merry giftsmas and happy chanustuff

It’s 7:00 a.m. on Christmas Eve. The sky is still dark, and my dogs are snoring at my feet. My husband and daughter are away until afternoon. The last sip of the coffee I made at 5:45 is still hot in my lidded Thermos mug. The tree is twinkling, and the crows are barking hello to me as they fly over the house.

The room where I write is full of stuff—books, wrapped presents, framed photographs, guitars, a collection of cake plates, crow-themed items. The eight leather chairs are new.

Every year, without fail, I amass new stuff (alas, without purging much of the old). Because we’re not in hock, with credit card debt and a mortgage that’s higher than our home’s value, we can usually take care of the little emergencies—and even some luxuries, like a concierge doctor or a guitar.

For the last few years, I had a tough time getting jingly wit’ Christmas. Sure, I’m always up for eggnog and cookies, a couple of favorite holiday songs, festive lights (the gaudier the better). But the frantic buying of stuff has bugged me.

I guess that’s ironic, given that I am a material girl.

The other day, a friend was torn about lamenting. Her favorite ornament—a one-of-a-kind, personalized item given to her by her sister—had broken, and she wondered how to come to terms with the loss when she generally takes a Buddhist approach to attachments.

Well, cross that religion off my list! I love things! I mean, I love things.

Lording over the living room is a taxidermy crow. On the sofa is a crow hand puppet so soft and fluffy that I put my hand inside it regularly. On Halloween, I gave it a clown nose, and it cheers me. On the bookshelf, I have a glass vase filled with hundreds of paper cranes. Those cake plates? I have seven of them.

Some of the things I have can be replaced, but so much of what I love most is a reminder of whom I love most: my thoughtful husband and daughter, who brought me a frozen crow in the dead of winter; my sister, who always gives the best gifts and helps to talk me down from the ledge; Grace, a young artist, who is already a star in my book but who is destined for others’ books; friends who helped me celebrate the release of my own book.

The woman who’d lost her ornament quoted someone named Peter Walsh. “The memento is not the memory,” she reminded me. True! But for me—menopausal, forgetful, busy, over-stimulated—that memento is the trigger for that memory. It reminds me to think of those people and their goodness every day, not just when they pop randomly into my head.

For the past few years, I’ve been a Christmas curmudgeon. This year, though, I’ve made some new material attachments. And to temper all this getting—paintings, earrings, magnets that say “Fuck” and “Shit”—I gave. I supported half a dozen Kickstarters. I donated to public radio and poetry and Wikipedia! Now they are my things, too.

I still hate that stuff-buying is a holiday. I want giving and receiving to be more special than that. People should display their affection with material items when they come across something that is you, something that would always remind you of their love, like the way they share a link on your Facebook wall. It shouldn’t be dictated by the calendar. Or maybe it should be on your own birthday, rather than someone else's.

How do you fight that, especially when you have children, even though that's when it seems most important to try?

The Christmas card I made for the year (yes, it’s a Christmas card; Rudolph is on the front) says, “May your joys outnumber your toys.” I do mean it. And if your toys bring you joy, too—well, you do the math.

Steven Wright said, “You can’t have everything; where would you put it?” He’s right, of course. But I still have some room.


* * * *

I miss you, Mark Harp. This will forever be your day.

RIP, Cleopatra.

deer

My hands smell like deer. It's a gamey smell—wilder than horse but tamer than buffalo.

I was thinking about deer today after having pulled out last year's Christmas card, a Hipstamatic shot of a plastic deer bathed in the delicious rainbow of sunflare. I got the idea to make a new card for this year and started working on it after lunch.

At five, after a full day at work, I bolted out of my office, ready for my beer and my family (in that order), and as I was driving the winding, rural roads, in my usual hurry, the card flashed in my mind. I slowed down and adjusted my seat back a little. These roads are littered with road kill. And deer are everywhere.

A few miles down Greenspring Avenue, I thought I saw one cross the dark roadway; indeed, a bunch of cars slowed down and sped back up, as if waiting for it to pass. The streets were surprisingly empty for a rush-hour Monday night. I got to the intersection of the beltway and Greenspring in just fifteen minutes, but the good time I'd made was about to disappear.

A baby deer lay squirming in the road.

I stopped my car, backed up, and turned on my hazards. I was on automatic pilot—clearly not thinking. The deer had been hit, but no one was here on my side of the street, normally a busy intersection. The animal was between the two lanes, and I was blocking one of them. I saw the mother on the hill, looking down and running away at the same time.

You can't unsee an animal in pain. And that instinct just kicked in, you know? How could I let this gentle creature die alone? I massaged his fur, and when I was sure he wasn't going to bite me, I hugged him to feel his weight.

Cars were coming, so I stood up and motioned for help. Lifting is an issue, so I turned and faced the growing number of headlights, like a deer in them myself, and begged: Will someone please help me?

They just wanted to go home. I know. I'm one of them, usually. I'd have been leaning on my horn, screaming at me to get out of the fucking street on any other day.

So I cradled the animal's head, which was too far in the other lane, and directed traffic around us.

I asked again if someone could please help me move the deer to the side of the road, and a Jeep pulled up behind my car. A man got out and walked toward me. "I'm a veterinarian," he said. "Is he dead?"

He wasn't, but I felt like the deer had relaxed in my hands, was less anxious. Dying. The man said, "What are the chances that a veterinarian would be behind you?" He picked up the baby animal and carried him to the side of the road.

"Thank you," I said. I had nothing more profound.

"I'm going to put him down," he said, and went back to the Jeep for some medicine. Last time I saw that medicine was December 13, when we said goodbye to Cleopatra.

"I love you," I told the man, and I left. I did love him. I do.

I cried the whole way home, headlights and streetlights a wet blur, gamey smell of deer on my fingers.

- - - - - - -

If you know this veterinarian (maybe he told you this story), please email me at dogfaceboy@gmail.com.

overstuffed

Things. Objects. Junk. Stuff. I have a lot of it, and sometimes I feel as though it has me.

In the rooms where I write, I am haunted by great writers; the floor-to-almost-ceiling bookshelves packed with books in various stages of use by authors who question my worth behind my fancy Herman Miller desk chair. A three-year-old copy of Ginsberg’s Collected Poems still makes a cracking noise when you open it, while Mila 18’s title on the spine is indiscernible. Hundreds more books live in the bedrooms—and even the bathrooms—upstairs, while thousands breathe life into the attic, many snoring from boxes under the eaves, still packed from our move here 18 years ago.

Atop the bookcases in my dining room are no fewer than seven glamorous cake plates, as if I’ve ever made more than two cakes at one time. From where I sit, I see three acoustic guitars, a DSLR camera, some high-tech speakers, and lots of art. Never mind the tchotchkes.

Last year at Christmas, we decided that we have everything we could possibly need, including a brand new iMac, our family gift. We didn’t even get a tree for probably the second time since we moved here. It’s not that we were all bah-humbuggy. We just thought: enough’s enough. Christmas (and Hanukkah, though it’s a little quieter) seemed absurd.

I thought it would change this year: some cold days would settle in to let us know that winter was arriving, and I’d get the bug to hang some balls on something, maybe a tree, and light a fire in the rarely used fireplace. But the holidays still seem absurd to me.

This season, I’m feeling a little bit of revulsion. I get anxious when I hear the phrase “door busters.” I am queasy over extended shopping hours. Indeed, the thought of some stores opening their doors at, gasp, three a.m. on Black Friday gave me a migraine. I’m angered by the people being trampled on their way to get a deal on a Wii. I am super pissed off at the TV husbands (obviously from a well-off planet) who give their wives a new Lexus. And I am creeped out by Stinky the Garbage Truck.

I tried to stimulate my holiday appetite. I hosted Thanksgiving and made homemade eggnog and eggnog cheesecake and carrot cake. I had my own turkey for the first time in a decade (we’re still eating it a week later as salad and stew and sandwiches). I had friends stop over the next day to help make a dent in the sweets and the troughs of stuffing and mac and cheese my sister left here. But I am missing the spirit that makes me want to shop. And I can’t think of anything I want. The kind of stuff I need—new tires, new windows, new kitchen cabinets—are not gift material.

My kind of Christmas comes as a card in the mail with a personal message to me, like “I love you, Facebook Queen” or “Can’t wait to drink a Dead Guy Ale with you on Good Friday and a Resurrection with you on Easter Sunday” or “I sure hope you get a job in the new year, because your FB status updates kinda freak me out.” I mean, sure, your family/kids/dogs/reptiles/even cats are cute in the photo on your card, and I guess the post office really needs that forty-four cents, but while you’re at it, tell me something good or something funny or something happy about yourself. I already know your name.

My kind of Christmas stars the little kids who still believe in Santa, while I drink a cocktail in Kim’s massage chair next to her beautiful tree and sing along with Chuck Prophet. My kind of Christmas is heading down to the basement with my own family band to play real live Guitar Hero.

Did I just outgrow the holiday? Or am I simply responding to my inability to finance it? How have your feelings toward Christmas changed, if at all?


- - - - -

If you're not feeling Scrooge-y, someone you know would probably love a calendar.

alchemy

It’s Christmas, but you wouldn’t know it by my house, which has no tree, no wrapped presents, no fauxflake or stocking or stray spray of tinsel. It’s not because I’m a curmudgeon. I just started thinking: What do we need that we don’t have? What do we want that we don’t get nearly as quickly as the thought pops into our heads? While this condition is much the same for us every year, it’s the first time I have been stricken by the absurdity—of frantic shopping, of wrapping surprises on the same pre-scheduled day as most of this country and some of the world, as if we’d deprive our child, now too old (not to mention too Jewish) to believe in Santa, of her reasonable heart’s desires for an entire year, as if we should have waited on Hendrix the Creature, her pet bearded dragon. As if guitar picks should be stocking stuffers rather than tools of her trade.

As I sit here, my daughter is pounding insanely on the drums while her friend makes repetitive keyboard sounds, my husband is watching some dull war documentary, the kitchen countertop is covered with crumbs, my back is sore, and my dogs are where they always are—beneath my feet, a perpetual tripping hazard—one of them, Cleo, snoring so loudly that I can hear her over the drums.

But I am practicing a new craft. I am waving away the fog of depression, turning the ugly floaters into the swirling glitter of a snow globe. My daughter taught herself how to play the drums, and she’s good; she has a friend with her, and they are making music, not noise. My husband is watching the movie on our brand new shiny iMac. My counter is crumby because I’ve just made warm, delicious brownies filled with the free bag of chocolate chips Safeway gave us for spending twenty bucks on the ingredients for brownies and chicken stew. My back is sore because I’ve been standing up playing guitar, something I couldn’t do a few months ago. And my dogs are beautiful; at fourteen, Cleopatra’s cacophony is a comfort because it means she is still alive.

If I have a resolution for the coming year, it’s to practice more of this kind of witchcraft, to discover a way to transmute anxiety and sadness into something bright and gleaming, something the crow dragged in.

I have spent far too much of 2009 listing the things that have gone wrong. It’s not that I didn’t earn the right, but pacing back and forth along this path has put a rut in it. Sometimes I wonder if it’s as awful as it is habitual. Now the rut is a damned trench, which makes the climb out a little tougher. All I really need to do is start filling it with each good thing until that, the filling, becomes my groove.

Habits, old or new, are hard to break; however, I’m wise enough to know that my blessings are many. My family, friends, and social networks have literally kept me alive when I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay that way. We had foster families at the beginning of this year, people who fed us and drove us around and made sure we were safe.

Before I sat down to review the year, I’d already panned 2009, in my mind worse than at least forty other years. But some pretty remarkable things happened this year.

• I knitted and sold enough scarves to help pay for an expensive chair, which was instrumental in my recovery.

• I ran almost two miles six months after back surgery.

• I felt the force of several thousand crows lifting off from a field where I stood.

• Bob Schneider sat next to me in my car, and, a week later, I got to hang out for half an hour with the very cool Chuck Prophet.

• I have written at least five really good songs this year and will record them in the studio soon.

• I was in two movies, I Will Smash You and 60 Writers, 60 Places, both of them released recently. In two different glowing reviews, my parts were singled out for positive acknowlegment.

• My daughter, Serena, got straight A pluses (except for the A in religion), improved her saxophone, guitar, and drum playing and her singing. She landed the acoustic intro to one of my favorite songs ever, “ Crazy on You,” by Heart, for the Seattle Sounds show in January, and she’s nailing it.

• The Book was published! Let Me Eat Cake was not the best book ever written, and I got down on myself a lot after negative reviews, but you know what? Simon & Schuster liked it enough to pay me for my words and to publish them with a beautiful cover and pictures inside. I don’t know too many people who can say that. So there!

I’m not completely skipping gifts and holiday cheer, but I am finally questioning them in light of our dwindling bank account and increasing debt and dismal prospects for employment. And all we have already and all we discard every day. For instance, this week, I’ve received ten Christmas cards in the mail. Half were store bought; the other half were personalized with family photos. Not a single one of the senders wrote more than a generic, nameless greeting and a signature. I appreciate that you thought of me among the mountain of friends who give your hand a writer’s cramp each year, that you’d truly like me to have a blessed holiday, that you’d share your beautiful family with mine. But tell me something—that I’m a good neighbor, a good friend. Tell me you love me and my family, that we’ll make an effort to get together more this year, that you hope my back heals, that I write another book, that I stay with my husband for the 28th year. Make me laugh or think or cry over your sentiment. Those are the cards I save and reread when I need a quick reminder that I’m worthwhile. Unfortunately, my recycling bin fills up first.

So many of you have touched my soul this year. Telling you each might take me the majority of 2010. Until I do, please enjoy the card I made from photographs of the beautiful snow, an icy windshield, and the birds I love. Print it out if you’d like to keep it. When I see you next, I’ll write on the back of it what I love most about you.

Peace.