Half spent

It was with a great and deep sigh of relief that I squeezed into the pew on Christmas Eve.  Surrounded by three generations of my own, I clutched a candle and settled in to listen to the lessons and to sing the carols and to watch for the Light coming into the night.

Concentrating on the words of the carols especially, after this prompting by Emily at Chatting At the Sky, I was struck by a phrase from an old, old hymn. As we sang the end of the first verse of Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, these words tiptoed into my ear, “…amid the cold of winter, when half spent was the night.”  

I was feeling that way.  Like the night was half spent. 

The first part of the night was busy.  It was harder than it needed to be, no doubt, despite our efforts to keep it under control.  We spent our Advent weeks, trimming and trimming, both trimming in preparation for the celebrations—the tree, our home, our hearts—and also trimming in the sense of cutting back and limiting. 

The culmination of this preparation was the annual trip to the airport.  As we drove out of town, I felt accomplished in our well packed but not overfull bags, in our timeliness and preparedness, in our settled spirits. 

But the hand patting my back in eager congratulations was my own and this is the point in most stories when the heroine meets the challenge that shows her air of achievement to be just that. 

My particular challenge was a baggage checking line that stretched the length of the airport and back again.  WJ and I arrived at the airport more than two hours before our scheduled departure.  And we missed our flight.  The four Continental employees working the kiosks could not keep up. 

Standby became our word for the day and we stood and sat and walked and waited in Terminal A as flights arrived and left again without making room for us.  It was ten hours and at least twice as many games of Go Fish before we called it quits and summoned Dave for a ride back home.  He arrived quickly, a true knight in shining armor, with a plan to drive the sixteen hours to my parents’ home.

We grabbed his bags from our apartment and a few spare items for WJ and myself, as our suitcases had miraculously made the flight that we had missed and had arrived in the Midwest well before lunch, and the family set out together for a different kind of adventure than the one we had planned.

Half spent was the night.  Half spent was the night and half spent, I felt, was all I had to offer when I squeezed into that pew on Christmas Eve.  But that is the thing about Christmas.  The baby is not born at the beginning of the story or at the end.  The Light doesn’t enter as the heroine slips the completed Christmas cards into the mailbox just in time to pass out homemade cookies and whiz through airport security.  Nor does the baby come into the picture when the trimming and the driving and the washing up of a carsick child in a roadside restroom have left everyone completely depleted.  Christmastide is a midway point, coming after some waiting, some successes and failures, but well before all hope is lost.

So I breathed a sigh of relief as we all leaned against each other amid the cold on Christmas Eve.  Relief that I have made it this far and relief that there is more to come.  As we lit our candles and lifted them high in the dark of the nighttime church, I welcomed the Good News. 

Happy New Year, by the way, and thank you for reading the first part of our story of slowing down.  I hope you will be taking things slow with us as this year progresses.  It is only half spent.

Take heed

Even when you are trying to take things slow, you can do too much.  I thought I was being discriminating but there are signs that I have let the season get the better of me.   This is a shot of WJ in the car at 11:10 AM.  One too many late night; one too many party; one too many sugar high and subsequent crash.  The poor little guy couldn't even stay awake on the way home from church.

My task tonight is to look over the calendar for this week to see what I can subtract.  Will you join me?  Cross a few things off the list even if they aren’t finished?  An obligation that might not be that obligatory? 

Let me know what you subtract.

*This post is part of SteadyMom's 30 Minute Blog Challenge (18 minutes!) 

Shortbread

There is time today for baking.  My mother’s shortbread recipe, which is not really hers but Mrs. Brennan’s.  Shortbread has always meant Christmas in my childhood home.  As we light the second candle of Advent this week, it is a good time for making preparations, for making shortbread.

WJ and I made a batch of shortbread a few months ago, even though it was not Christmas or Advent, because I had left a stick of butter on the counter for over a week and it was beginning to haunt me.  My mother always says that shortbread is better if the butter is a little rancid, which makes most of my contemporaries cringe.  When that butter on the counter caught my eye, however, I knew its fate was a small batch of Scottish cookies.

WJ climbed onto a stool next to me as I cut cookies that day. “How did you learn to make shortbread?” he asked, stretching the word “learn” magically into two syllables for emphasis.  “I learned to from my mother,” I replied.

“And did she learn how to make shortbread from her mother?” he asked.

I explained to him that this was a complicated question.  My grandmother did make shortbread but really Mrs. Brennan had taught both my mother and my grandmother.  Mrs. Brennan, I told WJ, was a wonderful friend.  She and her big Scottish family lived in the basement of the house my grandmother rented when my mother was young.  It is a brilliant story of women supporting each other, of strangers becoming family, of a community finding room for those just arrived.

As the beater turns the butter and sugar today into fluffy goodness and as I slice the sheet of delicate dough into the most perfect diamonds I can manage, I am thinking about this season of waiting, of watching my mother make shortbread, of the work of preparing both heart and home.

I am thinking about the stories we tell in this time, the stories I hope WJ will feel a part of and find a place in. 

Each night in Advent before he lights the candles at our table, WJ prays the last sentence of our mediation for the season.  Teach us to live as children of God.  At quiet time he gathers the nativity set together and carries it off into his room to tell the story of Mary and Joseph and a baby quietly to himself again and again.

 Those months ago, after pulling lightly browned cookies from the oven and sharing them together, WJ said to me, “Maybe someday I will have a child and when I make shortbread my child will ask me, How did you learn to make shortbread?  And I will tell him, I learned it from my mother and she learned it from her mother, and she learned from a woman from Scotland who lived in their basement.

I hope so. I hope so. May all of these stories be yours.

*This post is part of SteadyMom's 30 Minute Blog Challenge (26 minutes!) and is also linked to Chatting at the Sky's Tuesday Unwrapped.

Mummy and his Mommy

Just as there is a trend toward high tech today, there is another trend toward high touch – homemade and wholesome.

–Meryl Gardner

I recognize that my desire to make WJ’s Halloween costumes is a little silly.  But my mom made ours. 

I remember watching the other kids come to school in store-bought costumes, the plastic suits reminiscent of doctor’s office dressing gowns and the shiny plastic masks with scratchy elastic, eyeholes the size of peas, and pinholes for air at the nostrils and mouth.  I remember watching them walk through the piles of leaves in little bunches of superheroes and watching them climb onto the bus like a living listing of the Saturday morning cartoons.  I remember watching them and being so jealous. 

From my grown-up mommy vantage point, however, I am finding that a homemade Halloween costume is so much more fun and possibly holds a measure of nourishment I did not fully comprehend as a child.  I like this idea of “high touch.”  It must be genetic.

Last Friday night, our family set about the task of creating WJ’s requested mummy suit.  We needed the costume for a party on Saturday morning so it was not the relaxed, taking things slow kind of moment I would have preferred.  But we did have fun. 

Everyone helped.  WJ helped me rip a white sheet into long strips.  Dave was on duty with the pulling off of loose strings.

And I was armed with my hot glue gun.  I can knit but am not exactly a whiz with a needle and thread.  In hindsight, I am not sure exactly why I felt it was prudent to wrap and hot-glue the white cloth to WJ’s costume while he was actually wearing it, but at the time it seemed very important and I only burned him a few times. 

Was WJ pleased with his costume?  Yes, he did not seem to mind that it was “high touch” instead of high tech.  For now anyway.  Ask me again this time next year.

Do you have any "high touch" traditions in your family?

Apple crispish

When you have made a commitment to taking it slow and you have a school holiday right smack in the middle of October, you go to the pick-your-own farm.  You watch your child delight in nature and in his cousins and you drive home with a trunk full of the goodness of the earth.  And you hope your child’s superstitiously declared desire to “eat an apple a day to keep the doctor away” will hold out for at least another month so as to insure a sizable dent in the bounty of fruit you are lugging out of the car.

And when your child surveys the wonders of his harvest and announces with joy and anticipation, as you attempt to find places to store this collection of fruit in your tiny city apartment kitchen, “I am ready to bake,” you have only one choice.  You put the catching up on emails, the finishing of paperwork, the making of dinner on hold and you bake with your child. 

With great excitement, WJ washed and chopped apples as I made an attempt at overhauling the Joy of Cooking’s apple crisp recipe.  I used whole-wheat pastry flour instead of all purpose and substituted half honey and half agave syrup for the sugar.  I knew the topping would be wet instead of crumbly with these substitutions so I planned to add some oatmeal, but found that I only had steel cut, which I have never baked with and this did not seem a good time to try.  I added a handful of almonds to the dough and food-processed it.  Still wet.  A handful of wheat germ; still wet.  Staring into the open cabinets, I saw the Honey Nut Cheerios and thought to myself, couldn’t hurt!  So I added a big handful of those too and chopped them in the food processor.  The dough was doughier but still not the chunky crumbs you usually sprinkle atop a crisp.

Our apple crisp was not all that crispy; maybe it was crispish, a little more like a cobbler.  But it was crunchy thanks to the nuts and the Cheerios.  And it was warm and sweet on a cool fall evening, keeping us together at the table for a few minutes more.

Have you picked your fall fruits yet?