The English Geek

"Even if Everyone Hates You, Your Mom Always Loves You."

Yesterday at the library, I answered the phone to an urgent voice. "I'm at the bookstore," he said, "and I need to know what to get my mom for Mother's Day." I had a small inward giggle at someone calling the library from the bookstore—they have booksmart people there, too. Also a silent groan and eye roll: it's only 4:30 on the day before Mother's Day, what's the hurry? Still, I asked him some questions about his mom's taste and then made some recommendations (Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake which I recommend to almost every woman older than about 35 or 40; Unbroken, and Frozen in Time as his mom likes nonfiction about history). The urgency was gone when he thanked me.

The very next phone call that came through was my husband. He wasn't at the bookstore (ha!), but his question was fairly similar: Give me some ideas for a Mother's Day gift. 

Another deep sigh.

Mother's Day, like Valentine's Day, is not my favorite thing. From the talks in church about perfect moms (I actually dreamed this morning that I had to speak this morning in church, and my dream talk started out by stating how I wouldn't be talking about perfect moms) to the idea of gifts. I don't know—it all makes me uncomfortable.

I told Kendell not to worry, I wasn't expecting anything and what I really want for Mother's Day is for everyone to be nice to each other. And maybe a picture of me with my kids and no one complains about taking it. I wasn't being passive aggressive; that's really how I feel. But then I found myself writing a Helpful Guide for Husbands Who Don't Know What to Buy: gift cards and little tokens and even grand gestures.

I ran out of time to write it last night.

This morning, Kaleb woke me up at 7:30. He had an envelope for me to open, and four pictures he'd drawn for me. In the envelope were three pennies he'd found, and the pictures were of skeletons and dragons and hard work---he'd written about why he loved me, in his most careful penmanship, and not just a few words. (The quote in my title comes from one of his cards.)

And that, my friends, is Mother's Day in my mind. The sweetness of my child being himself and telling me he loves me. The only thing I really need is that reminder: I love you, Mom.

Back Yard

When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in our backyard. I'd be out there for hours practicing as much of my bars routine as I could on the swing set. I'd play with our dog Brittney or with one of the cats. Before Dad put the fence up, I'd wander around the corn field behind our property, watching morning glories to see if I could spot them opening or closing. (The farmer who owned the field did not like my wanderings, and I was afraid of him, but I liked that cool, dirty, peaceful wandering too much to let fear stop me.) Or I'd move my favorite chair (a rocking lawn chair with bright green floral canvas upholstery) into my favorite spot on our shady patio, the west corner by the peach tree, and read all afternoon.

Sometimes Becky would come outside with me, but in my clearest memories, I am alone—except I can hear the kids who live on the other side of the field. I was happy in my little backyard paradise, but I was also lonely. It's strange: I talked to Kendell just this weekend, when we went out to dinner, about that lonely kid, and how I can't really say she's just who I used to be since I feel like she's still here; then I found myself thinking about her again this Easter Sunday, when we sat on the patio together, eating dinner.

By "we" I mean a lot of people: my kids and husband, my sisters, my mom, my brothers-in-law, two of my nieces and one of their husbands. The little kids were playing in the grass, laughing and chasing and pushing the babies on the swing. While we ate dinner, I made sure to sit in my favorite spot on the patio, which I still love even though the peach tree and the chaise are gone. I especially love it on spring afternoons and evenings, when the sun hits the back of your head so you are both in shade and sunlight at the same time. It has long been a place of solace for me, that spot in the backyard. Perhaps even a holy place, sometimes.

I ate last because I was avoiding the first rush at the food, and then I took some photos of Haley with her boyfriend Adam who came to the party but had to leave early. When I came back to my food, all the grown ups and the teenagers had gathered around the table, and as I ate we started talking. Random stuff at first, and then something hard my sister is experiencing, and then, somehow, to our teenage exploits. As we talked and laughed, I found myself sitting back. Not talking, almost not listening to the stories. Just settling myself; just letting that specific moment sink into my bones so I could keep it, somehow, forever. Between my sister and my daughter. All of us laughing. Sharing sorrow and wisdom.

I always love my family. But in that hour of talking, laughing, crying a little, eating a bit, I loved them so much. Enough that I didn't mind my old ghosts being brought up (Yes, I did sluff an entire semester of high school my junior year), which sometimes bothers me. I loved them and I wanted to keep that feeling. I thought of my dad, who one day—perhaps a spring afternoon like this one, lovely and warm with just a slight breeze to keep the edge off, and the mountains still snowy and the grass turning green—stopped pruning the honey locust in the backyard and left his saw in the crotch; it's still there, every year swallowed a little bit more by living tree. I thought about last year and how I thought it would be the last year we did this, and how I am glad we had one more, just so we could have that moment. I thought about our strangeness and our wrong choices and the paths we've taken. I thought about all the things I hoped for myself and the things I still hope my children obtain.

I thought about that lonely girl I used to be.

I cannot say the loneliness is cured. But in that moment—it was gone. I held the memory of my childhood self in the cup of my mind and wished I could tell her, somehow: not always. There will be people you can't imagine yet who will love you.

There were Easter eggs this year, colored by my kids who were all, even Kaleb, slightly disinterested. There was a lovely service at church. I made my favorite cake; we had Easter baskets and chocolate and even Peeps. The kids hunted for eggs. But that time on the patio: that was Easter to me, the best Easter thing, better even than my favorite caramel-filled chocolate eggs. The sense of time folding which can happen in the places we felt something intensely, as if the emotion left an echo you can still feel years later. That old loneliness whispered to me, but I could whisper back to it something more comforting.

Tradition and Tension

One of the traditions I started when Haley was a baby is the ornaments. Each year, each of my kids receive a new ornament to hang on the tree. Mostly I get these from Hallmark...Haley and Jake have both had a few different series; Nathan's ornament series started the year he was one and is still going, and Kaleb has a hodge-podge because I've not found him a series. (Boys are hard!)

Although the original impulse for this tradition started inside a craft fair, where I found this adorable porcelain baby shoe ornament that was perfect for my sweet 8-month-old baby (and I wanted to replicate that feeling of finding the perfect sweet thing over and over), what kept the tradition alive was knowing that I wanted them to have their ornaments on their trees when they were adults. Like opening the boxes and hanging up the things I'd given them, year after year, could be a way of packaging up all the Christmases of their childhoods and sending them into the future with them.

This year, as I watched Jake open up his boxes of ornaments, I had this thought: what if his wife doesn't want them? I've never thought that before and it horrified me. What if my tradition causes future holiday tension? What if she (his future wife) hates random, or cutesy, what if she only wants a pretty tree, what if his ornaments feel like a mother-in-law intrusion of the worst sort?

I had to leave the family room for a minute to make my heart stop pounding and to get the blush to leave my cheeks.

I think it's interesting that I never had this thought about Haley's future husband. I think it's because, in my experience, the wife is the person who makes most of the traditions. I have a few ornaments on my tree that Beth made (they felt more valuable this year than ever), I hang up Kendell's childhood stocking, and this nativity:
which I put in my kitchen, is the thing I took from Beth's mom's house when she died in 1998. (I love it, even though everyone else thinks it's ugly.)

But for the most part, our holiday traditions are based on what I  have wanted to do. Some are things I've incorporated from my childhood (the Christmas Eve pajamas), some are things that have just happened and then stuck. But I honestly never thought about integrating my husband's traditions from his childhood into the mix.

(Cue intense wifely guilt with that realization.)

In fact, the only tradition I really even know about is his uncle Buffalo's, who always wrapped his gifts in brown paper bags. Kendell did suggest we do that, back when we were first married, and I was horrified.Horrified! My mom taught me to wrap presents the right way, which is as beautifully as possible, with pretty paper and no torn edges showing. Not a bundle of brown paper!

And there, right there: that moment is what I am getting at. My way, because I'm the wife and the mom and the maker of Christmas, is the way I wanted it. How would I have felt if my husband showed up with a hodge podge of ornaments from his childhood and he wanted to hang them on our tree? What if I hated them, what if they went against my vision of what Christmas looks like?

I'm afraid of the answer.

All of this gave me a holiday realization. Because, see, one of our not-so-awesome tradition is the Holiday Big Ugly. Sometime in December, with possibilities growing exponentially as Christmas gets closer, Kendell and I generally have a big ugly argument, the December version. I hate this and I dread it and whenever someone asks me what I want for Christmas my inner thought is always to not have a big argument. It always starts with something stupid and then feeds itself on all the tensions the holidays bring with them (the money and the planning and all the extra stuff and the pull between his family and mine), but what I didn't ever see is that maybe it also comes because Christmas doesn't feel right to him.

So much of the holidays, when you are an adult, is memory. Is reaching back to find the way it felt to have the world made magic both so your kids can experience the magic—and so that you can, too. This is why I started giving my kids ornaments to hang on their future adult Christmas trees, so that it would be easier for them to find their way back to the feeling I'd tried so hard to create for them. But I think I forgot somewhere, along the way, that my path to those memories cannot be Kendell's path. And maybe because this is the first year both of his parents are gone, but I realized I need to help him remember, too. Help him feel what it felt like for him.

Maybe wrap a gift in a brown paper bag even if it doesn't match my color-coordinated wrapping paper and ribbon.

And maybe because I had that realization, this Christmas was a good one. I tried extra hard to keep things smooth, to disappate the tension, to shop earlier and plan better. Or maybe it was just Beth looking out for us. But we had no BUA this year. We had a sweetness between us that we haven't had for awhile. And I have a few ideas in mind for next year, when I will try harder to help him find the magic, too.

Merry Christmas!

I wonder if other moms feel this? This deep-seated anxiety that something is forgotten, or someone will be disappointed, or what is done is not enough?

There are a lot of things I didn't accomplish this Christmas.

But you know? Christmas will come tomorrow anyway. And hopefully my anxieties will be unfounded and everyone will love the day. Because it's here! And it will be wonderful!

I hope your Christmas is wonderful, too.

My Father's Daffodils

For as long as I have been an aunt, my family has had the tradition of an Easter egg hunt in my mom's backyard on Easter Sunday. Because we tend to enjoy food, we also eat dinner together. As my oldest niece was born when I was 15 or 16, we've been doing this for a long, long time. Certain groupings of experiences have come and gone: the times when the amount of girls vastly outnumbered the boys, the year when we had three babies (this was Haley's first Easter), the times when the amount of boys vastly outnumbered the girls, the year we added cute little baskets to the hunt. Snowy Easters or bright, perfect ones; plenty of new spring outfits admired and photos snapped and strawberry-based desserts devoured

Since Kayci (the oldest niece) got married the year Ben and Kaleb (the youngest grandsons) were born, we didn't have an Easter with every one of my parents' grandchildren before the in-laws started being added. But every year, part of our tradition has been to get all the kids together for an Easter photo. We did some with Grandma and Grandpa and some without. Sometimes we took them in the front yard, sometimes in the back; sometimes, on snowy Easters, on the porch or inside, on the couch.

And for so many of those Easter Sundays, my dad was there, smiling, telling his slightly off-color jokes to Kendell, helping to hide the eggs full of candy. He and I would always talk about spring flowers, which ones were blooming, how the lilac bush was coming along, what the name of those tiny little purple flowers blooming by his antique wagon wheel might be. (He never seemed to remember exactly.) One Easter he played baseball with Nathan, who was just 18 months old. He was quite but still an essential part of the experience. Until he couldn't be any longer. Until silence took him away.

This year, for a variety of reasons, we had our Easter Sunday party on Palm Sunday instead. Some family drama meant that some of the nieces and nephews didn't come. We only had five kids to hunt eggs: my grand-niece Oakley, who is almost one; my two youngest and Becky's two boys. It was cold today, grey and blustery, and none of my father's daffodils were blooming yet. I felt heartsore, missing him, missing the years when all the grandkids were still little, the days when my knowledge was not yet so deeply felt and I thought that things would stay the way they were forever.

"Maybe this will be the last Easter party," my mom, who would like to sell her house and move into something smaller, said to me, while we were waiting for the men to hide the eggs. (It's tradition.) It felt like the last to me. Or maybe the one after the one that should have been the last. I don't know. When do you acknowledge that the family you have might be too large and diverse to continue insisting on pliability and similarity? When do you find that your own small family is enough? When do the edges snap away?

I went out to the front porch of my childhood home, scene of myriad memorable events. I looked up at the trees that were my height when Dad planted them, and then down at his flowerbeds, which were littered with little purple grape hyacinths. I talked to my sisters; I laughed. I went to the backyard and watched the small group hunt for their candy-filled eggs, revisiting the same hiding places the older generation had long ago discovered. When there were only a few eggs left, I walked with Kaleb, trying to help him find just one more treasure.

But it was me who found a treasure, just for a whisper of a moment. I thought of the blooming purple flowers, of the tulips with their green hands still shut tight and the lilac bush just barely covered in pale green leaves. I thought of all that has passed away. And I felt him there, my daddy, in the backyard that he loved and nurtured. Even though it's weedy now, and the swing set is knocked down and rusting. Even though the daffodils weren't blooming yet. He was there with me, just for a moment. He was there because he made it. He's gone but his grandkids still race around the beautiful space he made. He's gone but his grape hyacinths are still spattering the soil with lavender quiet. He's gone, but the trees he planted rustled in the wind and the flowers he planted worked their way towards blooming and somehow all the changes, the edges slowly breaking off, felt OK. Felt like how things just naturally progress. And they felt OK because of that moment. Because he made it OK.

Something moved away from me then. Perhaps it was the expectation that things will ever be the same. Maybe it won't be the last Easter party. But it will be the last time I expect it to bring me the same bright joy. It will have its own sadness, no matter where we have the party. And next Sunday, when it is Easter, I will only have my own children around me. Make it good, the wind whispered to me in my father's voice. Make it your own.

I will, Dad. I will.

{What I Love} no14: this Valentine's Day

Life is ironic. Here I am, an avowed Valentine's Day hater, trying to de-grinch myself by writing all month about stuff I love. And life turns around and gives me one of my favoritest Valentine's Days ever.

Here's how it went:

First, this morning, I treated myself to a caramel hot chocolate from McDonald's on my way home from driving the kids to school. (Yes, I was still in my pajamas!) I made valentines for my kiddos, a batch of pizza dough for dinner, and a batch of sugar cookie dough for dessert, and then I rushed off to work, where my coworker immediately gave me a bar of chocolate.

When my shift was about half-way finished, I was sitting at the main desk. My library has what we call a bridge, which is a glassed-in walkway between two wings. I was working on some book group stuff (as I am wont to do) when I looked up and saw four middle-aged men walking across the bridge. They had on matching outfits: black pants, red sweaters with black shirts underneath, and black and red floral-print ties. I wonder who that obviously-a-barbershop-quartet group is going to sing to? I thought, sitting up straighter to greet them. Whomever it is is going to be slightly embarrassed.

I never thought it would be me.

But it was. Kendell had hired his friend's group to serenade me. In the middle of the library! It was awesome, even though I was blushing so hard I'm fairly certain I was purple. Before they started singing one of them asked me if they could sing as loud as they usually do, or if I would get fired. I made an executive decision to let them sing loudly. It was lovely and sweet and thoughtful and memorable!

When I got home, I discovered that Haley had cleaned the kitchen, Kaleb had made me a sweet Valentine cobbled together from some of his favorites from school, and Kendell had dropped by the jewelry store to pick up my anniversary/Valentine's Day gift (which I shall blog about tomorrow). More sweetness! I had to run to Costco quickly, as I had run out of time that morning to buy the pizza toppings. The second I got home all the kids and I worked together to make the pizzas. When we make pizza at my house, each kid has an 8" pan of his/her own. I spread the dough and then the kids make the exact pizza they want. Kaleb discovered he likes canadian bacon!

After we ate, we cut out the cookies, then baked them, and Kaleb just, all by himself while I was eating, frosted them all.

Tonight, I get it. I get why people love Valentine's Day. And while I don't think I'll get (or even want or need) jewelry, flowers, and a singing quartet every year from now on, that is OK. That it's happened just this year is good enough. It's awesome, in fact. Because now I have this Valentine's Day, the one I can look back on with sweet fondness no matter what any other year brings!

How was your Valentine's Day?

it came without ribbons

(although, there were ribbons—400 feet of curly ones, to be exact; and bows—nearly two entire bagsful; there were boxes and packages and some of my favoritest-ever tags on the Santa gifts)

I didn't know if I would feel it this year, that enveloping spirit of Christmas. I tried to be more prepared so that in the last week before the big day, I could relax. Maybe bake a little, make my traditional candy. Spend time with the kids. I did manage to get nearly everything wrapped before the kids' last days of school, which made me feel a little better. But I still left too many things until the end. Instead of the relaxing pre-Christmas week I'd imagined, I needed to finish a sewing project. I went to my mom's house twice to help her clean out her basement. I made next year's calendar which meant a long stint with Photoshop and the resulting headache. (Am I the only person in the digital world who gets Photoshop-induced headaches? I can't be, can I?) I got the Christmas cards printed (finally) and the Christmas letter written. I agonized over the list of presents, knowing one kid would feel neglected but not entirely certain how to fix it. I nearly had a tiny little temper tantrum in the middle of Buckle over that very worry (luckily Haley was there with me and managed to talk me down). I went to the mall, to Target, to Costco, to Walmart, to Kohls, to another Walmart and another Target and another Costco and two fabric stores and two bakeries and three different gas stations and Office Max for good measure. I stood for two hours inside Target talking to people we kept bumping into. My late nights got progressively later: 12:45, 1:30, 2:15. 3:00. I was surviving on sugar & caffeine and feeling very Bilbo-esque: like butter scraped over too much bread.

But perhaps that very exhaustion (combined with the overwhelming anxiety of feeling like I hadn't done enough or made it good enough) that made it seem impossible to feel the Christmas spirit was the very thing that allowed it (once I let myself relax a little) to flood my heart in unprecedented richness.

I've already written down the details of my children's Christmases, so that come January (or some random other time in the future) when I sit down to scrap the photos, I won't have forgotten any of the details. The moments that felt like my gifts, when I felt the elusive but at last pervasive here is Christmas at last feeling I am setting down here:

The Hug

When I was a kid, my sisters and I had a tradition of drawing names for each other's gifts. I don't remember if we opened these "sister gifts" on Christmas eve or Christmas day, but I know we all looked forward to it. I've kept that tradition with my kids, only we call them the "sibling gifts" and always open them on Christmas eve, after the pajamas but before the reading of Luke chapter 2. This year, Haley gave to Kaleb and she decided to get him a soccer ball. He's been wanting his own soccer ball for awhile but I kept putting it off, so he was completely surprised and excited. After thanking Haley, he came to me where I was sitting on the couch. "Momma," he said. "Thank you for this soccer ball. I love it so much!" And then he hugged me. His affection felt so entirely real and his gratitude so sincere. In just that instant I felt like all my pent-up anxieties melted away and then a flood of Christmas spirit.

The Reading

Even though it causes some eye rolling and "really?"s, I insist on everyone sitting down and reading the Nativity story. Usually I do the actual reading, but this year Jake asked to do it. Oh, my. This made my eyes swell up with tears, although I didn't let anyone see. I want to remember him reading those verses in his not-quite-14-year-old voice.

Cooking in the Dark of Night

Kendell usually falls asleep before I do on Christmas eve. This used to sort of bug me. Wasn't the playing of Santa something couples all across America doing together? But I long ago realized that I actually love doing it myself. It makes me happy and gives me a chance to think. This year, he fell asleep as usual, but Haley stayed up with me while I finished the food for the next day. I needed to make the sausage casserole, finish the sweet rolls, and put together the wassail. Haley did the sweet rolls while I did the rest. We talked and laughed and got stuff done. I'm certain she would have stayed up with me to put out the gifts, too. But I still wanted her to have some magic in the morning. She helped me carry the sacks of presents downstairs and then she went to bed. Having her help with the food gave me a deep happiness. It helped me remember that while the Christmases of her childhood are past, there is much joy to find in these of her adolescence.

 

 

The Sacrament
Our church had an hour-long meeting with the other two congregations in our area. My kids resisted going to church a little bit, but they didn't know it wouldn't ever be an option not to. Aside from the fact that, hello! It's Christmas. We are celebrating Christ here, not commercialism! but there was a moment I wanted to have. In our church, the boys who are 12 and 13 years old pass the sacrament. This means that for the past few weeks, Jake and Nathan have been passing it together. There will never be this moment again in the history of moments: these two brothers passing the sacrament at the same time on Christmas Sunday. I knew it would matter to me. What I didn't realize was the effect the combination of three congregations would have. There were 18-20 boys, in dark suits and ties, gathered together in a mass to serve other people. None of them are perfect, I know. But the combined strength of their goodness and their right intentions was so palpable I almost couldn't look at any of them. It brought, almost more than any other moment, the true meaning of Christmas into sharp focus for me.

The LaughCry
One of the songs we sang in church was "Away in the Manger." It reminded me of something I'd completely forgotten: the cattle were lowing. My dad always used to joke about that. "What does it mean, the cattle are 'lowing'?" he'd joke. "Have you ever heard a cow low? I thought they mooooooooo'd" and then he'd sing the sing with "moo" replacing "low." I did that combination laughcry, a hiccup's-worth of uncontrolled emotion: laughter at his sense of humor and at being able to find it in such an unexpected place, sorrow because—I miss him. I miss him always, but I miss him at Christmas, when he'd always manage to find a dirty joke to tell at the dinner table and then give my mom something wildly inappropriate and too expensive. I miss how he made me laugh but I am joyful that he can still manage it.

The Bells
"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day" has never been one of my favorite carols. I don't dislike it, but I don't love singing it. When you compare it to the exuberance of "Far Far Away on Judea's Plain" or the elegant joy of "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear," "Bells" just seems so somber. At the end of the meeting, however, we sang it, and the pianist played it on the organ instead of the piano. The organ was set so it sounded just like bells, and that shift in the music completely undid me. Haley and Nathan both asked me why I was crying. I couldn't help it. The anxieties of the preparation, the arguments over spending, the stress of wanting to make everything just right, and the way I had felt so certain that peace would not be found—these things felt perfectly summed up by the idea of "the wrong," which the song says will fail. God is not dead. My heart revolved to day.

The Gifts

There were three gifts this year I was so excited to see opened:

• a necklace with the saying "Keep calm and carry on" that I found at an Etsy shop for Haley. This has been her motto lately and I knew she would love it. 
• Nathan's iPod. We agonized long and hard over whether or not we should get this for him. It was expensive (although, being us, we didn't buy it until we found an excellent deal), and seemed excessive. He also had his heart set on it. We did a great job at convincing him that we would not buy it for him. It was the last gift he opened and his face made all that agonizing worth it.
• the quilt I made for Jake. (This will eventually get its own post, it's that big!). I bought the fabric for this over a year ago—I know, mother Fail. As a kid who just simply likes to have a blanket around, he's worn out two quilts this year. Plus I wanted him to have one that I'd made just for him. Even though it was a fairly simple design, and tied instead of quilted (per his request), it still stressed me out a bit. And honestly: he wasn't over-the-top excited when he opened it. But the day after Christmas, he told me how good he'd slept with his new quilt, and again with the sincerity: it told me that my efforts were appreciated.

All of which served to let me see that I have arrived squarely in the middle of that part of life when giving really, really is better than receiving.

My Gift
Although, Haley did give me something pretty awesome! She put this four-photo panel together for me, starting with finding the frame, taking the photos (trust me...three boys are hard to photograph), developing the photos, and assembling it all. I love it. The frame is exactly my taste and the photos are perfect. Even the font she used was just right!

I wasn't sure, starting this post, if I could say what I wanted to express. I don't think I have, exactly. Perhaps this is because I don't have the way to put into words what I felt. But I will keep this words I did manage and use them as a reminder, next year, when I am, frazzled and stressed and sad, my own Amy version of Grinchiness: if I let it, it will come. Christmas will visit my heart, too, even if I am anxious and exhausted, in ways I can never imagine but which are exactly what is needed.

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling, how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags.

Christmas Eve

Right now, I am wishing I had one of those totally-on-top-of-it personalities. Alas, I do not. I'm feeling panicked about my Santa Claus duties: will the kids like their gifts? Will I have disappointed any of them? Is everything evenly dispersed? And about my culinary traditions: the caramel isn't made yet; I did make a batch of fudge but it turned out so disastrously that it was inedible; I haven't made cookies for Santa yet. And slightly disturbed about the list of things I still have to do that I should have accomplished, somehow, this week, like mailing the Christmas cards (we took the photos back in October! like, before Halloween! why was it so hard to get it printed before yesterday?) (But, I did take some solace in the fact that there were twelve other harried mothers waiting in line at Costco to pick up their Christmas cards, too. At least I'm not the only one.), or finishing the little handmade gifts I was going to make for friends, or going to Temple Square to see the lights.

Plus I can't find Kendell's Christmas present. Like, seriously. I'm afraid I might have thrown it away. I don't know where. it. is.

And all this last-minute franticness is making me feel like once again I've missed the point. I so wanted today to be a peaceful one, when I wasn't in full-out panic mode. Because I wanted to feel the spirit of Christmas. I wanted to savor just being with my kids. I wanted to feel like it was all to celebrate Christ's birth, not to celebrate getting and spending.

But, alas, I didn't manage it. So, once more into the fray. But I'm trying to keep this little fragment of poem (which I just memorized) in my heart as I go, just in case:

Then sped my thoughts to keep
     that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching
     by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields
     and marveling could not tell
Whether it were angels
     or the bright stars singing.
                             (Robert Bridges)

I hope your Christmas eve and Christmas day are full of peace and joy!

The Answer to That Question is Always Yes

It's December 16---single-digit countdown to Christmas. I've wrapped nearly every present I've purchased. I've had the traditional Santa-Claus-is-not-real-and-all-this-magic-making-occasionally-takes-me-away-from-the-fing-laundry argument with my husband. I have freaked out by losing a Very Important Gift in one of my super-secret hiding spots but then found it again. I have panicked about failing to maintain my "wow, she's crafty" status and set myself an overwhelmingly impossible-to-finish-in-time sewing task. I have had a meltdown in the middle of Victoria's Secret. I've eaten approximately 1,289 Lindt Dark Chocolate Peppermint Truffles (must. eat. as. many. as. possible. They are a limited edition after all.)

I've reached the snarky stage of December.

And really. Who wants to bottle up her snark? Bottling it up is the worse thing that you can do. Bottled snark causes cancer, acne, and wrinkles. Better out than in I always say! So instead of keeping it all in the eternal loop that's been going and going and going in my head all day (the 4.5 hours of sleep I got last night? probably not helping my Snarky Stage), I am here to share them, the questions I always answer yes to:

1. Do drivers of SVUs that are so long they trap me in the McDonald's drive thru when they've pulled up into that little "wait here while we fix your order" spot bug me?
2. Do I feel guilty for the voice in my head that judges said SVU drivers for their negative environmental impact?
3. Am I internally rolling my eyes when someone asks me for a happy, uplifting book with no sex, swearing, violence, or anything depressing that will change their life forever?
4. Does my laundry room look like the overflow from an episode of Hoarders?
5. Am I terrified to balance the checkbook?
6. Do I go over and over the Christmas list because I'm paranoid one or another kid will think he or she was treated unfairly?
7. Do I have a secret affection for "Sexy and I Know It?" (Well, only because it's got a beat and you can dance to it.)
8. Have I completely failed in the exercise-and-eat-healthy department lately?
9. Does my back hurt? And my ITB even when I'm just walking up the stairs? (the answer to that question also includes the letters W., T, and F., BTW.)
10. Did I harangue my husband in the middle of WalMart last night?
11. Did I screech like a fishwife at not just one but every. single. one. of my kids this week?
12. Did I completely forget that I was supposed to bring donuts to Kaleb's class yesterday to celebrate his Half Birthday? And then take some giant steps backward in my non-self-flagellation goals once I realized what I'd done?
13. Does my kitchen table look like...well, something no one's invented a simile for, it is that messy?
14. Did I spend too much money at Lands' End, the Gap, Amazon, and Aeropostale? (but! Also! did I get amazing & incredible bargains!?!)
15. Did I really eat three more Lindt truffles while I wrote this blog post?

What question do you always answer yes to?

Christmas Eve Notebook Revisited

Last year I wrote this post at Write. Click. Scrapbook. about my Christmas Eve notebook tradition.

The gist of the idea is this: every year, after I've played Santa, I take a midnight shot of the Christmas tree with its pile of gifts, and then I write in my Christmas Eve notebook. Here is where I focus on my emotional responses to what the holidays have brought so far, and what I am anticipating for the next day. We all work so hard to make sure Christmas is perfect for our kids! This little moment is the thing I do for me to help me feel peaceful and centered and refreshed.

Since that WCS post was done on Christmas Eve day last year, I had a couple of people ask me to remind them to do it this year. SO!

Here's your reminder. You don't have to make an altered notebook like I did. You just have to get a notebook that is dedicated to the experience, set aside some time on Christmas Eve, and write down what you are experiencing this year.

Happy writing!