And we veer back to the odd: A Toolbox Christmas.
There are a lot of "novelty" records out there. Can one forget Meowy Christmas, by the Jingle Cats? A whole record of cats, meowing out Christmas carols. The Toolbox Christmas is similar-ish - in that the entire contents of someone's wood shop are used as musical instruments. Honestly this is a record that you cannot listen to straight through, but one track once in a while seeded into a holiday playlist is a beautiful thing.
I know.
But Elf. There's that scene where Zooey Deschanel is singing in the shower and Will Ferrell joins in on Baby, It's Cold Outside. It's delightful, and a little creepy, because Ferrell's elf is so socially awkward.
But elsewhere in the movie - or just on the soundtrack? - Deschanel sings it with the divinely anachronistic Leon Redbone. It's the best rendition.
I'm not all and only idiosyncratic. Sometimes you need the classics, like the New York Choral Artists singing the Carol of the Bells. It's just about perfect. Clean, clear, unmannered.
The Roches are three sisters, who sang as a mostly a cappella trio. Their Christmas record is mostly delightful (though a few tracks are pretty twee). Their Hallelujah Chorus is fabulous, but the haunting Star of Wonder is today's pick.
If you are given to singing around the fireplace or with a chorus, the sheet music for Star of Wonder is on the Roches website - with a note from Terre Roche who says:
I encourage anyone who would like to sing "Star of Wonder" at Christmas time to do so. I consider myself to be the channel through which this little song came into the world. I don't "own" the song. Nobody does. It belongs to all of us! The thought that people are singing "Star of Wonder" at Christmas time makes me feel great!
...is you.
Maybe you first encountered All I Want For Christmas when Mariah Carey released it in 1994. Maybe you know it from Love Actually. Or maybe you caught it when Mariah Carey reprised it on Jimmy Fallon with the Roots "on classroom instruments". I succumbed to it when my sister gave me the Puppini Sisters Christmas CD in 2010.
I've given you Patti Smith. I've given you Sharon Jones. You've probably figured out that my taste in Christmas music is a little idiosyncratic. Here is one of my all time favorites: Silent Night on the musical saw.
It is haunting and lovely, and just what you want to listen to after everyone's gone to bed on Christmas Eve and you're left downstairs with a little whiskey and a few more pistachios, candles guttering and the lights down low.
Every year, I try to add a few tracks to my expansive holiday playlist. (Yes, "holiday" - it's not all Christmas.) The best of the lot from last year is, hands down, Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings doing "White Christmas".
Alas, she died a couple of weeks ago, so there'll be no more rollicking covers of the standards or deliciously subversive additions to the canon (like Big Bulbs).
Do yourself two favors:
1) Cue up It's a Holiday Soul Party, and
2) Check out the sad and lovely slideshow of photos of Sharon Jones's last year.
Although I grew up in the kind of atheist household in which Christmas was celebrated with abandon, we never had an advent calendar. I think my mother thought they were too religious for the likes of us, although it seems like not much more than a countdown to the 25th, one tiny door at a time.
So as an adult, I've never had an advent calendar - at least, not a physical one. A sweet friend of ours sends the online Jacquie Lawson one every year, and that's kind of delightful. But it got me thinking: I will (try to) post a song a day from now until Christmas.
Up first? Patti Smith singing O Holy Night at the Vatican. Enjoy!
I was changing trains at Times Square. There was an older guy, kinda down-and-out looking, who was clearly uncomfortable walking. He was pretty much shuffling, not picking up his feet. We got to the stairs down to the 1-2-3 and I thought, he's gonna take a half an hour to get down to the platform. With that, he gracefully perched on the hand rail and slid on down. I was impressed.
Heading home, I walked past the modest brownstone church I walk past every night. There was a guy lying on the sidewalk, perpendicular to the church, butt up against the building, feet resting on the wall, playing the trumpet. Playing the trumpet.
This morning, as I waited to refill my Metrocard (behind some foreigners who were paying with a credit card and were flummoxed by the instruction to key in your zip code), I heard music in the distance. A solo trombonist, playing Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. I detoured past him and gave him all of the change in my wallet.
And on the sardine-can-packed subway, I wished for discretion and fearlessness, but opted not to take the picture of the young Asian man in the black & white plaid shirt coiffing his hair just so, using the window as a mirror, standing next to (but not with) a young Asian woman intently reading her phone, wearing a fuzzy black & white plaid coat. Bill Cunningham or Neil Kramer would have found a way to take the picture. I couldn't do it. I could barely get my phone out of my pocket.
This morning's missive from the Union Square wall, with style points for using the N and Q subway line logos: Never Quit.
Sometime after September 11th, an unofficial memorial sprung up in the Union Square subway station.
It's unassumingly constructed out of clear, matte finish mailing labels, and is nothing but the names, all of the names, each name to a subway tile. Over the years - fifteen! - the labels have become worn, dirty, ragged. But they're still there.
Sometime after the election, a forest of post-it messages appeared in the same station. I walk through there every day, and every day there are more.
They are heartfelt. They are erudite.
They are direct. They are angry.
They are pointed. A set of six post-its says A Woman Won The Popular Vote, in blue felt tip pen. Another hand has added Yes with a black ball point pen.
And somehow, although I may be grasping at straws, I have to find them hopeful.
Dear Girlie:
Tomorrow you turn 13. No, your birthday is not ruined by the events of yesterday. Hillary's defeat is saddening, it makes us angry, it makes us scared. But we are stronger than that. Stronger together in our little family, stronger in our little town, stronger in our conviction that all people need to be lifted up, that all children deserve an education, that all people need good and affordable health care, that no one should live in poverty. That women everywhere have the right and the ability and the freedom to control their – our – bodies and make our own decisions about our health care. We will love, we will accept, we will teach and reach out to those who hurt.
And as much as we glibly say "let's move to Canada", we can't and won't do that. We need to stay here, on these shores, in these United States and work to make the country an open, compassionate haven for those fleeing oppression elsewhere and those struggling here. While it seems right now as though we have woken up in an unrecognizably racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic country, it is our job to work to continue the expansion of LGBT rights, to protect the environment, to assure access to health insurance for all, to defend marriage equality, to improve our gun laws, to uphold the First Amendment and safeguard the Fourth Estate, to codify and enforce the equal rights of women, and to offer succor.
David Remnick, who’s the editor of the The New Yorker, wrote an essay this morning. It is worth reading, and ends thusly:
"Despair is no answer. To combat authoritarianism, to call out lies, to struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals—that is what is left to do. That is all there is to do."
And that’s what we’ll do. We’ll wipe our tears, and we’ll work.
Love,
Momma
PS:
Remember what you said to me last night, at the beginning? "I want to be a social studies teacher, or a politician, or Rachel Maddow." Channel that thought - those are all good goals. Our country needs a well informed citizenry - which you get by educating children and having smart engaged journalists - and we need passionate politicians who put the best interests of the entire country first.
PPS:
Martha thinks you should run for President. Of course, you can't until you're 35, which means 2040, but hey, goals!
PPS:
In her speech this morning, Hillary said "This loss hurts, but please never stop believing that fighting for what's right is worth it." Those are words to live by.
It has been a wild 24 hours. I got home from work last night, and went to phone bank at someone's house. I then went home and took a nap, and headed to the airport at 3:00 am to greet Secretary Clinton as she arrived home from Raleigh, NC. Yes, 3:00 am, in the cold, in the dark, in a huge crowd. It was crazy, awesome.
We got home from the airport at about 4:30 am, and went to bed...only to get up at 7:00 am to go vote. [We paused to make coffee, and stopped at the deli for bacon/egg/cheese sandwiches.] I loved filling in my little circle for Hillary Rodham Clinton; I loved having my 12yo in on the action; I was a little bit verklempt about the whole thing.
We were still in the building when the Clintons arrived, but we were already in the exit hallway. So we made our way to the crowd at the front of the school, and joined the waiters and watchers - another crowd of fans and supporters. Best of all was a woman carrying a vintage "Votes For Women" umbrella, who turned out to be Elizabeth Cady Stanton's great-granddaughter.
Eventually, the Clintons emerged to greet the crowd and talk to the press. I wasn't close enough for a selfie or a handshake, but I did get a picture.
And then I went to work, where I found great graffiti on the sidewalk near Union Square.
I think it's going to be a long night, but #imwithher.
Tomorrow morning, I'm going to get up at the crack of dawn, and haul on over to my polling place. Polls open at 6, and I aim to be there plenty early, so I can catch my usual train to the city.
What are you going to do? Do you know where your polling place is? Are you going to vote before work, after work? Do you know what time the polls open, close? (I hope it goes without saying that you know that you CANNOT vote by text or online.)
If you're thinking "I don't have to vote; she's going to win my bluest blue state", think again and make a plan to vote. There are down ballot races everywhere: governors, senators, representatives, state assembly members and state senators and local judges and mayors and town council members and dogcatchers. Go vote for them.
Here, check to see where you vote - the League of Women Voters has an easy tool:
And if you need some encouragement, this We Are The World parody is seriously funny and possibly completely not safe for work (or children or people with delicate sensibilities).
VOTE!
As I drove down county today for my shift at the Field Office, I thought about the fact that lots of other elections in my lifetime have been important to me, but this is the one I’ve really plunged into.
I helped canvass before the NY primary, I’ve donated money, I’ve got a window cling on the car, and another on the garage door. I’ve got two lawn signs (and a third for a woman who’s running for the State Senate). I’ve bought pins, shirts, candles, cards; the pins I wear on a rotating basis and most of the other stuff is living on the mantle in a quasi shrine. I’ve worked the phones at the Brooklyn headquarters, at houses in my town, at the field office. I helped organize a fundraiser, I’ve gone all in.
And I ask myself, why? Why this year, this election. It’s this woman, it’s my child.
Hillary is qualified – “There has never been any man or woman more qualified for this office than Hillary Clinton,” said President Obama. She’s a policy wonk. She’s been doing this for years. She’s even-tempered, she’s warm, she works like there’s no tomorrow.
My child – and your child, and yours, and your grandchild, and the next door neighbor’s child – deserve a world in which women get to make decisions about their own bodies, in which Black Lives Matter, in which children do not grow up in poverty and education is a priority. Where nuclear weapons do not proliferate, where climate change is understood as real. Where science matters, and the 1% pays their fair share in taxes. Where everyone has access to the health care than they need, and where military weapons are off the streets. Where people of all religions are free to worship without persecution, and LGBT people are free to marry whom they choose. And where women’s rights are human rights.
And she’s my Wellesley sister and my Chappaqua neighbor, and she's the best person for the job of President of these United States.
I’m With Her.
VOTE.
Like everyone I know, and everyone you know, and everyone else, I’ve been thinking a lot about politics and the imminent presidential election in these United States. I avoid the polling data, but I’ve read every piece that David Fahrenthold has written about the Trump Foundation, I’ve read so many thoughtful, nuanced essays on why people love Hillary Clinton, I've read countless lists comparing his crimes to hers, and today, I sent an all staff memo out reminding everyone in the office to vote:
As you may have heard, Election Day is next Tuesday, November 8.
Please vote.
And if you have issues with timing or lines, keep in mind that there is no school and we would rather that you vote than worry about being late to work.
Polls in NY are open from 6am to 9pm. [I don’t know about NJ.]
VOTE!
I’m worried. I’m worried about the possibility of our country being led by a man who has admitted sexual assault, who has used his foundation for personal gain, who’s on trial for fraud with regard to Trump University, who hasn’t released his taxes (because he doesn’t want to show us that he hasn’t paid any), who has called for the ban of an entire religion from entering the US, who belittled John McCain for being a POW, who’s called Mexicans rapists, who attacked a beauty pageant winner for being overweight, who wonders why we can’t use the nuclear weapons we have, who thinks women who have abortions should be punished, who makes fun of disabled people, who disregards the First Amendment and wants an end to freedom of the press, who thinks global warming is a Chinese hoax, who loves Putin, who doesn’t pay his contractors, who … do I need to go on?
No.
There is simply no contest. Secretary Clinton is smart, informed, thoughtful, practiced and measured. You may find something, one thing, that you want to quibble with on a point of policy. But overall, there is no contest. Politics is about compromise, about being able to reach across the aisle, about being able to get to 95% and letting that other 5% go because the 95% is better than nothing. She’s the 95%. He’s ZERO.
Don’t forget to vote.
Not to be outdone by the Republican candidate's toupée, Rainbow got into the action this afternoon.
Her toupée is purely decorative, not covering any bald spot. Further, it is not made of cat hair, but rather rabbit fur. Although I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.
The cats have some kind of death wish. They perch atop the newel post, and then they walk along the banister rail.
If you look closely, you'll see scratching on the part of the banister in the foreground. Yes, one fell off once.
But that's not why I took this picture.
The cat, Rainbow, seems to be mimicking the painting of a house on the wall behind her.
I made that, back in, oh 1967? It's tempura on now yellowy-brown newsprint, framed by my mother behind glass in a nice oak frame. For about 40 years, it hung in the back bathroom of my mother's house, on walls patch-worked with framed treasures from the elementary school careers of all of her children. This particular one? Somehow it went home with my sister when we sold the house. She, in turn, wrapped it up and gave it to me for Christmas.
And now, my cat is imitating it.
Life is weird.
Or maybe I am.
Most books, you just pick up and read, more or less straight through. At least I do, unless I put the long complicated novel aside for a little detour through a fast mystery. But then there are the books that have a year as an organizing principle. And because I have some deep seated necessity to make order of things, I cannot read that sort of book in one go. Instead, I read the January chapter in January, the May chapter in May, taking a full year to read it. If it's a cookbook, like Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries, I might find myself puttering around in front of the stove, making something with rhubarb when the rhubarb is freshly sending up its pink stalks. A gardening book, like Henry Mitchell's One Man's Garden, has me making lists of bulbs for fall planting in April and contemplating the location of a plot for spring peas, to be prepared and dug in November for March planting.
Last year for Christmas, my mother-in-law gave me a book of Verlyn Klinkenborg's little essays, called The Rural Life. For a time, he had an irregular column on the editorial page of the New York Times, where he waxed rhapsodic about so many things, like snow in January:
By nightfall the snow in the fields was fox-deep.
And spending in March:
Living in the country you learn to spend money in the meanest ways, and you also learn the most extravagant parsimony.
Reading September in September, I was dumbstruck last month, when on September 11 I came across his passage about September 11.
On the first Friday after that sudden Tuesday, I took an afternoon train back homeward out of Manhattan and into the country. Do you remember the day? [snip] Life is bearing witness. In some superficial sense the morning of September 11 sifted us all into difference circles of witnessing. Some people narrowly escaped the collapsing towers. Others watched in terrified safety from windows and rooftops further uptown, Many, like me, saw it live on television from midtown, while an incalculable number of people around the county and the world watched as the tapes were replayed into the night and the coming days. But we're all witnesses, no matter what we saw or how we saw it. Our burden is very different from the burden the victims bore and their families still bear, but it's no less real. Witnessing is a matter of knowledge and of conscience. We know what we saw, and yet we watch the televised tapes play over and over again because we disbelieve what we know.
I've gone back and read that passage several times over, thinking on so many disasters, natural and otherwise, and how we do witness, disbelieving what we're seeing. This election year is a good example.
Yesterday, I found myself on the train to New York without the newspaper (I'd forgotten it) and with a pitiful charge on my more-than-three-years-old-phone (the only problem with which is the pitiful battery). Happily I had the Klinkenborg, but I had to break the rule of read November in November and read December in December, because what was I going to do? Be rigid, or read? I read.
He is a lovely writer and manages to make even a horrible destructive heavy wet December snow sound beautiful:
The snow that fell at home this past weekend was a predatory snow, heavy, wet and punishing. It fell hastily, clumsily, and by the time the storm ended, there was as much precipitation stacked overhead in the tangled woods, waiting to precipitate, as there was on the ground.
Precipitation waiting to precipitate.
Fall is that time when trees change from green to gold and scarlet, the hosta looks decidedly rough around the edges, the tomato plants are mere skeletons though yet with fruit.
And on October 16th, my patient impatiens are still blooming their little hearts out. The suburban life, it is confounding.
I know that this happened on Saturday, but the hard copy of the printed paper has been sitting on my kitchen table since then, and I want to record this for posterity.
If you embiggen that so that you can read it, you will see that the lead story on the front page of the New York Times on Saturday, October 8, 2016 prints the words bitch, pussy, fuck and tits.
This is two of George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words and newspaper journalists of a certain age have collapsed into puddles of ectoplasm and/or rolled over in their graves.
We may have actually reached the end of Western civilization as we have known it.
If you haven't figured it out, I'm With Her, and the orange man must never become President.
There are plum cakes other than the plum cake.
Yes, the New York Times published ... yet again ... the plum torte recipe. It's divine. If you haven't ever made it, it's spectacularly easy and absolutely perfect. Tender, buttery, sweetly spicy, laced with tart plum bombs.
But right around the time that plums were coming in, my friend Erika posted a peach/blackberry cake on Instagram:
I was intrigued by the reference to Plum Tart and Roden, so I asked and sure enough, it's a Claudia Roden recipe for a plum tart, even though Erika used peaches and blackberries.
At first glance, the recipes seem similar - a dough with some fruit on top. But the Roden version was different enough that I needed to try it - and it turns out to be more like cookie/pastry/cake under the plums, not sweet tender airy cake.
It is delightful! And even if you are committed to THE plum torte, it's worth trying this one.
Besides, who doesn't love a recipe header that says "It is very simple and easy to make, with pure fresh flavors and a marvelous biscuity base. You must try it. We all love it."
Swetschkenkuchen / Plum Tart
Adapted from Claudia Roden's The Book Of Jewish Food
Ingredients
2/3 cup (125 g) sugar (divided)
1 1/4 cups (175 g) flour
1/2 t. baking powder
3 oz (75 g) cold butter
1 small egg, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon Mirabelle eau de vie (or brandy)
1 1/2 pounds (750 g) Italian prune plums, halved and pitted
Preparation
Preheat oven to 375° F.
Mix half of the sugar with the flour and baking powder.
Cut the cold butter into cubes and rub into the flour and sugar mixture.
Stir in the egg and Mirabelle and mix with your hands until it forms a dough.
If the dough is too sticky, add a little flour.
Press the dough into the bottom of a round 9" tart pan - and up the sides a bit - make a 1/4" lip if you can (you don't need to go all the way to the top).
Arrange the fruit, cut side up and tightly packed, on top of the pastry. Sprinkle the remaining 1/3 cup sugar over the plums.
Bake at 375° F for about 50 minutes or until crust turns golden brown and the plums are soft and juicy.
Serve hot or warm or cold, sprinkled with confectioners sugar. Whipped cream would not be amiss.
Last weekend, there was a book festival in my town. It's a great event - lots and LOTS of authors, each at a smallish table with a big pile of books, chatting and signing, signing and chatting. There were food trucks doling out wood fired pizzas and artisanal grilled cheese, and portable mini-golf for toddlers, and lots of friends hauling boxes and running cash registers and ferrying cups of tea to parched chatty authors.
But the sweetest part of the day? Jane Yolen gave a copy of a poem to the force-of-nature organizer of the event, who happens to be the number one rabble rouser in support of Hillary Clinton in our town, and asked that the poem get to Secretary Clinton. It's a terrific little poem:
HC: A Modern Ode
She stands there,
hammer in hand
staring at the ceiling,
measuring with her careful eye,
finding just the right spot
to ding it down.
No wasted effort,
no casual boast,
the eye not the I.
A flick of the wrist,
a perfect strike.
The suffragettes smile
in their iron cradles.
Shards of glass
fall around us
like the Perseid stars.
–©2016 Jane Yolen all rights reserved
I've given a copy to my little unshrinking violet, because glass ceiling? Here we come.
Today would have been my mother's 81st birthday. Would have been.
Since she's no longer here to celebrate with nine times nine candles, I have to remember her here, eating an apple, sometime in the 1950s, when she was in college.
I've always liked this picture - the red in the foliage, the red apple, the red red lips, the red fingernails. The grey of the wood fence / rock wall matching the grey sweater. The oh so turned up jeans. Jeans! The dorky socks. The bottle of wine, clutched in her hand, the open brown bag it came from.
Who took the picture? Is it the photographer's shadow at the lower right? What kind of shoes is she wearing? Where are they?
Happy birthday, Moky. I'm sorry you can't tell me the answers to all of these questions.
I am annoyed at my newspaper of record. I have been reading the New York Times since I was a child. I remember the ENORMOUS headline when Nixon resigned. I remember when they went from 8 columns to 6. I remember when it was truly grey - there were no color photographs or advertisements.
Last week, I learned that they had dropped coverage of suburban arts, restaurants, and theater. This is a terrible move. Not only is it a disservice to the institutions that will no longer be covered, it's a disservice to readers who might frequent those institutions.
I grew up in one NYC suburb and now live in another. For all intents and purpose, The New York Times is my local paper. I want to hear about openings at the museum a couple of towns north, and what an objective writer thinks about the new restaurant at the train station down the hill from me. And the flip side is that those institutions need the imprimatur of the Times for their success.
Days after I heard that metro coverage was being curtailed, I spotted a little announcement:
I bought a bunch of books: a September head start on my Christmas shopping, and a baby present for Flutter's baby. There is something wonderful about buying a goofy pull-tab book and getting it signed "Dear Baby Rob" by 
The authors cover a wide spectrum - one lives in our town and has written one book, others have been writing tons of books over years and years. I had a copy of Vicki Cobb's 
