Between the lines

The broad supermarket windows are papered over with Halloween coloring-contest entries, and while the clerk bags my spinach, EggBeaters, bagel, frozen yogurt, I listen to several little kids bouncing up and down in front of the display and claiming their own handiwork. "That's mine," one girl says, glowing. "Ten years old," she emphasizes, underscoring a talent she hopes we realize is beyond her years, and when I collect my groceries and go over to look, I see that she has written the same next to her name on the form. Maddy! 10 years old! Maddy has embellished the line drawing of trick-or-treaters further by inscribing one of their plain paper bags with "BOO!" and some possibly bat-like squiggles in dark-green felt-tip. And time obligingly collapses, thirty years accordioning down so that for a second I can feel it too: that pride and validation, the fifteen minutes of fame that come from seeing your careful crayoned submission scotch-taped above the rack of Presto Logs and the food-drive barrel.

Outside half a dozen kids are swarming over the hay-bale corral of pumpkins in front of the store, selecting the perfect victim for a jack-o-lantern. I glance at them and one of their weary dads looks so much like my uncle that I do a double-take right there in the parking lot, almost speak to him before realizing, stupidly, that no, he looks three decades older than that nowadays, and don't we all. It's his birthday today, and my mother's too. Happy birthday, Unc. Happy birthday, Mom.

Hello, weenie

I made a point of going up to Herkimer and securing a window seat today, because it was the Greenwood/Phinney district's annual Halloween celebration, where the kids are welcomed to trick-or-treat up and down the main drag of businesses. I'm a little skeptical of how the process has evolved since I was a kid, because it simply can't be as thrilling, never mind scary, to go door-to-door in broad daylight on a crisp fall afternoon. But at least they're not relegated to a mall...and the spectacle offers some prime hilarity, which I suppose is all the better for being well-lit.

Anyway. So I took up a stool at the street-facing counter for nearly 2 1/2 hours, laughing helplessly at the hordes and hordes of kids in synthetic manufactured costumes, and painstakingly homemade costumes, and indifferently assembled "costumes" that I do not think, really, should count. I have a couple rules about Halloween; one of them is that, if you are old enough to grow your own mustache, you are too old to be begging for free candy on the sidewalk. (For the girls, if those high heels are your own, same thing. Or, you know, the mustache--though if you are thus tonsorially...gifted? challenged? you probably ought to receive a mini-Snickers and some sympathy.) I gave the five teens outfitted as the complete Scooby Gang a pass, though, considering that Fred agreeably put on both a blond wig and an ascot. Although, Shaggy--come on, you get a D for effort, because a Shaggy costume just involves rolling out of bed and putting on the contents of the laundry hamper. The dazed munchies are optional. Probably you will need that pillowcase of candy later, Shag.

On the other end of the spectrum, a word of advice, to parents of the smallest trick-or-treaters: the cute floppy feet attached to the costume pantlegs, or the ruffled fairy anklets, or the long gauzy strips of princess-gown hemline? Do not put that crap on your charges who have barely mastered plain regular walking. That kid is going down, casting a debris field of dropped candy for a three-foot radius, and there will be tears. Toddler total-faceplant tally, just those directly in front of my window? Three. "OoooOOOHHHhhh," me and all the other spectators in the windows moaned, each time a little plush tiger or bumblebee or dinosaur smacked the concrete headlong. Owie.

But good grief, storebought costumes have gotten fancy since I was little. Whatever happened to the old ones, where you got a thin molded plastic mask and what amounted to an acetate romper, usually with the character's name and face printed idiotically right in front? I can remember bumbling down the block in those, already a little freaked out by the darkness and certainly unable to see, since my glasses wouldn't fit underneath the mask. The elastic band snarling in my hair, my breath forming cold condensation on the flimsy plastic...good times. We coveted those! I can remember pawing frantically through the display at Fred Meyer in search of a Princess Leia...and the crushing disappointment of getting stuck with Chewbacca. (Sis, that year, was a three-foot-tall Darth Vader. Hee.) But now the costumes are plush and voluminous, sequinned, bedazzled, equipped with hats or wigs, fake foam muscles, giant spiny lizard heads that bob above the wearer's own. Too much! Too easy! I want to see you work at it a little, kids, come on.

So I was pleased, in the ceaseless tide of princesses, fairies, fairy princesses, and superheroes, to see a few kids marching to a different beat. A little-girl Hulk, pushing her younger sibling in a stroller: right on. A boy dressed as Angus Young from AC/DC. A...prairie bride? another princess? tall and gangly, but with checkered Vans clearly visible beneath the six-inch ruffled hem of her ivory gown. A boy who I think was meant to be a Barack Obama campaign bus, clunking down the street inside a blue-painted cardboard box with paper-plate wheels, festooned with all manner of Obama and Biden and HOPE stickers. Ten more days, little man! Rock the vote! Also, a pug in a pumpkin suit. Come on, that's hilarious! A pug! In a pumpkin suit!

My runner-up favorite: two boys, probably 14 and so hovering on the border of trick-or-treat legitimacy...but allowed a pass by me, for dressing in drag. One had a long red wig and hideous skirt; the other was galumphing gracelessly in white-go-go boots, updo, and glasses--yeah, waitaminute. Yes. Yes! Sarah Palin. An eighth-grade drag Sarah Palin. So, major points for going as the scariest thing this liberal-enclave neighborhood can envision right now.

But I've saved the best for last: the girl, probably 11, whose Girl Scout uniform I recognized in a glance, that shrill kelly green. "That's cheating," I thought idly, as she got into the candy queue in front of the coffeehouse. "That's an extracurricular activity, not a costume." Then she turned around. The jaunty green vest of merit badges, the little neckerchief thing, were shabby and streaked with gore, her face painted gray, eyesockets hollowed, lips and chin gruesomely bloody. A ZOMBIE Girl Scout! Oh please, please let her have thought of this herself. Please let her have come to this in total exasperation after years of flogging cookies in front of the supermarket and being forced to camp in the rain. The Ghoul Scout stared blankly right into my face, dead-eyed, through the Herkimer window, never breaking character. "AWE. SOME," I mouthed at her through the glass, before she turned and shuffled away, undead, triumphant. Oh, zombie Girl Scout, you are made of win. Happy Halloween!

A very Pagooey Chrismukkwanzukkas!

Hey everybody, it's time for Pagooey Holiday Dinner Bingo! Can also be played as a drinking game. Make yourself a card and play along, at our home or yours!

--Get mustard on festive holiday shirt: 2 points
--Arrive wearing footie pajamas: 5 points
--If you are more than two months old and arrive in footie jammies: -3 points
--Cookie wears her shiny gold pants: 5 points all
--Lob dinner roll across table like softball: 2 points
--Successfully intercept thrown roll: 5 points
--Heckle vegetarian attendee with slab of corned beef: 3 points
--Make derisive reference to my failed bacon-wrapped breadsticks/burnt offering hors d'oeuvre mishap from '02: 3 points, and for the love of little apples I AM SORRY, DAMN
--Whose wineglass is this? Oh well, it's yours now: 10 points
--Bust in on someone in the hall bathroom: 4 points
--Get busted in on, in the bathroom: 8 points, and somebody really needs to fix that lock, seriously
--Put on Stan Boreson Christmas album: 5 points
--Switch allegiances in the mashed potatoes/mashed rutabagas--combine or segregate? debate, to venomous outcry from both camps: 3 points
--Slide down iced-over back steps on ass while carrying out recycling: 6 points (warning: you will be required to repeat this story multiple times throughout evening, and lose a point with each telling)
--Cookie shouts "Turn that down, are you DEAF?": 3 points
--Busted for surreptitiously texting at dinner table: -5 points
--Whose wineglass is this? Whatever: 10 points
--Salsa dance with baby: 5 points
--Put on Dean Martin Christmas album: 5 points
--Perform "Dance of the Stepped-On Brio Train Set" in breakfast nook: 7 points
--Poppy has giggle fit easily mistaken for cardiac event: 5 points all
--Lie on floor, sporting two pieces of Hanukkah gelt like the coins on a dead man's eyes: 5 points
--Put on Otis Redding's Greatest Hits: 9 points
--Cookie shouts "Turn that down, are you DEAF?": 3 points
--Baby vomits copiously on Mr. Sis: 10 points to Mr. Sis, who made sure to keep a six-foot perimeter between himself and all children for the duration of the evening to prevent a repeat of such occurrence; hence, 5 points also to the baby, for difficulty
--Hide Mom's purse, for old times' sake: 5 points; an additional 1 point shall accrue for each five minutes' duration of her search
--Get a little weepy in kitchen, but only because you love these people SO MUCH: 7 points
--Suggest going to midnight mass: 6 points
--Actually make it to midnight mass any Christmas in previous decade: 30 points
--Change into footie pajamas before departure: 5 points
--If you are over the age of four and change into footie pajamas before departure: -3 points
--Get poured into cab or otherwise require services of a designated driver: 10 points
--Hope drool on your sweater is from baby: 2 points

I hope you and yours had as much fun as me and mine. Merry Happy Everything to one and all!

Oh, Christmas tea

Last Sunday afternoon I had the privilege of attending holiday high tea at the Fairmount Olympic Hotel, with a group of ladies I mostly know from book club. The lovely Kristin recognized that no one wanted to take on the extra responsibility of hosting, during December, but thought we could still get together and be fussed over by professionals, with the added benefit of access to downtown shopping. Genius!

I admit, I've been having a hard time getting into the holiday spirit this year. This worries me as much as anyone--Christmas brings out my most Martha-esque tendencies. I have everything Christmas. I possess a plush Santa Claus toilet-lid cover, and red and green silicone cupcake liners in which to bake sour cream-poppy seed streusel muffins on Christmas morning, and a CD of carols rendered by a Caribbean steel-drum band. Usually at this time each year my house looks like the finale of the Macy's parade without the blue police barricades. So my exhausted apathy this year is troubling, yes. I am not sure what to attribute it to; is this just more fallout from weaning myself off antidepresants this summer? I'm not depressed, but in not feeling Christmassy, I do not feel like myself, and I don't know what that means.

So it was more meaningful to me than the other ladies might have guessed, to walk into Seattle's swankiest classic hotel and be smacked with a double-barrelled Christmas blast. The Olympic is the closest thing we have to The Plaza, and it did not disappoint; it was like dropping into a 1930s movie musical, or the Warbucks mansion at the finale of Annie. Swags of pine garland and fairy lights everywhere. A massive tree at the center of the atrium, and another decked out in gold in the tearoom itself. A gingerbread rendering of the Pike Place Market in a glass case, with marzipan produce lined up in tiny rows. There was some sort of children's holiday party going on elsewhere in the hotel, too, and so all around us were little girls in red velvet dresses and little boys in crisp white shirts and dark ties, on high Good Behavior Alert not only for the environment but because of Santa's imminent final accounting. Several of us, arriving early, went looking for an ATM, and that was also "fancy": hidden away in a discreet alcove and paneled in oak, with the old-timey appellation "Miniature Bank."

It was good that we'd obtained some cash beforehand, because the special holiday tea was sort of psychotically expensive if you stopped to think about it. We were a large group, and so the included service cost brought our tab to $75 a head. Would I have gone, if I'd anticipated that? Probably not...so I am glad I didn't know. Because it ended up being entirely worth it. We had white linen and real silver, delicate floral china and our own individual teapots. Individual crystal cruets of raspberry jam and clotted cream stood at the head of each place setting. And at that price, they keep the wee goodies coming for as long as you're willing to sit there. A polite young man in a gold vest hovered nearby, with a tray and a pair of little silver tongs to hand out as many tiny open-faced sammiches as we could stand, each no bigger than my thumb. There was a smoked salmon triangle that simply dissolved on the tongue, and quarter-sized rounds of toast crowned with curried chicken salad. One savory had shavings of black truffle; one sweet was dusted with gold flake--two outrageous delicacies I'd never consumed before. I ATE GOLD. It was awesome. We gossiped and sipped tea and daintily ate many hundreds of tea goodies; we were all also on our best behavior, and managed not to knock anything over or guffaw too openly, there in the Georgian Room...which is lovely, all pale yellow with scads of white ornamental molding, like dining inside a wedding cake.

It reminded me of being a little girl, actually...all that dazzle, the giddy tension of being in a place and a situation 100% nicer than the rest of your everyday life. We went to some sort of Santa Claus brunch at the Space Needle, once, when I was a kid--I remember it being very early morning, still nearly dark as we revolved slowly above the Christmas-lit city, eating pigs-in-a-blanket and nervously awaiting the arrival of St. Nick, the guest of honor. There are pictures of us, me and Sis in matching (!) outfits that were actually Easter dresses from the previous spring--red and white calico patterned, but by December growing a bit alarmingly short. We are showing a lot of leg, for 8 a.m. Matching Dorothy Hamill haircuts also, I probably don't need to add. Anyway. We were excited, and impressed, and anxious in a largely good way, Christmas on the line and Santa keeping a watchful eye.

I haven't felt like that in years...but this was close. Worth every penny, and with the added benefit of having that salmon, boy. I would rather have poked out my own eye, as a kid...but after sampling that with an adult's palate, I can now die a happy woman. A holiday miracle indeed!

Snippy

Either bravely or foolishly, depending on how you consider my overall home-maintenance track record, I took advantage of the sunny afternoon and attacked my overgrown shrubbery with various sharp implements. I'm proud to say that I still have all twenty digits intact! Although I stirred up enough mulch and leaf mold and dirt and, I don't know, spider effluvia, to launch an allergy attack and I've been sneezing for nearly four hours.

But the bushes now conform to reasonably symmetrical shapes. Yesterday, the neighbors across the street were out in force, stringing hundreds of Christmas lights. I want to do the same...but I figured that if I was going to draw attention to my landscaping with yards of twinkle bulbs, I'd better impose at least a little order on things, first. (Also, truth be told I'm lazy--many of the lights I have are the kind that just come in a big net formation; you fling it over a bush like a jungle trap and ta-daaa, done!)

Meanwhile, during the yardwork I discovered FOUR SEPARATE INSTANCES of someone having blithely allowed their dog to have its way with my lawn. That is neither neighborly or Christmas-spirited, friend. And nor will I be, if I ever catch you in the act, because I will come running out my front door swinging a bat, so help me.

Gratitude

The cake got done, as cakes do. I left it cooling in my kitchen and forced myself out to walk around Greenlake in the dazzling sunlight this morning; the walk really cleared my head and, just in that hour, I found three things to be improbably grateful for, all out of proportion:

1. The enormous blue heron I saw standing alert and motionless at the water's edge, just past the crew house and grandstand. I crept off the pavement onto the muddy running track for a closer look, while hordes of other joggers steamed past me oblivious in either direction. No one else seemed to even notice the heron; we eyed each other steadily for probably a minute. He looked to be four feet tall, somehow, and never moved until I chuckled to myself and moved on.

2. The swellegant Goth daddy, with cropped purple hair and piercings and a long black velvet overcoat and fearsome boots...pushing his toddler son's stroller across the lumpy grass by the wintering-over swimming beach, so they could get a better look at the ducks.

3. The message etched inside the stall door of the public restroom I stopped in. (This one's a special shoutout to Holly, who might remember this sentiment from our high-school days. Happy Thanksgiving, lady.) I settled down to my business and read the following, scratched into the paint at (seated) eye level: YOU BICTH.

Funny, the things that make us feel so much better. I can find hope, in strange places indeed.

The tree you really are

Last week, I spent $25 on a used CD: a children's Christmas album by Nat King Cole, one I'd worn out in both vinyl and cassette form over the past 34 years. You can't go too wrong with Nat; "The Christmas Song" is a musty old roasted chestnut indeed, but that butter-rum voice of his just pours into every fissure in your soul. It heals what ails you. This particular record has been rereleased multiple times, even recently...but the latest CD has a slightly altered track listing; hence, my costly acquisition from Eric in Texas, who surely has no idea how deeply he's improved my Christmas this year. Brace yourselves, everybody--this will be both long and sentimental.

In December 1972, I turned three years old. My parents and I were living with my maternal grandparents, waiting on the completion of our split-level ranch in the suburbs; Sis was still a seven-months bun in the oven. For my birthday, my great aunt Nannie, Grandma's sister, gave me a record, on vinyl, Nat King Cole's "Christmas is for Children." I can still see the album cover perfectly in my mind's eye: late-60s graphics, broad vertical stripes of red and green. In each stripe was a photo illustration of a little kid opening (or staring with bewilderment at) a glittery wrapped present. All of those pictured kids are comfortably in their 40s, if not 50s, today.

The most current version of the album is missing "Buon Natale," the loopy Eye-talian verve of which is sorely needed, I think. Because the core of "Christmas is for Children"? Is a first-class tearjerker of the highest order. For example: "The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot," the protagonist of which looks enviously on at other little fellows' holiday bounty, and then goes home "to last year's broken toys." "I'm so sorry for that laddie...he hasn't got a DAAAAAADDYYY," Nat sings. Apparently this was a big hit during World War II. As a kid in the divorce-a-riffic 70s, a few years later, it meant something different to me...but that's another story. No, the weeper I'm going to talk about here is "The Little Christmas Tree." Penned by Mickey Rooney (!), as I was dumbfounded to learn from the newest liner notes.

Little Christmas Tree
No one to buy you, give yourself to me
You're worth your weight in precious gold, you see
My little Christmas tree

Promise you will be
Nobody else's little Christmas tree
I'll make you sparkle, just you wait and see
My little Christmas tree

I'll put some tinsel in your hair
And you'll find that there's a strange new change
That you have never seen
I'll bring my boy a toy
He'll jump for joy
To see his bright new queen

With me you will go far
I'll show Saint Nick the tree you really are
And there'll be peace on Earth when Daddy lights your star
My little Christmas tree

You're big enough for three
My little Christmas tree

I can only guess, now, at why this song completely devastated me, at three. I think it's partly that reality, when you're that little, is not made up of points on a spectrum, but exists as a level plane. Santa, God, your parents, your pets, Mickey Mouse, stuffed animals, the t.v. clown who hosts the morning cartoons, Sunny Jim smiling on the peanut-butter jar--all are equally valid and sentient beings, with needs and longings as simple and straightforward as your own. Hell, I'd probably just seen Charlie Brown's limp, needle-dropping tree for the first time, too. For whatever reason, I was utterly convinced--and entirely destroyed--by this song. Somewhere out there was a tiny tree, unloved and forgotten on the salesman's lot...no one to take it home, decorate it, wrap its base lovingly in an old flannel sheet to keep its toes warm. I was inconsolable; I cried, even as I begged the adults to play the song over and over, lift the needle and reset the little tree tragedy time and again. I went to bed in tears, cried myself to sleep.

And my Grammy listened to me. If I know her at all, I am sure that she first turned on Nannie--why would you buy such a horrible album for a little child!--because she and her sister lovingly, tirelessly bickered every single solitary day of their adult lives, over the trivial and the extremely trivial. But after she finished chewing out Nan, Grammy went to my father. She stuffed a handful of bills into his pocket and told him, "Go out and find the tiniest tree you can buy. Don't come back without it." She was five feet tall and weighed maybe 100 pounds with her wig on, but Dad knew what side his bread was buttered on; he went.

Why did Grammy listen to me, after all? I was three years old, three days before Christmas; I'd had one rough night, but in the morning surely I could be distracted by toys, her clip-on earrings, a frozen waffle. From my friends with kids, I know that parenting toddlers is largely a long daily litany of tiny peace-keeping fibs and distractions: oh, the battery must have run out! oh, Barney isn't on today! sorry, sweetie, but there IS no more candy! But she saw something in my grief, that night, that resonated with her. As an adult, I can look at the story now and see Grammy's own thread running through it. When she was three years old, she lost her mother to breast cancer. December 25, 1925. Merry Christmas.

So she thrust money at my dad. I don't know where he went--a florist? a nursery? Maybe the drugstore, because I saw a few Little Christmas Trees at the Walgreen's last week, exactly like the one he procured: a tiny dwarf evergreen, not 12 inches high, a live tree in a colored-foil-wrapped pot.

And that's what I remember, the confusing Christmas-light haze of being roused from bed and carried to the kitchen. My father sat me on the grey Formica-topped kitchen table next to the tree, and my Grammy said "Look! Look what your daddy found! It's the tree. It's the Little Christmas Tree! Your daddy saved it and he brought it home!"

And I BELIEVED. I sat on that table in complete awe and I BELIEVED with all my heart, that my father had saved that tree, that a genuine Christmas miracle had occurred. Grammy came up with a handful of ornaments the size of gumballs, a garland that might have been one of her own beaded necklaces; we decorated that dinky little tree and stood it on the bookshelf, and for days I stood near it and whispered to it and stroked its bright-green blunt needles like it was a pet. Surprisingly or not, it thrived. It's planted in front of the house I grew up in. It's about the size of a Volkswagen Bug, 34 years later--too big really to dig up under cover of darkness, though there have been tipsy nights since we sold the old homestead when I have thought about it.

I got an embarrassment of riches from Santa in 1972, and all the years afterward--toys I remember playing with, some toys I loved. In between I've had magnificent Christmases, and kind of crummy ones, and at least one where Santa brought everyone the stomach flu and we all spent the hour of Jesus's birth fighting over prime bathroom real estate. But nothing has stayed with me quite like waking up to that little tree; nothing has matched the absolute wonder and joy of that instant, a true Christmas miracle in my eyes, and that rooted my love of the holidays right into the core of my soul. It's the first Christmas I remember, and on some level it remains the very best.

Happy Holidays, everyone who's reading; I hope the closing of the year and the birth of a new one bring you as much astonishing happiness and complete wonder as they bring me. Then, and still.

They're jingling, baby

Sunday morning, I did the 22nd annual Jingle Bell Run 5K in downtown Seattle, to benefit the local Arthritis Foundation. Mr. Sis decided to do this race, too, but because he is an Accomplished Triathlete, he left in the first wave of high-speed runners, clad in his aerodynamic, body-hugging, moisture wicking, solar-powered tracksuit. I was slotted in the third wave of slow-ass plodders, wearing the giveaway t-shirt and with a few Christmas bows stuck on my head. There was a costume contest, which some folks took quite seriously; if the gent in the full-on Bumble suit a la the Rankin and Bass "Rudolph" special reads this, I'd like to buy him a coffee. Or a beer.

The route took us on a veeeeery subtle-but-deadly incline through the festive holiday streets of downtown Seattle, kicking up a twee cacophony via the free jingle bells distributed to one and all. Then we doubled back uptown through the express lanes underneath I-5, which was fun for about a minute--I'm running on the freeway, yo!--and then dark, echoingly loud, and exhaust-a-riffic for many minutes more. Eh, it was for a good cause. Plus the last four blocks or so were all downhill, so you could make a dramatic show of barrelling through the finish chute Rosie Ruiz-style.

Anyway. The disparate finish times gave Mom, Sis, and Mr. Sis ample time to appreciate some of the other wonders of the season...DOWNTOWN! (cue Petula Clark belting here). To wit:

1. The big Macy's, nee The Bon Marche, has for years set up a Christmas train window, with model trains in assorted scales tootling around and around, airplanes whirling from fishing line, etc. This year, it seems there's been a tragic derailment at Gingerbread Gulch:



Note the little plastic child, once innocently frolicking on ice, now cruelly pinned beneath the coal car.



Mommy? I'm...so...COLD, Mommy...

2. The drunk hobo who leaned directly into Mr. Sis's face whilst the fam was awaiting my return, and said "Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck." According to eyewitnesses, his belly did indeed shake like a bowlful of jelly, and could perhaps have used a shirt.

3. Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Sis, stop acting so corny!



It's that little corn arm waving that makes it art.

Another reason for the season

A semi-rural church in western Washington is drawing crowds with its "Live Nativity" production that includes sheep, goats, actors (in their dads' bathrobes, I'm guessing), and an eight-foot-tall, 2000-lb, one-hump Arabian camel named Hannibal.

Here is my favorite, favorite part, a quote from pastor Chris Hill: "We'd like to think that it is Jesus, but the camel is the main draw."

And somewhere, John Lennon is no doubt rolling in his grave like a pig on a rotisserie. But laughing, probably.

God Jul

Yesterday Mom and I decided to attend Yulefest, the annual Christmas festival at the Nordic Heritage Museum in Ballard. Neither of us had actually been to the museum before, and clearly we need to go back when the aisles and exhibits aren't crammed with vendors and musicians and sugared-up children...but it was a fun couple hours.

The vendors offered up an interesting, peculiar mix of objects: there were mugs and flags and imported licorice, but also Fimo clay jewelry and pashmina shawls in sealed plastic bags, labeled by someone with a tenuous grasp on English. Of course there were also more Nordic sweaters than you could shake a stick at; you couldn't turn around without getting hung up on somebody's silver buckles. I was honestly more curious about the food. I did not see any lutefisk on offer, though I suspect that it brings a unique array of liability issues with it.

But there were pastries: a whole table spread with cookies and little cakes and, to my delight, lefse. (I'm also delighted that both lutefisk and lefse appear in Wikipedia, hee hee...but since I had to explain the latter to my personal trainer this morning--a confession, if you will--I'll do so here as well.) Lefse is a Scandinavian flatbread, basically a tortilla made with potatoes. There are savory versions, served with ham or summer sausage in them...but we always had it sweet, growing up: spread with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, rolled into a narrow cone. They had both kinds on offer at the Yulefest booth, a dollar apiece; outrageous, but I nonetheless paid up and eagerly took a bite.

Margarine. Instead of butter, it was spread with margarine.

Which was revolting, and yet made me well up a little, because that was how we had it when I was little. We were cheap, and butter in the 70s was somehow ostentatious and bad for you both, like a rare steak. So my Grammy would spread slices of lefse with Nucoa brand margarine, a soft stick of which was always present in her bright-yellow Melmac butter dish, and that was the flavor of my heritage when I was six or eight or twelve years old. Manna from heaven.

I remember margarine-ing and rolling up dozens and dozens of little lefse tubes with Grammy one night, for a presentation on My Family History in seventh-grade social studies the next day. Did she come to school with me that morning? I want to say yes, but she would still have been pre-retirement, so maybe no. I brought family photos, and my great-grandmother Dina's apron with its handmade lace insets. Even at 13, my waist was too wide to fit...though it occurs to me now that poor Dina might have been crammed into a corset. I rambled on for some appropriate interval and then plied Mrs. Taylor's first period with sugared vegetable shortening on white bread, basically. I was a big hit.

So that rolled lefse tasted ambrosial to me, as Mom and I wandered through the rest of the museum. The building--a former elementary school from the early 1900s--has a tricky and peculiar layout, and at one point we found ourselves peering through an open door into the kitchen. I deeply regretted not bringing a camera, at that moment, because here we discovered the crack lefse assembly line: four snowy-haired Scandinavians at a long table--three ladies, one gent--carefully buttering and sprinkling and rolling a truly enormous quantity of lefse, on down the row. The Costco-sized yellow tub of Gold-n-Soft margarine stood before them at the ready. God bless us, every one, ya sure you betcha.

You're the Charlie-Browniest

I curled up last night to watch "A Charlie Brown Christmas," practically a moral obligation in my list of Christmas rituals. And I know I am hardly the first person to notice this, and that I've noticed it many times before...but Jesus H. tap-dancing Christ, that shit is depressing.

It kind of strikes me anew, every time. I realize that part of the weird appeal of Peanuts in general is that Charles Schulz was putting these deeply adult sentiments and philosophies in the mouths of teeny little kids. And he wasn't entirely off the mark, either--children are not simply small adults, but they do have complex feelings and they are, of course, capable of tremendous cruelty. I think the Christmas special reflects that quite honestly on some level, even if the script exaggerates deliberately for effect.

But still...man, those kids are BRUTAL to good ol' Charlie Brown...who himself is so wretched, so admittedly lonesome and depressed, he's hard to watch. Today someone would get him a therapist and a drum of Paxil and probably an Individual Education Plan, but trapped in the 1965 cartoon he just suffers, and...was this intended as a kids' show? When the little tree collapses under the weight of its lone ornament, and Charlie Brown moans "Everything I touch gets ruined"? Holy shit, y'all, I practically have to leave the room. The local alternative weekly paper, The Stranger, once claimed that suicide rates, and calls to helplines, spike every year with the annual screening of "A Charlie Brown Christmas," and while I think they were joking I would not be even a little surprised, because DUDE.

That said, the good edges out the miserable, I think. The Vince Guaraldi score is magnificent and perfectly suited to the cartoon, alternately melancholy and infectiously giddy. Every year, I have to get up off the couch and do the dance with the kids, whipping my head painfully side-to-side like those mysterious twin girls at the pageant rehearsal--do we ever see them again? And I've seen it so many times that even the movements are surely etched into my DNA; I love Snoopy's dance, not just the jolly, vaguely Russian prancing but the lilting side-to-side skips he first performs atop Schroeder's piano. I love the way Charlie Brown, his faith oh-so-momentarily restored, skips home with his little Christmas twig. I love the "loo-loo-loos" of the singing kids at the end, with their pauses for breath--this year, I noticed that Pigpen stirs up a fresh cloud of dust when he inhales for each verse. (And there is another kid that needs a Child Protective Services intervention, because boy is FILTHY with neglect, good gawd.) I love Charlie Brown's disbelieving squat-and-squint at the transformed tree, how he scootches closer.

I love the roughness of it too: the hand-drawn animation, the real kids haltingly speaking lines they clearly don't comprehend. Some of them were so young that they couldn't read and had to be fed their lines, a few words at a time; it shows, and it is somehow completely charming. (My favorite fact Googled up today: Sally was voiced by a child named Kathy Steinberg, who I suspect might not have been crafting a letter to Santa, this or any year.) The Christmas-tree lot Charlie Brown and Linus visit is gorgeously surreal--the "aluminum trees...maybe painted pink" are also polka-dotted, or harlequin-patterned; they remind me of some of the wilder Fauvist backgrounds in some Warner Brothers cartoons. Funny, that the very commercialized trees scorned in the special now look beautiful and nostalgic to me: what I wouldn't give for a sweet, innocent 1965 pink-and-orange aluminum tree. (Note to self: check eBay.)

Anyway. After the classic cartoon, ABC aired a second Peanuts Christmas special I'd never seen, this one plainly much later and composed of weird, brief little vignettes of the kids engaging in different vaguely Christmassy activities. The animation was slick and smooth; the voice actors were precocious, cloying children or, I suspect in the case of Sally, an adult affecting a shrill "kid" tone a la Elmo. The whole thing was glib and self-aware and leadenly paced with beats for laughter, and I HATED IT SO MUCH it made me ANGRY. It was so plainly a sell-out, literally embodying every polished, commercialized Christma$ quality that the original decries. It straight-up trampled the first special's message. Oh, Sparky, what did you do there? Man. THAT was depressing; my heart shrunk two sizes just watching. I'll stick with my Original-Recipe Charlie Brown Christmas, thanks very much.

Them that rejoice

I don't know if it's a lingering sense of catharsis from finishing NaNo, or I'm simply devolving into a sentimental sap, but I am weeeepy today, ready to leak like a busted faucet at the slightest provocation.

I was ready to relax in front of the television, chewing with my mouth open, and so I ordered a celebratory dinner from Thai Siam here in Ballard. Thai Siam is notable first for not screwing around with the spices; I was cowed and humiliated by a three-star dish there some years ago and have stuck with the medium-level since. Anyway...they are also reknowned for their annual anniversary dinner, a day-long bash in which all proceeds are donated to local charities. People line up around the block for this; they've been at it for nearly 20 years.

I went to pick up my food and sat reveling in the loopy warmth of the place: the waiters greeting regulars by name, the flower-wreathed Thai figurines, the enormous Christmas tree looming askew between two tables, the little kid waiting with her family and proclaiming her status as the Birthday Girl.

When I got to the counter, I noticed the stack of fliers they were tucking into every bag.

Free Christmas Dinner For Those In Need

If you know someone who would not be able to have a festive dinner on Christmas Day, Thai Siam Restaurant would like to extend our invitation to a free turkey dinner!

It's that "festive" that laid me out, made me want to roll around in front of the cash register blubbering. Such a lovely word, evocative of so much more than a charitable gesture. The broke, the lost, the lonely...deserving not just a free meal but a festive one. They'll get it, too, packed into that narrow restaurant with the tree and the ornate carvings and the golden origami fish mobiles twirling from the ceiling. Bless us every one, indeed.

I was snuffling into my sleeve until the cashier asked me if I needed chopsticks or forks included in my order.

"Nah, thanks," I said.

"Just gonna eat with your hands, huh?" he asked.

*****

Know someone who needs a little Christmas? You can get more info about the Thai Siam dinner, noon-2:00 on Christmas Day, by calling the restaurant between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m., Monday-Friday.

Dear Santa: Brace yourself

Overheard at the Greenwood/Phinney Starbucks.

Dad: What do you want for Christmas?

Little kid: You know!

Dad: No, I don't. Tell me.

Little kid: A...metal reindeer. That talks. And...walks.

Dad: Did you...see this reindeer, somewhere?

Little kid: No. I just thought of it!

The Turkey Story

I've been telling this story for maybe ten years, now, but it's not mine: I stole it from my chef ex (not my ex-chef, which makes it sound as if I was living la vida Oprah). He somehow ended up with all our couple friends, in the aftermath; I got the t.v. and the VCR, which probably surprises no one. I'm taking this too...no hard feelings, Ex. Happy Thanksgiving, wherever you be.

Any PETA members might want to just go watch the Macy's parade or something right now...fair warning. I'm sorry.

When Ex was just a wee lad, his parents were going through that back-to-nature, wheat-germ-on-the-cereal, live-off-the-land phase, as you did in the 70s, and they decided one Thanksgiving to procure and butcher their own live turkey. Papa Ex obtained the bird from a purveyor of such, brought it home in a big cardboard box that had once contained a television or other big appliance, and set the box in the back yard, the day before the holiday.

Thanksgiving morning, or maybe sooner, the Ex clan must have come to the realization that they had neither chopping block nor hatchet. Undeterred, Papa Ex devised a plan: he would use a large Bowie knife to cut a hole into the side of the box. When the turkey's innate pea-brained curiosity led him to stick his head out the hole, Papa Ex would decapitate him with the selfsame knife, and any death throes would be handily contained.

Mama Ex and little Kindergarten Ex were brought forth to witness the edifying departure of the main course. Cue Elton John, Cirrrrrcle of Liiiiiife. As planned, Papa carved out a turkey porthole, and as expected, the turkey's noggin emerged for a look-see and was swiftly dispatched.

At which point--no doubt greatly surprised at this turn of events--the remaining corpus of Mr. Turkey lurched bolt-upright inside the box.

At which point the bottom of the box, thoroughly saturated with 24 hours' worth of turkey poops, gave way in a dissolving mush, and the absent-of-head but highly agitated Mr. Turkey set off at the proverbial trot.

At which point the family dachshund completely lost his mind. Generations of hard-coded hunting instinct spurred Willie into a frenzy, and he lit out after the turkey. They circled the back yard at a weaving sprint, Mr. Turkey still emitting copious gouts of blood from where his head had been, and Willie gnashing and snarling and trying to leap on the turkey's back.

If memory serves, the story was that when turkey and weiner dog were at last parted, the Ex clan were still unaware that dunking a fowl in boiling water eases defeathering. So they dry-plucked it, with the expectedly grisly results. I believe dinner was served around 11 p.m., and that Mr. Turkey proved rather gamy and tough.

I'm not sure whether this Hieronymous Bosch holiday tableau ultimately influenced Ex in his career path. I can say that in his restaurant days he could hack up an entire goat on the chopping block without batting an eye, but that when he once needed four stitches in his thumb he fainted and had to be caught by a nurse; make of that what you will.

At any rate, tomorrow, Sis is handling our turkey, who arrived already dead--the least of our things to be grateful for. I am bringing the Green Bean Casserole, as required by federal law. We intend to observe the day by our own strict guidelines: gluttony, followed by moaning on the living room floor with our respective top buttons undone. Then, a postprandial cutthroat game of Scrabble, concluding with the traditional kicking over of the board in a hypercompetitive tantrum. Finally, pie.

Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours, Interweb friends!

Crackamint mocha

Ohh, Starbucks. My Dark Overlord. You know, as you must, that I am helpless in the thrall of your Winter Seasonal Beverages? That whatever havoc has been wreaked in my dietary needs by the novel would be rendered null? That whatever resolve I had to stem the relentless tide of sugar courses alternating with starch, alternating with some sugary starch, would be utterly undone by the sight of your holiday-decor-bedecked menu chalkboards, your red-t-shirted baristas, your Elton John's Big Gay Christmas Party promotional CD? Ah, the return of a favorite pairing of words, nay, of sensations:

The Peppermint Mocha.

It warms, and yet it cools. It is sweet, and yet it is peppy. It prompts caffeinated alertness, and yet it floats me away on a little minty cloud of joy. It costs more than three damn dollars, Starbucks, I mean COME ON.

It comes in that little red cup, emblazoned this year with holiday lights and a racially ambiguous couple smooching their bliss under the mistletoe. And a little koan of justification, right there on the Tall size: it's only once a year.

Yes. And at least once a day for the next two and a half months, Starbucks, you magnificent bastards. Damn.

It was a graveyard smash

Eric Lippert's zombie tutorial (via Mike) has belatedly reminded me of my own spook-house experience during college.

At Sarah Lawrence every Halloween, they'd bus in a bunch of kids from a local group home for a party and trick-or-treating in the dorms. There was some sort of mechanism by which you could sign up and indicate that you'd be giving out candy...but the night inevitably devolved into packs of sugared-up children careening through each building knocking on every door in sight, barely pausing to breathe between shoveling fistfuls of mini-Snickerses into their pillowcases. One year my friend Matt and I had the misfortune to RUN OUT OF candy; we huddled in his room with the lights off while scores of treat-seeking orphans HAMMERED on the door in succession. We were certain that at any moment they'd just come on through, blasting a big kid-shaped hole in the wall.

Anyway. So one year I volunteered to help usher kids through a haunted house set up on the campus. We commandeered the student-run coffeehouse located then in the basement of one of the grand old Tudor dorms. We had some fake cobwebs, dry ice, a strobe light; we distributed the roles pretty casually. I was some sort of vaguely witchy guide. One spectacularly woolly kid, a long-haired, bearded neo-hippie who never even wore shoes, was our designated Wolfman: this consisted entirely of him taking off his shirt and crouching inside the giant stone fireplace that occupied one wall. ("Raaahrrr," he'd say genially to the passing kids.) Another debonair young gay man was conscripted as our vampire. He wore a tuxedo shirt and a long black cape (both of which I'm pretty sure he'd already possessed for the asking), slicked his hair back, and practiced rising out of a makeshift coffin, somebody's battered footlocker. Hey, it was gonna be pretty dark in there.

Things went fairly smoothly at first, but as the night outside got darker, and the groups of kids progressively more wired up, it went a bit south. This culminated in a girl of about 12 absolutely FREAKING THE FUCK OUT when Dracula loomed before her. "I vant to suck your BLOOOOOD," Drac lisped through his plastic teeth...and said kid responded by SHOVING Drac in the chest as hard as she could, both hands--nuh UH, bat dude! Drac went down like a telephone pole, becoming firmly lodged in the footlocker. He lay there kicking like an overturned beetle as the kids fled shrieking past.

The best part is that Dracula tore his shirt in the process, snagging it on one of the brass trunk fittings...so that for the rest of the evening we had to listen to a sullen gay vampire bitch about his outfit between tours. "She ripped my shirt! Did you see that? Look at this! Crap, this shirt was vintage, man! God damn it!"

Then later on I was housemates with two drag queens...but that's a different story. Damn, I miss that place sometimes.

Dork suit

I dressed up for Halloween yesterday, for the first time in probably a decade. Inspiration struck, and so I'd outfitted myself as Incarcerated Martha Stewart: a cheap blonde wig that resembled roadkill, a Value Village poncho, and an orange jumpsuit I picked up at the Army-Navy Surplus. It's really a flight suit intended for a seven-foot-tall jet pilot, apparently, so 5'1" me had some pretty deep cuffs. I tattooed "GOOD THING" across my knuckles with a ballpoint pen and brandished a tray of canapes. My (female) boss got it in one guess; the menfolk 'round the office were mystified. Sigh. Whatever; the jumpsuit cost me nearly $40, so I'm just going to be "Incarcerated Celebrity of the Month" for the next 10 Halloweens.

Boss took a few pictures, which reminded me of how I hate the instantaneous feedback of the digital age, because HOLY SHIT I looked like a vast decorative gourd with a dead cat on my head. This did not stop me from finishing off the peanut-butter cups lining the office hallways. I was disappointed that few other sensible adults chose to wear costumes; I mean, I'd pumped gas AND gone to Starbucks in my freak git-up. One of the writing teams showed up in white shirts and ties and claimed to be "IBM Employees," but they were still retaining some dignity, which shouldn't count. I was relieved to encounter an elaborately draped and bewigged witch, coming out of the restroom. "It's hard to drive in this," she said. "It's hard to pee in this," I comiserated. It was--about 15 strategic zippered openings on the flight suit, but none designed to accomodate a lady, y'all.

By two o'clock I had a migraine--or possibly a wig cramp, or a Reese's O.D.--coming on; I left early to take a nap before changing into my Tired Fat Lady Handing Out Candy costume: pajama pants and a faded-to-illegibility college sweatshirt so riddled with holes it appears I've been the victim of severe gunplay. Coincidentally, this will also be my NaNoWriMo uniform. Because Georgia, who's now outed herself as Brooke, talked me into it over brunch last week, and in a pancake-induced delerium I said yes. And elected to novelize my grandmother's brutal, abusive prairie childhood during the Depression, because what could be more fun than that? IDIOT.

I'll end on a better note with my favorite trick-or-treater: the teeny, tiny Spongebob who just opened the door and strolled on in. "He's very into doors," his mother said, apologizing profusely. The kiddo insisted on closing the door behind himself, as well. Hilarious.

Going to hell in an Easter basket

I miss kid-Easter. We were heathen children, growing up--not even part of the lily-and-poinsettia crowd of twice-yearly churchgoers--but we loved dyeing eggs. Nowadays you can marbleize them, or do Victorian decoupage, or have Martha come over and hand-gild a few when she gets her anklet off...but in the 70s, we just had the Paas tablets, dissolving too slowly in Grandma's most chipped and stained coffee cups. We loved the vinegary reek of it, and tolerated the flimsy bent copper wire that was supposed to serve as an egg-dipping tool but inevitably caused your egg to KONK to the bottom of the cup or slip free and roll off the table. Our post-Easter egg salads were always veined with purple and blue from assorted crunchy mishaps.

When I was ten, my dad claimed me and Sis for the Easter holiday and took us to his sister's, a one-time event that may be self-explanatory, shortly. Dad had remarried a few months before, to a young, pretty waitress almost exactly between he and I in age. She could drink legally, but not by more than a year or two. This was before terms like "blended family" were invented or kids were entitled to opinions: you were introduced to your new Step-Something and then you relinquished the shotgun seat and zipped it, thanks. So...metaphorical elbows were still being thrown as we all jockeyed for position and adjusted to one another.

My aunt had remarried, herself, so that for this holiday there were at least six kids present, half- and step- and regular cousins all jammed into the kitchen and tasked with coloring eggs to grace the dinner table. Maybe it's significant that I can't remember which of us had the idea, only that we all thought it was an excellent one. Someone took the translucent white crayon that came with the dye kit and inscribed one of the eggs:

TURD

We kept it out for last and dunked it haphazardly in every color. It came out sort of an olive-drab shade, not the brown we were hoping for but still highly unappealing, candidly declaring TURD in childish, high-contrast printing. TURD!

Each place setting at the table had a ruffled paper cupcake panty filled with cellophane Easter grass, a few jellybeans, and a festive dyed egg. By silent consensus, we set the TURD egg at my stepmom's place.

Twenty-five years later, Step and I have reached a cordial peace. This allows me to imagine, a little, what that moment must have felt like, gathered at the table with her considerable new extended family, the kids all snuffling and snorting with barely suppressed hilarity. Saying grace over a glistening ham, a cake molded in the shape of a lamb and iced with shredded coconut...and a grimy green ovoid next to her plate hollering TURD! Bless this mess, Christ is risen, a dozen pretty pastel eggs with stripes and bunny decals and you get TURD TURD TURD. You are TURD, child-bride stepmom. You are Other.

I'd like to see Julia Roberts make a movie out of that.

Joy

Driving home from Darcy's around the lake, this afternoon, I saw at least four little kids, wobbling along the path ecstatically on shiny, shiny, dazzling new bicycles as their parents strolled beatifically along beside.

Aw, Santa, you old coot...you still know just how to get me.

NotMe and Ida Know

Julius is demonstrably my Bad Cat. He eats the plants, he tips over his water dish, he torments his sister daily. He goes knickknack fishing when he tires of the vast array of designated kitty toys; I'm forever stepping on something unexpected in the dark of the night on the way to the bathroom. He surfs on the throw rugs and hysterically trash-talks the benign neighbor cat through the windows.

Tulip, on the other hand, is essentially an affectionate decorative throw pillow. With appalling cat fud breath.

So far, the cats have been largely indifferent to the Christmas tree. But among my decorations are little garlands of paper Scandinavian flags...and for about a week I've been coming home to find here a flag, there a flag, everywhere a slightly soggy chewed-off flag, all around the living room. Naughty, naughty Julius, I thought. I've been lightly scolding him for days.

You can imagine my surprise when, last night, Tulip (fresh from a nap) sidled up to the tree, snagged a flag and started tugging. SHOCKED, I tell you. "Hey! No no no," I told her. And she looked right at me, with huge glowing dilated crazy!pupils, and chomped down on the poor little candy-cane bear ornament, dangling adjacent. (He's already got only one eye--cut him some slack!)

Those who say that pets are not like people, let alone backstabbing, sibling-rivalrous children, obviously have none.

I should be relieved, though: check out the Very Bad Cats indeed Iris and Fern, decorating their own tree.