Merry Christmas

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.