Starting Over Again

My children love to stand over the furnace register on cold, winter mornings.  They crawl out of bed and head immediately to the inviting warmth of the side room register.  Often they wrap blankets around their necks and the forced air inflates the blankets into large cones.  The register always brightens their mood, brings them comfort, and puts a smile on their face.

This morning my 3-yr.-old daughter, Rose, woke up in a bright and lovely mood.   As I sat at the table reading, she came in and gave me one of her million dollar smiles.  After talking for a few moments about last night's dreams she went to sit on the couch with her 5-yr.-old brother Nathanael, who was reading a book.  I had no clue of the disaster that was about to suddenly strike our household.  Within seconds Rose was hyperventilating with dramatic tears.  She claimed that Nathanael had scratched her foot and wouldn't leave her alone (not unusual).  Nothing I did or said improved the situation, and she remained adamantly inconsolable (also not unusual).

Several minutes later I called the kids in for breakfast.  Rose sat on the couch and refused to come in and eat.  I looked at her and said, "Sweetheart.  Please come sit down with your brother and sister for breakfast."  "But my foot hurts!  Nathan scratched me!" she insisted.

I knew arguing with her when she was upset like this was fruitless.  So I suggested something I knew would make her feel better.  "Why don't you go stand on the register.  It's on right now."

"No!!!  I don't want to!"  She wailed.

"Are you sure?" I asked.  "If you stand on the register, I think it will make you feel better.  You'll see things a little differently if you do."

"No!!!  It's not even working!" she cried.

I glanced over toward the register.   The fronds of our spider plant above the register blew back and forth, clearly indicating the furnace had kicked on.  In the background I could hear the soft hum of the air blowing through the ducts.

"Rose, this will help you feel better," I said.  "Lift your arms."  I gently picked her and set her down on the register.  "No!  It's not working!  It's not working!" she yelled as the air from the register blew her hair up over her ears.  She was so angry at her brother that she refused to be comforted by the warmth of the furnace.  At that moment it didn't even exist.  Tears streamed down her face and spittle hung from the corner of her mouth. I bit my lip to keep from laughing.

After several seconds I said, "Okay.  Why don't we start over.  Do you think we could do that?"  Rose hesitated a moment and after a bit more encouraging headed back upstairs to her room. Sometimes when a day begins like this one did, the kids go back to bed and we start the day all over again.  Five minutes later I walked upstairs and went into her room.  "Good morning sweetheart!  Did you sleep okay?  How about some breakfast?"  The tears and the anger disappeared, and Rose soon sat at the table to eat her Honeycomb.  The sad, grumpy little Rose disappeared as well and a new Rose took her place.

Thank God we can start over.

More later. . .

Sledding Vol. 2

We visited my parent house recently

All Good Things Must Come To An End . . .

This weekend we took our Christmas tree down. In our house, the Christmas tree goes up the weekend after Thanksgiving, and comes down New Year's Day. I can say with confidence that this is officially and predictably one of my least favorite days of the year. There are many reasons for this:

1 - The tree itself. For about 4 weeks the tree, once decorated, brings light and joy into our house and is a reminder of very good things. It's pungent fragrance bombards your senses. The tree is the centerpiece of our Christmas celebration. Each year we go through the same revered family ritual of bringing out old, cherished ornaments while carefully choosing new ornaments that will join the pantheon. Each ornament has a story and a specific meaning to us, and we're very stingy about new ornaments going up. If they lack the beauty and character of what we already have they don't stand a chance. The tree is the focal point of tremendous sentiment and nostalgia.

By the time the tree comes down on New Year's Day it's deadness hangs off the boughs like Marley's chains. The needles explode off the branches as you remove the strings of lights, which come off with far less care than they went up. Then you're faced with the important task of deciding if the current light strands will make it for another Christmas. If you choose to keep a strand that is unknowingly close to death, it might burn out on next year's tree after it's already been decorated. This presents a frustrating and time-consuming situation, so it's best to just pitch any strands older than one Christmas. After the lights come off, the tree will end up being thrown out the front door into the yard, with a grunt and perhaps a curse. Merry Christmas!! I'm sure it's amusing for my neighbors to see me burst out of my front door wielding a dead Douglas fir over my head. The needles and sap eventually get cleaned up, but it seems like every year I'm vacuuming at midnight.

2 - The music is over. Growing up my parents didn't play music much. My mom was a Kenny Rogers fan, but the Gambler came out rarely. But on Thanksgiving Day an unending flow of Christmas music poured out from the Realistic phonograph my parents owned. It was an autofeed record player, and it would stack 10-12 records on the post. Whenever the records finished rotating through, someone would flip the stack over and start it again. Among many of our favorites there was Jackie Gleason, Robert Shaw Chorale, Perry Como, Nat King Cole, Vince Guiraldi, Brenda Lee, Glen Campbell, Rosemary Clooney, Bing Crosby and of course Christmas Magic by Frad Waring and his Pennsylvanians. I've collected almost all that old music on CD or iTunes and it now resides my iPod. In our house now, the Christmas music starts when we hop into the van to make the 7 hr. trip to Grandma's in Jamestown, NY. From that moment Christmas music is played non-stop until the day the Tree comes down when it will go dormant once again until next Thanksgiving.

3 - The movies and decorations go back in the box. Each year we buy one Christmas movie to add to our collection. So far we have It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street (the original), A Christmas Carol, A Christmas Story, Polar Express, Christmas Vacation, Charlie Brown Christmas, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, & Veggie Tales Christmas. This year we added The Preacher's Wife and The Bishop's Wife. Of course the more we add the more difficult it becomes to watch all of them, so we have to choose a select few. I still want to add The Santa Claus, Scrooged, Muppet Christmas Carol, Holiday Inn, White Christmas, Home Alone and Grumpy Old Men. Being committed to only buying one Christmas movie per year means it will be several years before our desired collection is complete.

4 - Goodbye to the lovely traditions. Let me list some of them, a lot of which have to do with food: making peanut brittle, sour cream twist cookies, chocolate buckeyes, egg nog w/brandy, Kara's decorated cutout cookies, nuts in the shell, mushroom sandwhiches, cheese and sweet dry sausage. Not to mention all the seasonal Christmas and Winter beer that abounds during that time. No wonder my digestion gets disrupted and my clothes don't fit anymore.

5 - Back to school. I've lived my entire life within the bounds of the academic calender. I currently work with college students and my daughter is in the first grade. So New Year's Day still means that school is right around the corner. It also means the end of college football until the fall, and that's a real bummer. So we go to bed New Year's night & every trace of our month-long Christmas celebration is gone. Within a day or two we're back at school and our minds are filled with the things of the New Year. It's still that way now.

So we look forward to another wonderful Christmas in 10 1/2 months time. I wonder what new ornaments we'll find for next year's tree, or what new beer I'll discover when the new winter seasonals are released in the fall. Who knows? Maybe none of us will be around for another Christmas.

Maybe Jesus' second advent will take place before then.

More later . . .

A six-year-old's story of the first Christmas

Tonight my six-year-old daughter Grace read me a story that she wrote. It's entitled "The First Christmas" Here's what it says in her words:

"Jess ws bron in belhem. Shepds brot the sepp. Wis men brot gld sive and fagstn. The wise men folod the star. Taet is yi we selbt Christmas. The fret Christmas."

Then she added a pencil illustration of the stable and the baby in the manger with his mother. Above the stable she drew a very large 6-pointed star. I told her it was exceptional (which it is).

She asked if she could read it to me aloud. This is her translation of what she wrote:

"Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Shepherds brought the sheep. Wise men brought gold, silver and frankenstein. The Wise Men followed the star. That is why we celebrate Christmas. The first Christmas."

It's quite a lot of fun to be a parent.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

More later . . .

Lake Effect Snow

“Are you okay?” I ask Nathanael, my son. He’s four years old. From the bottom of the hill he’s looking up at me, his face and neck covered with snow. His first run down the sledding hill ended with a soft and rolling crash, leaving him splayed like a starfish. After a moment he finally determines, “I wanna go again!” Quickly he stands up and starts the long climb to the top. His older sister Grace has already made her way back up. She doesn’t need my help sledding anymore. She already has two winters on her younger brother.

As Nathan fights the smoothness and pitch of the big hill, I take a moment to look around me. It’s the day before Thanksgiving and we’re visiting my wife’s grandmother in Jamestown, NY. Jamestown is about an hour south of Buffalo in the very heart of Lake Erie’s snow belt. This means that there is always an overabundance of snow from early November until the spring. Tonight is no different. There is at least a foot of snow on the ground and it’s perfect – cold enough to pack, but not so wet that it soaks through your snowsuit.

It’s just dusk and the lights from the streets and the parking lots around us reflect brightly so that it’s not really dark out. There’s a soft, amber glow to everything so you could sled all night if you wanted. It’s the same glow I remember from my childhood playing outside in the snow under the streetlights. We always had lots of snow when I was a kid growing up in Northeast Ohio. Looking around I notice the snow has gathered thick on the branches of all the trees creating a soft canopy covering the houses and sidewalks beneath. There are ten or twelve different families on the hill surrounding us by their laughter and screams of delight as the kids surf down the huge hill in ones, twos and threes. Some are on discs, some are on toboggans and one teenage kid has an old Flexible Flyer. One brave father allows his two young sons to lie down on top of him as they cruise down on their bellies. At a glance it looks like today's version of a Currier & Ives print—folks young and old enjoying the fun and frolic of the fresh, fallen snow.

Grace soon finds a friend named Crystal and she’s off to go up and down the hill without us. That leaves me to give all my attention to my boy Nathanael, and I’m all in. His little 35 lb. frame is made for this, and my somewhat larger frame seems to be holding up. The more trips down we make, the more Nathan’s confidence grows. Soon he wants to hit the big ramp the teenage boys are using with their snowboards. We try it. We crash. We laugh. Inwardly I know that I’m going to be in some pain the next day, but it’s a pain I’ll gladly endure. I also know that we’ll be returning to Grandma’s warm house later where hot chocolate and warm baths await. Grandma's hot chocolate has amazing healing powers.

This is a good moment. It’s a moment that makes any preceding not-so-good moments worth it. It’s a moment that will stick with me for a long time: My boy learning the pure joy of sledding in the perfect snow from Lake Erie, the promised hot chocolate and the forging of lifelong remembrances.

A good moment that is mine.

More later. . .

The Difference Between Males and Females. . .

We have a room in our house that we call the sun room. Sometimes it's referred to as the breakfast room, even though we eat almost all our meals in there. It's located on the north end of our small Cape Cod over what used to be the coal room in the basement. (Our house was built in 1940, and most homes were heated with coal furnaces back then). It's a bright room because it has huge windows on three sides. It's bright and cheerful, hence the name.

Earlier today Christina, Rose, Nathan and I were just sitting down to eat our lunch in the breakfast room when Christina bursts out, "What is that?" She was pointing down at the Newsweek she was reading. Stuck there on George F. Will's The Last Word commentary was a nasty white-colored booger. "Whose is that?" I thought to myself while chewing.

Upon realizing that it was in fact a booger, Christina covered her mouth and inhaled a cry that rivaled her "Charly, there's a Spider!" cry. A wide-eyed Rose copied her mother and covered her mouth with both hands too. "That's a booger, isn't it?" Christina said. Without hesitation Nathanael's eyes brightened up and he said, "A booger? Where? Can I see?"

More later . . .