Friend of Santa

What's the deal with dissing Santa? It's bad enough we can't have Nativity scenes, but now there's a major retailer putting Santa down.

I object.

I know, it's supposed to be humorous. But the defender in me always rises up when I see those ads about how the retailer can best Santa in the game of gift giving.

Just so you know: I'm a dyed in the wool, steeped in the DNA Catholic.

I love the sacramental infusion of the smells, the bells, the holiness of the ordinary, the ritual, the language,  the music, the art, the mysticism of Catholicism. And the gracious, non-deserved, no naughty and nice list of the Gift of Christmas.

And maybe, just maybe, that's why I love Santa Claus.

Long, long time ago, when I was a young mother of a two year old, I was standing in the back of the church, holding the Lectionary waiting to process up the aisle. Next to me was a woman, probably in her fifties, a kind of "church lady" with her sensible gray hair and plain grey skirt. It was Christmas morning and I was the lector at the 10:15 Mass, and she was a Eucharistic Minister.  I mentioned the fun of Christmas with my toddler daughter, the anticipation of Santa and the gifts.  She very plainly said, "oh we never bothered with all that with our kids. We emphasized the spiritual rather than the Santa aspect of Christmas."

She was of so sincere. And humorless. What a drag.

For just a moment I felt chastened. I had been corrected by my elder on the true nature of Christmas and what's important to teach children. But that didn't last long.

What's more Christian, more holy even, than a saint spreading the blessings of God on a world deeply in need of reminders of love?

We are physical, that is, incarnate, beings  not spirits just renting out space in a body--we need the sights sounds touch excitement, magic, yes magic, of Christmas and the  concrete expressions of love and undeserved gifts.

So when folks complain about the secularization of Christmas, I wish they'd leave Santa out of it. He's a holy man. A wise man. A magi.

And, man oh man, he's one of the best teachers of the holy that we've got.

Merry, Merry everyone.

Meat and Potatoes

Pot Roast, anyone? Characters in my novel-in-progress have been hovering around the kitchen, the living room and the back yard for weeks now, waiting to eat Pot Roast. They've been lingering and thinking, but now it was time to eat. But I couldn’t seem to get them to the table. Well, finally, they can have their supper.

How did such a thing happen? Well, that’s what I’m writing about: the glimpses of the numinous we get to be part of in the creative arts.  Mine is quite a humble glimpse, but, I am thrilled by it.  Why?  Well, let me tell you.

I started this novel quite a while ago.  Started with a writing prompt in a seminar.  I don’t remember the prompt, but the picture it nudged into life has stayed with me for the last few years. I ‘saw’ a woman holding onto a Miraculous Medal. She is in pain.  She is angry, confused and her world vision has been turned inside out.

But that’s all I had.  I hadn’t yet learned what it was that upset her, what sent her into a deep well of darkness.  I had to discover that.  So over time, much time, since I am quite slow at this, my character Rose had to turn into a real person, albeit one that lives in my imagination and in the pages I have churned out.  But the truth is, she lives in this other place, this place I couldn’t just access by willing it. I had to ‘drop down’ into that place where writing happens. Then, I had to be let in.

Someone I know often said that a person with a pencil in his hand can make characters do and say anything the writer wants.  That may be true, to an extent.  But, it is only part of the story.

Talk to writers for a while and they may let you in on a secret: the best, most compelling writing comes not from the conscious, willful mind. The writing that delights the writer (and hopefully the reader) comes from something bigger than our own little controlling sensible logical day-time brain.  It is writing that surprises the writer.  It is the turn in the story or development of character and plot that has its own trajectory, its own secrets to reveal. It is the thin slice of gold that is the real reason writers face a blank page day after day, hoping, working, putting letters on a screen, in anticipation that we can get to the yellow brick road, even if only for a few steps.

When one of my characters needed a cigarette, he went to the back porch to light up.  It is raining.  Without warning, he steps into the rain. This impulsive act sets in motion a way to break the tension and allow dinner to proceed. I didn’t know he was going to do that. Actually, until the words showed up on the page by way of my fingertips I was struggling with what turn of events would progress the story. I was thinking too much. I was in my own way.

Remember the Nav’i in Avatar?  Those long pony tails were not just for show, they were the cord by which the large blue people connected with the horse like flying creatures, each other, and the tree of life that was at the center of their culture.  Connected, they were more than they were alone; they were one with the greater energy that is always present, but often ignored.

I had been trying to steer my novel in a certain way, like the man turned Nav’i in Avatar was trying to steer his ride.  Once he was connected, braid to braid, he was part of the process, not part of the resistance. He could move forward.

Now that my characters have had their dinner, I wonder what will happen to them next. Guess I’ll find out.

Dessert, anyone?

Choirs of Angels?

Several years ago, when our oldest child was in high school and our youngest in elementary, Gene and I came home from our Small Community of Faith gathering to find Katie directing John as he posed as a shepherd for the Christmas card she was drawing. She had him wrapped in a pastel green tablecloth and was instructing him to "look afraid" at the sight of the Angelic Host. He complained, in that youngest child way, why every year his siblings tried to make a fool of him.  They protested that accusation with a defense that they try to make of fool of him every day.

Mike was waving a shillelagh/shepherd’s staff and Daniel was sitting on the couch reading through a skateboard magazine awaiting the director’s instruction.  When it was Daniel’s turn to sit on the stairs that were doubling as a Bethlehem hillside he brought over the magazine and announced that he was studying the “Noble Word”, a new title for sacred scripture, we supposed.  He had an old blanket on his head and a belt from a Ninja turtle costume as the headband.  A large blue sheet was his garment.  Mike was sitting on a dining room chair, still waving that shillelagh and making up a dialect that was a cross between Mel Brooks and Darby O’Gill reacting to the imagined choir of angels, while he was draped in tablecloths.  Katie’s attempt at directing her three brothers to look serious, contemplative and afraid of the celestial announcers of the birth of the savior was not very successful.  No way were they sitting still and going to look anything but goofy arrayed in our best dining table attire.

Ah, Christmas!

It was rather refreshing to be greeted at the door by the sounds of our children laughing and joking with each other. You can believe it was a wonderful change from the almost usual litany of complaints and the call to separate boys mid-fight over some squabble that would erupt as soon as we stepped out for a little adult conversation. This was a benefit of their ever-growing maturity, along with the large sneakers that littered the house.

I knew this was a 'snapshot' moment.   I almost took a picture of them in their silly outfits, but I didn’t, for two reasons.  One was that there are some moments you cannot pose for.  Another, very practical reason, is that we never develop our pictures (this was before we had digital cameras).  We had rolls of undeveloped moments of our family history in drawers and cabinets and shelves all over the house. Why we bothered to say “Cheese!” is one of our family mysteries.  This was something we would trust to memory and imagination:  the four of them laughing and joking and trying to pose as historical figures from the greatest drama of all time in our suburban living room/ hillside of Judea.

I had been nostalgic for Christmas past when we had a house full of young children anxiously awaiting the arrival of Santa on Christmas Eve.  There is no question that those early years of childhood are precious beyond measure with innocence and hope in the generosity of a jolly old saint adding a special wonder to their eyes. It was one of the few nights that we could actually get the kids to go to bed without too many complaints or stalling maneuvers.  They all camped in the front bedroom with the blinds up so they could spy Santa and his reindeer-led sleigh passing overhead.

When morning came too quickly for parents who were up all night helping a red-suited elf display the fruits of the Magi’s legacy, it was impossible to resist the excitement of little round-bellied tots in footy pajamas as they ripped open the mysteries left overnight while visions of sugarplums, or whatever the current new toy was, danced through their heads. Yes, I do miss that.  But, over the years, we have deposited quite a bit in the “remember when” reservoir that adds depth to our definition of what Christmas means to us.

After all that posing and pretend complaining, when Katie produced her initial sketches for what that year’s card would look like, her three shepherds on the hillside all have their backs to us.  There is a flash of angel in the distant sky awakening the sleepy trio to announce the good news, but their faces are hidden.  But I know what they look like.

We managed to get Katie's drawing turned into Christmas cards. If  I had it handy I would post it along with these words.  I'm sure it is somewhere safe in a folder  in the back of my closet. Someday I'll find it and show it to the grand-kids. There's always room for new family traditions.

Hey, Don't I Know You?

I've just had a revelation. No angels or skies opening up. (That would have been cool, though.) Just a regular ordinary revelation.  A recognition.  Yeah, I like that word-- recognition.  Like you've met somewhere before, and you realize, oh, that's right.  That's what I've been waiting for. This is the beginning of week 2 of NaNoWriMo-- National Novel Writing Month.  I started out amazingly well, for me.  I am a slow writer.  I dally. I dilly. I dilly-dally around  words, around thoughts, around characters.  That's okay.  All writers have their own style and pace.

All last week while I was trying to get my daily production of about 1700 words a day on-screen, I realized that no matter how I tried to steer the work, I kept coming back to the same themes and characters I've been working on in my novel-in-progress.  I have about 23,000 words that I'm relatively pleased with (countless words of notes and trial and error and scenes that went nowhere), so, I thought, I'll cheat.

NaNoWriMo is supposed to be 50,000 new words churned out with the internal editor away on vacation, too far away to interfere with the writer who's hiding behind the censor.  My editor/censor doesn't take vacations. My censor like to work. What a pain.

But, that's where I am.  So be it.  I can still try to shake up my censor and get one over on her once in a while.  Like, this morning.  I was so sure I had my first chapter written and the novel would proceed from the themes I set up in that chapter.  But, I was stuck.  Which is one of the reasons I started the NaNo process.  I want to become unstuck.  Free those words and ideas that the censor has cowering in the corner with the threat of being sent to the principal's office if they squawk.

They squawked.  The principal was kinder than the censor.  HaHa!

Here's how the revelation/recognition happened.  Gene transferred my NANo words to Scrivener.  Scrivener is this fairly new tool for writers that is supposed to be easier and more intuitive. This morning I was looking at this new creature and I could not find the last chapter I had written.  So I summoned it from my Word files.  I re-read it.  I liked it.  And then, (drum roll, please) I recognized that this chapter should be the first chapter because it introduces themes and characters that play out in the rest of the work.

So, thank you NaNoWriMo, for jiggling loose some thoughts that might have stayed in the wrong place if I hadn't taken your challenge, and then modified your challenge to my own purposes. It's good to recognize a friend you've met for the first time.

Food Sober

At this week’s Slimming World © meeting, I reached a landmark in weight loss---I won’t tell you what it is because, well, just because. But it is a good feeling. I can now shop in my closet to wear clothes that have been hanging there since I let the weight sneak in. Some of the clothes are even baggy. Now, that’s a great feeling. I was chatting with my friend Trina at the meeting and she had a fabulous idea. We get stickers for weight loss, which is great. (I don’t think we really ever get over getting a gold star to attach to our work.) Trina suggested that we get stars for maintaining goal weight, like the folks in AA get a chip for so many months or years sober. We called it Food Sober.

We all have coping mechanisms, things that we use to protect ourselves against whatever pain or trauma we have experienced. Some drink, some gamble, some shop, some smoke, and some of us eat.

When I was growing up I didn’t care much for food. Really. I pretty much lived on milk. My father said I was a bargain. I was healthy, rarely got sick, and I didn’t cost my parents much in food. As long as the milkman kept delivering those gallons of milk (I am one of six kids) I was happy.

So, what happened? Well, it’s sneaky, you see. I have four children and of course you have to have snacks in the house when there are four kids. They were active, healthy, robust and lean children. They burned all the calories they took in. I, however, wasn’t out playing capture the flag or hide and seek with them.

When we moved to Texas I discovered tasty seven layer dips and chips and various Southwest foods.  We had lots of social events to attend. Plus, it’s darned hot in Texas. And you have to drive everywhere.  So who’s gonna’ go out and walk in 100 degree heat when the car is in the driveway and I can turn the A/C full blast?

That explains some of the transformation. That got me to plump (pleasingly, so my husband tells me).  The real problem came in the last few years. We had several family and personal traumas to get through. Seemed like shotgun blasts one after another. I didn’t take up drinking (I really don’t like headaches and vomiting). But it looks like I took up eating. Not on purpose. Just ‘cause. Just ‘cause the sauce on the chicken marsala was so tasty, and here, try this delicious cheese cake. Just ‘cause when I couldn’t stay asleep a cookie or two in the middle of the night seemed to help. Just ‘cause the food was so tasty and, dammit, I need something to make me feel better.

It’s all a process.  I think you have to be ready, have some kind of wake up call, or hit some sort of bottom to change your life. In getting on the wagon of healthy eating I have discovered more about myself. I am more conscious, more aware, more honest, and--- thank God, food sober.