272/365 Christmas Greens

So I called the wholesaler. It was time, if we wanted to reserve the things we want. We get our trees from a different wholesaler, and I can call him later (it's kind of a grungy outfit, office reeks of cigarette smoke, men who look like my uncles in carhartts standing by 50 gallon drum fire pits...). But the wreath wholesaler sells to florists, and so you know it's a nice place.

I called the guy we worked with last year. It's different now. Astrid used to run a wreath fundraiser and order the church wreaths at the same time. They arrived the first week of Advent and while that's great for your front door, it's not so good for a Catholic church that decorates for ADVENT before it decorates for Christmas.

Astrid doesn't do it anymore, and, surprise surprise, nobody has picked up the standard and marched on. So last year I did the order and this year I'm doing it again.

"When would you like delivery?" he asks me.

"Well, we will decorate on the 19th, so could we do the 18th, or maybe the Thursday or Friday before?"

There's silence on the other end. "You mean the Friday before Thanksgiving?" he asks.

"No, I mean the week before Christmas."

"You don't want your greens until the end of December?" he asks, like it's a ridiculous idea.

"Yeah, we decorate for Advent first, you know, all purple and blue and stuff--then we decorate for Christmas on the 19th this year."

"Ok then, well, I'd recommend the 16th if that's ok--everybody wants delivery on Friday for all sorts of things."

"That would be great."

I can see him hanging up the phone in his office, shaking his head at how bizarre we are.

328/365 To-Do

*Trees: check, borrow truck, Saturday
*Wreaths etc: delivered Thursday to garage: is there even room? Ask.
*Poinsettias: delivered next week all by themselves.
*Lights, bows, ornaments, creche, etc: all ready for the most part. Bows, though. Damn.
*Delivery of Christmas boxes Saturday. I guess trees after that.
*Deliver of meals next Friday. Cook in the morning with Sr. Vanda.
*Ian gets to town Sunday.
*Wait for EEG results do not bite nails to the quick
*Wrap gifts
*Teachers?
*Sturm und Drang. Always Sturm und Drang.

329/365 Christmas is on a Saturday

So it's throwing me for a loop. Everything to get ready is this weekend, but then there's a week in between getting ready and doing the whole Christmas thing with the family and the tree and the gifts and the driving.

It'll be ok.

331/365 Novena Night One

Rachel's voice echoed through the barrel vaulted ceiling of our beautiful church in semi-darkness.

I couldn't help but engage.

332/365 Wreaths and Trees

It's that time of year.

The time of year when I mention Christmas decorating and the wreaths in the garage and Miguel says, "there are wreaths in the garage?"

"Didn't you leave at all yesterday, in your car?"

Sure he did. He just didn't notice any wreaths.

So I went over to the garage and found he was right. No wreaths. Nothing had been delivered.

The phone call to the wholesaler was practiced in my head and in my dreams all Friday night. When I called Saturday morning, the salesman had the audacity to ask me why it had taken until Saturday morning for me to call. Because I don't live at the church. Because I assumed they'd been delivered. I oh so wanted to get mad. I wanted a confrontation--I've had my fists balled up ready for a fight for 3 weeks with nothing coming and maybe, maybe the salesman at the florist wholesaler was going to take it.

But no. I represent the parish, not just myself.

We were written down as a pick-up, not a delivery. Which is a huge chunk of bull because I never ever would have said pick-up. And I made this order in October, when life was normal, so I didn't make the mistake.

He was unwilling to budge.

So I sighed. "How can we make this work?"

The wreaths will be delivered Monday. Thank God Christmas is on a Saturday.

In comparison, I drove out to the tree lot where we get our trees ever since the boy scout fiasco (why am I in charge of anything? I am not good with people. I should be a hermit. A hermit with a crossbow. Maybe just an assassin). I told the men standing around the drum fire (like hobos in a movie) that I was here from the church. They pointed to the office. The office had my paperwork. They had my trees. One of the hobo impersonators loaded them into the truck. We took them back to the church. All was well. The End.

333/365 Christmas Deliveries

A Delivery of Christmas Past:

Saturday before Christmas, parishioners gather in the parish hall, say a prayer, and then go forth in their trucks and minivans and hybrids out into the community. Mike and I, with our girls, have done this every year (Thanksgiving, too, although that isn't quite so involved). Sometimes we show up at doorsteps of immigrant parishioners who aren't even sure what this whole thing means. Sometimes it's grandmothers on fixed incomes who want to give my girls candy for coming by. Young families with big screen TVs that dare us to say something. One older woman who wanted to sell us her treadmill. It's always an adventure, and over the years, has made me, at least, realize that poverty in my neighborhood is veiled in many ways. People who can get by except that it's hard at the end of the year, or people who spend money in ways I might not, money they don't have. People who send their money home in envelopes with red borders.

Last year, we had an address a little further south--in a rougher area of the parish (our parish just consolidated a few years back and gained territory I don't know as well). It was an old side-entrance flounder house (which put it probably as the oldest house on the block--they are peculiar to St. Louis and Alexandria, VA, old and odd, like half a house), and before I even stepped onto the porch, I could smell it. It was something I hadn't pulled up since I worked in the housing projects the first year I taught. A sweet smell, but rotten somehow, stale. Poverty. Scent and sound make an impression on my brain like nothing else can, and I am suddenly taken back to Jarvis sitting next to my desk with this angry look on his face while I hunt around the room trying to find what smells so bad...and then I realize it's him, and I just make it through my day without another word.

The woman answered the door, and behind her I could see the filthy kitchen. Mike asked if she wanted him to bring the things back. No, she told us. Just hand them to her. Her five kids, all pale tow-heads, too thin, half dressed, like images out of a Bosnian war film, were slumped on the bunk beds in the too-hot room in front of the kitchen. The woman was about my age, and the look on her face said it all, right? Maybe. Mike, who is better at this sort of thing, asked if she needed anything else, and she shook her head, staring at us as we stepped off her porch.

There wasn't much to say on the way home.

334/365 More Christmas Past

On my birthday, 1983, the Marine barracks in Beirut were bombed. My uncle, and godfather, Patrick, was supposed to be there--sort of the story of his life, actually--but drew the short straw and was sent to Honduras instead, out of contact for months. My family had no idea whether he was in Beirut or sitting pretty in San Diego, or what. After it was sifted out that he was alive, not in Beirut, and not somewhere he could talk about, everyone halfway relaxed.

That Christmas, I remember hovering around the big oak kitchen table at my grandmother's house, hearing but not understanding most of the stressed conversation. When it was time for dinner, my grandmother said grace. My grandmother, Penny, is a liturgically liberal charismatic Catholic, and she held her arms open and palms raised like a priest in the Eucharistic Prayer. She thanked God for those gathered--seven of her eight children, all her grandchildren but two, her siblings, their families--and prayed for "those who could not be with us here tonight." Meaning Patrick and his daughters. She then promptly burst into tears and ran from the room.

This was upsetting when I was 9. But looking around the tight little kitchen, nobody was much impressed by her performance. Patrick had always been her favorite. The siblings exchanged annoyed glances, the in-laws passed the plates around. When my grandmother came back in, calmer after the traditional Christmas phone call from officers overseas, she had me sit on her lap and held me too close while I alternated between resistance and resignation.

335/365 Christmas Trees

Every year, my family goes out to find a tree. We go to little family-owned tree farms in dells around Missouri. A couple of years ago, we discovered a place in Washington, Missouri, that grew Canaan Firs, which was the Great Christmas Tree Compromise. Mike grew up with balsams from the Optimist Club lot, I grew up with whatever we managed to find growing nearby. Canaans smell and look like balsams, and I was the hero of Christmas a couple of years back when I discovered them. My parents and sisters take the truck, Mike and I with the girls in the minivan, head down to Washington.

In 2006, snow on the ground, we found the perfect trees quickly, but then had a lovely snowball fight. Sophia and Maeve attempted snow angels. We sawed the trees and drug them back through the snow to the lot where they net them and we pay. Each tree gets a tag, and you keep the other half. Of course, there is the obligatory hot chocolate or cider, and we stood around for a moment chatting, looking for heart-shaped rocks in the limestone gravel path. Mike grabbed our tree, started dragging it back to my dad's truck, and..my parents' tree was missing. Nothing matched the tag. The guys in flannel and boots went through the parking lot--sometimes things disappear accidentally. Don't check the tag, take home the wrong tree. No luck. No extras lying around by mistake, either.

The owners of the farm graciously let us go find another, even though we probably should have taken better care. My dad and I trekked back out to find another--they are all lovely, of course--and he said, "well, somebody must have needed a tree a lot worse than we did." The owners later agreed with him--each year they lose two or three to outright theft.

We laughed once we got back home, though, because my parents live in a 1904 era house with huge ceilings. The stolen tree was over 9 feet tall, and most houses built after 1930 in Missouri stick to the 8 foot standard. We turned on bluegrass Christmas music and reminisced about years when it would have been a good option to steal a tree. Life is good.

336/365 Christmas Meals Prayer

From the Rule of Benedict chapter 35:

Let the brethren serve one another,
and let no one be excused from the kitchen service
except by reason of sickness
or occupation in some important work.
For this service brings increase of reward and of charity.

...

Immediately after the Morning Office on Sunday,
the incoming and outgoing servers
shall prostrate themselves before all the brethren in the oratory
and ask their prayers.
Let the server who is ending his week say this verse:
"Blessed are You, O Lord God,
who have helped me and consoled me."
When this has been said three times
and the outgoing server has received his blessing,
then let the incoming server follow and say,
"Incline unto my aid, O God;
O Lord, make haste to help me."
Let this also be repeated three times by all,
and having received his blessing
let him enter his service.

What I said:

By blessing kitchen workers, often alongside those who will proclaim
the word of God for the week from the ambo, Benedict is saying something very
important about the nature of spiritual and manual labor. We don't pray without
working, or work without praying. They are intertwined and both are important.
There is no lofty pursuit that is not supported by basic work. Both are pleasing
to God.

As we prepare to send these meals out to our brothers and sisters home on this
Christmas Eve morning, let us consider our work in this context. O God, come
to my assistance, O God, make haste to help me. Bless this food we have prepared,
bless those who will partake in this meal, allow our own happiness and love to
shine through its simplicity. Bless and protect those who are about to go forth
into the community to bring our labor to fruition. Blessed indeed are you, O God,
who have helped and comforted us.

Amen.

337/365 Big Sister Moment (double posted)

This December has been filled with moments. Here is one.

I'm the oldest of 4. My brother Ian is 4 years younger than I am; Bevin is 5 years younger than him, and Colleen is 2 years younger than her. Spread out, kind of like my kids, actually. Enough time between that it's been hard for me to realize that my siblings have started catching up with me--there's a huge difference between 21 and 17, but not so much difference between 36 and 32. Not so much at all, in fact.

Ian and Ashley visited this Christmas. We all went to Christmas Eve mass (10 pm, not midnight, thank goodness), all but Mike, Leo, and Maeve since Maeve had a fever (of course). We sat in two front pews, my parents, Ian and Ashley, and my niece with Sophia. My sisters and I sat behind them. Snow was still falling outside but the church climate was warm, so we kept taking off and putting on coats and dripping from shoes and boots. Sophia and Kennedy were both dressed in party dresses for reasons I never really gathered fully. They'd worn them the night before to my parents' party and I suppose they equated them with Christmas. Anyway.

Sometime around the offertory, Ashley leaned her head against Ian's shoulder, and it totally caught me off guard. My brother is just over 6 foot and must weigh close to 270. He's huge. Ashley is barely 5 feet tall and one of those 120 pounds soaking wet kind of girls. That might even be more than she weighs when she's not pregnant. Tiny.

She's pregnant, in the category of high risk. They will know how high come January at the "big ultrasound" that we all do and none of us notices except if we're looking for the baby's gender. It has never hit me that it is truly an anomaly scan, even when the tech is measuring thicknesses and looking at the roof of the baby's mouth for a cleft. Craziness. Never had to worry. Ian and Ashley have to worry. The baby has Down Syndrome and that can bring with it a whole mixed bag of physical problems, most worrisome being heart defects. We just won't know until we know and on Christmas Eve that was still a long way away.

Earlier that day I'd picked up a baby book when I was at Catholic Supply getting the last Christmas gift (my parents have a creche that we add to each year, an unbreakable creche, I might add, although the woman at the counter said that dogs like to chew on Baby Jesus sometimes. My parents don't have a dog so that's ok). And a little cross to hang in the baby's room, one of those God Bless the Child etc. kind of sentiments. I was standing in line and there was a neighbor in front of me, a woman who goes to my church and lives on the next block and we know each other but I can never remember her name. She and her husband are going to be grandparents in the new year and she's glancing at the baby book and asks me who is having the baby--probably thinking it's me, after all, with my 3 and my youngest at almost 2. And it's Christmas Eve and I'd had a minor brush with death earlier in the day and it's snowing and I'm exhausted and I start to cry. Jesus. I'm not handling any of this well because I'm his older sister and if I could do anything on earth or in heaven to help them I would and I would, without a second thought switch places and have this baby and take this cup from them? You know?

Of course, my neighbor and fellow parishioner has a twin sister who has 7 kids and the last one in that row has Down Syndrome and we talk a moment (it's like everyone comes out of the closet when you break the ice, whether about DS or epilepsy or whatever). The girl behind the counter in her Notre Dame sweatshirt waits patiently. I'm in Catholic Supply, a store I usually detest going to but it was open and I realized I'd forgotten the damned creche and I had no time to make the ridiculous trip over to the shrine in Illinois where I'd rather shop for these things but, did I mention it was Christmas Eve and there was quite a bit of stress? And I'm crying at the counter in front of this woman who is just almost a complete stranger and I pay the girl and I walk out into the snow.

So it's later that night and my daughter is sick again and my heart just won't come to the point where it admits what day it is and Ashley puts her head on Ian's shoulder.

My brother, I should mention, has always been the type that worried me. The adulthood part, I mean. He always reminds me of the passage in that David Sedaris essay about his younger brother and finding out he's going to be a father. Something like my brother was the type who would disassemble the baby and then get distracted by something else, like the chance to eat 100 chicken wings, and forget to reassemble the baby. I'm paraphrasing but that's Ian in a nutshell.

At least the Ian I knew. The Ian who sat on the couch with his 6 year old and watched "Snakes on a Plane" while my girls hid in her bedroom, afraid of scary movies. The Ian who eats habanero peppers to prove his manliness. The Ian who used to drink amazing amounts of alcohol, the Ian who took 47 years to get his bachelor's degree. And so forth. Not an adult.

We'd spent the week together, doing St. Louis things like the Arch and the City Museum and eating Italian food on the Hill because Ashley likes toasted ravioli and even though you can get them in the freezer section nationwide, perhaps, they still are kind of a St. Louis thing. Kennedy, my niece, has grown up a lot. She's 6 months younger than Sophia and is a grade behind her due to birthdays, but she's smart as a whip and nice. Nice counts for a lot when you're the aunt. Later that night she would open my present to her, a sampler quilt with colonial lady blocks, and she would be genuinely happy about it. Nice.

And this week together had shown me that Ian's edges had been worn down in similar ways that mine had. He didn't tease Kennedy, or Ashley, the way he used to. He didn't talk politics with me to get me going unnecessarily. Things were subdued, but not bad. He was more like my friends and less like the people I avoided in high school.

So Ashley puts her head on his shoulder and he puts his arm around her and I suddenly realize he's an adult. She is too, but that wasn't the shock. He's about to be the father of two, one of whom, a little boy, is going to need a lot of care and love and prayer. A baby they're planning to name Ethan, which means steadfast.

It was one of those moments. I've been having a lot of them lately. The most recent one was Maeve's seizure, realizing how incredibly beautiful she is, while she lay there in a post-ictal cataonia. And here it was again. It was another beauty in fear and worry moment. They're here, they're together, they're adults.

What was that I said about life persisting?



The Dream Keeper by Langston Hughes

Bring me all of your dreams,
you dreamers,
Bring me all your heart melodies,
that I may wrap them in a blue cloud cloth,
Away from the too rough fingers of the world

342/365 Things Not Done

I never called our floral wholesaler about the missing wreath. I'll dig through that in the coming year. See if they charged us, for instance. Complain later.

I never asked Flora about new bows for the wreaths. I think we could doctor what we have. I know she would do them. I just ran out of time.

I never got confirmations from folks about decorating. On Sunday we had enough people, but Tuesday was slim and by Thursday it was just me, really, and I left after I'd done what I could in the silence of the afternoon.

It wasn't my best Advent. I've done better. I kind of phoned it in. Granted, my brother and his family were in town and so I was essentially "on vacation" to St. Louis with them. Maeve had a seizure, of course, right before Advent started, throwing me for a bigger loop than I want to admit. I had quilting and sewing to do. I never baked a single anything. I hardly got presents wrapped or the tree up.

Something about this Advent still doesn't feel like it's over.

343/365 Fever

Maeve's fever. What's up with that, anyway? This strange mystery of her brain, which leads me to ponder the strange mystery of parenting. And the infinite capacity to not know.

Not only not know, but not be able to do a damned thing.

344/365 Snow on Christmas

It's like a special gift to children, snow at Christmas. This year, too, it was a gift for me. A gift to watch my niece watch it fall the first time. To scurry around and find extra snowpants and makeshift boots (rainboots with two pairs of wool socks) and waterproof gloves. My brother heading out to the park with the girls while I stay home and let my mind relax a moment.

We didn't leave Christmas Day. Maeve had a fever (still) and we wanted to give Christmas travelers some space. So we went over to my parents house and ate pancakes, no rush. Did typical Blake things (bitched, mostly, in unison).

The snow is 4 inches deep at least. Heavy, good snowball snow. The girls made snowmen and a "fort" that was about 8 inches high. Neighbors joined. It was Christmas Eve and there was snow falling. Lots of it for St. Louis in December.

Going out to the car to head over to mass, I smelled it in the air. That clean snow smell. I remember.

345/365 Christmas is Over

That's what my sister-in-law said, annoyed at a commercial on TV.

But it's not.

The local radio station that plays the worst Christmas on Earth starting in early November stops abruptly at midnight on December 26. Done. Christmas is over.

But it's not.

This is when it's Christmas for me. Advent, not only this year but especially this year, is sturm und drang. It is work and suffering and preparation in many ways. It is ridiculous rituals that we love and school stuff we have to finish up and snow shoveling and not enough salt for the porch and mopping the floors for the 96th time that afternoon.

But this is Christmas. This is rest and glow. This is foraging for cookies in my mother-in-law's dining room and watching Dr. Who while knitting in the recliner. This is listening to my perfect Pandora radio station I've created, to Nat King Cole and Bing and Dean and Vince Guaraldi sing Silent Night White Christmas I've been dreaming of santa claus coming to town. This is sleeping in and Mike isn't working and so the kids have two parents to bother instead of just me and did I mention sleeping in? Someone else cooks, or doesn't. Someone else cleans, or doesn't. Kids play and I take a couple advil and rest.

It's a short Christmas after what seemed like a short Advent but it actually was long. So bewildering. I'll be chalking the doorposts in a week and that seems ridiculous already.

But it's not over yet.

348/365 Back Home

I got a bulletin from this past Sunday--having a key to the church has its advantages. I sat in the car and read this poem by Christine Rodgers that Miguel inserted into his column, something about the Christmas star and the magi and how we are led to God and it was short and William Carlos Williams-esque in style, this simple little dropping of words. The last part reads:

And if

an angel
warns you
in a dream

not to
return
by the old

way,
please
listen.

I love the story of the Magi, the transformation, the gifts, the flashback and forward for Christ's whole life. Me, I'm moving away from this crisis point but there isn't any resolution. I don't think I've arrived anywhere and nobody is pointing me a way back or forward. I'm back home, but I'm still headed that way. I hope I've taken the correct turns.

350/365 New Years

"You're welcome to come over," Astrid invites us over for New Year's. It's a choir party, from what I gather. I think she was embarrassed she hadn't mentioned it earlier. Ah well. Becky starts listing off folks or something, I don't know, I'm gathering stuff up before my car gets a ticket on Grand.

"And Lynn called," Astrid fills in. "She thinks she might even come by without Pat."

"Lynn is coming?" I clarify.

"Does that determine if you are?" Astrid says with a smile.

"Nah. I've got a neighbor thing, but it is good to know that up front."

Eh. As if I'd want to ring in the new year with Lynn. Maybe just to round out the ridiculousness.

351/365 Christmas Novena in Review

I loved the Christmas Novena this year. I needed it. Something predictable (even though I'd never been before, it follows what I know). Something the same each night. Something a little warm on the chilly December evenings, with round voices echoing in the barrel vault of our church ceiling. Something I could probably do by heart as time goes by.

Simple beauty and stillness. It brought my heart round back to where it should be.

358/365 Taking Down Christmas

I took down Christmas today--at my house. All but the wreaths and the creches (is it proper to put an 's' on that? maybe "nativity scenes" is better, or, what they really are, "Jesus' Birthday Playsets").

The tree will go out tonight to Carondelet to turn into mulch for somebody. The ornaments and other bits and pieces get put into a plastic box with cardboard dividers, and into a green metal footlocker. A metal footlocker that my grandmother gave me on some kind of spontaneous whim about 10 years ago. My parents were in town--probably at Christmas, or maybe when they first moved here?--and we were at her house. "Do you want an old trunk?" she asked. I never say no, which is a blessing and a curse. Sometimes it means dirty baby stuff that I have to dump myself. But sometimes it means a spare dining room table from Astrid or the primitive square-nail construction dresser that holds our TV. And this was one of those blessings.

I remember my parents being there because Bevin was jealous of the trunk. Old, an actual footlocker/trunk instead of a newer replica of the real thing. Forest green, the lock broken but the flip-down latch locks in perfect order. A mailing label on the top. It was Aunt Betty's.

This is the story I know of Aunt Betty. Forgive me if you've heard it already:

"You know Aunt Betty?" she starts. I know Aunt Betty. I don't know how we're related, but I know that the green footlocker I keep my Christmas ornaments in has her address on Delmar on the label. I remember her last years, at occasional family gatherings we rarely attended. She'd sit at my grandmother's butcher block kitchen table and appear to talk to her hands. Sometimes my mother would sit next to her and smile-and-nod at her.

"Well, when she died, I had to go through her things. In her desk drawer, I found this envelope. In this envelope, there was this key. And there was this address. I thought, 'that's down on South Grand in the city.' And so I drove down here one day and found it was Tower Grove Bank. It was a safe deposit box key."

"Well, I went into the bank, and talked with a man at a desk, and I said, I'm her cousin's daughter, but I'm in charge of her estate. And the man says, well, she hasn't taken a look in that box in over thirty years. He says, she just pays the rent. I said, well, I want to close it out. Whatever's there she doesn't need anymore, I said. And so he takes me to the box, and I open it."

I stand there on my porch, she's leaning on the roof of her car, waving at people passing her slowly in their cars.

"And in it is one piece of folded paper. It's dated in the thirties, 1937, and it says, 'I've gone. John.' She'd only been married to John for three years. And he never came back. And she put that letter in a safe deposit box in south city. That letter was 50 years old when I took it out of that box." She shakes her head and laughs. I stare at her in disbelief.

"You know, no man's worth 50 years of heartache."

Merry Christmas. Don't waste your time.

359/365 Taking down more Christmas

On Sunday, we've decided to sort of spread the poinsettias out, take down the evergreens, and ease our way out of Christmas. Like I said in my email, I don't care. Neither did most who replied. But Lynn's response was something along the lines of, "But aren't people expecting to be allowed to take a poinsettia home on Sunday?"

I thought, but did not say:

What? Since when is the parish a source of free plants? Since when do folks "expect" to receive a poinsettia from the parish after Christmas is over?

And then I remembered the year Lynn announced to the whole crowd at the Migration mass after-party , a week before the season was over, that everyone could go upstairs and get a poinsettia! I wasn't there (thank goodness). But I remember the devastation. It looked like post-sale Black Friday at a walmart. What a mess. But I do remember that being odd, how eager she was to give the damned plants away. Is this common? I just don't remember it from other parishes...

362/365 Down with Christmas

But don't take those poinsettias.

I stood in the back of church talking to Flora about what we needed to do after mass, after folks filed out and went out into the world. If we had people stay, we needed to take lights down off trees, take wreaths down, etc. And I was tying up the ribbons on my Christmas banner so they wouldn't get tangled or drag on the ground. Sal was trying to talk to me about how he did not touch the trees this year (although most likely he did...) and I was making a mental list of tasks.

I watched as a young girl, my daughter's age, went over to the creche scene and took a poinsettia. Miguel leaned over and said something to her, I couldn't hear what, but she put it back. He'd mentioned it at the end of mass announcements: don't take the poinsettias because we're still going to be using them for a few weeks.

Mostly because it annoys me that Lynn is so anxious to give them all away. I don't even like the damned things. But I guess I'm just not nice enough to let it go...