Show & Tell Friday: The Preparing for Christmas Edition

Happy Friday to you all!

Some good stuff to share this second-to-last Friday before Christmas! (Crazy, right?!)

1.) Michael McIntyre - "People with no kids don't know"

Lately, trying to successfully parent two children under the age of five (one of them a baby) during this most hectic of seasons, do some work, keep the house Christmas-shiny, get to every single preschool performance-choral concert-friend's party that we need to, and do all the holiday shopping, has been exhausting. I know you're all exhausted, too. In ways good and bad. Because there is hectic-exhausted and happy-exhausted.

But I digress. Last night at a concert a friend shared this link with me to British comedian Michael McIntyre doing a stand-up routuine called "People with no kids don't know." It's absolutely hysterical. And I especially like his take on trying to get out the door.

2.) Christmas Concerts in your town

Speaking of concerts: Last night my husband and I attended the annual Brevard College Christmas Concert at the Porter Center for the Fine Arts in our little mountain hamlet in Western North Carolina. If you don't know much about Brevard College--which is a small liberal arts college with a great big heart, known largely for its Music and Wilderness Leadership programs--trust me when I tell you that whenever these students put on a concert, it's a hum-dinger.

Here's a taste of the Brevard College music students and faculty, and members of TCS, directed by David Gresham and singing an African Noel (please forgive the quality--I'm no videographer):

BC Christmas Concert

We make it a point to get a babysitter and go each year with friends. It's a great evening, full of incredible music generously performed for free by the College's music students and faculty, and members of the Transylvania Choral Society. Afterwards, everyone gathers in gorgeous lobby of the Porter Center for punch, cake, and time to meet up with friends old and new. This is the time of year in any town, big or small, that arts events--often free--abound. If there's a choral concert in your town around this time of year, I say get thee to it, and take friends! There's nothing like live Christmas music to put you in the spirit.


3.) Recipe - Aunt Gloria's (Adapted) Killer Dip

Everybody needs a good party recipe this time of year--one that's blessedly free of all the "frees": fat-free, sugar-free, etc. This recipe is full-fat and tasty as all get-out. My Aunt Gloria always made it when I was growing up for our annual Crawford Christmas, which basically involved a whole lot of yummy pogey bait.

Don't know what "pogey bait" means? Look it up. (Hint: it comes from WWII.)

Anyway, I altered the recipe just a bit from the original, and tend to serve it at Christmas parties, football games, and New Year's weekends at the lake. Yes, it makes a lot. Yes, it's full o'fat. Don't try to halve it. Trust me: it WILL get eaten.

Here you go:

Killer Dip

Ingredients:
1 lb Original Velveeta
8 oz. cream cheese
1 lb sausage
1 can Rotel
Tabasco or Texas Pete to taste

Directions:
Brown the sausage and drain; melt the cheeses together and stir in the Rotel; add the sausage and stir together. (I do all this on a big pot on the stove. Set on low and stir frequently to prevent burning.) Serve with tortilla chips.
I dare you to take just one bite!


4.) Christmas quotations

I'm a nut for a good quote.

"Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn't before!  What if Christmas, he thought, doesn't come from a store. What if Christmas...perhaps...means a little bit more!”
~ Dr. Seuss, from How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

“Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.”
~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

“I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"Christmas is a time when you get homesick - even when you're home."
~ Carol Nelson

"Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart."
~ Washington Irving

"I'm dreaming of a white Christmas,
Just like the ones I used to know,
Where the tree tops glisten
And children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow..."
~ Irving Berlin

Magical Omens & Great Snowy Owls

www.birdsource.org

Sometimes, magic happens when you least expect it.

It’s easy to miss, in our every day lives, our eyes so used to unnatural light, trained to the tiny things, to the rectangles of our iPhones and our computer screens.

I don’t know about you, but I hunger for the magical. For the mystic. Especially this time of year.

It’s easy to miss. Magic is fleeting, capricious, and will-o-the-wisp. It’s stepping out of your car, child in arms, on a cold, black winter night, and looking up to see stars like pinpricks of lantern light against the pitch. It’s the flash of a genuine smile from a stranger on a busy city street, the warm weight of your dog resting her gray muzzle on your thigh; it’s baby’s breath, sweet with milk, in the crook of your neck.

Magical omens, I believe, take on a bit more drama. An omen in the natural world requires that we open our eyes wider, that we blink back the doubt, rub the cynicism from our sleep-crusted eyelashes. Omens require that we really see, and then seeing, that we believe.

Over the weekend, there was a Great Snowy Owl in my North Carolina mountain town. A man in my Sunday School class told me about it: he’d been driving out in the country, along farm fields and fertile river bottomland, when he came upon several cars parked on the side of the road and a group of people standing outside them, their giant camera lenses pointing out into the field. Far out in the middle of the field sat something, the man said, that looked like a big, overturned white bucket. But it wasn’t. It was an owl–and not just any owl, it was a Great Snowy Owl. Lost on her search for food, perhaps? The birdwatchers were ecstatic: this was a great find.

Apparently, snowy owls have been appearing lately much farther south than their usual range. This article in the Associated Press says that they live in the Artic, but when their food supply–mostly lemmings–runs low, they wander.

Snowy owls have a wingspan of up to five feet. They’re huge, and easy to see. They like wide-open spaces, like that farm field, in which to hunt for mice and other food.

I wish I’d seen that owl. But I don’t need to have been there to recognize the magic of such a sighting. Can you imagine it? A huge, great snowy owl, in the center of a winter-yellow field? Surveying the kingdom with those golden eyes, fluffing its enormous speckled wings in the sun?

I can. And I believe it’s an omen. Sure, there’s a logical explanation. Every four years, scientists tell us, owls have irruptive periods, where they travel far from their normal flight ranges. (The Cherokee, by the way, believe four is a sacred number. And about owls, well, that’s a whole other story.)

But an unusual amount of huge white owls, far from home? The symbolism is endless: the rarity, the color white, the owl itself. A true mystic could take this and run with it.

I think it’s nothing less than an omen–a good, shining, magical one. A blessing for the season we’re in, and for the new year to come.

Adventures in Eating

Baby Feeding 101:



Always keep your vacuum cleaner handy when you feed your 7 month-old. Our vacuum cleaner is patient, stealthy, and 83 lbs.

Keep a steady hand when the dog walks by.

 

Blame the cereal-face on the dog.

 

Leave the baby just as happy as you found her.

No Posts This Week ... Well, Except for This One

Hi, all. Happy December!

Hope y'all had a wonderful and relaxing Thanksgiving. Despite our epic trip to see my in-laws, we did. Hallelujah.

Just wanted to let y'all know that I won't be posting any this week; I've got a bunch of very long essays to grade, and they're due very soon. I'll hope to be back next week, to share some good stuff with you, and hopefully post a little about heading back to graduate school in snowy Vermont for my second-to-last residency at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

For now, though, check out this series of film vignettes starring actors like Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett, Oprah Winfrey, Forrest Whitaker, and more. (It's about 9 minutes long. Pretty cool.)

Thanksgiving Angels

Yesterday afternoon, we loaded our car with our bags, food, our dog and our girls–4 years old and 6 months old, respectively–and hit the road to visit my in-laws in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. It is a trip that, with stops for feeding the baby and letting the dog out to do her business, and even perhaps a meal, should’ve taken us at most 6 hours.

NINE hours later, we arrived on the island. Why? Well, let’s just say that it started with us having to return to our house only 15 minutes after we’d left to retrieve an item, involved crowded rest areas, insanely loud hand dryers and a freaked out 4 year-old, stopping several different places to try to find hot water for a baby bottle, and resulted in having to have our car jumped by strangers and a long visit to replace a battery at 9 p.m. in a tiny, dark, country town’s Advanced Auto Parts store.

Yet, I firmly believe we were visited by Thanksgiving angels. At the dark, remote, and just-a-little-bit seedy gas station in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, S.C., several kind and generous souls came to our aid.

Here’s what happened: When I returned from a quick and desperate visit to the gas station bathroom (which involved a kicking a screaming 4 year-old who refused to “go potty”) I found my husband staring at the steering wheel and dashboard of our Honda Element in disbelief.

“I can’t believe this,” he said. “I think our alternator’s out.” He turned the key, and sure enough, that ghastly, horrible clicking sound filled the car.

In the back seat, the 6 month-old began wailing, and the 4 year-old started whining. “I want to get out,” she pleaded. It was 37 degrees outside the car, with a wind out of the frozen North. A car which no longer had power. Or heat.

“I’m going to have to call AAA,” my husband said, hand gripping his forehead.

“What garage will be open tomorrow?” I wondered out loud.

“We’ll probably have to get towed to a hotel and spend the night,” my husband muttered. He hopped out of the car, sans coat and hat–which he really needs for his handsome bald head–and began pacing as he talked to the AAA rep. Minutes later he knocked on the window. “I need to find out the address of this place,” he said.

So, I got out and headed into the store, but the door was locked. I pressed my face to the window: all the lights are on, and no one there.

Normally, I’m not so great in situations like these. I deal with them, but I’ll admit: I’m a bit of a drama queen. I blame those acting classes in high school. Anyway, for some reason I felt calm, though the wailing baby and the whiny 4 year-old, plus the idea of trying to find a hotel that’d take us and the dog, was wearing on me. And then I noticed a man in a University of South Carolina sweatshirt approaching my husband.

The man had hopped out of a mini-van, parked under the florescent lights where he’d been filling his car with gas. There were only two other cars in the parking lot of this gas station, and a variety of teenagers–mostly boys–in camouflaged hoodies and baggy jeans had been going in and out of the store there. I said it before, but the gas station was on the side of a country highway with only a Dollar General across the street. Sometimes the boys walked out with brown bags.

It was not looking good.

Finally, the cashier–a cute young woman in a blue t-shirt–unlocked the door and pops her head out. “Hi, sorry about that,” she said. “It’s open.” As I was getting the address from her I watched the man–in his late 30s or early 40s, perhaps, approach my husband. I couldn’t hear what they said to each other, but I could tell he’s wondering if we need help. The next thing I knew, my husband popped the hood of our car and he and the man leaned under the hood. It was going to be a while, and the car was now getting cold, so I bundled the girls and got ready to take them into the store.

A few parking spots away, as I was trying to get my baby out of her car seat in the freezing cold and cover her with a blanket as quickly as I clould, an older lady rolled down the window of her aging Cadillac. “Y’all need help?” She asked, bright-eyed in the pitch dark.

“No, ma’am,” I answered. “We’re going to call AAA, so we should be okay.”

“You sure?” She asked again.

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

“You welcome.”

Finally, I got the girls bundled and headed inside. “Our car’s broken down, ” I told the cashier. “Do you mind if we hang out inside for a little bit?”

“No, ma’am, not at all,” she said sweetly. “You’ve got the baby, and it’s freezing out there.” So we wandered around the store, and I did a fairly good job of convincing my 4 year-old that she did not need candy corn or that perfectly lovely rhinestone and leopard print wallet. In the mean time, my husband popped his head in and said the stranger was going to jump our car to see if it was the battery, and if it was, we were going to jump in and keep driving, not stopping, until we got to Hilton Head.

While we waited, I chatted up the cashier. I like talking to strangers. Turns out she has to work the next day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas, too. When I offer my condolences, she just smiles. “Oh, I don’t mind it,” she says, “It’s real quiet.”

Finally, my husband waves to me from outside the store. The car started! As we’re clipping the girls into their car seats I can see that there’s a wife in the passenger seat of the man’s mini-van, and two boys, preteen to early teenage, in the back seats. My husband jumps in and looks at me across the car and in the dark. “There’s an Advance Auto Parts about 10 miles away,” he says. “They want to follow us there to make sure we’re okay.”

Turns out, our car battery had corroded. Which is just bad luck all around, because we’d had the car serviced back in N.C. that very morning. As we sat in the parking lot of the auto parts store, I handed snacks back to my 4 year-old, sang songs, and listened to the sounds of my husband laughing with the teenager who worked there as he installed our new battery. The man in the mini-van stayed for a while. I heard Stuart say something to him before heading inside to pay for the battery. Alone in the car with the girls now, I waved to the man as he headed back to his mini-van, backed out, and started to drive out of the parking lot. Suddenly, his car stopped. He hopped out, ran over, and knocked on our window.

“Everything’s okay now,” he said. “It’s just the battery. It’s going to be alright.” Then he smiled and jogged back to his car. As he pulled out, his wife flashed me a big smile and waved, and I waved back until they were gone.

Thanksgiving angels, I’m telling you. First the mini-van stranger, with what looked like his entire family in tow on a frigid night, goes out of his way to make sure we’re okay. Then the sweet older lady in the Cadillac checks on us. The cashier at the somewhat seedy gas station shares the warmth. And the Advance Auto Parts just happens to be open late on the night before Thanksgiving.

But it’s the stranger in the mini-van who takes the cake, mainly because he was a University of South Carolina fan. I mention the Carolina fan thing in particular because we are Clemson fans, and happen to have a big ol’ orange Tiger paw on our license plate, which I’m sure the man saw. And if you know anything about the Clemson-Carolina rivalry, it’s old, long, and ugly. But this guy didn’t care. He obviously saw a family in need and didn’t hesitate to help us out. In fact, his whole family didn’t hesitate. Imagine what he taught his boys that night? They got to see what kind of a man their dad is, and that’s lovely.

I have so much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving holiday–for family, friends, my faith, a warm home, a healthy baby and child, and so, so much more. But I’m particular grateful, this year, for my Thanksgiving angels.

With Willa, my 6 month-old, in the broken-down car on Thanksgiving Eve

Friday (Night) Show & Tell: Grace Kelly on JFK

It’s been a doozy of a week. And while I’d love to write here in detail about the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the man, and his dreams for America (I’d never known he integrated the Peace Corps–how fantastic), I am down-deep-in-my-bones tired.

Instead, I thought I’d share a link to a wonderful interview I learned about via Twitter. It’s with Grace Kelly, and in it she remembers JFK, and shares how she felt about the man and his presidency. Her voice is unmistakable: poised and crystalline clear, oh so graceful, just as she seemed to be in real life. It’s set to animation, and even showcases some of her fashion sense. Truly–it’s really neat, y’all.

Check it out here from “Blank on Blank” and PBS Digital Studios:

And have a wonderful weekend!

Two Things Bringing Me Joy Today

Nope, it's not my two girls. Though they do bring me great joy. That right now I'm willing to share with all people, especially babysitters.

One of my dearest friends, Christy, always shares the coolest things on Facebook. So I thought I'd pass a couple along. Both involve music, and both will make your day.

Without further ado, two quick little videos. The longest is 5 minutes or so, and it's totally worth watching until the end.

Guy Singing In the Car with Strangers (adorable guy, righteous song, just awesome)

Best Coin Ever Spent : Little Girls Tosses a Coin in a Musician's Jar & Gets a Concert (gorgeous and joyous - will make your heart sing)

Happy Thursday, all!