everyday life

Some early holiday thoughts

A couple of people have asked what specific holiday music I listen to, since I’ve made several references to my year-round passion for Christmas carols.  I have been accumulating CDs I love over the years and I recently made a playlist of my very favorites, which I happily share at the bottom of this post. The question put Christmas on my mind, though.  Christmas is my favorite holiday.  It always has been.  Much like in the rest of my life, I refuse to over-program the holiday season.  I do my cards and my shopping early.  We say no to a lot.  And, as a result, we can really sink into December, rather than sprint through it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have some important family rituals around Christmas (I had completely forgotten that I’d written about our traditions already, until I stumbled upon this post in the archives).  One thing I don’t do early is buy our Christmas tree: we don’t go until the middle of December.  We do go to the same farm every year, as a foursome on a Saturday morning, and the pictures from that outing are always some of my favorites.  Grace and Whit are each allowed to choose one ornament from the overheated greenhouse where you check out, and they look forward to and plan for this choice for months.

We always decorate our tree on a Sunday afternoon, sometimes with a few dear friends or family present (you know you’re special to us if you’ve joined us for this tradition!).  We crank up the carols, drink hot chocolate, and pull out the ornaments, spreading them over the coffee table, and Grace and Whit slowly trim the tree.  Almost every single ornament carries the freight of memory, and I adore the process of lovingly looking over each one.  This is a ritual that was a part of my childhood, and I’m happy to have recreated it with my family.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Each year I buy a personalized ornament for each child.  I’ve done photographs, silhouettes, and initials.  I’d love any ideas for this year’s special ornaments.  For the last several years I’ve found them on etsy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One weekend afternoon in December we always bake and decorate Christmas cookies.  For the last several years we’ve danced along to carols as they baked: last year it was to The Lower Lights holiday CD.  It’s extraordinary to me to witness how easy it is to make a tradition and how important they are to my children.  We just randomly started dancing to carols one Saturday afternoon a few years ago, and now it is so vital a part of our family’s year that Grace talks about the “Christmas cookie dance party” all year long.  Attitude is all it takes to imbue the smallest activities with meaning.

Last year we were with my sister in Jerusalem for Christmas, which was a once-in-lifetime experience that none of us will ever forget.  This year, the children have lobbied hard to wake up at home on Christmas morning and I think we’ll make that a priority for a while to come.  As is our standard custom, we’ll celebrate the Solstice on December 21st, we’ll go to our church’s Christmas Eve family service (we missed it two years ago because we were in the ER with Whit), and we’ll mark the evening of the 24th with fantastic wine and carols around the dinner table at my parents’ house with our oldest and dearest friends.

There is so much richness ahead.  I can barely wait. I’m grateful that my bias towards under-committing continues into the holidays, that there are many nights where we sit and look at the lights on the tree, that there is still time to sign along to carols and talk about what different ornaments represent and bring baked goods to friends and write love letters to our grandparents.

And with that, here’s the playlist I’ve got on repeat these days:

Joy to the World – Amy Grant
Angels We Have Heard on High – The Lower Lights
Angels from the Realms of Glory – Annie Lennox
O Come, O Come Emmanuel – Sugarland
Universal Child – Annie Lennox
O Holy Night – Martina McBride
Silent Night – Stevie Nicks
Love Came Down at Christmas – Sean Colvin
The First Noel – David Archuleta
Oh Come All Ye Faithful – Amy Grant
In the Bleak Midwinter – Sarah McLachlan
Auld Lang Syne – Barenaked Ladies
Little Drummer Boy – The Merry Christmas Players
The First Noel – Annie Lennox
Do They Know It’s Christmas – The Tributes
Believe – Josh Groban
The Holly and the Ivy – Annie Lennox
River – Sarah McLachlan
O Little Town of Bethlehem – Annie Lennox
O Come All Ye Faithful – Josh Groban & the Mormon Tabernacle Choir

How do you mark this holiday season (whatever your specific celebration)?  Are there any particular traditions that are special to you?  And do you have any ideas for this year’s personalized ornaments?

A very special weekend

Grace and I spent this past weekend in New York with her best friend and her mother (who is one of my dearest friends; I know, I am fully aware of how lucky I am!).  They turn 10 exactly 7 days apart from each other, this week and next, so we were celebrating their big transition into double digits.

The weekend was gorgeous.  The sky was a saturated, autumn blue and days were warm.  We rode the subway, had dinner at Balthazar, went to a wonderful show on Broadway, danced on the big piano at FAO Schwartz, clinked white wine and Shirley Temples in a toast at dinner.  We took a carriage ride in Central Park,, ate cupcakes from Magnolia in a deserted park in the soft dark of early evening, walked up and downtown, visited mecca (Dylan’s Candy Bar), and had sushi for lunch.

The girls wanted desperately to play on a playground and so we did, walking into Central Park late in the afternoon on Saturday.  I watched them running around, their joy palpable, aware of it won’t be long until they won’t be caught dead at a playground.  My favorite moment in a weekend crammed with happy ones was our walk home from dinner on Saturday night.  Park Avenue was empty, the air held the last gasp of October’s warmth, and the girls ran ahead of us, their laughter ringing in the night air.

As usual it is the in-between moments that move me the most.  I walked down the street, chatting easily with a friend I cherish, watching my daughter and her daughter dancing ahead of us.  Those ten minutes were life at its richest and most wonderful, and I knew it as I stepped through them.  As we rode the train home on Sunday, Grace turned to me, eyes shining with tears.  She told me that she was really sad the weekend was over, but that she knew she would never forget it as long as she lives.

Neither will I.

Be in love with your life

Be in love with your life.  Every detail of it. – Jack Kerouac

I saw this quote over the summer and knew instantly that I wanted to write about it.  This is so much of what I think about, write about, feel these days.  It’s taken me a very long time to fall in love with my life.  A very long time.  But I have, and I am.

But that life is full of challenges, both big and small.  It is full of disappointments and heartbreak, fury and fighting, mess and ugliness.  Every day contains some of these things.  For some reason – I suspect it’s my settling into this season, the square middle of my life, the beginning of the afternoon – I grow ever more accepting of the tarnish that is an inevitable part of each day’s sterling silver gleam.  These days, I far less often allow these troubles the power to occlude the brightness of the rest of my life.

You can’t have one without the other, after all.  Maybe that’s what midlife is, realizing this.  Every detail is required to paint the picture.  Another thing I believe is that you can dislike small things – about your life, about your relationships, most crucially, about your self –  while acknowledging their essential role in the whole.  I don’t know if that’s exactly what Kerouac meant, but that’s how I choose to read his words (believing as I do that actually loving every single detail in its own right may be challenging!).

And so, yes, I am in love with my life.  With all of it.  I embrace the shadowy valleys that are as integral to the topography of my life as are the peaks and the wide, sun-drenched plains.  After all, we are only here for a brief, shimmering second; the least we can do is throw our arms around – and ourselves into – the whole of our lives, as they are, right here, right now.  As my friend Stacy Morrison so gorgeously put it, recently, “I see now how much I want to live my life in a way that honors it, by paying attention.”  I want to honor it all: light and dark, joy and pain, beauty and ugliness.  All of it.

(Speaking of silver, those spoons are Grace and Whit’s, a gift on Valentine’s Day a couple of years ago.  I bought them here.)

Questions and answers

A couple of people who commented on my Six Year post asked about what I am reading, both in terms of books and blogs.

Books is the easier answer.  I am currently reading Teach Your Children Well by Madeline Levine.  I recently ready Amy Sohn’s Motherland and re-read Operating Instructions by the incomparable Anne Lamott.  Next up is Lee Woodruff’s Those We Love Most.  After that, my list includes Allison Pearson’s I Think I Love You, Molly Ringwald’s When it Happens to You, Andrew McCarthy’s The Longest Way Home, and Will Schwalbe’s The End of Your Life Book Club.

Blogs.  I read a lot of blogs.  There are some I read in full every single time they write something, others that I tend to skim.  It’s hard to pick my favorites, and even trying to list the ones I read makes me nervous because I know I’ll forget someone.  Some of my favorite blogs are dormant right now, so I don’t list them. But here is a partial list of people whose blogs read most devotedly: Katrina Kenison, Jena Strong, Amanda Magee, Denise Ullem, Aidan Donnelley Rowley, Pamela Hunt Cloyd, Meredith Winn.  There are so many more!  There are over 100 blogs in my Google Reader, and I check that several times a day.

I read blogs in other categories, too.  I read several style blogs religiously, a handful of cooking blogs, and a couple of hilarious commentary-on-celebrity blogs.  I read a lot of what Lisa Belkin shares on Parentry at the Huffington Post and many pieces on Literary Mama.

For years I joked that you could tell a lot about someone from the magazines they read.  After all, I have such a varied magazine list that a stranger on a plane once commented on it.  I think that the same is true of someone’s Google Reader.  What they value, what they love, what interests them: these are all apparent from what is contained in their Reader list.

If that’s so, I think my Google Reader selections demonstrate someone who cares passionately about excellent writing, who thinks often and hard about parenting, who likes clothes and fashion and Hollywood news, and wishes she cooked more often and more successfully than she currently does.

What do you read?  Books, blogs, magazines?  What do your selections say about you?

Moments of change, red leaves, lost teeth, and the world spins on

The moment of change is the only poem. – Adrienne Rich

I had these words in my head all day yesterday.  And I sat down to my computer and realized that these two pictures from the weekend are both saying the same thing.  I shared both on Facebook yesterday: the tree, on my facebook writer page (shameless plea to please like it if you haven’t!) and Whit with the missing teeth, on my personal page.

Sometimes my body and my fingers and the tears in my eyes know something before my brain does.  In fact, that’s almost always how it goes.  According to Westinghouse Denta here, this, these leaves changing, these baby teeth falling out, it’s all the same, it’s all change, the irrevocable and resolute turning forward of the earth.  This, the way the world spins with a mute inexorability that is at once the most violent and the most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed, is the black hole at the center of my life.  It’s the still point at the center of all my writing, of all my tears, of all my feelings, of all my joys.

Because these moments of change, they are poems.  But what I believe is that every moment is a moment of change.

So it’s all poetry.  Every second of this life.