DK Photo @ 7:27 am this morning. Sunrise on Christmas Day. 13° F, feels like -2° F. 7:20 to 7:30 am. December 25, 2022. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning’s walk here: 1) Frozen Seagrass Photos, 2) Twilight photos, 3) Sunrise photos.
There are a few hours each year that belong to no day. The no-man’s land, between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning…
Morning kneels quietly at our feet, opening its pale palms out to us.
Merry Christmas, lovely, he says, so gently…
Look outside! The daughter is practically screaming. During the no-man’s hours, it has snowed. It is not that thick, muzzle-clean snow, but it is enough to glaze the landscape with a pure sheet of ivory light. Enough to give us all the sense that time has paused, just for today. We decide that seeing something for the first time is much the same as seeing it for the last.
Let it snow
Let it snow
Let it snow
— Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies (Picador; March 31, 2022)
Portrait of Maddie Mortimer from The Times
955 consecutive (almost) days. Like in a row. Forecast is for rain, and more rain. I can hear it tapping on the gutters and the hood of the car. Wally is sleeping, he looks up out of the corner of his eye, no chance i’m going out in this, no chance. You’re on your own dad.
We’re now 45 days from 1,000, and duty calls. I trudge downstairs out the door, and drive to Cove Island Park.
I’m sitting in the parking lot, car is running, heater blows. Wind gusts up to 44 mph splash buckets of rain against the car, the wipers slapping from side to side struggle to chase it all off the windshield.
I need to find something, anything to record that I was here. You did it. You were here. But, it’s not letting up and there’s no chance I’m going out in this.
I cue up George Winston’s December, and like the magic of the season, it turns the soul to a softer place.
I turn the heat up to 71° F and sit and listen, to the heater blowing, the music, and the wind and rain. Krouse: “Nothing is more comforting than the sound of rain when you’re not in it.”
hello peeps, wally here. Laila, love her name, suggested that we re-name my handle to “Wally The Adventure Doggo.” i like it, a lot, and this is coming from a PhD student who reads Dostoevsky and Woolf in her spare time, and is way smarter than dad, so i pay attention, i’m noodling it.
anyhoo, re: video. volume up and stick to the end. mom said that its holiday baking time, so i helped her bake oatmeal cookies…she said that i must keep my little tongue in my mouth as i cant drool in the mixing bowl. dad said i cant talk about mom in my posts because she’s banned from limiting free speech.
oh, there’s more. rachel says i look like a large baked potato. name calling like that, that’s just not right. dad said she keeps it up, she’ll be on the banned list too.
i helped dad unwrap, yes, you heard it right, unwrap eric’s xmas present, because dad couldn’t wait, yes, dad couldn’t wait to open eric’s xmas present. mom yelled at dad calling him a man-child. oops, now dad is yelling at me because mom is banned from mention on this site.
finally, i am very good at finding sunlight on the floor and then taking naps in it. that last shot is of me laying in what eric calls the sunbox. I love the sunbox, it is warm like mom. oops, there i go mentioning mom again, need to be careful or i could be banned too. it’s nap time. good night everyone. Wally.
A humble Christmas tree in a New South Wales town has gone viral for being lauded as the worst display of festive spirit ever.
The dishevelled tree – which looks like it arrived home after a 24-hour bender, slapped on some makeup and covered itself in tinsel – was erected in the main square of Port Macquarie to cries of dismay and horror.
Port Macquarie’s council initially took it all in their stride, with mayor Peta Pinson declaring “any publicity is good publicity”. But that was before the lights had to be removed when they were deemed a safety risk due to slowly slipping from the tree.
“I have a great sense of humour, just like our wonderful community has,” Pinson said. “All you can do is laugh.”
The council has now reportedly replaced the tree with a more traditional option – a smaller, artificial tree that was decorated by council staff…
— Caitlin Cassidy, from “Tinsel travesties: the worst Christmas tree displays across Australia.” A safety risk in Port Macquarie, an inappropriately spiky star and a literal coat rack are among the nation’s least-accomplished examples of festive spirit. (The Guardian, December 7, 2022)
Elissa told me the story: After leaving India the year before, she decided she had enough stuff, or too much stuff. She made a pledge that for a year she wouldn’t buy shoes, clothes, purses, or jewelry.
I was impressed by her conviction, but she shrugged it off. “It wasn’t hard.” After that, I did some small-scale experiments of my own, giving up shopping for Lent for a few years. I was always surprised by how much better it made me feel. But it wasn’t until New Year’s Day 2017 that I decided to follow my friend’s example. At the end of 2016, our country had swung in the direction of gold leaf, an ecstatic celebration of unfeeling billionairedom that kept me up at night. I couldn’t settle down to read or write, and in my anxiety I found myself mindlessly scrolling through two particular shopping websites, numbing out with images of shoes, clothes, purses and jewelry. I was trying to distract myself, but the distraction left me feeling worse, the way a late night in a bar smoking Winstons and drinking gin leaves you feeling worse. The unspoken question of shopping is What do I need?, but I didn’t need anything. What I needed was less than what I had…
My few months of no-shopping were full of gleeful discoveries…Once I stopped looking for things to buy, I became tremendously grateful for things I received…
It doesn’t take so long for craving to subside. Once I got the hang of giving something up, it wasn’t much of a trick. The much harder part was living with the startling abundance that had been illuminated when I stopped trying to get more. Once I could see what I already had, and what actually mattered, I was left with a feeling that was somewhere between sickened and humbled. When did I amass so many things, and did someone else need them?
If you stop thinking about what you might want, it’s a whole lot easier to see what other people don’t have…. “I realized I had too many decisions to make that were actually important,” she said. “There were people to help, things to do. Not shopping frees up a lot of space in your brain.” …
The things we buy and buy and buy are like a thick coat of Vaseline smeared on glass: we can see some shapes out there, light and dark, but in our constant craving for what we may still want, we miss too many of life’s details. It’s not as if I kept a ledger and took the money I didn’t spend on perfume and gave that money to the poor, but I came to a better understanding of money as something we earn and spend and save for the things we want and need. Once I was able to get past the want and be honest about the need, it was easier to let the money go. It was like Elissa had told me when she first explained the benefits of not shopping: “Our capacity for giving is huge.”
— Ann Patchett, from “My Year of No Shopping” in “These Precious Days: Essays” (Harper, November 23, 2021)
Image: Los Angeles Times: Best New Books to Read November 2021
The picture was taken last night. Part of a family tradition that Grandma started years and years ago — Grandma sends her gifts which they open on Christmas Eve. It’s always pajamas. The ritual never grows old, and has travelled with us as we moved from city to city, and from house to house, chasing a Life.
It’s 5 a.m. It’s silent now, but for the high winds howling outside my window. The moment reminds me of their younger days, when we lived in much smaller quarters.
“We call out good night to each other down the hall. How beautiful, the way that children sleep so deeply and peacefully that their parents’ voices do not wake them.” (Elizabeth Alexander, “The Light of the World: A Memoir.”)
I sit, writing this post. It’s quiet but for my breathing. A tear slides down my cheek.
Martin Amis said that “Time has come to feel like a runaway train, flashing through station after station.” Melancholy sweeps over me — I wonder how many more Christmas moments are left before they move on with their lives.
Maybe one more. Please, give us at least one more…
Merry Christmas.
Quiet has many moods. When our sons are home, their energy is palpable. Even when they’re upstairs sleeping I can sense them, can feel the house filling with their presence, expanding like a sail billowed with air. I love the dawn stillness of a house full of sleepers, love knowing that within these walls our entire family is contained and safe, reunited, our stable four-sided shape resurrected.
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes: Photo: Mennyfox55
Stick with this to the finish. (Apple’s new holiday ad)
Every year when the decorations come down from the attic, time goes both ways at once…
All day long I’m surrounded by reminders of nearly a quarter-century in this house. Who I am and who I’ve been, and who everyone else I love has been…
Then the Christmas boxes come down from the attic, and time extends backward even further, beyond this house, and forward to a future in which the broadest outlines are already clear though the details are still unknown. Getting down the Christmas decorations is always a reminder of eternity, that unfamiliar space where past and present and future exist simultaneously — a space I can enter, even figuratively, only at Christmastime.
Here is the ornament in the shape of a baseball player from my husband’s boyhood years. Here is the little felt-covered drum my mother helped me make from a paper-towel roll. Here are the blown-egg ornaments my high school Secret Santa left in my locker and the gold-and-silver Benson & Hedges box a college friend hung on the tree in my first college apartment. Here are the metal lapel pins that proved I’d paid for admission at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the only “decorations” I could scrounge up when I was in graduate school. Here are the twisted-tin icicles my husband and I bought at a craft fair the year before we got married, already looking ahead to our own first tree. Here’s the little marionette Santa my mother-in-law won as a door prize at a Parkinson’s support group just before what turned out to be her last Christmas.
Most precious of all are the homemade ornaments from my children’s preschool years: messy, often unrecognizable figures — is that an archangel or Medusa? Rudolph or Popsicle-stick conceptual art? We hang them on the tree every year, ugly as some of them indisputably are. They remind my husband and me of that brief time in our family’s life when there was still someone at home small enough to jump up and down, clapping with glee, when the Christmas tree lights came on for the first time, even if it was only a test and the lights were spread out across the floor or still tangled together at the bottom of a cardboard box…
Last year when I packed up the Christmas decorations, I set aside our oldest son’s homemade ornaments in a separate box. He is on his own now, and I know the day is coming when he will have his own tree to decorate, his own holiday traditions to establish. He didn’t put up a tree this year, so his father and I are still keeping them safe, but we are also ready for whatever comes next.
For now those ornaments are back in their old familiar places, hanging alongside all the other reminders that the people who are gone from us are never truly gone, that the little boys hopping up and down with excitement are still somewhere inside the grown men who can set that homely angel in her place at the top of the tree without even straining to reach.
Notes:
And Lindsay captures it wonderfully in her photo above and in her post titled “Snow Falling” – while I sit here in darkness, early this morning, watching snow fall on Christmas Eve:
“There is something absolutely magical about snow falling. I am always in awe of the eerie silence that falls around the house as it lightly touches down on our roof and the ground around us. I love how from somewhere it picks up little hints of light so it resembles glitter falling all around you…It was magnificent. It was glorious to be able to lean up against the window and just watch the big flakes fall luxuriously down around us. Something about snow makes me feel like a little kid all over again.”
Inspired by: “—light snow, silence, the empty streets, the fog, thrilling cold—so much beauty. Like breathing pure oxygen.” ~ Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks 1964-1980
Volume Up! How great is this! ‘Tis the Season.
Notes: 1) Lori, thank you for sharing! 2) Post title from lyrics and music by Redbone: Come and Get Your Love (1974) (Don’t miss their video on Soul Train)
Hundreds of racers dressed as Santa Claus race through the streets of Michendorf, near Berlin, as part of a Noel-themed 10K. (Michele Tantussi, Reuters, wsj.com December 9, 2018)
It’s Wednesday. I take a late morning train to attend a late morning meeting. There are no meetings that follow. There is no Next, and Next and Next.
I sit in the train. The train clears. I’m immersed in the final chapter of the last book in Rachel Cusk‘s trilogy. I take the time to finish up, I grab my bag, and exit the train. There’s no rushing to the exits, the platform is empty. I walk alone in Kaminsky’s quiet: “What is silence? Something of the sky in us.”
Security at Grand Central is tight. Each entrance is heavily armed. Yet, I don’t flinch – the gunmetal black, semi-automatic weapon looks like a prop in a scene in Toy Story – I’m among the extras, commuters rushing to their Next, and tourists snapping photos.
Broadway teems with tourists mingling on sidewalks, trying to decide What’s Next. I smile, step around them, not interrupting their chat as they stand three abreast. Tis’ the season.
Full body sized neon letters hum and flash overhead: Mueller probe. Cohen. Trump. Russia. This nasty, viscous, mucus is non-stick, and glances off. You won’t touch me, not today.
My meeting ends. A luncheon thanking colleagues for exceptional work on a project with a highly successful outcome. I learn at lunch that today is the 86th Rockefeller Center Tree Lighting Ceremony. Aha! This accounts for the heavy security and unusually large crowds. [Read more…]
Quiet has many moods. When our sons are home, their energy is palpable. Even when they’re upstairs sleeping I can sense them, can feel the house filling with their presence, expanding like a sail billowed with air. I love the dawn stillness of a house full of sleepers, love knowing that within these walls our entire family is contained and safe, reunited, our stable four-sided shape resurrected.
~ Katrina Kenison, Magical Journey: An Apprenticeship in Contentment
Notes: Photo: Mennyfox55
Live & Learn 