#TheTwelveDaysOfChristmas: The Second Day

The Twelve Days of Christmas:

A Christmastide Tale in Twelve Instalments. With Elves.

Day2

The Second Day of Christmas

I went over to Tom’s house first thing in the morning on Boxing Day, before it was even light—not that that means much this time of year; sunrise doesn’t come until almost nine o’clock. His truck wasn’t parked at the curb where he usually leaves it. I used the key he’d hidden on top of the lintel—he figured that was safer than under the door mat—and let myself into his basement suite.

There was no sign of Tom. The bed looked slept in, but that didn’t mean anything—he never made it, so it always looked slept in. The real clue was the coffee maker. The dregs in the bottom were stone-cold, so he definitely had not been home that morning; he would never leave the house without at least one cup of fresh-brewed coffee.

A while ago, he had been making some vague noises about going ice fishing on Boxing Day with a buddy—I couldn’t remember who—but surely he would at least have let me know?

I checked the time on my phone. Seven thirty—I could probably get away with going upstairs to talk to his landlady.

“No, haven’t seen Tom,” Lilian, who was still in her housecoat, said cheerfully. “Not since Christmas Eve morning. But guess what I did see?” Suddenly she gasped. “There! There they are again!” She rushed towards her patio door, then stopped a few feet short of it and crept slowly closer, waving at me to follow.

“Look!” she whispered, pointing out the door. “A pair of turtle doves!”

Through the door I could hear the distinctive hooting call of the grey-brown birds that were perched on the edge of Lilian’s bird feeder. I knew that hoot well, as Tom liked to copy it—he could make all sorts of noises by blowing into his cupped hands. He tried to teach me, but I could never pull it off. I have to stick with beatboxing, which I’m not too bad at, even if I do say it myself.

“I saw them yesterday, during the Christmas bird count!” Lilian said, enraptured. “They don’t usually stay around for the winter, but this year they did! They’re so beautiful! I had to list them as mourning doves, of course; that’s what they insist on calling them in the records—but my family’s always called them turtle doves. Two turtle doves—that’s really unusual this time of year. Maybe I’ll win birder of the month with that!”

“Nice,” I said, pulled out my phone and shook it to open the camera. Even in the low early morning light the birds came out clearly in the photo; that could be nice on Instagram. “So, look,” I said, “could you do me a favour and let me know if you hear from Tom?”

“Oh, sure.” She nodded, her dyed red curls bobbing. “Maybe that lady out at Carson’s Landing knows something; I think that’s who he was talking to Tuesday morning.”

“What lady?”

Her eyes were back on the birds out on the patio, and she answered absentmindedly.

“Oh, you know, that sexy one in the fancy new house they built at Jimbo Carson’s old place. Her and Tom were standing out by the street, and Tom looked real smitten with her. Oops—I didn’t mean…” She looked around at me and giggled sheepishly. “I’m sure he isn’t—didn’t—”

No, probably not. Tom wouldn’t cheat on me—would he?

To be continued…

XRF_12days
By Xavier Romero-Frias (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

#TheTwelveDaysOfChristmas: The First Day

The Twelve Days of Christmas:

A Christmastide Tale in Twelve Instalments. With Elves.

By Xavier Romero-Frias (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The First Day of Christmas 

If you think that elves are small, cute, cheerful creatures with pointy ears, green hats, and jingle bells on the hems of their shirts, do yourself a favour: think again. Mind you, I can understand how you would come to such a conclusion, especially at this time of year—even our small town has a Santa in front of the grocery store with those little green guys flocking around him, luring small children to sit on his knee. Luring them—that’s about the only way in which the cheesy Christmas elves resemble the real thing.

I don’t know if it would have helped Tom any if he had known what elves are really like, that Christmas Eve he disappeared.

Tom Rimer is—well, was—my boyfriend. We had made tentative plans for him to pick me up from my place so we could go up the valley to spend Christmas Eve with my family; on Christmas Day he was on the early shift in Lord’s Mine.

He didn’t show up. I wasn’t too surprised—Tom’s a good guy, but not the most punctual; he tends to lose track of time.

However, when half an hour after he was supposed to have been there he was still a no-show with no communication on whether he was coming or not, I was getting a little miffed. After an hour, I was fuming. I’d tried calling him about three times, but the cell reception isn’t the best around here, so I didn’t get through.

I reached for my phone one more time and was just starting to type out yet another irate message, when my phone pinged and a text from Tom popped up on my screen.

“12 days xmas” it said, “has 2B the whole thi”

“*thing”

“else I’m stuck here”

“pls try!!!”

Say what? Tom is prone to being cryptic with his texting, but this was a bit much.

“???” I texted back, then, “Where r u?”

But there was no response—it was almost like I could hear the texts falling into the silence of an empty room. I gave up.

“Leaving without you,” I texted, “c u Saturday”

The next afternoon—Christmas Day—was when it started up.

“Look at this, Mac,” my mom called out, “come over here!”

I stepped over next to her by the living room window and looked out into the snow-covered yard. The Bosc pear tree still had a few forlorn brown fruits dangling from its highest branches where Dad hadn’t been able to reach them—plus, he always said, leave some for the critters, they need to live too.

In this case it looked like the critter in question was a small, round bird, perched on the spreading lower branches of the tree.

“That’s a big quail,” I said. “I didn’t know they like sitting in trees. And where’s the rest of the flock?”

“It’s not a quail,” Mom said, “it’s a partridge. Get it?”

Oh, cute. A partridge in a pear tree.

I reached for my cell, shook it to open the camera—it’s one of the features I like about that phone—snapped a picture, and texted it to Tom along with a pointed “See what you’re missing?”

I never got a response, but as I figured he was at work I wasn’t too worried. Unfortunately.

When I got home late that night, I found a message on the answering machine of my landline.

“Hey, this is Herb. Trying to get a hold of Tom; he didn’t show up for work today. Tell him to get in touch, would you?”

To be continued…

XRF_12days
By Xavier Romero-Frias (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Twelve Days of Christmas…

…start tomorrow, Christmas Day. Twelfth Night, which is one of my favourite of Shakespeare’s plays (especially the 1996 film version with Imogen Stubbs, Helena Bonham Carter and Ben Kingsley), was written for a Twelfth Night party, the celebration to mark the end of the twelve days of jollification that in Ye Olde England(e) was the true period of Christmas.

Incidentally, I was just listening to Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and he mentions the Twelfth Night party, too, when the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge around to see people celebrating:

…the Christmas Holidays appeared to be condensed into the space of time they passed together. It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of it, until they left a children’s Twelfth Night party, when, looking at the Spirit as they stood together in an open place, he noticed that its hair was grey.

(from The Christmas Carol on Project Gutenberg)

Unlike in most film adaptations of the story, the Ghost of Christmas Present doesn’t just give Scrooge a single day’s worth of celebration, but good ol’ Ebenezer gets a condensed version of a span of almost two weeks. If that hadn’t cured him of his bah-humbuggery, there really wouldn’t have been any hope for him.

So, remember I said there’d be a surprise coming your way? It’s a twelve day long surprise! And it starts tomorrow…

Life, the Universe, and a Christmas Surprise! Just one more sleep…

amovitam_Christmas Ornament

 

Two More Days!

Two more days to the Christmas Surprise! On Christmas Day, there’ll be something coming your way… [humming a well-known song]

Meanwhile, here’s a picture of this year’s Christmas bush (note the treetop star in the middle, cause that’s where the top of the trunk is). Move over, Charlie Brown, you had nothing on us.

Two more sleeps!

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#SweetSaturday: Springerle

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We finally got around to baking this year’s Springerle (Shpring-er-la) – “Little Jumpers”. It wouldn’t be Christmas without them.

They’re a cookie that’s unique to Swabia, the South-Western region of Germany around Stuttgart. The dough consists of eggs, flour, icing sugar and just a pinch of hartshorn salt (ammonium carbonate)*, and the cookies are made by pressing the dough into carved wooden molds, letting them dry overnight, then in the morning brushing the bottoms with water and baking them at a fairly low heat. The dried-out surfaces are firm and hold the image, while the bottom expands straight up – they “jump up” to twice their height, hence the name.

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My grandmother always made them and sent us some, and when she passed away more than twenty years ago, I asked for her molds. I already had some molds I got from my mother, who wasn’t using them; one of them, a double mold with a squirrel and a strawberry, had come from a great-great-aunt, and it has her name and “1909” written on the back. My grandmother’s also have her last name pencilled on the back.

The reason for labelling them is the (now mostly lost) custom of Springerle-baking evenings: a little bit like quilting bees, where all the women in a village would get together to bake Springerle, sharing the molds, so that everyone could get a good variety of images. The men, in the meantime, would sit around carving new molds out of hardwood.

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As I said, some of my molds are 110 years old; others are much newer, labelled with my name and the name of my daughter and the date just a few years ago, acquired on one of our trips. My favourites are the Father Christmas and the goose girl, which are among the antique ones – no date on them, but they might be the same vintage as the squirrel/strawberry. When the goose girl turns out well, you can see the tiny imprints of the grain kernels she’s scattering for the goose at her feet! (Hmm, actually, now that I look closely – that’s not a goose, it’s a chicken. And here I’ve been calling that mold “the goose girl” all these years, after my best-disliked fairy tale.)

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Springerle are actually not the tastiest of cookies – they’re kind of bland and mostly sugary. Also, you’re supposed to bake them much earlier in the season (I’m about four weeks behind this year), and they go rock-hard in storage and are best eaten as “dunkers”, rather like biscotti. But because of that, they don’t need to be kept in airtight containers; in fact, if you want, you can poke holes into them before baking, and then put a ribbon through them and hang them on the Christmas tree. After Christmas you get to “plunder the tree” and eat all the edibles that have been hanging on it.

Another one of my favourite molds is the grape. The reason I love that one is because it was the one that Oma liked best, and it has her name on the back. The bag of cookies she’d send us always had one or two of those in it.

Christmas traditions tie me to my past, to my history. And now that I’ve been baking Springerle for several decades myself, they have become part of my family’s tradition, too. The word “tradition” comes from Latin “tradere”, “to hand on”. My molds were handed on to me by forebears, and my daughter already has dibs on inheriting them when I go.

Now that is sweet.

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For those who’re wondering, here’s the actual recipe. You probably don’t have any antique wooden molds to make them with, but maybe you can find something else to imprint the tops with?

SWABIAN SPRINGERLE

4 lg. Eggs

500g Powdered (Icing) Sugar

500g White Flour

1 knife-tip (=1/8 tsp) Hartshorn Salt* (aka ammonium bicarbonate, smelling salts, etc.)

Beat the eggs and icing sugar until very fluffy; stir the hartshorn salt into the sifted flour and mix into the egg & sugar, knead into a smooth dough. Form into a ball and let rest for 1 hr.

Roll out ca. 1cm thick, cut into little squares. Dust the molds with flour, press dough into it, trim the edges. Poke in holes with a toothpick for hanging up, if you want.**

Lay onto a cookie sheet overnight to let the tops dry and the designs “set”. In the morning, brush bottoms with water, put on a greased cookie sheet (the recipe calls for sprinkling it with ground anise, but I don’t, because I don’t care for the flavour). Bake in preheated 150-160°C (200-210°F) oven for 18-22 minutes. They’re supposed to “spring up” and have “feet”, but stay nice & pale.

Store in cookie tins or hang on the Christmas tree.

Beware of the first bite once they’ve sat for a while; you might chip a tooth. The best tooth to attack it with is your eyetooth, the sharper the better. Or else, dunk them into your afternoon coffee or Christmas Eve mulled wine.

Frohe Weihnachten!

*Hartshorn salt: I get it in a German deli; I’m not sure what you could substitute it with if you don’t have access to one of those. It’s extremely volatile stuff – it comes in little pouches, and once or twice when the pouch wasn’t properly closed after using the tiny pinch required for the recipe, I’ve had the remainder evaporate on me between one year and the next.

**When you’re cleaning up, do not get the molds wet, or they’ll crack. Brush out any stuck-on dough with a stiff dry brush (I use a toothbrush that’s reserved for this purpose) and maybe scrape out the design with a knife tip or a toothpick.

Surprise…

Pssst – guess what? There’s a surprise coming your way on Christmas Day! I’m not telling what it is – it may or may not involve elves and a well-known Christmas carol –  but keep an eye on this spot.

It’s a-comin’… Just five more days… 

amovitam_stellar's jays
Picture of two Steller’s jays at my feeder that has nothing to do with the surprise – or does it??

#FridayFragment: 06.12.2019

Papyrus text: fragment of Hippocratic oath: verso, showing oath. Via Wkimedia Commons.

The monster stared her in the face.
“I’m going to eat you up!” it growled.
She wrinkled her forehead.
“Why would you want to do that?”
The monster blinked. It took a deep breath.
“I’m going to eat you up!!” it roared.
“Yes, you mentioned,” the girl said. “But you’re not answering my question: Why?”
The monster rapidly batted its eyelashes. They were quite long, thick, and silky, the girl noticed. It opened its mouth.
“Don’t!” the girl said, holding up her hand. “If you’re going to say you’ll eat me up, just don’t. I’m getting tired of it.”
The monster shut its mouth with a snap and looked bewildered.
She put her hands on her hips and faced it.
“So, come on, answer me. Why do you want to eat me up?”
The monster gaped a few times like a goldfish.
“Be–because…” it said finally, in a voice that sounded suspiciously like a squeak.
“Thought as much,” the girl said with satisfaction. “You’ve never thought of anything better to do, have you?”
Almost unwittingly, the monster shook its great scaly head.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s work with this.”

#CreateDaily

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It’s Kevan‘s fault. He just sent around a newsletter announcing a new project of his that began with a determination to “Create Daily” – in his case, write a blog post every day for the next year.

For some reason, that really struck me – “Create Daily”. Lends itself so well to hashtaggery. I had a lot of fun with #inktober this year, and of course right now it’s #NaNoWriMo, which you absolutely can’t get done unless you work on it every day or nearly every day while it lasts.

Having a motivation to do something every day is a good thing. So, Create Daily … something. Something small. YOU’RE ON, KEVAN!

But being an inveterate overthinker, I started ruminating about it. Do I really want to commit myself, in public, to do something like this? Every day? For a whole year? It’ll just create pressure again, performance tension. Which I need more of like I need a hole in the head.

And then I read something in Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly*: There’s one bit where she calls herself “a recovering perfectionist and an aspiring good-enough-ist” (p.128). And a couple of pages later, she says that “one of the most effective ways to start recovering from perfectionism is to start creating” (p.135).

Put those two together, and you’ve got the perfect (haha) recipe for how to approach this #CreateDaily thing.

Because creating can itself very easily fall prey to perfectionism. If I say I’m going to create daily for a whole year, the first day that I don’t, I’ve blown it. Aaaack! Perfectionism trigger! But, if you apply good-enough-ism to it, you’ve nipped perfectionism in the bud.

So, I’m going to approach the #CreateDaily thing in the spirit of Good-enough-ism. Start here, right now. With small (very small) acts of creation; maybe every day, maybe not; for a while (I’m not going to give it a specific time limit). I’m not even going to call it a “project” – more of a “practice”.

I’m defining “creating” as “intentionally making something that wasn’t there before“. So here’s some things that might count:

-writing a small, not-very-polished blog post

-writing a fiction fragment of three sentences

-knitting a few stitches on my current project

-playing half a song on the guitar or recorder

-taking a photo with my phone

-taking a photo with my big camera

-writing two-and-a-quarter lines of a poem

-cooking a pot of soup

-spinning half a metre’s worth of yarn

-making something in clay

-doing a five-minute sketch or doodle

-baking a batch of brownies

-growing a seedling, or a tray of sprouts

-writing a letter…

Of course, there are also the “big” creative things, like working on a novel (I’m still in the throes of NaNoWriMo at the moment), organising an event, completing a knitting project, baking a fancy cake, etc. And there are a hundred other small creative things one could do (Making ink! From walnuts! Or making soap! Or writing a song! Or arranging pebbles in the backyard in a spiral! Or learning a new cat’s cradle pattern! Or…).

All of that counts. And perhaps, even, what might tie into it is the celebration of other people’s creativity, like going to an art show or a stage play, or listening to a wonderful piece of music, or applauding someone else’s short story, or appreciating a lovely piece of homemade cake accompanied by tea in a handmade pottery mug. Because almost invariably, when I see other people’s creativity, I’m inspired and propelled towards my own.

Which is exactly what happened when I read Kevan’s post. “Go ye and do likewise.” Create Daily.

Life, the Universe, and Creating Daily. Thanks, Kevan, I will.

*Brené Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead. New York: Penguin Random House, 2012.

**Another book that very much ties into this is Craftfulness: Mend Yourself By Making Things, by Arzu Tahsin and Rosemary Davidson, which I impulse-purchased this spring in the gift shop on the Vancouver Island ferry and have been living on ever since.