Month: December 2014

A Spoonful of Christmas Sugar

I have to stop, take a break and realize ….I’m stressed – but I’m happy. Happy that I have almost all of my family home.  We’ve marked another year – Christmas to Christmas.  I sprung out of bed in the dim morning light– with visions of butter tarts, not sugar plums, in my spinning Christmas Eve head.

The house was peaceful and silent while I whipped egg whites and chopped dates for the buttery tarts, everyone else still dreaming of a white Christmas – but the household is hopping now.  My husband just rushed out for some mysterious last minute shopping.  Cole, our eldest son has had to make his morning green smoothie amongst my cooking mess, and then he flew off to replace a left-behind cord for his camera to enable him to record all aspects of the planned Christmas Eve merry, merry merry-making.  His brother, Hudson, slept later, not at all panicked about gifts he still has to find with so many males of the same ilk, who will flock to the malls.

Lily, our youngest daughter has found the two of us the Mary Poppins movie on the kitchen television and is going to wrap, tape and festoon her carefully selected gifts with bows, while I try to focus on the next special dessert – and we both sing along to Chim Chim Cherrie and A Spoonful of Sugar.

mary poppins  I’m scattered, getting out the fancy dishes one minute, mashing potatoes for the Romanoff the next, only to be interrupted by a call for more tape, and then seeing the tree needs to be watered, before locating the chocolate mint pie recipe and texting hubby to remember the whip cream.

For only the second time ever in thirty years our kids will not all be present – but our eldest, Zoe, is bound to have a jolly holly time with her husband and sweet small daughters – who will share their excitement for the Big Guy in the red suit’s arrival with their other grandparents in a cozy cottage in the mountains.  So I tell my other grown kids, who feel a little blue about missing their big sister – we need to share her, and we’re sharing her with good people. All truly is fine.

I am the mom.  And I do ‘manage’ Christmas in the house like so, so many moms.  And I see that the clock is ticking and the iconic wife saver (egg strata) for tomorrow’s breakfast isn’t made, the crackers for tonight’s oysters must be crushed, the salmon dressed, and the cream whipped and the stockings found and the punch stirred, and the chaos tidied, and on and on and on.

But I’ll slow my thoughts, concentrate on the melting butter on the stove and my daughter humming along to ‘A Spoon Full of Sugar’ with Mary Poppins and having my big family in the same house (almost) and let peace and joy settle over me. And I wish that for you, too – in this holiday season and throughout the year. xo

May Your Hearts Be Merry and Light

Two of our four children were born at Christmas time.  Despite the deep fatigue and life changing chaos, those were extra special holidays – with sweet teeny babes in floppy elf sleepers, snuggled in a grandparent’s eager arms while tree lights twinkled in the background. Eighteen years after those births, when our first ‘child’ had been away for the first time to university for three long months of not-enough-communication, those holidays times were extra special again.

elf baby

I remember so clearly the anticipation of Zoë coming home to sleep in her bed again at the close of first term and how giddy that made the rest of the household as we searched for the tree stand and the rice krispee roll recipe. I wrote about that in my book Text Me, Love Mom; Two Girls, Two Boys, One Empty Nest – and I’d like to share a snippet of that here in a holiday blog.

“Zoë was different after being at university.  I noticed that the first evening she was back as we lingered around the table after dinner, bombarding her with questions. It was a look on her face, a quality it was hard to put my finger on, except to say that she had drifted away a little bit.  I had gazed around the room at her siblings, her brothers Cole and Hudson, and her little sister Lily, and imagined us all reuniting after future ventures.  Zoë swore that she would travel to the far north someday, being captivated by the notion of a trip to Yellowknife or even Inuvik.  Cole insisted he was going to snowboard in the southern hemisphere.  Hudson was harder to pin down –I think he aspired to travel back and forth in time, and back then I wrongly viewed our youngest,  Lily, as a home body.

paper angel

During the holiday season I would be happy to imagine them all simply staying put.  I was going to pretend for the three weeks that Zoë would be home that she had never left.  We would decorate a too tall, slightly lope-sided tree together and my husband would insist once more on putting up the goofy looking angel Zoë made in kindergarten.  I wanted it to be a holiday season full of my kids dog piling on top of one another, and watching Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, all of us singing aloud to the Sisters’ song –

‘All kinds of weather

We stick together 

The same in the rain or sun 

Two diff’rent faces

 But in tight places

 We think and we act as one‘ [1]

I intended to encourage Zoë to humor Lily and I, and come skating with us on the lake near their grandparent’s property, after which we three would go for lattés, before coming home to whip up a batch of butter tarts for Christmas Eve.  I knew Zoë would be impatient to go hang with her friends, but I hoped to convince her to indulge us with a skate around the lake first.  I’d ask, but I promised to be a grown-up about it myself and not harass her to join us – just to ask.

shea skating

She needed time to reconnect with her same-age peers.  At ages eighteen and thirteen my daughters couldn’t really act as one, but I knew that on Christmas Eve they would raise their voices with Bing Crosby’s and happily sing about it.”

New babies and growing up children – both added loveliness to the holidays.  May this season bring tranquility to you and yours.

christmas bird-1

[1] Berlin, Irving. “Sisters.” Lyrics. White Christmas. The Movie. 1954