Holiday travel for my family in 1957 covered a lot of ground, sea and air and started early. By Thanksgiving, our apartment on Mississippistrasse in the Hainerberg housing area of Wiesbaden, Germany was denuded of all but the most necessary items and the furniture provided by the Army. We even ate Thanksgiving dinner in the mess hall of my father’s unit. (This was the infamous raw-shrimp-cocktail Thanksgiving, about which I think I’ve written previously.) We had all had our shots updated and been tested to make sure we hadn’t contracted tuberculosis from injudiciously eating ice cream on the street. For a few days, after moving out of our quarters, we stayed in a once-magnificent spa hotel downtown, where I think there was a fountain of dreadful-smelling mineral water in the lobby. At last our port call came, and we made our way to nearby Frankfurt and Rhein-Main Airport. We were fortunate to be flying, as my mother and brother were prone to seasickness.

The flight home was not without incident. I’m not sure why, but we had a layover in Montreal that I’m pretty sure was unscheduled. We were put up in a motel, and when we tried to get something to eat in the restaurant, we were met with “So sorry m’sieu, the kitchen, she is in the fire!” I think that night ended with our first experience of take-out fried chicken.

We did eventually reach McGuire AFB and neighboring Fort Dix, and after the usual Army “processing,” we were ready for the next leg of our journey. We children were excited to learn that this would be in a new (to us) car. And not just any car – it was a two-tone, blue and cream, 1956 Ford Fairlane Victoria in the hardtop convertible style. It wasn’t really convertible, but it looked as cool as one. V-8 engine, just enough chrome, and take a look at those cool headlights! I couldn’t limit myself to just one picture. Here’s an old advertisement I got from Uncle Phil; ours, however, was a two-door model, we think. I seem to remember the car as having a lighter blue in the blue parts, like one of the photos below; but I may be confusing it with the Edsel that replaced it.

This one could use a little restoration. You may think this a small car for a family of seven, but none of us were very big at that time, ranging in age from 7 to 3 1/2.

Take a look at those cool headlights! Thanks to Uncles Phil and Carl for helping me figure out the make and model of this car.

Since I don’t remember the exact dates of any of this, I’m not sure exactly what happened next. I think we drove to Bridgeport or New Haven where my father would be working as a National Guard Advisor, and he reported in. Then we looked for a house to rent. They found a dark green duplex, two-story, with one very large bedroom in the front that could be divided into a boys’ side and a girls’ side, a couple of blocks from the beach and our school could be seen from the back door. I think they probably went to a used furniture store for beds and such. AND, because Brother #1 was sick (not seriously, but he was pretty miserable, poor little fella) Daddy brought home a color television! Since we had basically had no television for two years (very little was broadcast in Germany then and of course, it was all in German) this was a very exciting development for all of us. I think we stayed in Milford, our new home, long enough to get a bit settled and for my parents to enroll four of us in school (the twins had turned 5 in October so they hadn’t started kindergarten in Germany, but the principal of Point Beach School decided they could begin in January). Then we headed for Maine and Christmas.

There was no I-95 then as far as I know; we started out on the Wilbur Cross Parkway and continued on various turnpikes, parkways, and US and state routes. Some of the more outstanding advertising structures (a giant Indian, a giant steer, and so on) would become familiar landmarks over the next seven years, but they were all new to us then and to be pointed out and exclaimed over. At last, we paid our dime and crossed over the Piscataqua River, and we were in Maine.

There’s one family story I must tell that we think took place on this trip. We were only about 30 miles from Bowdoinham, near Exit 9 on the Maine Turnpike at Falmouth, when we saw a lone airman in uniform hitchhiking north. My parents briefly considered picking him up, but decided our car was really too crowded with kids, luggage, and Christmas presents. Not long after we arrived at my grandparents’ house, there was another homecoming – my uncle Carl, who was then an airman stationed at Pease AFB in Portsmouth, NH. Ayuh. He was the hitchhiker we had passed by. My mother always said, “If we had known it was you, we would have made room!” But he hasn’t held it against us.

Ah, Christmas in Maine at Grammie and Grampie’s house! My memory is that we actually stayed there, though we had our own little house up the road. In addition to Carl, my aunt Kate was still at home since she was still in high school, and my bachelor (at the time) Uncle Dick lived there as well. There were still two large bedrooms free upstairs, and since the house boasted no central heating, crowding in together could help keep you warm. The kitchen stove, living room stove, and a small one in my grandparents’ room were the only woodstoves in the house as far as I know. Bricks and old flatirons were heated on the stove in the evening, wrapped in newspaper, and used to warm the beds and our chilly feet; we huddled under mounds of Grammie’s homemade quilts until we got warm enough to sleep. Aunt Kate had a pair of ski pajamas, or that’s how I remembered them; she assures me that they were really red flannel with white snowflakes, made by my grandmother, in place of the kind you could buy in stores which cost $3.77 in the Sears catalog.

But what of cold? It was Christmas! I don’t remember any of the presents I got that year, though I’m sure I enjoyed them at the time. I recall a few we gave – the cuckoo clock brought from Germany that played “The Last Rose of Summer” on the hour in Grammie’s living room for many years; and the smoked dried German sausage my parents had smuggled in. I think perhaps we had Christmas dinner at my aunt Celia’s farmhouse on the Ridge. I know it was great to be there, to hear the grownups talking and telling stories, to see the cousins (all older or younger than I was), and most of all for me, to have such a wide choice of reading material! I had been sadly deprived during those weeks of moving and travel, and now it was all here – the children’s books from my mother’s childhood, (this may have been when I first read Little Women), the green-bound set of Dickens in the hall bookcase (I never got beyond the first few scary pages of Great Expectations until I was in my 20s!), Grampie’s Life magazine and Westerns, Uncle Dick’s Argosy, True, and Field and Stream. I dipped into them all.

We didn’t talk a lot about homesickness in my family. Our parents took the line that wherever we were together was home, and avoided complaining about any place we lived, at least where we could hear them. But I know it was a special Christmas for all of us, to be at home in Maine again with all our loved ones nearby.

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 13

2010-12-14T17:52:00.002-05:00

(A busy couple of days past means I’m a day behind, but hope to be caught up by the end of the night.)

One of my blogging friends, LutheranChik, has just returned safely home to Michigan after a trip to California. LutheranChik is a great champion of Michigan, its food, crafts, and tourism, so I’m dedicating this post to her and her beloved state. Patricia Polacco, author and illustrator of many excellent children’s books, is a native of Union City, Michigan (a Michigander!) who has returned there after many years away. Her author website makes good reading and so does this Christmas story from her family history, An Orange for Frankie. Get the book if you can, for as you can see the illustrations are beautiful.

I chose two very different songs for this story: “Christmas Train” is a rockin’ good number from Carey Bell, featured on Alligator Records Genuine Houserockin’ Christmas compilation; “This Old World” is a more reflective song by the group of folksingers gathered as the Golden Ring Singers.

Since the 13th of December is St. Lucia’s day in Sweden and Swedish-American communities, back in 2008 I recorded a section from Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, telling of Karl Oscar and Kristina’s “Christmas in the New Land” near Taylors’ Falls, Minnesota. For some unfathomable reason, the films made from these books by Jan Troell are not available on DVDs that will play in most US players. (For a lot of money, you can get Region 2 copies, which you might be able to play on your computer or if you have a multi-region player.) However, you can still read the books. For many years we’ve been driving through (and sometimes stopping in) Lindstrom, Minnesota, which has a water tower shaped like a Swedish coffee pot , a statue of Karl Oscar and Kristina, a Swedish bakery, and whose yearly festival is called “Karl Oscar Days.”

Here are Karl Oscar and Kristina, with American and Swedish flags. Kristina is looking back to Sweden.

One of Sisterfilms’ great experiences during high school was performing in the Christmas Revels in what proved, sadly, to be its last year in Minnesota. The theme that year was Scandinavian and she sang several Swedish and Finnish songs. I can’t recall if they used “Julafton,” recorded by the Revels Chorus of Houston on a combined Russian/Scandinavian recording, To Drive the Dark Away. Another version of the same song is done by the Lund Cathedral Boys’ Choir and called “Goder Afton.”

Individual Files for Mac Users

Intro Dec 13 2010 Surprise 1 Surprise 2 An Orange for Frankie

Intro Dec 13 2008 Surprise 1 Surprise 2 Christmas in a New Land

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

December 13 2010 December 13 2008

Ye Who Now Will Bless the Poor….

2010-12-13T16:05:00.003-05:00

(Today’s writing prompt is Volunteer/Charitable Work. I’m focussing on one activity that was very important to our family for many years.)

On the first Sunday in Advent in the early 1980s, you would probably find our family making an emergency stop at Snyder’s Drug Store on the way to church, to buy a package of ornament hooks. In the early years of the Wreath of Love program in the TRUST Church Group, the organization supplied a plain wreath to each church, which was to be decorated with small construction-paper cards. On the green cards, the outline of a tree waa on the front with someone’s first name written on it. On the red cards, a stocking with a name. Inside, three Christmas ball shapes with the description of a gift written on each – the green cards might have a wish for a sweatsuit, a comforter, a radio, or a pair of Velcro-fastened sneakers; the red ones might be wishes for candy, cookies, cologne,or even a stuffed animal. These were all wishes from residents of two local nursing homes. These homes, unlike many in the Twin Cities, were not affiliated with any of the major denominations, and TRUST helped provide a chaplain for them. The residents, some of whom had no close relatives and most of whom were on Medicaid, had some simple wishes they could not fulfill on the $40 a month left to them for necessities and small luxuries. So each year the TRUST churches would distribute these cards among their members and gifts would come rolling in. I was the coordinator of this program at my church for many years – until we left town. It was one of the most satisfying parts of Christmas for me and my family, and for many other church members.

The program did not always exist in that way. As editor of the church newsletter, I’d spent several years putting in the yearly article requesting a variety of generic gifts for the two homes’ residents, and always wondered a little – what if, for instance, all the people who brought in gifts brought slips and eau de toilette, and there were elderly men getting nothing? Someone else must have considered this and come up with a brilliant solution. The chaplain and social worker would go to each resident and develop a wish list of three large and three small gifts (staff members would choose gift ideas for those who were unable to communicate any wishes) and the church members would be asked to buy one from the “Tree” card and one from the “Stocking” card for each resident, wrap and address the package, and bring it to church for pickup in time for the nursing home Christmas party.

The increased personalization of the giving process made all the difference – from the very beginning, all I had to do was announce that the cards had arrived, and I’d have to hightail it out of the sanctuary to beat the stampede of members and their children eager to get a card. My responsibility (besides hanging the cards on a wreath, which custom disappeared within a few years) was to note who had taken which card, make sure all were distributed, and make sure all the gifts came in safely and on time. There was never a serious problem with any of it. In fact, when other churches couldn’t get rid of all their cards or when new residents arrived at the last moment, we could always be called upon to take a few extra cards. (To be fair to the other churches – being a United Church of Christ congregation, we did not have any denominationally-run homes as most of the other churches did, and which they supported in similar ways.) Well, our one problem was that sometimes people would not be able to stand getting just one gift and would buy all three items the person had asked for. Not a bad problem to have.

It was always interesting to see how people made the choice of “their” resident to buy for. Sometimes it was just the name – if the resident shared your name, or the name of a favorite relative, of course you’d want to pick that one. Other people looked at the inside of the cards to see what gifts were asked for, sometimes with a view to getting a bargain (“Comforters are on sale at Penney’s this week, I can get a nice one there….”) and sometimes because it would be fun to look for the item, or the wish list suggested a kindred spirit. One friend, a historian, was quite tickled one year to be able to purchase a subscription to a Civil War history magazine for “his” resident. There was great competition for the stocking cards (these gifts were to be approximately $5 and under) among the children of the church, and great pains were taken in selecting and wrapping these gifts. The adults, too, delivered beautifully wrapped presents, which piled up in the minister’s office over the next couple of weeks until he could hardly reach his desk. They too took great care to find the right gift. I recall one dear friend, now gone, who looked all over town for a pair of blue Velcro tennis shoes. After finally being successful, she somehow found out that the person who wished for blue tennis shoes was blind and unable to communicate, and the social worker who made up the list just thought “Blue would be nice.” (This did not discourage my friend, who continued to be a loyal giver to the Wreath of Love.)

We moved away five years ago, and I handed the Wreath of Love to a friend who is still coordinating it today. She’s probably checking her list right now to make sure all the gifts are in. Over the years, one or perhaps both of those small nursing homes closed; the relationship now is with a larger home which also has a small daycare, so in addition to presents for older people, we now have some cards for children – for each child, someone chooses a book. It’s one of the best-functioning little programs I know and I hope it goes on a long time. Indeed, we ourselves found blessing.

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 12

2010-12-12T22:00:00.002-05:00

Tonight, in honor of my Minnesota connections who are dealing with the aftermath of a big snowstorm, one more Minnesota memoir, of a somewhat more recent vintage. In fact, it tells about Christmas of 1984, a day I remember quite well (see yesterday’s Memories post for the reason.) Colleen Kruse is a Minnesota radio personality and stand-up comic who is very funny, but has her serious side too. And indeed as she says, Mickey’s Diner is still there: here’s a picture. I have to admit I’ve never been.

It’s all too easy to forget the people – some well-paid, most not – who work on Christmas to deliver babies, plow snow, drive buses and taxis, and keep the convenience stores and diners open, and provide many other amenities that make our lives better. Dave Carter’s song “American Noel” won’t let us forget. It’s one of my favorites, which I first heard on the album Wonderland (issued to benefit a Western Massachusetts foodshelf program). I recently bought Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer’s album American Noel which also contains more great original songs as well as some lovely and unusual versions of more familiar carols. Either would be a great addition to your Christmas music library.

For a more child-friendly story, try Merry Christmas, Strega Nona by Tomie de Paola from my 2006 stories. The song that goes with it is “’Twas on a Night Like This,” (sometimes known as the Star Carol; the tune is the Carol of the Italian Bagpipers mentioned in the story.) You can go here for more information.

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Intro Dec 3 2006 Surprise Merry Christmas, Strega Nona

December 12 2010

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December 12 2010 December 3 2006

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 11

2010-12-11T17:26:00.005-05:00

Tonight’s story, a memoir, also has a little bit of family history connected with it as well as some interesting political aspects. It is an excerpt from “The Victorian City in the Midwest,” by Harrison Salisbury, first published in Growing Up in Minnesota (University of Minnesota Press, 1976) and reprinted in Christmas in Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society, 2005).

Harrison Salisbury (1908-1973) was born and grew up in North Minneapolis in a now-disappeared neighborhood of nice homes called Oak Lake. Its heyday was 20 years or so before his birth. By the time Harrison was born, the wealthy had moved south, and his father, a bookkeeper for a bag factory, could afford to live there with his wife, two children, a boarder and a servant (as of the 1910 census). The Salisburys lived at 107 Royalston Avenue. I was surprised to find that this street still exists, although 107 seems to be a parking lot; the area is completely given over to industrial and warehouse/commercial buildings now, and is just north of Glenwood Avenue near a conglomeration of freeways. (You can see for yourself if you type the address into Google Maps.)

In the memoir, Salisbury and his sister are taken to Holtzermann’s department store – the official name was Holtzermann’s Chicago Store Company. (Chicago seems to have been added for glamour.) Forty or so years after Salisbury’s World War I-era experiences there, Onkel Hankie Pants and his sister (oddly enough, as close in age as were Salisbury and his younger sister Mary) were taken to Holtzermann’s by their father at Christmastime also. Post-World War II, the store offerings seem to have recovered some of their magic, or at least that’s the way my husband and his sister remember it. My sister-in-law still treasures a large and beautiful ornament that she wheedled her father into buying for her at Holtzermann’s (and he was not a man given to impulse purchases.)

While looking for more information on Holtzermann’s, I discovered many interesting facts about Jacob D. Holtzermann – both the elder and the younger. The elder Holtzermann, born in 1869 in Piqua, Ohio, held the patent on Holtzermann’s Patent Stomach Bitters, a preparation intended to aid digestion (and which may have contained alcohol) but which is now mostly known for the collectibility of the bottles it came in. He and his brother Louis came to Minneapolis in 1887 and opened the store. It’s not clear whether Jacob died young, but he does not appear in the most recent censuses available; instead there is a younger Jacob D. Holtzermann, born in 1902, who is either the son or nephew of the first Jacob D. It is this Jacob D. Holtzermann who owned the store when my husband was a child. He graduated from the University of Minnesota, studied in Geneva and Munich, and received a master’s in International Law from Harvard – and then came back and ran the store. He made numerous trips to Europe on buying expeditions – I’ve never seen someone who showed up so often in the New York Passenger Lists on Ancestry.com – and remember, this was all on ships.

Whether because or in spite of his cosmopolitan outlook, Holtzermann was a staunch isolationist in the years leading up to World War II, and one of some influence, since he owned a local isolationist paper, The Beacon. But unlike some America Firsters, he was not an anti-Semite. A Lutheran, he belonged to a local organization called the Roundtable of Christians and Jews (and this meant something, because Minneapolis was a very anti-Semitic city in those days). When Charles Lindbergh was making speeches which might have been open to interpretation as anti-Semitic, he wrote to the aviator urging him to repudiate such statements. Lindbergh did not. And, when Soviet Russia invaded Finland, he was at the forefront of a campaign to raise money to help the Finns; $150,000 was raised in a statewide drive (in addition to money that the Finnish-American community raised.)

In later years Holtzermann was active in Republican politics and attempted to gain the nomination for Senator in 1966; he died in 1969. The store closed a few years later (I don’t think it was there any longer when I came to Minneapolis.) The building still stands and apartments in it are advertised as being in the “Historic Holtzermann Building.” There are also numerous businesses, many of them connected to the Somali community. In Salisbury’s time, Holtzermann’s was on “Snoose Boulevard”, the center of a Scandinavian immigrant community.

I just want to mention, though it has nothing to do with Christmas, that Salisbury’s book, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad is one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read. It was totally riveting and I still remember it years after reading it; I highly recommend it. If the remaining 28 books of Salisbury’s oeuvre are even half as good they are worth reading as well.

Since Minneapolis is experiencing a big snowstorm today, and because of the German connection, I chose the song “Leise Rieselt der Schnee” (Softly Falls the Snow), sung by the Bielefelder Kinderchor sometime in the 1950s.

For something a little more child-friendly, try the December 11, 2006 reading, Cat in the Manger by Michael Foreman; you can find more information here.

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Intro Dec 11 2006 Surprise 1 Surprise 2 Cat in the Manger

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December 11 2010 December 11 2006

Nu har vi jul igen!

2010-12-11T14:56:00.002-05:00

(I’m pretty sure I’ve covered most of the traditions from my family of origin in the other posts, so this is going to be all about one tradition I married into.)

Nu har vi jul igen,
og nu har vi jul igen,
og julen varer ved til påske.
Nu har vi jul igen,
og nu har vi jul igen,
og julen varer ved til påske.

Now it is Christmas time, and now it is Christmas time, and Christmas lasts till Easter.

It’s Christmas Eve and the pork roast and ris à l’amande have been eaten, leftovers put away and at least the dishwasher is loaded. Now it’s time! We move the tree from its normal spot (currently in front of the picture window) into the middle of the room, being careful that the angel doesn’t get knocked off by the ceiling fan. Of course the presents must be moved too, some under the tree and some moved into another room for the time being. A braided rug made by my great-aunt Lida covers the cord from the tree lights to forestall accidents. After some explanation for anyone who is new to this ritual, we all hold hands and circle the tree. The bravest among us starts a Christmas carol and we walk around the tree; after one verse another song is begun and we reverse direction. We sing a mixture of religious and secular Christmas songs (“Up on the Housetop” seems to make an appearance every year) until somehow an unspoken consensus is reached – it’s really time now! We begin singing “Nu har vi jul igen”, going faster and faster, until we can’t go any faster and are all out of breath. Then, and only then, can we sit down and begin opening presents.

You may have seen this Scandinavian custom in Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander. If memory serves, the Swedes in their palatial home did a sort of conga line all through the house or at least the ground floor. We call it “dancing around the Christmas tree” even though it is more like walking and jogging. A few years ago my niece’s husband videotaped the event:

A couple of years ago, after we had introduced this custom to our Maine relatives, we went to City of Lakes for Christmas. We heard afterwards that our nephew and his girlfriend had made up their own version, the words to which went something like “I love you again and you love me again and you and I eat lots of pasta.” This custom came with Onkel Hankie Pants’ grandparents and great-grandparents from Denmark in the 1870s and 1880s when they came to America. I’m sure it will continue in our family for a long time.

The Only Thing I Want for Christmas (Is Just to Keep the Things That I’ve Got)

2010-12-10T17:18:00.002-05:00

Eddie Cantor sang this during the Depression, and this is one of the years I feel the same way. Oh, I like getting presents and I’m sure my loved ones will find some things to delight me. But what I’m most looking forward to this Christmas is to be celebrating with family, in our own warm home, thinking of our daughter at her first Christmas Eve services as an ordained minister (she’s got three of them!); and the cards and calls from relatives and friends far away.

My brother and his son, I think, 20+ years ago.

My parents “yust went nuts” at Christmas. They always seemed to figure out which of the things we asked for were really what we most wanted, and then they always came up with something we didn’t know we wanted. The year I was 10 I got a clock radio for Christmas. This meant not only that I was old enough to get myself up in the morning, but also allowed me to listen to the DJs and radio programs I wanted – Murray the K on WINS, Oscar Brand and Make-Believe Ballroom on WCBS. (We were only about 70 miles from NYC so we had a wide choice of media.)

One year we all got US Army mess kits.

I’m sure my siblings each have at least one special present they can remember.

When we became parents, we fell into all the usual traps, such as having to put things together at the last minute and buying too many advertised toys that were soon forgotten. But there were many happy moments on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. Observe:

Cordeliaknits and SonShineIn with some of their presents; the hats came from South America, brought by their aunt.

Our best Christmas present ever, Sisterfilms, Christmas Day 1984.

The play food was a big hit!

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 10

2010-12-10T16:37:00.002-05:00

I am short on time today, as I’m going to a play tonight, and not just any play. It is It’s a Wonderful Life, at the Chocolate Church in City of Ships, and starring (at least I think so) Onkel Hankie Pants as Clarence Oddbody, AS2. So, I chose a picture book which I bought last year for a buck or so at the Christmas Tree Shop. It’s called Harvey Slumfenburger's Christmas Present. John Burningham, born in England in 1936, both wrote and illustrated the book.

I’ve loved the song that goes with it ever since I first heard it on the late lamented Minnesota Public Radio Morning Show. It’s “Jogging Along with My Reindeer” by Seamus Kennedy from Goodwill to Men.

For a slightly longer story, you can go to December 10, 2008, for Appalachian writer Rebecca Caudill’s A Certain Small Shepherd. One Appalachian carol (written by John Jacob Niles, based on a tune fragment he heard in the mountains), one African-American carol, and one American carol whose provenance I’m not sure of are songs to go with the story.

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A Certain Small Shepherd

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December 10 2010 December 10 2008

Friday Five: Who or What Lifts You Up?

2010-12-10T13:04:00.002-05:00

Mary Beth at RevGalBlogPals tells us: “My colleague, an Italian, just walked by my door singing, "Jingle Bell Rock." At the end of each line, he punctuated it with a clap!

"Jingle bell, Jingle bell, Jingle Bell rock (*clap!*)"

I'm not sure he knows any more of the song than that, but he sure does sound happy. :)

Another colleague and friend, who has been away from our workplace for several months, has returned on a part-time basis. She danced into my room this morning with a big, "HEEEEY!" and hugged me.

I love having people and things in my life that lift me up. This morning started out with icky things running through my head: I've been sick, I feel like a zombie; my husband's been sick; all the world's news seems to be bad, Christmas is coming and my proverbial goose is not nearly fat! and work deadlines are looming. And yet, and yet.

These two friends have brought a smile to my face today. My spirits are lifted.

So, for today's Friday Five: What lifts you up when you are low or troubled? Who helps you remember that you are not alone, it's getting better all the time, etc.?

Your five responses can be people you know, people you DON'T know, music, places, foods, scripture, surprises, something you do for someone else. It could be a pair of slippers. It could be a glass of water.

Bonus: Do you like the song "Jingle Bell Rock?" If you do, who do you prefer to hear sing it? Bobby Helms, Brenda Lee, Mean Girls, Stephanie Smith, Chubby Checker, Billy Gilman, Brian Setzer, Hilary Duff, Thousand Foot Krutch (I am not making this up), oh, there are so many more! I am currently partial to my friend Marco.”

1. My almost-daily phone calls from Sisterfilms. Even on the days she’s ranting about some minor crisis, it makes me happy that I’m the one she chooses to share it with. Of course, it will be even better when she is here in person at Christmas – and after!

2. The goofy faces, constant attempts to communicate, and unconditional love of our dog Rusty. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s so pretty and we get so many compliments on our walks.

3. Christmas cards! I’ve got to get busy and send some out, since we have now received the first four real cards (not ones from people we pay for something like the dentist and the paper carriers). I love the little notes, the printed Christmas letters, the photographs, all of it – not to mention how interesting it is to see what people choose. Today, from our train-buff friends, we got the Sunset Limited, and from a cousin who’s moved to the Southwest, a beautiful card of an adobe church with luminarias.

4. Special for today: looking forward to seeing Onkel Hankie Pants as Clarence the Angel in It’s a Wonderful Life. I will know most of his lines by heart since we’ve been running them over the last few weeks in the brief time he’s at home between work and rehearsal. On these occasions I bask in reflected glory.

5. Getting back to blogging. I’ll be doing three blogposts today – this one, Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime, and the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories. It keeps me busy and although the quality varies, the writing practice is good too. The Memories one is especially good for eliciting memories from some of my relatives who read them.

Bonus: Sure do, almost any version, and I have about 80 of them. (The number 87 comes up, but some of those are Jingle Bells where the album title has Rock in it). Although the original version brings back memories, my favorite is Ozzie Kotani’s instrumental version from Hawaiian Slack Key Christmas.

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 9

2010-12-09T16:49:00.002-05:00

Tonight I rectify a great injustice. Yes, I must confess it: I have never before read a Betsy-Tacy story. It follows that I never read them to my children either. And yet, I lived for three years just 25 miles from Mankato, the “Deep Valley” of the Betsy-Tacy books, and many more years in Minnesota, home of Maud Hart Lovelace. I found this story in Christmas in Minnesota, published in 2005 by the Minnesota Historical Society. The story is cited as coming from Down Town: A Betsy-Tacy Story, published in 1943. I’m not sure if this is the same as the book Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, published the same year. There is a Betsy-Tacy Society which has restored the homes of Maud Hart Lovelace and her best friend, on whom the stories are based. Above is a picture of the first Betsy-Tacy book with the original cover illustrations by Lois Lenski (she wrote as well as illustrated and I may be reading one of her stories later on.)

There aren’t many good songs about Christmas shopping; “Pretty Paper” and “Shake Me, I Rattle” are a bit maudlin for my taste, and there is a new song called “I Broke My Arm Christmas Shopping at the Mall” which does not fit the spirit of our story. So we turn to the classic “Silver Bells,” in its first recorded version by Bing Crosby and Carol Richards.

For those who want something a little more substantial, in 2006 I read In Clean Hay by Eric P. Kelly; a good song to go with it is “Wsród nocnej ciszy (Amid the Silence)”, a Polish carol sung by a Polish choir. You can read more about them here.

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This Time of the Year Is Spent in Good Cheer

2010-12-09T11:47:00.002-05:00

(From “Drive the Cold Winter Away,” as sung by the Baltimore Consort, among others.)

It will probably give anyone who doesn’t know me in real life a false impression to say that most holiday gatherings I’ve attended with pleasure centered on family or church. Onkel Hankie Pants’ parents and his uncle and aunt alternated for many years hosting a New Year’s Eve gathering which centered on a festive soup with dumplings (could not locate a recipe or picture) and was more fun than almost any New Year’s Eve party I’ve attended, except perhaps the Y2K party we had at church at the end of the millennium. Another yearly event I looked forward to was the Caroling Party – we would meet at church and divide into two or three groups to go caroling to our shut-ins, reconvening for a potluck supper. In early years the entrée of Sloppy Joes was furnished, and I still add a little bit of brown sugar to my Sloppy Joes as the church lady who made them taught me.

When we joined our church in City of Lakes, there was a core group of “church ladies” who were about the age I am now. They were very welcoming to us younger women who were beginning to join, and I especially remember my first Christmas Tea – an annual event which at that time was held in one of the nicer homes nearer the lake. It featured musical entertainment, delicious treats, a silver tea service (and coffee too of course), and beautiful decorations, and was held on a weekday afternoon. I was able to attend because I was going to night school at the U and OHP was temporarily unemployed. Over the years the tea was simplified and began to be held in the church lounge. Then came the Christmas that the “church ladies” realized that, in their late 70s and 80s, they really didn’t have the energy to do this any more. A few years before, I had begun reading a story as part of the tea entertainment, and I didn’t like to see it go. A few friends and I decided to continue the tradition, with a few changes – it became an Epiphany tea held on the Sunday afternoon nearest Epiphany. One friend with a Martha Stewart eye decorated the tables, and for as long as she could, a long-time member who was nearly a recluse the rest of the year came and played the piano for our carol singing – her playing was much better than our singing even though the singing wasn’t bad. Later my sister-in-law took over the piano. I always enjoyed the tea, but it describes my personality pretty well to say that my favorite part was the day before, when two or three friends and I would gather to make the cream-cheese frosted sandwich loaf which was the traditional main dish for the tea. (Here’s a photo of one that looks a lot like ours:

(Since my grandnephew, an expert garnisher at age 10, was nowhere near, we did not have the radish roses, which I have to say look a little Hallowe’eny to me; and we had only three layers, one of egg salad, one of tuna salad, and one of cream cheese mixed with cucumbers.) After our labors we enjoyed the leftovers and scraps along with whatever other goodies were available, and tea out of a Peter Rabbit teaset like this;

Three or four good friends is a fine party in my opinion.

You Can Put Some Rømmegrøt * and Rosettes on Your List

2010-12-09T10:52:00.002-05:00

(This rather obscure line was the only one I could think of about Christmas cookies. It’s from “I’ll Be Home for Lefse” by Leroy Larson and the Minnesota Scandinavian Ensemble – get it from the UffDa Shop, where else?)

Fancy cookies like rosettes (pictured above, about which more later) were not a part of my childhood, although I do recall my mother making pinwheel cookies, which always seemed like a lot of work to me. I mostly remember the sugar cookies which were slightly different from the year-round variety and were cut in shapes and iced or sprinkled with colored sugar.

Mama also made year-round a filled cookie with a soft sugar cookie dough; at Christmas time she was apt to fill these with mincemeat. I remember also my grandmother’s soft molasses cookies (and though not a cookie, the popcorn balls she made for the grandchildren each year – she had 27 of them, and since my eldest cousin is, I think, 12 years older than I, several great-grandchildren too. Those popcorn balls were the tastiest I’ve ever had.) One of my aunts used to make and distribute around the family some of the no-bake cookies that featured cereal, coconut or maybe chow mein noodles I bought some at a cookie walk a few weeks ago and was instantly transported back to childhood.

Rosettes are a deep-fried cookie requiring special equipment and made by nearly everyone in Minnesota. I well remember my first sight of them, at a Christmas concert at one of the Lutheran churches in the small town where Onkel Hankie Pants and I lived when I first came to Minnesota. I had seen klejner (the Norwegians call them fattigmand or “beggarmen”)

and brune kager (these don’t look quite right, my mother-in-law’s were larger and diamond-shaped) the previous Christmas, when my new mother-in-law had sent them to Berlin for our first Christmas. But rosettes don’t travel well. So I was amazed and delighted to see them on the cookie plate at the after-concert reception. Even though it’s been many years, and I’ve even made some myself, these fragile beauties still amaze and delight me.

I love to eat cookies, but I’m not so fond of making them. It seems that once one has prepared the dough, that should be enough – but then there’s the rolling, shaping, dropping, and the multiple cookie sheets, the short baking time…it’s a good thing that Sisterfilms loves baking cookies and will be here soon to take charge. It’s much more fun baking with her than alone. Before then, I might make some cookies to take to my niece’s caroling and cookies birthday party; probably these, which I’ve been making ever since early in our marriage when I had a chilly kitchen and no electric mixer, because they use melted butter and can be stirred by hand.

Cardamom Cookies (Kardemomme Kager)

1 egg

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup melted butter

1/2 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon crushed cardamom seeds or ground cardamom

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 cup flour

Mix ingredients in order given. Refrigerate dough one hour or more. Roll into balls and flatten down to the size of a fifty-cent piece.

Bake on a greased and floured cookie sheet in a preheated 350 degree oven until lightly browned on the edges. (Not very long! Try six minutes and see how it goes depending on your oven. However, I have overbaked these and as long as they aren’t burnt they will still taste good.) To me, the taste of cardamom is especially Christmasy. The recipe came from a book called Wonderful, Wonderful Danish Cooking by Ingeborg Dahl Jensen.

*Rømmegrøt: is a Norwegian dish which contains no rum. For that you want Rombudding, which I’ve had once. I’ve never tasted Rømmegrøt, which is basically cream – sour or sweet – cooked a long time with a bit of flour. You can find one recipe here, or Google to take your choice. Not for the lactose-intolerant!

Voices Singing “Let’s Be Jolly”

2010-12-09T09:52:00.003-05:00

I’m just not a party person; I’m like my mother and grandmother in that. That’s why I don’t find many photos of parties in my files.

When we were young children, I think our parents must have gone to some parties at the NCO Club, as least I do remember an occasional babysitter. When my father was a First Sergeant on our first tour in Germany, he would sometimes invite some of the men in his unit to our home, but I think those were more like family dinners than parties.

There must have been several holiday parties at school during my elementary years, but the only one I remember was in my fifth-grade year, when it happened that my teacher was Jewish – although that has nothing to do with the story. This was during the era familiar to many baby-boomers, when overcrowded schools had some children going to school in the morning and others in the afternoon. That happened for me in sixth grade, but in fifth grade I got lucky and was assigned to an all-day class made up of both fifth- and sixth-graders.

This story does not reflect well on my ten-year-old self, but it taught me several lessons. I’ll just tell the story and let you find the lessons in it yourself.

One of the features of our holiday party was that we drew names for a Secret Santa gift exchange. Now there was one girl in our class who, while she wasn’t bullied in school, was not well-liked. Brenda was not an unpleasant person, rather self-effacing, but she had greasy hair, unfashionable clothes, and a bad complexion – and sadly, these things meant that no one wanted to be her friend. So I wasn’t pleased when I drew her name in the gift exchange. Rather mean-spiritedly, I chose a bottle of iridescent lavender nail polish, which I thought was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. (It was like this, but not as high-quality.)

Brenda loved it. She was really pleased with her gift and wore it frequently for the rest of the school year. I don’t remember her being in school after that year, and I suspect now that her family was poor and somewhat transient.

And what did I get? There was a small group of sixth-grade boys (they probably went on to play football) who were the Alpha Males of the classroom, and one of them drew my name, as I could tell from their covert glances as I opened my gift. Unwrapping several layers of aluminum foil, I came at last to a handful of shelled peanuts. And what’s more – some of the peanuts were real, but some were rubber.

I’ll continue the discussion of Christmas parties in the December 9th “Grab Bag” post.

They Know That Santa’s on His Way

2010-12-08T21:41:00.002-05:00

(Note: This is the memory slated to post on December 6, a day without Internet for me. I hope to be caught up by tomorrow.)

It is Christmas Eve, 1952, early in the evening, for my brother, not quite 2, and I, 4 1/2, are still up. The new twins are sleeping, and some aunts and uncles are visiting with my mother. Daddy is in Japan, and will soon be going to war in Korea, but my brother and I don’t understand this. We are excited about Christmas. Suddenly there is a knocking on the window and a face appears out of the darkness – a face with a big white beard and crowned with a red hat with fur trim. We know who that must be. Yet one of us is frightened and hides behind the big armchair, while the other laughs excitedly at this visit from Santa. But which was the frightened one and which the brave? It seems to me I used to know, but now I can’t remember. Perhaps the fact that I can’t recall whether Santa came into the house suggests that I was the scaredy-cat. This is my first memory of Santa Claus.

I don’t recall much about “commercial” Santas in my childhood, other than the advertisements for Coca-Cola and other things that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post or other magazines we took. I can’t recall ever visiting a department store Santa, although when we lived on military posts there may have been Santas at the NCO Club parties – more about one of those in the next post. Santa, to us, was a spirit or “ghost.”

As such, Santa (and we) adhered to some very specific rules. On Christmas Eve we hung our stockings (Daddy’s big olive-drab Army socks) on the backs of chairs. I don’t recall ever having a fireplace or worrying about the lack of one. Then we went to bed earlier than usual, after leaving a snack for Santa. No cookies and milk for our Santa – he liked pie and coffee, we knew.

We could get up as early as we wanted on Christmas morning – 4:30, 4:00, maybe even 3:30! (To this day I can’t sleep late on Christmas morning and usually wind up waking everyone else up.) We would wake our parents, and then came the tantalizing minutes while they went to the living room and the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. Thus fortified, they called us in to attack the stockings. Santa does not wrap presents; he puts them in the stockings, or underneath if they do not fit. Santa always left us a thank-you note for the pie and coffee. It was written in a special “ghostly” handwriting – very shaky like the handwriting of a very old person. By the time we were done exclaiming over our gifts from Santa, and had reached the tangerine or orange in the toe, our parents were ready to face the day (I suspect Mama had already been out in the kitchen getting the huge turkey into the oven). Then my father would begin to hand out the tree presents, one at a time, with everyone watching each other unwrap the gifts from our parents and others, and those we gave.

I don’t know a lot about Santa in my mother’s childhood home (and still less of my father’s), but I do remember her saying that they always heard reindeer hooves on the roof and could see the prints in the snow on Christmas morning. Was it just Grampie throwing snowballs? If so, he missed out on a baseball career, because it would take a powerful arm to throw snowballs onto that roof. Here’s a picture of their house, just before it was torn down to make room for I95. The rooms had tall Victorian ceilings and the children nearly all slept on the second floor.

Raising our own children in the city, Onkel Hankie Pants and I did take them to see Santa – for many years, in conjunction with the Christmas show of animated figures at Dayton’s downtown store. Polaroid photographs were sold of the occasion; the children’s reactions to their Santa visits varied, as you can see below.

One year when Sisterfilms was small, we discovered the Santa at Bachman’s, the giant florist/nursery/gift shop whose lilac packaging is a familiar sight in the Twin Cities. I would readily believe that this was the Real Santa. And there was no hard sell – bring your own camera, take your own picture.

Santa’s duties are shared in our home now, and even the grownups and the dog get stockings. In some way, even when I’m staggering around early in the morning filling stockings, I still believe in the Santa Claus spirit my parents taught me about.

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 8

2010-12-08T17:04:00.003-05:00

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of major department stores. But I think we lost something important when so many American cities’ iconic local department stores were subsumed into Macy’s. I think Macy’s (the original, Thanksgiving Day Parade, Miracle on 34th Street Macy’s in New York City) lost something too. It’s not special any more. But wait, isn’t this supposed to be storytime? Where’s this rant coming from? Well, back when the new Governor of Minnesota’s name was on the big store on Nicollet Mall, one of our yearly family rituals was to take in the Dayton’s 8th Floor Auditorium Holiday Show. We often did it on Christmas Eve morning, with some sort of treat afterwards – when SonShineIn was small, it was lunch at Kramarczuk’s in Northeast Minneapolis, later when more children and church responsibilities meant a more hectic day, simply hot chocolate and a special cookie sufficed. There is still a show at what is now Macy’s, but Sisterfilms tells me that it just isn’t the same. Twenty to thirty years ago, each year’s show was different, often based on a classic children’s book. Sometimes it tied in with the Christmas show being put on at the Children’s Theatre Company; some of the same designers worked on both.

One year the show was How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and that was the year I bought the book – the same edition shown in the picture, although our copy is pretty worn now. I can’t remember if I had read the book in childhood – I was beyond the picture book stage in 1957 when it was published – and I’m not sure I saw the first broadcast of the TV special as it took place December 18, 1966, and I may not have been home from college yet. (Television was a rare thing at my alma mater. I believe they brought some in to the dorm lounges on Election Night, and I only remember one person on my freshman floor who had a television in her room.) I’ve never seen the Jim Carrey movie, even though I picked up a copy at a yard sale, because that man’s face gives me the willies.

As he often did, Dr. Seuss has a message deftly hidden amidst all the fun and wordplay in this book. It’s one we can all use since the Recession Grinch has scaled down our material expectations of Christmas. (Every dark cloud has a silver lining!)

The well-known song from the TV special, “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch,” has become a favorite of rock, pop, and jazz artists for inclusion on their Christmas albums. So I chose something a bit different – an instrumental played by All the King’s Tubas.

Now, if you are already completely Grinched-out and feeling Grinchy about the Grinch, perhaps you’d like to join Jim and Della once again in O. Henry’s Gifts of the Magi. You can go here to read more of the history of the story. This story has been dramatized and adapted numerous times, but to my knowledge no one put it to music till the Squirrel Nut Zippers.

Individual Files for Mac Users

Intro Dec 8 2010 Surprise How the Grinch Stole Christmas

Intro Dec 8 2007 Surprise Gifts of the Magi

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

8 December 2010 8 December 2007

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Days 6 and 7

2010-12-07T21:10:00.003-05:00

I had not intended to fall behind so early in the month, but a defunct surge suppressor left me Internet-less all day yesterday. So tonight there are stories for both the 6th and 7th.

Baboushka and the Three Kings, a retelling of a Russian folk tale by Ruth Robbins, won the Caldecott Medal in 1961 for its illustrations by Nicolas Sidjakov. This ensured that it would remain in print and on library shelves, so it’s not hard to find and you really should look at the pictures. The story is suspiciously similar to the Italian legend of La Befana (which was retold and illustrated by Tomie de Paola years later). Archetype? Cultural migration? Who knows. It’s a lovely story.

For music to go with it, Sergei Prokofiev’s Troika, from the Lt. Kije Suite, gives a musical picture of a sleigh or carriage pulled by three horses. There are many performances available; I chose one by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

Then, the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir sings Noch’ tikha, noch’ svyata (Ноч Тиха, Ноч Свята) – Silent Night in Russian.

For tonight, a story about a time when Santa didn’t want to climb into that old sleigh again: The Year without a Santa Claus by Phyllis McGinley. This has nothing to do with the television special, as far as I know. Phylis McGinley was a very popular writer of light verse in the 1950s. Her poems dealt mostly with the trials of the suburban housewife, always with a humorous touch, and were published widely in mass-market magazines (which actually published poetry and short stories back then.) I found a song by country singer Marty Stuart that seemed to go well with the story: Even Santa Gets the Blues.

For the alternative story on December 6, here’s one recorded in 2007, which I recall reading more than once at church on Christmas Eve. Mr. Edwards Meets Santa Claus is a chapter from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie; here is the cover from the original edition, and then a photo of the set of paperbacks I bought a few years before our first child came along.

Because of the television series, many people think that the Little House on the Prairie was in South Dakota, but in fact it was in Kansas (as this chapter shows, mentioning towns there). I actually have a friend who comes from that part of Kansas and she has confirmed that the winters are as described. At the time I recorded this story, the Pa's Fiddle Project either had not begun or was in the planning stages, and I couldn’t find a solo fiddle playing a Christmas carol. An Americana Christmas, with Vassar Clements, Norman and Nancy Blake, and others, was the closest I could come with their lovely performance of Cradle Hymn (Away in a Manger) to the tune Afton Water.

Once during the 24 days of stories, I give myself a break by using a recording of a piece read by the author. In 2008 it was Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory. For me, hearing Capote’s voice helps me get into the world he and his cousin inhabited. Since the story is about that much-maligned confection, fruitcake, I chose Seamus Kennedy’s singing of the humorous ditty, Miss Fogarty’s Christmas Cake, which is followed by an instrumental piece called The Cook in the Kitchen. His album Goodwill to Men is a wonderful blending of humor, raucous celebration, and quiet spirituality which I highly recommend.

Individual File Links for Mac Users

Intro Dec 6 2010 Surprise 1 Surprise 2 Baboushka and the Three Kings

Intro Dec 7 2010 Surprise The Year without a Santa Claus

Intro Dec 6 2007 Surprise Mr. Edwards Meets Santa Claus

Intro Dec 7 2008 Surprise A Christmas Memory

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

December 6 2010 December 7 2010 December 6 2007

December 7 2008

And if you are looking for the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories, I'll be posting three days at once tomorrow!

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 5

2010-12-05T21:10:00.002-05:00

Tonight there’s something a little different – it’s a memoir, or part of one. Lillian Smith, the author of such classics of civil rights literature as Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream, wrote this memoir of her childhood Christmases that goes a long way to explain how this Southern white woman became a crusader for the civil rights of all people.

A good song to go with it is Almost Day, the Seeger family’s version of Leadbelly’s song On a Christmas Day.

The song is associated with Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) and some say he wrote it. Ledbetter may or may not have worked on a chain gang like the Christmas guests in our story, but he definitely served time in Southern prisons. Afterwards, he made part of his living entertaining at children’s parties until he was discovered by folklorists John and Alan Lomax.

If you’d like something a little more antique, try this story that I recorded in 2006, the chapter “The Festival of St. Nicholas” from Mary Mapes Dodge’s Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates. At the time, the only Dutch carol I could find was King Jesus Hath a Garden, sung by the Clare College Choir. Here’s another version by the Wells Cathedral Choir, in an arrangement by John Rutter.

Individual Files for Mac Users:

Introduction Dec 5 2010 Surprise Memory of a Large Christmas

Introduction Dec 5 2006 Surprise The Festival of St. Nicholas

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

December 5 2010 December 5 2006

Merry Christmas Power Company

2010-12-05T18:14:00.002-05:00

(The post title is from Neal and Leandra’s song, Boswell’s Lights, which appears on their album Angels and Fools. Highly recommended.)

Putting up outdoor Christmas decorations was not something we did much of in my childhood. Most of the time we were living in rented or military housing, and that may have had something to do with it. When we lived in Connecticut, my parents admired the colonial houses with one simple candle in each window – as do I. Here’s a picture of one from our neighborhood:

Unfortunately, although I would like to do this, I suspect our dog Rusty would make short work of them as soon as he saw a squirrel outside.

We did enjoy an occasional eveing drive to see decorations others had put up, and this continued once Onkel Hankie Pants and I formed our own family. For the many years we celebrated Christmas Eve at my in-laws’ home, the short drive home with sleepy children still awake enough to exclaim at the lighted houses on dark streets were a magical part of Christmas.

One year, after a few months of empty-nesting as our son was in his own apartment and both girls were in college on the East Coast, we got one of those inflatable snowmen and installed it on the front lawn with a sign reading “Welcome Home Sister Aimee and Little Nell.” (The “Sister Aimee” was a nod to Cordeliaknits’ newly-discovered, and now fulfilled, call to the ministry). They were both suitably embarrassed!

In our “new” house in Maine, we have sometimes decorated the three concrete lions in front with greenery or Santa hats. And since our house was built in 1951, it has a picture window through which our lighted tree can be seen all the way down the block.

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 4

2010-12-04T22:26:00.002-05:00

Sorry to be a little late tonight; I had a party to attend! Tonight we conclude Barbara Robinson’s classic, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

I think this was a play poster.

One Christmas song that always has me tearing up a little is “Away in a Manger” as sung by the cherub choir. Joan Baez does a good job too.

For those who’d like something a bit different, I’m including a Zip file of the story from December 4, 2007: Deputy Sid’s Gift by Tim Gautreaux, a fine contemporary Southern writer. I always enjoy reading stories in a dialect not my own. My general plan of attack is merely to suggest the accent, rather than trying to mimic it perfectly (which I can’t do in any case). If you’re from Louisiana, let me know how well I did on this one. I’m only including the Zip file because the story was 4.06 MB too long to fit the file-hoster’s protocol.

For Mac Users:

Intro Surprise Chapter 6 Chapter 7

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

December 4 2010 December 4 2007

An Old Christmas Card

2010-12-04T20:43:00.002-05:00

Have you noticed I’ve been trying to title these posts with a line from a Christmas song? Jim Reeves was a favorite of my father’s so this is doubly appropriate.

I remember that cards were sent and received in my childhood home, but I don’t remember much about them. I think my mother picked out a package or two, addressed and signed them in her lovely Palmer-method cursive handwriting, and that was that.

At some point, probably when we moved to Germany after my sophomore year in high school, I started sending a few cards of my own. For a long time I bought cards from UNICEF. This continued during the first few years of our marriage with the addition of input from a spouse. Given that I had attended three high schools and a college, and Onkel Hankie Pants one of each, plus our friends from jobs and the Army, plus our relatives – soon we had over a hundred cards to send, and both of us felt that we needed to do a bit more than just sign our names. A personal note updating the recipients on our year’s activities was called for. By Christmas of 1976 this seemed an insurmountable task, so I decided to write one of the dreaded Christmas letters. When OHP saw my effort, he felt he could do better, and he did – writing a humorous verse that hit the high and low spots of the year and was a big hit with our correspondents. He continued doing this sort of thing for several years; subsequently we sent some “straight” letters and have finally settled down to a sort of newspaper format, now published in February as the Groundhog Day Gazette. So, once again I’m sending Christmas cards at Christmastime.

We’ve had some creative cards come into the house over the years, too. We appreciate every greeting we get, and we do like the Christmas letters. And here is a sample of one card we always look forward to (it’s a different scene every year)

My brother’s family does this; in the card above, Cordeliaknits is also present, as she was celebrating Thanksgiving in Maine that year.

Now I’d better get at those cards!

Hang a Shining Star upon the Highest Bough

2010-12-03T19:47:00.002-05:00

Today’s writing prompt from the Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories is Christmas Tree Ornaments. I’ve already talked quite a bit about them in my first post on the Christmas tree. After all, a tree without ornaments is too minimalist for most of us.

I’ not sure if any of the German ornaments, or any others, from our childhood survived to be divided up among us five children when our parents died. Five children, moves hither and yon, and after retirement and settling back in Maine,cats and dogs, probably took care of most of them. I remember a lot of those little glass ones from Germany – was there once a teapot? A gingerbread house?

As I said, our tree always had a star on top. But when I was looking for a treetopper in Berlin, I found an angel with a wax head. She held a tiny candle and had gold paper wings. She ended up gracing our trees for over twenty years – maybe even thirty. Sadly, first her head was broken off while she was on display for an ornament show at church; it was reattached with a pin, but one year the poor angel fell apart and the head could not be found. We experimented with various treetoppers for a few years until Cordeliaknits made a beaded angel with hand-knitted, fluffy white wings.

That first Christmas in Berlin I did a lot of shopping by mail, One thing I bought was the first issue of a new set of star ornaments from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I believe the star, gold over sterling silver, cost $12.50. We continued to buy the stars each year until we had 25. By that time the price had increased to $50 and the Met was no longer commissioning a star design from a living artist, but using elements from items in its collection. So we stopped. Here’s a photo of this year’s star (I couldn’t get all the bits of the silver snowflake out of the picture). Apparently it now costs about $120 or more, as you can buy both the star and snowflake for $240. Too rich for my blood! We have bought or been given other “collectible” ornaments over the years, but we haven’t started any official new collection.

Most of our ornaments now were bought one by one, or sometimes three by three – as the children got them for Advent calendar presents or in their stockings. Others were gifts from friends and family who traveled or made them, and of course there are the precious ones made by little hands at day care or kindergarten. A few years ago, I attempted an inventory, and also got one boxfull photographed. Here are a few of them.

This was Sisterfilms’ first ornament – received the night before she was born. (Yes, she is a Christmas baby.)

A Christmas Eve tradition for many years was going to the Dayton’s Auditorium Show first thing in the morning. For a while they sold these fancy glass ornaments based on whatever story was being portrayed – this was Beauty and the Beast. Of course, I bought this at the after-Christmas sales for 50 or 75% off.

Our daycare provider Faye made up for my lack of craftiness with many nice projects. There’s another angel like this with pearlescent cellophane instead of copper; I’m not sure which girl made which (but they probably remember.)

Big Bird was a favorite of SonShineIn’s. As a small child he had a life-size cardboard cutout of him in his room, and I would be Big Bird’s “voice” as they chatted at bedtime.

Cordeliaknits was very proud of being in “Kindergarten Readers” and making this long word chain to hang on the tree.

It wouldn’t be a Danish Christmas tree without some woven heart baskets.

What do you remember about Christmas ornaments?

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 3

2010-12-03T18:55:00.002-05:00

Tonight, chapters 3, 4, and 5 of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. The picture is another of the many covers the book has gone through in nearly 40 years. Sisterfilms said she had forgotten how bad the Herdmans really were – burning down a house and then considering doing it again to get more doughnuts! A good song for tonight, I thought, would be “Rebel Jesus” as sung by Jackson Browne, backed by The Chieftains.

If three chapters are a bit too long, or you’d prefer something just a bit more adult-oriented, I also have links to the story I recorded for December 3, 2007: A Hint for Next Christmas by A. A. Milne. No Winnie the Pooh here, but the young man in this piece has some of the same hapless quality as the bear.

Individual Links for Mac Users

Intro Dec 3 2010 Surprise Dec 3 2010 Chapter 3

Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Intro Dec 3 2007 Surprise Dec 3 2007

A Hint for Next Christmas

Self-Extracting Zip Files for the Rest of Us

Zip for Dec 3 2010 Zip for Dec 3 2007

Christmas Dinner Then and Now

2010-12-02T22:42:00.002-05:00

Christmas dinner at my parents’ house, 1980

When I was a child, our Christmas dinner was almost exactly the same as our Thanksgiving dinner. We opened with celery sticks stuffed with cream cheese and olives (a favorite of my mother’s) and shrimp cocktail (a relic of mess hall Thanksgivings), and then enjoyed roast turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, and a plethora of vegetables: sweet potatoes, squash, turnip, cranberry sauce, and some more everyday vegetable for the kids who were picky eaters. Creamed onions often made an appearance. Dessert was pie, and lots of it – apple, pumpkin, and mince were the three constants, with a couple of other varieties usually added. The one food, other than cookies (to be discussed later this month) which was special for Christmas was stuffed dates, the nearest to sugarplums we could devise. My father and I would make them by inserting half a walnut into a date and then rolling it in confectioners’ sugar.

Did we eat these foods because the magazines in the supermarket told us we should? Or were they really part of our heritage? As we were New Englanders of primarily English and Scotch-Irish stock, I think it was the latter. For the most part, our holiday dinners were a slightly stripped-down version of the dinner my great-great-grandfather described having for Thanksgiving in 1879: “…turkey, chicken, baked chicken pie, plumb pudding, pumpkin pie.” The plum pudding tradition seems to have died out, although one of my father’s aunts (the other side of the family) made one at least once that I can remember. The mince pie hangs on in New England, or at least in Maine, and also in Old England, although they make them much smaller there.

My Christmas table this year, as for most of the past 38 Christmases, will be quite different from my childhood feasts. Hors d’oeuvres may vary from year to year, but the entrée is always a pork roast stuffed with apples and prunes. When it’s available, we may also have medisterpølse, a Danish sausage flavored with allspice. I will need a meat-grinder and sausage-stuffer for my mixer before I can tackle making my own.

I have pretty much given up on the traditional red cabbage, since I’m the only one who will eat it and the smallest cabbage available still makes way too much for one person. Dessert will be ris à l’amande – rice cooked in milk, flavored with almond, and mixed with whipped cream. Some people use a cherry sauce with it, but we prefer raspberry.

There will be a whole blanched almond hidden in the pudding, and whoever finds the nut in his or her portion has to keep it hidden until all are finished eating, and then claim the prize.

All this is eaten on Christmas Eve. For the first twelve years of our marriage we did various things on Christmas Day; sometimes going to a relative’s house for a turkey dinner, and once I did a roast beef and Yorkshire pudding dinner in our tiny house. Our Christmas Day became even more of a festival when Sisterfilms was born that day in 1984. Our Christmas dinner still varies – often it’s been a simple chicken and rice casserole, last year it was more of a brunch with aebleskiver. There was a

brief flirtation with ice cream cakes from Dairy Queen, but for some time now Sisterfilms’ birthday cake has been a bûche de noël; now she mostly makes it herself. I’ll be sure to take a picture this Christmas.

So, this Yankee has joined the Scandinavians, very grateful that the Danes don’t eat lutefisk.

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime: Day 2

2010-12-02T20:16:00.003-05:00

It seems I’ve been reading The Best Christmas Pageant Ever forever – or at least since SonShineIn outgrew Santa's Beard Is Soft and Warm.

Barbara Robinson’s tale was already a well-known book by that time, having been published in book form in 1972, and earlier in McCall’s Magazine. I certainly read it to all three children. It was too long for me to read at church on Christmas Eve, although one year when I was out of town another member presented an abridged version. I’ve even seen a theatrical version at Lakeshore Players in White Bear Lake. (Minnesotans: a theater in Chaska is presenting it this season.) I’d avoided recording it, though, just as I’ve so far skipped Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, because of the length (80 pages). Last year, I decided it could be read over a three-day period, so here tonight is the first installment.

Barbara Robinson is best known for this book, and I had not known until today that she wrote two other books featuring the Herdmans.

The song I chose to go with tonight’s reading is Nuttin’ for Christmas as performed by Art Mooney and His Orchestra with vocal by Barry J. Gordon.

(My introduction, recorded last year, was incomplete.) Written by Sid Tepper and Roy C. Bennett, Nuttin’ for Christmas was a major hit for several artists in 1955, and this version made it to No. 6 on the Billboard charts. Tepper and Bennett also wrote at least one other Christmas song, the Rosemary Clooney hit Suzy Snowflake, as well as most of the songs for Elvis Presley’s movies

Some years, if the timing is right, I also record a Chanukah story, so for tonight, the second night of Chanukah, you can also choose to hear The Peddler’s Gift by Maxine Rose Schur.

It’s come to my attention that the self-extracting Zip files don’t work on Macs, so I am including links to both the unzipped and Zip files.

Intro 2 Dec 2010 Surprise Chapter 1 Chapter 2

Self-Extracting Zip File for December 2 2010

Intro to Chanukah Story Surprise 1 Surprise 2 Surprise 3

The Peddler's Gift

Self-Extracting Zip File 15 December 2006 (original date)

O Christmas Tree! (December 1 Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories)

2010-12-02T11:53:00.003-05:00

Onkel Hankie Pants, SonShineIn, Cordeliaknits and Sisterfilms bringing in the tree, Bowdoinham, 1987.

GeneaBloggers, an association of genealogical bloggers, has posted an online Advent Calendar of Christmas Memories, with writing prompts for each day. I don’t have a genealogy blog yet, but decided to do the posts anyway. I’m starting a day late so here is the memory for December 1.

(I like to admire the tree in its undecorated state for a little while after its installation.)

By the time I was born, post-WWII, the home Christmas tree was a firmly established custom in America, and I think this was the case for my mother as well. In great-great-grandfather Smith’s diaries, however, I find no mention of a tree in the home; at least in Downeast Maine, in the late 19th century, it seems to have been more of a community event that may have taken place at church or a village hall. We find further evidence of this in the Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House” books and in the hilarious adventures of the Peterkins, in one of which they decide to have a tree and have a hard time with this new-fangled activity.

Here’s our Christmas tree from 1951 at Fort Hancock, New Jersey.

Our childhood trees came from various places, depending on where our military family happened to be spending Christmas. If we were at home in Maine, we could go out to the woods behind our house and cut one of our own. The Southern Christmases, in Savannah, Georgia and El Paso, Texas, are lost in the mists of time for me and I don’t remember what kind of tree we might have been able to find there. Most of the time we were far enough north to get our preferred balsam fir. (Tannenbaum, after all, means fir tree.) The tree then, normally came from one of the local tree lots wherever we were. We would put it up a couple of weeks before Christmas, and my mother insisted on taking it down December 26th.

Here are my cousins David and Janice with their Christmas tree, in 1947.

Colored glass balls and some of the special German ornaments in various shapes like houses, birds, etc. were the chief decorations on our childhood trees, and there was also tinsel. At the top of the tree was a large tin star with a hole in the middle in which was inserted one of the big colored Christmas lights. These were also strung around the tree – those large, multicolored, 1950s lights, and also bubble lights. I remember that some people had a decoration, known as “angel hair,” which I believe was made of fiberglass and which was not approved of in our home as being too dangerous.

Gifts from our parents and other family and those we children gave were wrapped and put under the tree early, to tantalize us and tempt us into shaking and wondering (and my father was the worst of the lot at this!) My mother recalled that in her childhood, gifts that arrived in the mail from grandparents and such had to be left in their postal wrapping under the tree, so that there was a dual unwrapping on Christmas morning.

Me and my brother on Christmas morning, probably 1952 when my father was in Japan and soon to be in Korea. The twins are only two months old so not in the picture.

A lot of things changed when I married into a Danish-American family and we also changed with the times and formed our own traditions. Our first Christmas tree as a couple was a small pine tree that I bought in a Christmas tree lot in Berlin and conveyed by taxi to the Apartments-Hotel on Clayallee where I had rented a little apartment for Onkel Hankie Pants’ Christmas visit. I’ve never cared for those long-needled pines as Christmas trees, as they don’t suit my eclectic decorating style, but it was what I could get. Even the hotel receptionist made a face at that tree! I decorated it with German ornaments I’d bought at the drugstore in Dahlem that I passed on my way home from work each morning, and with some Danish ornaments my new mother-in-law had sent, including a string of Danish flags – a new custom to me.

I don’t have a photo of the Danish flags, but here’s a nisse made of yarn.

Onkel Hankie Pants’ first Christmas, with a little bit of the tree and his Bedstefar’s feet.

Dancing around the tree – a custom I’ll write about later on this season. If you enlarge the picture you can see the Danish flags.

There were no lights on our tree for the first few years – initially, because it seemed wasteful to buy German lights that wouldn’t work in the States, and then because our first American Christmas together coincided with the beginning of the first “Energy Crisis” – remember that? Eventually we relented and now will probably begin replacing our old lights with LEDs. We also have never had tinsel, because of fears for the safety of the cats and children (I wouldn’t put it past Rusty to eat some, either.) Instead we had old strings of colored glass beads that had come to us from Onkel Hankie Pants’ aunts in Chicago. Each year we have acquired more and more decorations so that now they must be rotated or we occasionally have more than one tree.

Our tree in City of Lakes, 1988, and one of the cousins who celebrated with us.

We now get our tree from our own woods in Bowdoinham, but most of the years we lived in City of Lakes we bought one – from the Y’s Men for a long time, later from the dear departed Lyndale Garden Center’s “swamp trees” section, one extravagant year at Bachman’s for $65, and a few times from a cut-your-own farm in the Taylor’s Falls area. No matter where it comes from, I’d have to agree with folksinger Jim Henry -- “It’s just not Christmas till we’ve got that tree.” And, since I love children’s choirs singing Christmas songs in German, here’s one from Bavaria singing “O Tannenbaum.”

But wait, there's more!

2010-12-01T19:43:00.004-05:00

Here's a link that will give you the whole folder for December 1, 2010, in a self-extracting Zip file (faster downloading).

And for a more "grown-up" story, here's a link for my reading of "Dancing Dan's Christmas" (see December 1 2009 blog for more information about the story, etc.)

Auntie Knickers’ Advent Storytime Begins!

2010-12-01T18:21:00.002-05:00

It sometimes happens that life interferes with our best-laid plans, and that’s what happened last year around this time; a thing as small as a broken tooth kept me from fulfilling my commitment to bring stories for the Christmas season on my blog. This year, I’m planning to do better. I will be telling about a story every day, but also making available a reading (by me) of the story with a link to a file-hosting service. (The service is free to downloaders, but limited, so if you want to download the stories, I’d advise doing it immediately rather than saving them up to get all at once.)

Today’s story is a silly one that shows the dangers of taking things too literally. Merry Christmas, Amelia Bedelia was the next-to-last of the Amelia Bedelia series to be written by the original author, Peggy Parish. (After her death in 1988, her nephew took over the series.)

The Amelia Bedelia books were favorites when we wanted a simple, silly story. Yet, there is no book so silly that it cannot start a discussion. Amelia Bedelia has problems in her work because she doesn’t understand common idioms and takes her employer’s orders too literally. She also has a good heart and a fund of common sense, so when things go wrong, she generally is able to have everything turn out for the best.

When I was researching a bit about Peggy Parish, of course one of the first Google hits was a Wikipedia article. It made me a bit more suspicious of Wikipedia than I had been, since it claimed that Parish got her idea for Amelia Bedelia from time spent in Cameroon. None of the other biographies,those from her publishers or the Greenville Library one referenced above, mentioned such a stay, and indeed, it’s hard to see when she would have fitted it in. According to Greenville, Parish actually got the idea from the literal-mindedness of her privileged students at the renowned and expensive Dalton School in New York City.

Most kids now don’t grow up with a full-time maid in the house, so reading this story would also be a time to talk a little bit about domestic service, especially if, as we do, you have grandparents or great-grandparents who entered the work force by that route. If you can recall some of the stories they told, or if you are fortunate enough to have such relatives still living, even a silly tale like Merry Christmas, Amelia Bedelia can be a springboard for teaching family history.

The introduction I’ve recorded was written for Sisterfilms. There’s also a little surprise included in the folder you’ll get with the link below. Meanwhile, here’s a video posted by a pretty good guitarist/singer of the song, “Serving Girl’s Holiday.”

And here are three links that will take you to the downloads:

Introduction Story Surprise

You’ll want to save them into a Downloads folder and then open them; I think they should play in either Windows Media Player or iTunes. Enjoy! (And let me know if you have any trouble, I’m new at this.)

Friday Five: Pie-ola!

2010-11-26T09:35:00.002-05:00

Songbird at RevGalBlogPals writes: “We had three pies planned for a six-person Thanksgiving dinner, and there was some anxiety on my part about the need one had for gluten-free crusts. I worried, you see, that we would have pies no one liked, or run out of the one "good" pie (you know, with gluten). There was a last-minute trip to buy more pie crust that failed (sold out!). Then early on Thanksgiving morning, the phone rang. It was my neighbor, saying she wanted to bring something over. It was a beautiful maple pumpkin pie!
Now we were all set.
Later in the day, the doorbell rang unexpectedly. Someone said, "It's a pie delivery!"
And sure enough, it was a relative stopping by, and he had a pecan pie for us. Pie-ola!!!
Please answer these five questions about pie:

1) Are pies an important part of a holiday meal?

Yes, especially at Thanksgiving. In my childhood, pie was also an important part of Christmas and Easter, but lacking my mother’s skill with piecrust and for other reasons, here’s what we have at Christmas: ris à l’amande with raspberry sauce, and later cookies, on Christmas Eve; and bûche de Noël for Sisterfilms’ birthday on Christmas day. And at Easter, if I’m at home, citronfromage (a very fluffy dessert with lemon, egg white and whipped cream.) By the way, it appears that Songbird’s family started out the day somewhat under-pied, as my grandmother’s rule was one pie for each person at the table. Yesterday at my aunt’s house we had: pumpkin, apple, mince, chocolate cream, coconut cream, butterscotch cream, maple walnut, pecan (for the seven diners) and when two more friends arrived they brought a “scrumpkin” pie (I was too full to try it) and a sweet potato/orange pie.

2) Men prefer pie; women prefer cake. Discuss.

My father used to say, “Cookies are for children. Cake is for ladies. Pie is for men.” I certainly like all three far too much, but given my druthers I’d choose pie.

3) Cherries--do they belong in a pie?

Why not? Especially in February. I’ve also had and enjoyed date pie and pineapple pie and just yesterday heard about Jell0 pie. I guess there’s not much that can’t be improved by putting it in a piecrust.
4) Meringue--if you have to choose, is it best on lemon or chocolate?

Lemon. Both because I will choose lemon anything over chocolate anything on any given day, and because to me, whipped cream is what goes on chocolate pie.
5) In a chicken pie, what are the most compatible vegetables? Anything you don't like to find in a chicken pie?

It depends on the season. In fall and winter, I usually go with carrots and potatoes. But in spring I make “chicken pie primavera” with asparagus, new peas, little carrots, new potatoes – whatever looks good. I would not like to find beets in my chicken pie. Or anywhere.

Come-ona My House!

2010-11-18T19:41:00.002-05:00

In the late 1980s, we were beginning to feel that our house was a little too small again. With one child in junior high, one in elementary school, and another in nursery school, and both of us working, it seemed a good time to look around. We went to quite a few open houses before visiting a 2 1/2 story house with ugly siding near SonShineIn’s school.

With some help from a couple of agents, we were able to sell our house and, on one of the hottest days of the year, move into our new one. It was actually the oldest house we’ve ever owned, having been built in 1905 (the first three were all built between 1910 and 1920). Although we still had only one bathroom, each of the children now had a private room and there were a couple of extra spaces on the third floor for excess books, etc. The nearby school was a K-8 magnet with an open school philosophy, and after a very brief sojourn at another open school, Cordeliaknits was reassigned there for third grade. When Sisterfilms started school it was a foregone conclusion that she would also be going there, so she is the only member of our family to have spent the first 9 years of school in the same building.

Here’s a picture of the three in the backyard. The older two delighted in dressing Sisterfilms up in outlandish outfits.

When we sold the house to move to Maine, it was to a contractor who had already spent several years fixing up the duplex next door. Five years later and finally on the market (just sold a couple of weeks ago), the house is unrecognizable from the outside, and only a few vintage features on the first floor remain to remind us of the house we lived in. (here’s a photo I snaffled in case the link is no longer active)

We did a fair amount of entertaining in that house, beginning with hosting the annual post-Showboat party for our church, continuing with my 40th birthday party, Thanksgivings and Christmases, confirmations, graduations, and children’s birthday parties. So here’s the song: Come-ona My House, sung by its composer, Ross Bagdasarian (later famous as David Seville of Chipmunks fame) and his cousin William Saroyan, the novelist, short-story writer and playwright of My Name is Aram, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, The Human Comedy, and The Time of Your Life. Of course, the song was made famous by Rosemary Clooney.

The House I Live(d) In

2010-11-17T23:01:00.002-05:00

As the 70s drew to a close, we were expecting a second child and did not see how we could fit another into Tiny House, so we began thinking about moving. One evening on his way to choir practice, Onkel Hankie Pants was detoured from his usual route and spotted this house for sale by owner.

Once again, we have a photo of the house taken after we left it – the new owner wanted it painted blue and reroofed in grey, whereas the house we lived in was white with a green roof. We were excited to be moving into a house with three bedrooms and a double parlor plus a dining room, with a kitchen big enough for a table. When we moved out of this house 8 1/2 years later, I was just shy of 40 and had lived in this house longer than I had lived in any one place in my life. We brought two baby girls home to this house on the corner. Our older two children had many friends in the neighborhood, there was a park nearby, and we could walk to church if we got up early enough.

This neighborhood was rich in economic diversity. There were a number of houses much nicer than ours, and others smaller and more modest. Across the street was a family in scattered-site public housing, while a few doors away lived Garrison Keillor’s sister. So I thought an appropriate song for our third house would be “The House I Live In,” with words by Lewis Allen (real name Abel Meeropol, the man who adopted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s sons after the execution) and music by Earl Robinson. I like Paul Robeson’s version.

Bless This House

2010-11-16T20:25:00.002-05:00

When we left Waseca for the bright lights of City of Lakes, we sold our house there. Since we had no actual jobs at first, we house-sat over the summer for a family friend in Home of the Coen Brothers. The most exciting occurrences of that summer were SonShineIn’s first steps and Bunter’s six-week vacation. The man we were house-sitting for didn’t want the cat in the house so she was living in the attached garage. She wandered off one day and after six weeks of worry and fruitless searching, she wandered back, a thinner and wiser feline. We think she probably got lost in the nearby golf course.

After the summer, we rented the bottom half of a duplex in a nice neighborhood to which we would return some years later. Our upstairs neighbor was briefly famous in City of Lakes for painting the Weatherball blue. The old Northwestern National Bank building downtown had a large ball mounted on top, which changed color with the weather forecast. (Natives will recall the jingle, the rest of you will have to go here and click the link under the picture. The colors were normally red, white, or green, but Phil, in an excess of post-breakup bravado, somehow climbed up and painted it blue. Someday when the Strib’s complete archives are digitized you could look that up, but for now you’ll have to take my word for it.

In those days, if you sold your house and made a profit, you had eighteen months to buy a more expensive house or you’d have to pay capital gains tax on the profit. So after 9 months or so in the apartment, we began looking for a house we could afford. We saw a lot of not-so-great houses, and then we found Tiny House.

This photo was taken some years later; the house used to be grey, the stair rails were black metal, and the front garden was not as nice when we lived there. In all fairness to Tiny House, it was in good condition, having been owned by a carpenter who’d done a lot of fixing up. It was in a nice neighborhood near the river, with convenient bus service to both Capital City where OHP was working, and Da U, where SonShineIn and I were going to school – he Montessori, I library. But it was very small – the first floor, not including the three-season porch, was 400 sq. ft., and the second floor even smaller. On the other hand, there was a nice back yard with a garden space which the former owners had enriched with free manure from the Ag School, and where OHP grew some beautiful roses. Here’s a picture of SonShineIn and the roses:

Some of my best memories of this house are reading to SonShineIn. When we moved in, he was just over 2 years old. Before we left that house we had read all the Little House books (I’d started with Little House in the Big Woods, which is written at a level most 3 or 4 year olds could understand, but since I had a whole set of the books he would not rest until he heard all of them.) Not only that, I read him Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. However, we did not neglect the more age-appropriate picture books; here’s a photo of us enjoying Robert McCloskey’s Maine story, Burt Dow, Deep-Water Man.

We lived in Tiny House happily for two years, but when Cordeliaknits was on the way we had to look for more spacious quarters.

One of the nice things about Tiny House was that it was only about a mile and a half from OHP’s parents’ house. So for tonight’s song, I’ve chosen a song that was sung at their wedding in 1946, Bless This House. I’d always associated this song with the 1950s as I heard Perry Como sing it so many times on Christmas specials back then, but in fact it was published in 1927. Englishwoman Helen Taylor wrote the words and her friend, Australian May Brahe, the music. The first recording was by John McCormack (and you can find that on YouTube), but, in the absence of a video of Bryn Terfel’s rendition, I’ve chosen another Welshman, David Keith Jones. I especially like the variety of houses the videographer highlights in this piece.

Our House, No. 1

2010-11-15T21:21:00.003-05:00

Considering what to blog about this week, I thought first about doing a Tuneful Tuesday of songs about houses. I came up with five songs – which would make a very long blog similar to last week’s about World War I – so I decided to have one song per day with something about one of the five houses we’ve owned during our marriage.

Here’s a photo of our first house, in Waseca, Minnesota. The photo was taken in 1990, long after we left it, but the only exterior difference is that the owners were apparently replacing or repairing the porch steps. We bought it for $10,000 in the fall of 1973 when Onkel Hankie Pants was teaching English in the local high school. I did not see the house before purchase, as I was in Maine visiting my parents after being discharged from the Army; we needed a place to live and there were few apartments available, so we became homeowners a bit sooner than we’d expected. The location was good, only four blocks from downtown with its library, small supermarket, Ben Franklin and the Busy Bee Café. The church we ended up joining was only two houses away, which was convenient in those days when we were still young enough to sleep late on Sunday mornings.

Not every song I came up with for this week is necessarily relevant to the houses we owned, but this one is:

This song captures a bit of what it was like for us, having only been together about 14 out of our first 64 weeks of marriage, to be making our first real home together. We had no money; OHP’s salary that first year of teaching was less than he had been making in the Army. Our furniture consisted of cast-offs from OHP’s parents and other relatives. Our glassware came from Shopko, except for a couple of heavy glass beer mugs that came from a gas station. (And we don’t really even like beer!) Our dishes would be very cool now, but in the early ‘70s when earthtones were in fashion, the white and turquoise modernistic dishes from Mom’s basement were just something to keep the food off the tablecloth.

The song talks about “two cats in the yard,” and we did have two cats in that house, but not simultaneously. Finn, a ginger cat, was our first. Sadly, he was hit by a motorcycle and died soon after we brought SonShineIn home from the hospital. That was a day of ups and downs, as it was also the day we learned that my parents were surprising us with a visit – the only time they were able to come to Minnesota, but then, a first grandchild is pretty special. A few weeks after Finn’s death, one of my coworkers at the library offered us a kitten born in a corncrib on the farm where he was renting a house. Bunter, a grey tabby (and female despite the name) lived to be 17 and moved with us to all our subsequent homes except the one we live in now.

I could tell some more stories about our first house – there was a cistern in the basement! Heat came up through a large floor grate in the middle of the living-dining room, and we sometimes had to bring the car battery in to keep it warm overnight since we didn’t have a garage. But that’s enough for today.

Nearly Wordless Weekend: World War I Film

2010-11-13T23:28:00.003-05:00

Here's the trailer for the film I watched last night. I'll review it on my other blog, http://queuingup.blogspot.com, tomorrow evening.

Friday Five: Winter’s on the Way

2010-11-12T11:10:00.002-05:00

SingingOwl at RevGalBlog Pals tells us: “The picture is of my back deck after the first heavy snow last winter. I am looking at the weather forecast with a sigh of resignation. You see, our glorious unseasonable stretch of sunny days is ending and rain mixed with snow is in the forecast. The weather guy actually said, "This is probably the last nice day till spring, folks..." So, I am trying to plan ahead. Help me out, please. When it is cold outside:”
1. What is your favorite movie for watching when curled up under a wooly blanket?

I think I’ll have to go with Bell, Book and Candle with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak.
2. Likewise, what book?
Mostly, I read new books. But I do like to go back to Jane Austen from time to time. And I have a book (actually a series for each season) called Winter: A Spiritual Biography which is nice to dip into – it’s an anthology of writings about the season.

3. What foods do you tend to cook/eat when it gets cold?

Beef stew, bean soup, pie, gingerbread, pot roast…you get the picture.
4. What do you like to do if you get a "snow day" (or if you don't get snow days, what if you did)?

In that case I’d really take the day off – bake or cook only what I wanted to, do some reading, watch a movie. Enjoy the snow with the dog.
5. Do you like winter sports or outdoor activities, or are you more likely to be inside playing a board game? Do you have a favorite (indoors or out)?

Inside, thanks. Board games are fun. We like Trivial Pursuit (I just got the “Lindbergh to Eisenhower” edition at a church sale, so watch out, Sisterfilms!), Scrabble, and Twenty-Five Words or Less. Cribbage can be fun too.

Armistice Week IV: A Pitiful List of Movies

2010-11-11T22:12:00.002-05:00

For a person who has two children who have studied film extensively in college, I’ve really seen remarkably few movies. I’m sure there were quite a few years where I may have only seen one or two. I’m trying to catch up via Netflix, but it’s a slow process when there are books to read and music to listen to as well.

My favorite World War I film so far is one I will blog about later on, in December, as it has a seasonal theme.

Lawrence of Arabia takes place during World War I and shows, at least from one point of view, how that conflict affected the Middle East in ways that continue to plague us today. I wish I had seen it on the big screen, but even on a television screen it is a stunning film.

I reviewed King of Hearts last year on my shamefully-dormant film blog, Queuing Up. It’s a rather ‘60s perspective on the war, but worth seeing.

My parents’ favorite movie was The African Queen, and it’s one of mine as well. I think perhaps my father saw himself as Humphrey Bogart and my mother as Katherine Hepburn. Set in German East Africa, the war at first takes a back seat to Bogart and Hepburn’s romance, but the scenes at the end where the African Queen engages a German warship are as tense and thrilling as any more traditional war movie.

I found several lists of World War I films, none of which seem to be definitive. So many books and films on World War I have come to my attention this week that I think I’ll take a couple of weeks and try to read and see as many as possible. I’ve already got Paul Gross’s film Passchendaele (I had to buy it as it wasn’t readily available otherwise) but haven’t yet watched it. A few others I’m planning to see, pending availability: A Farewell to Arms (I think I’ll go for Gary Cooper over Rock Hudson), All Quiet on the Western Front, Regeneration, Gallipoli, and All the King’s Men (not the Robert Penn Warren book, but a BBC production about the Sandringham Unit in WWI). I’m definitely going to read The Ghost Road and probably at least a couple more novels from the Guardian’s 1000 Novels list, as well as the John Keegan history when it arrives in the mail. Any suggestions for more?

Armistice Week III: World War I Books

2010-11-10T19:47:00.002-05:00

This week I’m blogging on Armistice Day and the Great War. Today, a few book suggestions for anyone who wants to read more about that war and its after-effects.

To begin with, you must read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. In this far-from-dull history of the war’s beginnings, Tuchman paints a picture of Europe on the eve of war which includes not only the salient political facts, but the atmosphere of the times. I’ve read this book two or three times at least in the last 45 years, and may do so again, although I rarely re-read books.

For a straight-out history of the entire war, I’m departing from my usual practice and recommending a book I haven’t yet read, John Keegan’s The First World War. Having read other works of Keegan’s, notably The Face of Battle, I feel confident in recommending it, and have just ordered a copy for myself.

Why should we read about this war? Well, you can get in ahead of everyone else who’ll be reading about it about four years from now when the centennial comes along. Seriously, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory shows us why. Fussell describes how the experience of the war influenced much of British, European and American writing for decades afterwards. I don’t read a lot of literary criticism these days, but I believe I will also re-read this book before long.

But perhaps you prefer fiction? When I looked at the Guardian’s list of 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read, Fussell’s thesis was borne out by the large number of these books (chosen by a group of British critics/reviewers) which dealt with the Great War. One of the classics, which I had not read until last year, is All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Here’s a link to my Goodreads review. This book has been filmed several times, but I have not seen any of the films yet.

Two American classics that I read so long ago I can’t really write coherently about them now are A Farewell to Arms (Hemingway of course) and John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers. Perhaps less well-known here is Englishwoman Pat Barker’s excellent Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road. I haven’t yet read the third book, which won the Man Booker Prize, but the titles will link you to my reviews of the first two. Wilfred Owen, one of the poets I posted about yesterday, is a character in Regeneration.

I must confess that much of my reading these days consists of mystery novels, but there is much to be learned from them as well. Anne Perry, famous for her Victorian mysteries, has written a five-volume mystery-espionage series set during World War I, beginning with No Graves as Yet. Charles Todd, Jacqueline Winspear, and Carola Dunn all have series that take place in the aftermath of the war – Todd’s and Dunn’s in the late ‘teens and early twenties, Winspear’s in the late twenties and early thirties but harking back to events of the war. Todd also has a new series featuring Bess Crawford, a nurse, which is set during the war. The series are all quite different from each other, so I’d advise trying one of each to see if you like it. I’ve enjoyed all three, but your results may differ.

Tomorrow: a few films of World War I.

Armistice Week II: Tuneful Tuesday - Songs of the Great War

2010-11-09T19:52:00.003-05:00

Continuing this week’s theme, here are some songs from and about World War I that I think everyone should hear.

It may seem odd that two of the greatest songs about this long-ago war were written many years after it ended. Australian singer-songwriter Eric Bogle’s songs, And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda and No Man’s Land (Green Fields of France) have been recorded by many other people. In the first video he sings And the Band…, which was written to commemorate the Australian troops who died at Gallipoli – NOT Winston Churchill’s finest hour. It’s often forgotten that the Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary in WWI (hence Lawrence of Arabia). Note, however, that the number of Australians who died is vastly inflated in this video – it was more like 8,000, which was plenty.

This version of No Man’s Land is unusual in that it’s sung in both English and German by Bogle and another singer named Wachol, about whom I couldn’t find any information. No embedding, click the title for a link. You can try one of the other videos for the complete English song.

If you are not familiar with the tunes mentioned in this song, The Flowers of the Forest and Last Post, here they are. Don’t play the first one if you hate bagpipes, though.

And I guess if you don’t like bugle calls, don’t listen to this one.

Well. That was really sad. But, going off to war, marching, and so forth, people often sing much more cheerful songs. One of the favorites of British troops in WWI was It’s a Long Way to Tipperary. Here’s the famous Irish tenor John McCormack, singing a song written by a British music-hall entertainer, Jack Judge. (You’ll see though, his grandparents did come from Tipperary.)

It seems to me I spent many happy hours as a child watching the James Cagney film Yankee Doodle Dandy, the biopic of George M. Cohan. One of Cohan’s most famous songs was Over There, celebrating America’s entrance into the war in April 1917. “Lafayette, nous sommes arrivé!”

And now, strictly for fun, one of the songs the soldiers really sang. As the singer notes, the many verses have “various degrees of suitability for family listening.” In other words, there’s something here to offend almost everybody. I love this Australian guy who has a lot of songs on YouTube.

I hope you have enjoyed these songs. Comments welcome, and do you have any favorite songs from or about the Great War?

Armistice Week I: Poems of the Great War

2010-11-09T18:59:00.002-05:00

As we prepare to celebrate Veterans’ Day on Thursday here in the U.S., it occurred to me that nowadays, the holiday’s original name, Armistice Day, is all but forgotten. (I think my British, Canadian, and Down Under friends still term it Remembrance Day.) This is not totally surprising, as World War I (also The Great War) did not affect the U.S. as much as it did Great Britain, Europe, and countries connected to them. Although over 320,000 Americans were killed or wounded in World War I, that’s a small number compared to over a million killed or wounded in World War II. In my own family, I can count on the fingers of one hand the relatives, some fairly distant, who served in World War I. In World War II, my father and several uncles served, as well as many uncles and cousins of my husband’s; my mother worked in a defense plant. I have seen the World War I draft registrations of my two grandfathers; my maternal grandfather was a married farmer with three children at the time he registered, and my paternal grandfather was 35 years old and had a tracheotomy, so both were exempt. I do have a photograph of Uncle George in his doughboy uniform. He was (Great-)Aunt Maude’s first husband and never made it to France, as he died of the flu epidemic at Camp Devens. Grampie’s foster brother, James McClellan,

had Canadian connections and joined the Canadian forces. Here’s a photo of him wearing his uniform, with my grandparents, aunt and uncle.

So what I know of World War I I know, not from family stories, but from history classes, books, music, films and poetry. Today (in lieu of Monday, when I didn’t manage to post), I have some World War I poetry to share.

I think my first experience of World War I was reading the poetry that sprang from it. Four poets in particular caught my youthful imagination – one Canadian, one American, and two British. All died during the war.

John McCrae was a Canadian doctor serving in Flanders (Belgium) when he wrote “In Flanders Fields’ in 1915 as a memorial to a friend and former student who was killed in the Second Battle of Ypres. He himself died of pneumonia in the field in January, 1918. This poem was almost immediately popular and is probably responsible for the custom of wearing a red poppy for Armistice Day.

American Alan Seeger was leading a Bohemian life in Paris when, on August 24, 1914, he joined the French Foreign Legion so that he could fight for France. He died in battle on July 4, 1916. His most famous poem, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” was published posthumously. It is read here by his nephew, Pete Seeger.

Rupert Brooke’s poems often speak of home, reflecting what must have been the thoughts of many British soldiers away from England for the first time (although Brooke had actually traveled quite a bit). His most famous poem, “The Soldier,” was sadly prophetic; he is buried on the island of Skyros in Greece. His death was hardly heroic (sepsis from an infected mosquito bite) but his poem stands as a song of love and gratitude to England.

Wilfred Owen (who is a character in the Regeneration Trilogy, about which I’ll talk tomorrow) was treated for shell-shock (what we now know as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and could have escaped further service in the trenches, but returned out of a sense of duty to the young men he led. He was killed one week before the Armistice was signed. His poems are shocking even today in their vivid imagery of the horror of war. ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ is one of the best anti-war poems to come from this or any war.

On Wednesday I will talk a bit about some books on World War I.

Almost Wordless Weekend: Why I Live Here

2010-11-07T23:27:00.008-05:00

On this grey November day, which turned into a very rainy November night, I need a few reminders of why we live here, so here are some pictorial ones.

We have some great parades! There are boat rides to be taken all summer long. Many days during the year, the sky is a beautiful bright blue. And pretty soon, instead of rain there will be snow. Sorry Blogger is not cooperating and I cannot arrange these photos better.

Wordless Weekend: The Mountain of Sweets

2010-11-06T22:47:00.001-04:00

Friday Five: It Is Well with My Soul Edition

2010-11-05T14:08:00.002-04:00

At RevGalBlogPals, Kathrynzj suggests:

“We lead privileged lives.

True, some are more privileged than others but the fact that we are communicating right now via technological devices puts us in the privileged category.

There are many perks in my life for which I give thanks and then there are some that make everything right in the world during the moment I am enjoying them. I'm wondering what a few of those things - five to be specific - are for you.

To help you along here are just three of mine that I will write more about on my blog: drinking coffee out of a real mug, walking into my home after the domestic goddess has been there, participating in the RevGalBlogPals Big Events.”

So, here are mine:

1. A hot shower with nice bath and hair products. Last week’s New York Times had an article about people who have drastically cut back on their showering and shampooing. Like, to once a month or less? I can’t fathom giving up such a simple pleasure. I especially like the shower that came with our current house. As best I can tell, there is some sort of mixing valve in it so you just turn the hot tap and get (for me at least) the perfect temperature. Add a nice body wash (I usually get them cheap at TJ Maxx) and grapefruit or lavender shampoo and at least for a little while, all is well.

2. Fresh coffee. Since I’m the only coffee drinker in the house, I usually make a pot and reheat the leftovers till it’s gone. So that first cup of really fresh coffee is a special treat. (Don’t talk to me about those one-cup coffee pod things. Too fancy and pricey for me.)

3. Recorded music. I certainly enjoy live music as well when I can get some. But I’m daily amazed and delighted by the rich variety available to me. As I have rather eclectic tastes which lean toward folk music and the Great American Songbook, I also appreciate recordings because they allow me to hear, not only current artists, but Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Leadbelly, John McCormack, Kate Wolf, Mahalia Jackson – and many others now singing “upon another shore and in a greater light.”

4. Good used book sales. We have a plethora of these around here, nearly year-round (actually one of the nearby libraries has a bookstore instead that’s open all the time.) I’ve found all kinds of treasures from recent hardcover mysteries and novels, to vintage editions of classics, to cookbooks and coffee table books that would have been too expensive to consider new. I do plan to patronize my local independent bookstore this very evening, though.

5. My wonderful public library and the systems that expand it. Our library, like many in Maine, is a sort of public/private partnership which began as an endowed institution. The participating towns allot money each year for building upkeep, staff salaries, supplies etc. The Friends of the Library raise money for the collection development (partly through a huge book sale each June). It seems to work well, not least because of Minerva and MaineCat, the two systems through which borrowers can acquire just about anything our local library doesn’t have. Make a request online or at the library and usually in a couple of days it’s there for pickup. The library also puts on interesting programs for all ages and has special resources for job hunters and those with health concerns. And the best thing is, I can walk there from my house and from September to May, it’s open seven days a week!

Mama’s Birthday

2010-11-04T19:32:00.002-04:00

Today would have been my mother’s 85th birthday. However, she died of colon cancer four weeks before her 62nd birthday. I spent some time today making pumpkin pie and beef stew. My pie is not as good as hers – I did not acquire her light hand with piecrust and also just haven’t had as much practice. It was common for us (a family of seven with an occasional guest) to have a dozen pies at Thanksgiving and Christmas. My beef stew is thicker – hers was more like a really hearty beef/vegetable soup, whereas I use the recipe from the Good Housekeeping Cookbook I’ve had for nearly 40 years.

A few more things about my mother: she taught me to read when I was 2 1/2. She made homes for us in Army quarters and rented houses as far away as Texas and Germany, and then back in Maine in the house she and my father built together. I also failed to acquire her skills in knitting, crocheting, sewing and quilting, and gardening, among many others. She taught me my multiplication tables and, with her memories of the Palmer method, changed my handwriting one summer from illegible to not-too-shabby. When I talk with other women, or read memoirs or stories, about mothers who are difficult, judgmental, demanding or otherwise cause problems for their daughters, I can’t really relate. What I got from my mother was unconditional love and support.

Here are some pictures of her.

I still miss her a lot.

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday

2010-11-03T17:37:00.002-04:00

The folks at NaBloPoMo suggested that those of us attempting to post every day in November do “Wordless Weekends” to make it a bit easier on ourselves. Wednesday is a busy day for me so I’m planning on Wordless Wednesdays.

Here are a few photos from our trip to California for the ordination of the Rt. Rev, Cordeliaknits. I was too busy and emotional in church to take pictures, so these are from Saturday and Monday when we did touristy things.

Farmers’ Market in Santa Cruz: note price on scallops (almost twice what I would pay here). They did have local fish, which was less.

Cordeliaknits, Salt Lake Liz, and Sisterfilms on the Wharf in Santa Cruz.

With so many changes on the Monterey Peninsula, I was surprised this place was still here – Onkel Hankie Pants and two buddies lived here in a one-bedroom apartment for much of their Army service.

We took the 17-Mile Drive and Cordeliaknits found her dream house! Only several million dollars away….

The Lone Cypress still stands (albeit supported with ropes and cables.)

Tuneful Tuesday: All I Know about Math and Science I Learned from Songs

2010-11-02T21:17:00.003-04:00

Well, that’s not quite true. But it did occur to me that there are some fun songs dealing with math and science, two subjects about which I actually know fairly little. I’d be happy to hear suggestions about some more songs in this vein.

As young teenagers, my friends and I often listened to Tom Lehrer records. My friend The Decorator’s claim to fame was that Lehrer had been her father’s math TA at Harvard. (In the second clip, Lehrer speaks amusingly about his job.) He must have been a good instructor, since said father had a successful banking career. The first Tom Lehrer song, however, deals with chemistry, in fact, the Periodic Table. (Click on link to go to YouTube.)

Tom Lehrer: The Elements

I actually did study a form of New Math, the subject of the next song. In 9th grade, we learned algebra from Mr. Spencer and the SMSG (School Mathematics Study Group) from Yale. (Yes, kids, even though we were so much smarter in other ways, we didn’t get algebra till 9th grade.) In 10th grade, it was geometry from Ball State in Muncie, Indiana, with Mr. Swett. But in 11th grade I was in a different school and had a “normal” Algebra II text, and Mr. Reisinger, who came from Pocatello, Idaho to teach in Germany. My experience with college math is one I would rather not discuss. Here’s Lehrer on

New Math

Back to chemistry, here is a great song about what happens when two elements combine. I believe the late Kate McGarrigle wrote this song, and sings it here.

NaCl

I couldn’t think of any songs about biology or physics or geology, but there are two fine songs about astronomy. Why Does the Sun Shine? was written by Tom Glazer (who also wrote On Top of Spaghetti). This rather better-known recording is by They Might Be Giants, who have also issued an update song with more current scientific information, The Sun Is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma. And now for something completely different (well, not that different really) -- The Galaxy Song by Eric Idle of Monty Python, but done here with some fine scientific photos by Dave Hardy and Colin Farrow (about whom I know nothing else.) I hope someone enjoys this Tuneful Tuesday.

Undeserved Blessings and Other Random Thoughts

2010-11-01T19:29:00.003-04:00

It's been a while, but I'm determined to restart this blog during NaBloPoMo November. Here are a few of my random thoughts to be going on with.

Recently I've been sorrowing with several people, some of whom I know only or mostly through the Internet, over various losses. On Hallowe'en afternoon I was walking Rusty down Maine St. and was offered hot chocolate and candy by some teenagers at a card table set up on the sidewalk. Of course, there was a price: the adult with them wanted to talk with me about where I would go if I died today. I'm afraid I wasn't very articulate in explaining my ideas about God's grace. She gave me a tract with a "Sinner's Prayer" at the end so that I could be sure of spending Eternity in heaven. I know, none better, that I am a sinner. And I know that God's grace is sufficient for me and for everyone, and that I get it even though I don't deserve it. That's a lot like the good fortune I have had in my life. For example, thinking about the people who are grieving right now, I am fortunate that my three children all lived through infancy and childhood to productive adulthood. I did my best for them, but so did the parents who are grieving now that their babies have died. It's also hard to articulate what I believe about bad things happening to people; I certainly don't believe that "God wanted another angel in heaven" or any such meretricious baloney. I don't believe God punishes people on earth in this way. I guess I think God set some things in motion, including the laws of nature, and does not randomly or readily break those laws. And sometimes those laws break hearts.

Since I last blogged, Onkel Hankie Pants and I have had two wonderful short trips: one to California to participate in Cordeliaknits' (henceforward the Rt. Rev. Cordeliaknits) ordination, and one to Minneapolis to celebrate the centennial of our long-time church home there and incidentally, the premiere of a hymn and anthem with text by OHP and music by a friend and fellow churchmember. Both events were truly once-in-a-lifetime experiences and I can't think of any complaints (except the flying part, never much fun these days, but well worth it).

I could actually manage a blog post every day this month just by listing the things I'm grateful for. Here's one: after Christmas our younger daughter, Sisterfilms, is moving East to live with us for a while, not because she has to, but because she wants to. We are all looking forward to this, although with some trepidation about how Rusty will get along with Sisterfilms' aging but still lively cat Winifred (and vice versa).

More tomorrow as we reinstitute Tuneful Tuesday!

Friday Five: We Who Sing Pray Twice

2010-09-24T07:56:00.004-04:00

Mary Beth at RevGalBlogPals writes: "Music is a part of the human experience, and part of religious traditions the world over. It is evocative and stirring, and many forms of worship are incomplete without it.

Our title comes from a quote popularly attributed to St. Augustine: "He who sings prays twice." A little Googling, however, indicates that Augustine didn't say exactly that. In fact, what he said just doesn't fit well onto a t-shirt. So we'll stick with what we have.

"Singing reduces stress and increases healthy breathing and emotional expression. Singing taps into a deep, age-old power available to all of us. When we find our voice, we find ourselves. Today, sing like you mean it." And let's talk about the role music plays in your life and worship. (quote on singing from The Green Children Foundation blog)"

1) Do you like to sing/listen to others sing? In worship, or on your own (or not at all?)
Absolutely. I sing lustily and with good courage, and wish more people would. And believe me, I'm not someone you would pay to hear sing.

2) Did you grow up with music in worship, or come to it later in life? Tell us about it, and how that has changed in your experience.
I think my first worship memory is learning "Jesus Loves Me" at the Bowdoinham Baptist Church's Vacation Bible School. Then singing from the Armed Forces Hymnal at the Hainerberg Protestant Chapel in Wiesbaden; "Blessed Assurance" and "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" are a couple that stay in mind from that time. The little Sunday school in the firehouse in Milford, Connecticut, had a choir for a time and I was in it! I got a ride to rehearsals from the divinity student in his three-wheeled Messerschmitt car, and we learned Fauré's "The Palms", quite ambitious for a bunch of 10-year-olds. When we moved to Fairfield and I started going to First Congregational there, a professional organist and choir director enhanced worship and I learned a lot of new hymns. In college, thinking hard about Judaism, I learned to appreciate Jewish cantorial music. Later, back in the fold at First Church, Waseca, MN, our wonderful choir director Penny Peters gave us a wide variety of music -- Bach to Bernstein to what I can only describe as cowboy music. It was then I became an occasional "choir widow." I've enjoyed hanging around with choir people ever since, aided by Onkel Hankie Pants and our two daughters. Music continues to be an important part of worship for me.

3) Some people find worship incomplete without music; others would just as soon not have it. Where do you fall?
Well, as I said, I can't imagine worship without it. I have met a few of those people and I don't "get" them at all. Even Quaker Cousin goes to a "programmed" meeting where they sing!

4) Do you prefer traditional music in worship, or contemporary? That can mean many different things!
I love traditional music of all kinds -- Bach and the old hymns, but also "roots music" -- black and white gospel and even those sawdust trail hymns my father used to sing bits of. "Contemporary Christian" and praise music -- not so much. But I've heard examples of both that were good. And I like Taizé and some of the newer hymns that have shown up in the hymnals I collect. Also "foreign" hymns add a lot to our worship, such as "You Have Come Down to the Lakeshore" and "Toda la Tierra."

5) What's your go-to music ... when you need solace or want to express joy? A video/recording will garner bonus points!
Trying to come up with one I haven't shared before, I thought of this one. There's little or no information about the singing group and I'm not even sure where they are, though a tag "sda" suggests they may belong to a Seventh-Day Adventist church somewhere. I listened to several others, some with lovely photos of lighthouses, but this is the one that dampened my eyes. After a long absence from Friday Fives, I need all the bonus points I can get!

Friday Five: Decisions, Decisions!

2010-07-23T09:25:00.004-04:00

Songbird at RevGalBlogPals says:

"Since I've been in the midst of a discernment process, I've done a lot of reflecting on how we make decisions. But don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to reveal a dark story about a poor decision, or a self-flagellating story about an embarrassing one. Let's keep it simple and go with five word pairs. Tell us which word in the pair appeals to you most, and after you've done all five, give us the reason why for one of them."

Hey! I can do this! I probably could have done it even without the unscheduled day at home because the car is in the shop. Here goes:
Here they are:

1) Cake or Pie: PIE! Not that there's anything wrong with cake. But pie is better. My father used to say "Cookies are for children, cake is for ladies, pie is for men!" And pie is for breakfast too, where I come from.
2) Train or Airplane: Train
3) Mac or PC: PC
4) Univocal or Equivocal: Equivocal. I guess.
5) Peter or Paul: Peter

Try not to pull on the big cat's tail when you answer. :-)

Friday Five: Hot Fun in the Summertime

2010-06-25T09:07:00.003-04:00

I promised a blog post and here it is!

Songbird at RevGalBlogPals has had some summer troubles. She writes:

“It's possible I may have a bad attitude about the arrival of summer. On the eve of the Solstice I left for a mission trip to a town in Maine bordering Quebec. Beset by a swarm of bloodthirsty black flies, and a "classic allergic reaction" according to the PA at the Urgent Care, I had to return the next morning to a week of Benadryl and ice packs. (If only I had known about Bug Band *before*...)
But I don't want that to ruin summer for the rest of you. So I invite you to share five things you love--or don't--about summer. The tone is up to you!”

1. LOVE: West Denmark Family Camp! We’re going there next week! We will have group singing, watch the folk dancing, listen to interesting people speak and discuss, see cousins real and honorary, have wonderful meals cooked by local organic farmers with some of their own produce, and of course be with Sisterfilms and The Traveller. After that we will go to City of Lakes to see SonShineIn and The Collector and a lot of old friends. WDFC has been part of nearly all our summers for 33 years now and we hope it continues for many more.

2. HATE: excessive heat and humidity. The heat is not so bad here as it sometimes was in the Midwest, but we do sometimes get a humidity that makes 65 degrees feel like 95. The doors stick, salt and spices lump up in their containers, and no one feels much like doing anything.

3. LOVE: summer fruits and vegetables. Onkel Hankie Pants, as we speak, is picking strawberries for the church Strawberry Festival. Maybe after he’s picked his quota he will have time to pick a quart for us! Later there will be raspberries and blueberries, eventually tomatoes, summer squashes, and all the other bounty of the farmer’s market.

4, LOVE: flowers. Walking Rusty, I get to enjoy my neighbors’ gardens with daylilies, peonies, old roses, new roses, etc. OHP has planted some new flowers on the sunny north side of the house, and a lupine and irises have already bloomed. We expect gladioli and maybe even dahlias as well as lilies. Hoping for peonies next year, as we bought some at a garage sale along with more hostas for the mostly-shady parts of our yard.

5. LOVE: Rusty’s new summer haircut. I like him as a shaggy dog and with the classic Springer cut, but this cut (built for exploring woods and beaver ponds!) makes his hair so satiny ! It was a bit disconcerting at first though, as he looked like a whole different dog. Here is a picture. I was pleased to not that (although it doesn’t look that way in the photo of him sleeping) he had not really gained weight over the winter.

So, although summer isn’t my favorite season, I’ve found more “loves” than “Hates” for it. Now for your listening pleasure, two renditions of a song my father used to sing to me:

(He may have learned it from someone who heard this recording!)

And from another icon of my childhood days:

Friday Five: Looking Toward Spring

2010-02-05T09:13:00.003-05:00

Sally, in England, posts this photo called “Easter Snow” and tells us:

“Candlemass is past, and Christmas is well and truly over; here in the UK February looks set to be its usual grey and cold self. Signs of spring are yet to emerge; if like me you long for them perhaps you need ways to get through these long dark days. So let’s share a few tips for a cold and rainy/ snowy day....

1. Exercise, what do you do if you can't face getting out into the cold and damp?

Fortunately for me, my dog Rusty is oblivious to any kind of bad weather and needs to go out regardless. Rain, snow, wind, cold – we take our walks anyway. Also fortunately, winter on the coast of Maine is quite often sunny. I’ll be starting an all-day job on Monday, though, so it’s time to get intentional about those Vitamin D supplements.

2. Food; time to comfort eat, or time to prepare your body for the coming spring/summer?

Comfort food is the thing for winter, I think. Because of the new work schedules (I’ll be working 6 days a week and Onkel Hankie Pants will be working 6 days plus 4 or 5 evenings – no fear, it’s not permanent!) I’m racking my brain for things that can be made quickly or in the slow cooker, and reheated at need. We may be eating even more homemade soup.

3. Brainpower; do you like me need to stave off depression, if so how do you do it?

During January, which is perhaps worse for me, I cheered myself by reading “not-so-trashy trashy novels” and watching costume dramas ranging from Mad Men to Elizabeth R. I’m fortunate not to have serious problems with depression so little fixes like those usually work for me.

4. How about a story that lifts your spirits, is there a book or film that you return to to stave off the gloom?

Jane Austen is a big help, in either medium – I’m enjoying Emma on Masterpiece Classic each Sunday night right now. The novels of Miss Read are what I resort to if things get really bad. However, they do engender some envy when she starts writing about “winter-blooming jasmine” and other flowers that, in southern England, come out soon after Christmas.

5. Looking forward, do you have a favourite spring flower/ is there something that says spring is here more than anything else?

I do love all the spring bulbs, but perhaps daffodils are my favorite, and yet I have trouble getting them to grow; we have better luck with tulips.

Bonus; post a poem/ piece of music that points to the coming spring......

Here's a song my father used to sing. I love the outfits on these guys!

Friday Five: Social Media

2010-01-29T12:23:00.002-05:00

I’ve been taking January off from a lot of my usual pursuits, but even though the month is not over, it’s time to resume them. So here’s this week’s Friday Five from RevGalBlogPals. Kathrynzj says:

“I had the joy of spending time with Songbird last weekend, someone I would have never met had it not been for the blogosphere. Now we keep in touch using a large variety of methods: blog (hers a lot, mine not so much lately), facebook, twitter, text messaging, chat and email. So far there has been no skype.
It got me to thinking of the pros and cons of these relatively new means of communication and interconnecting and so I ask you the following:”

1) What have been the benefits for you of social networking (blog, twitter, facebook, etc...)

I really hate making telephone calls. I don’t mind receiving them, just making them. So blogging, email, and Facebook have all enabled me to reach out to people without having to pick up the dreaded telephone! There are some people who aren’t really reachable by these media and I need to call them, but not many. The fact that my children are in different time zones from me also makes these other methods quite useful since none of us is awakening the other from a sound sleep! I’ve also made a lot of connections to distant cousins, etc. for genealogy purposes, via online forums of various kinds. My membership in DorothyL (an online discussion group for mystery readers, writers, publishers, booksellers, librarians – basically anyone interested in detective stories) has enriched my life and added to my library.

2) Which medium do you use the most? Or if you use them all, for what do you use each of them?

I’ve been using Facebook far too much! I’m going to need to set some limits for myself. I probably check my email a bit too often, but Sisterfilms sometimes emails me with urgent questions about commas and such, so maybe that’s an excuse. I’m not a fan of chatting or instant messaging online (and have no cell phone so no texting here). Chatting seems too disjointed to me. Tried Skype, had some success and then not so much, gave it up. I have a hard time sometimes deciding whether to email someone or send them a message on Facebook – wondering which they will see sooner? I’ve been bad about blogging partly because of perfectionism…Onkel Hankie Pants is similarly afflicted when it comes to email, feeling he needs to compose as carefully as if he were writing a letter to the Times of London.
3) If you could invent a networking site (with no limits on your imagination), what would it provide? What would it not provide?

Well

I can’t immediately think of anything else I’d want. I don’t care for all the applications and games on FB, but have managed to opt out of most so that’s OK. I’m afraid I’ll just wait to see what the 20-year-olds come up with next!
4) Who have you met that you would not have met if it were not for the 'miracle' of social networking?

Three RevGalBlogPals (in person that is—numbers more still in the virtual world, but that could change!) Many people on DorothyL and Goodreads who share my reading tastes and also help broaden them.
5) Who do you secretly pray does not one day try to 'friend/follow' you?

Someone I once knew who had a crush on me and in whom I was completely not interested – not quite a stalker but uncomfortably close. I did put my maiden name on my Facebook profile for ease of contacting people who knew me 40 years ago, so it’s possible. My excuse for not friending people is that I have my screen resolution and font size set so that I don’t usually see the stuff at the right side of the FB screen unless I look for it. (That’s also why I might neglect to wish someone a happy birthday…nothing personal!)
BONUS: What was the most random/weird/unsettling/wonderful connection you made that would not have happened if it were not for the ease of which we can find each other in the computer realm?

I can’t come up with just one. Would it be the descendant of my great-grandfather’s “missing” brother? Scattered friends from my high school in Germany, or the woman who had the same third-grade teacher I did a year earlier (also in Germany)? Or just one of the many people in my online communities who lead very different lives from mine, but with whom I’ve found surprising common ground? Of course, way back when we first got Internet connectivity, I found a distant cousin who told me about our family connection to Malaga Island, a big surprise that will continue to affect our family for some time to come (especially if Sisterfilms makes her documentary about it!) I expect new surprises daily.

Friday Five: IF

2010-01-15T09:07:00.003-05:00

It’s been far too long since I’ve updated this blog. Some minor health issues (resolved), Christmas craziness and fun (over now and welcomed guests returned to their own homes) and sheer winter hibernation or, to give it its proper name, laziness, interfered. I’ll have to pick up the songs and stories next December. Meanwhile, here we go again, with this week’s Friday Five coming from RevGalBlogPal Jan, who blogs at Yearning for God.

1. If you were a color, what would you be?

A soft, heathery blue-grey. That’s today. Maybe tomorrow it would be a dusty rose , or a sunny yellow . A chameleon perhaps?

2. If you were a flower (or plant), what would you be?

A pot of rosemary, inside for the winter, outside in summer, adding taste and aroma to everyday life. (Alas…I do not have a green thumb so my pot of rosemary died.)
3. If you were an animal, what kind would you be?

I’m afraid lots of people are going to say this, but…a cat. Home-loving, not usually energetic but capable of furious activity, likes people but also likes solitude. And they are all so pretty!
4. If you were a shoe, what type would you be?

I’m thinking I’d be this one , which I’m wearing right now. It’s an indoor shoe that can go outdoors, comfortable, durable, easy on and off, with a warm lining.
5. If you were a typeface, which font would you be?

Nicolas Jenson Italic. I liked it when I wrote headlines for my college newspaper, and I like it still. It’s both elegant and readable, two qualities to which I aspire.

Bonus: Anything connected with metaphors that you'd like to contribute.

Sorry, my mind is a blank. Sisterfilms’ work Internet was down, and she’s been calling me all day with requests to look things up!

December Stories and Songs, Part 9

2009-12-09T19:53:00.003-05:00

Continuing the Christmas tree theme, today’s story is The Tree that Didn’t Get Trimmed by Christopher Morley. It’s available in a couple of solo editions, which are out of print and quite expensive; but I also located it in A Christmas Treasury and The Home Book of Christmas, which should be easier to find. Like the tree in H. C. Andersen’s The Fir Tree, the tree which is the protagonist of this story wishes very much to be a Christmas tree; to enjoy the merriment and be decked with shiny baubles. But he languishes on the tree lot and there is a different fate in store for him – a far more cheerful one than that of Andersen’s tree!

Although I only chose two songs to accompany this tale originally, I’m giving you three today. I found a beautiful rendition of Sang til Juletræet by Christopher Pedersen. However, it appears (at least to my tin ear) to be sung to a classical setting by Edvard Grieg and not to the tune I am familiar with from Mike and Else Sevig’s A Norwegian Christmas. So here’s the Sang til Juletræet that I was able to find.

And to show how important the tree is to a Scandinavian Christmas, here’s another familiar song from our Danish Sangaften, Højt fra træets grønne top (High upon our Christmas tree).

And last but not least, a funny song by the late Erik Darling, which you can listen to here. You will need to download RealAudio (free and safe) before you can listen to Revenge of the Christmas Tree. Erik Darling, who died in 2008, had a long career in folk music. One of the first folk records I bought was Travellin’ on with the Weavers, on which Darling replaced Pete Seeger in the group.

December Stories and Songs, Part 8

2009-12-09T12:25:00.002-05:00

Here’s a picture of me and Brother #1 at Christmas, I think 1952. Our Christmas tree this year will come from the same woods that this one probably did. We don’t have it yet – I’ll have to send Onkel Hankie Pants out into the snowy woods for it this weekend. But if you don’t have a tree yet, it’s probably time to start thinking about it. So the story and song today are both about Christmas trees. (I’m hoping to get caught up today….)

A Christmas Tree for Lydia is a short story by Elizabeth Enright that I found in a little Scholastic paperback called Ten Tales of Christmas. The paperback anthology is still available and not too expensive; it’s worth buying for that story alone. The story also appeared earlier as a picture book (see photo at left), but that one will now set you back $50.00 or more. You could ask your local librarian to track it down in either version, or check the Short Story Index to see if it’s anthologized elsewhere.

The story is set in New York City shortly after World War II, where a young war widow is struggling to raise two children – an elementary-age boy and Lydia, a preschooler. The theme is not an uncommon one for Christmas tales – love and ingenuity overcome poverty to make Christmas happen. It’s one of my favorites, and I hope you will be able to find a copy.

Both the story and the song today are ones you may have to buy, unless you can find them at the library. The Tree is by Jim Henry, a folk singer/songwriter from Western Massachusetts. It appears on the CD Wonderland: A Winter’s Solstice Celebration, and as best I can tell, some of the royalties on this album still go to the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts. The CD is still one of my favorites several years after I bought it; it holds a great mix of music, from Bach to You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch, and several original songs, all performed by local artists. Henry’s song is full of childhood memories of the Christmas tree and how big it seemed, and how “it won’t be Christmas till we’ve got the tree.” By the way, if you get hold of the CD and can play music, here are the chords and lyrics to The Tree.

December Stories and Songs, Part 7

2009-12-08T16:28:00.003-05:00

There are just a few Christmas stories that have become iconic, and subject to endless retellings and re-imaginings. One is the Nativity story itself; another is Dickens’ A Christmas Carol; and a third is O. Henry’s classic short story, Gifts of the Magi. (According to the editors of A Christmas Treasury, from which I took my reading, this is the original title; it makes more sense to me than the usual The Gift of the Magi, but I have not been able to verify this.) Hardly a year goes by without some film or television special giving us a new version; in fact, one of the stories I blogged about last year, Emmet Otter’s Jugband Christmas, is essentially a retelling of the O. Henry tale. In any case, that’s the story for December 7. (Sorry about the late posting.)

O. Henry (William Sydney Porter) wrote several Christmas tales – The Cop and the Anthem and Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking come to mind. Many of his stories were first published in the New York World’s Sunday magazine, and Gifts of the Magi, said to have been written in Pete’s Tavern, (hence the photo above) was published in the World on December 10, 1905. Later it appeared in the short story collection The Four Million. Since it is now in the public domain, there are a number of illustrated versions available, and it appears in probably 9 out of 10 Christmas anthologies as well. However, you can also read it here if you like.

Illustrated books, films, musicals, and at least two operas (one in Finnish!) have been based on the story, and the Squirrel Nut Zippers have a song that recounts the story on their CD Christmas Caravan. And, through the magic of YouTube, here they are performing The Gift of the Magi: