This is my message to you-oo-oo...

"Don't worry about a thing,
'cause every little thing gonna be all right..."

You know that song, right? You're probably bopping your head around, singing it to yourself right this very minute. And if you're prone to such things, you may have just acquired an ear worm. I'm sorry, but...

"Don't worry about a thing,
'cause every little thing gonna be all right..."

Here's a question, though: do you know the name of the song? The actual name of the song?

Three Little Birds.

* * * * * * * * * * *

A while ago, a publicist asked if I wanted a review copy of a book, by Bob Marley's daughter Cedella, who turned Three Little Birds into a children's book called "Every Little Thing".

It's cute, but here's its problem. While some song lyrics work as poetry if you dissociate them from their music, that's not the case here. The book wants to be a read-aloud, for a pre-schooler or early elementary-aged child. And for reading aloud, the poetry sucks. It would have been << putting on editor's hat and raising red pencil >> far better to have turned the song into prose. Like I said, it's cute, and the illustrations are exuberantly fun, but it's far too awkward to read aloud.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Everything will be alright, as long as you worry about prose, prosody, and poetry. Not to mention grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Delivery matters, even in a book meant for kids.

Guilt / Regret / Delight

I have to get over feeling guilty about:

• cucumbers that have gone bad in the fridge
• review copies of books that are so bad I can't finish them, much less write about them
• that face-up penny I didn't pick up on Thursday because both hands were full and my bag was hanging off of my elbow

I have to get over my regret at:

• having forgotten to write my name in Sharpie inside the closet of my room at my mother's house
• failing to take the "baby girl" bassinet card when we went home from the hospital more than nine years ago
• not seeing Peter and The Starcatcher on Broadway

I am, however, delighted about:

• Caitlyn Moran's How to Be a Woman
• the tweet of Moran's I found the other day (and really, you must click that link, and the link in the tweet)
• the chickpea/farro/leek salad I made for dinner last night
• just how wonderful Moonrise Kingdom is

You? Name something that delights you.

As Seen On TV

Let's not bury the lede, shall we? If it says "As Seen On TV" on the box, run screaming in the other direction.

Case in point: a cake pop pan. The box says "fun & easy!" and shows a tidy person's disembodied hand pouring cake batter into all the little holes. Pouring, with a measuring cup, meaning that the batter is thin and pourable.

Um, not as such.

I need to digress here. The instructions called for "one standard box of cake mix according to directions". Sorry, I don't do cake mix. Come on, cake isn't hard. It's just mixing. Back to the instructions; they included this note:

For best baking results: Use an extra egg, substitute milk for water and use half as much as the recipe calls for. Also add a pudding mix that matches your cake choice.

That little note kind of subverts the "one standard box of cake mix according to directions". And shall we mention the lack of clarity in the "use half as much" of what? Water, milk, cake mix?

After sputtering around the kitchen fuming about cake mix and the decline of Western civilization as we know it, I settled on a staggeringly easy cake recipe from the 1953 edition of The Joy of Cooking. It's the kind of recipe that gives cake mix a bad name, because all you do is dump flour, sugar, butter, eggs, milk, salt, baking powder, cocoa powder and vanilla in the mixer and beat it up for a while. It already called for two eggs, so I didn't add any, and I didn't add any pudding mix either, thank you very much. The batter was, um, not thin enough to pour neatly into all those little divots. No, I resorted to spatula smearing it into the holes.

We clamped the top on the pan and stuck it in the oven. Shortly thereafter, the girl peered through the oven window and discovered that we had many little cake volcanos - cake oozing out of all the top holes. I grumbled some more.

When the pan was out and cool enough to handle, removing the top revealed lacy thin cookies veneering the entire surface of the pan.

Happily, the little balls of cake popped right out of their divots, though many were belted at their equators. Miracles of non-stick technology, with a judicious application of Baker's Joy.

The next step was to coat them in "candy coating". Is this a thing? Oh, there was another note:

To make a simple candy coating, follow melting instructions on the back of semi sweet chocolate chip bag. Add a tablespoon of vegetable oil if coating is too thick after microwaving.

Right. I'm going to adulterate some perfectly good chocolate with vegetable oil? I don't think so. (And that tablespoon of oil? What volume of chips was it supposed to adulterate? Oh for comprehensive articulate instructions.) We forged on, dipping the cake balls into our melted chocolate. The chocolate was indeed too thick, and the sticks were too flimsy, and so we did not achieve anything like enrobement. No, our balls were dipped on the bottom and perhaps one side, and sprinkles were applied haphazardly at best.

Here's what I have to say: run very very far from the cake pop pan. And please, don't even consider buying one of the single purpose electric appliances that makes cake balls. Just make a cake. A nice plain cake, like the Hurry Up cake from the 1953 Joy of Cooking. It's easy. Your kitchen won't look like an army of sticky chocolate covered toddlers has marched through, and your blood pressure will remain within normal limits.

The worst of it? The nine year old doesn't even want to eat them.

OMFG

I have kind of lost my blogging mojo. Oh, there are lots of posts in draft, and lots of ideas rattling around in my skull, but the actual sitting down and applying quill pen to parchment? That's just not happening.

Whatev. I'll be here when I'm here.

But lest you think I'm not still paying attention to charitable giving, guess what I got in yesterday's mail? You got it! A direct mail piece from the NRDC! Yes, the second one this year! And we're only halfway through January!

Why yes, I do like poking things with sticks.

2012: A Year In Books

Because I'm a tiny bit OCD about books, I like using Goodreads to keep track of what I read. (I know. Shut up. It isn't like anyone's expecting me to hand in my book log or anything.)

In 2011, I read 60 books; in 2012, only 58. But! I read fewer books aloud to the girl in 2012 - a consequence of her getting older, and more inclined to read herself to bed - which means that I read more books on my own account. I also read more ebooks, a sign of the times that I'm not sure I love. For lots of reasons, I prefer paper.

	2011	2012
Total Books Read	60	58
Fiction	27	34
Non-Fiction	33	24
Read Aloud to the Child	15	6
Total Grown-Up Books	45	52
ebooks	4	7
library books	5	5
unfinished	1	2

I love looking over the list, and making little connections. Two books were about unrelated Pettigrews: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. Two were memoirs by bloggers: Emily Rosenbaum and Jenny Lawson. Three were by Suzanne Collins (yes, I devoured the Hunger Games trilogy while out sick last spring), two were by Roald Dahl (since we love reading aloud his darkly comic tales) and two were by Curtis Sittenfeld (because I scored hardcovers of Prep and American Wife at the book swap at the farmer's market - though not on the same day).

I added three terrific cookbooks to the kitchen library - Tamar Adler's An Everlasting Meal, Deb Perelman's Smitten Kitchen, and Diana Henry's Salt Sugar Smoke - what, you don't read cookbooks from cover to cover, under the covers? A few older books were transfixing: Edna Ferber's So Big (which I read because of a book club at the library), Mary Dutton's Thorpe (a book I found on a blog post a long time ago), and Wilkie Collins' No Name (a big complicated Victorian thriller/novel which you can get as a free ebook). And the one hair-raising book I might want to read all over again is Gone Girl -just because it's so richly packed with tiny important details. I'm also anxiously awaiting volume three of Hilary Mantel's Henry VIII tales, after reading Bring Up The Bodies this year, and Wolf Hall in 2011.

What did you read in 2012? What are you looking forward to? And what's on your nightstand right now?

One Out Of Four

You know how in The Polar Express Santa picks a kid off the train to receive the first gift of Christmas?

Today, I got the first solicitation of 2013! And guess who it was from? Give me an N, give me an R...that's right - my number one bad charity of 2012, the Natural Resources Defense Council. Alas, there was no live stamp on the return envelope - though I guess that's progress of a sort.

* * * * * * * *

After my Cranky Philanthropist post last week, I made sure to "amplify" it by posting it on Twitter, four separate times, calling out each of the bad charities and using their Twitter handles so that they'd see the tweets. Did anyone respond? One charity did - Riverkeeper.

Riverkeeper's Director of Development followed up with an email, and after a back and forth, we made up. She sent me a copy of last year's thank you note - which I assume had been lost by the post office - and I told her they could keep us on the list if they promised only one solicitation a year (and no newsletters).

So, Riverkeeper's back on the good charity list.

* * * * * * * *

Believe me, I'm not saving all of the charitable mail this year. But I am still paying attention.

A Near Perfect Side Dish

A close reading of the New York Times magazine a couple of weeks ago resulted in the perfect side dish for our Christmas dinner. In fact, it might be the perfect side dish for nearly any roast meat meal, in that it seems like a starch, but it's really mostly vegetables. I'd heard of soubise, but because I'm not Julie Powell and I haven't cooked absolutely everything in Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, I had never tried it. Big mistake. We will have to make up for lost time by putting on the menu several times a year.

Essentially, it's cooked onions thickened with a bit of rice. Or, a reverse risotto - a little rice with a lot of seasoning. And it's really really good, not to mention easy, and forgiving. You could probably even leave the cheese out if you felt that was necessary. What's not to like?

---

Soubise
Adapted from Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking"

1/2 cup rice, (arborio or carnaroli)
4 quarts water
1 1/2 T. salt (to salt the water)
4 T. butter (one-half stick)
2 pounds yellow onions
1/8 t. pepper (a few good grinds)
1/2 t. salt
1/4 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup grated Gruyère cheese (or swiss)
2 T. softened butter
1 T. minced parsley.

1. Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and put 4 quarts of water on to boil.

2. Meanwhile peel your onions, cut them in half the long way, and slice thinly (into half rings).

3. Heat the 4 T. of butter in a three or four quart flameproof lidded casserole. When the butter is melted and foaming, stir in the onions.

4. Add the 1 1/2 T. salt to your vigorously boiling water, pour in the rice and boil for exactly five minutes. Drain immediately.

5. Stir the drained rice into the butter-coated onions, add the 1/2 teaspoon salt and the pepper. Cover and cook in the oven for one hour, stirring occasionally if you must. The rice and onions should become very tender and will smell heavenly. Taste and re-season if necessary. (Pause here if you're making a big meal and have lots of other things to cook - the onions will hold nicely. Reheat before the finishing additions.)

6. Just before serving, stir in the cream and cheese and then the softened butter. Taste again for seasonings and turn into a (hot covered vegetable) dish. Serve with sprinkled parsley.

Portrait of the artist ...

Yes, I got a new camera for Christmas. Yes, I got a new lens for my birthday. Yes, the tree is coming down this weekend, but I did have rather a lot of fun taking pictures of my enormous - and not so - balls.

The Cranky Philanthropist

A year ago, after sending out a raft of little charitable contributions at the end of 2011, each with its own little admonition, please do not solicit more than once a year, please do not sell or rent my name, I decided to conduct a small experiment. For the whole of 2012, I kept every piece of mail that came in asking for money - snail mail, not email. By the middle of December, it amounted to a goodly boxful. I sorted it, tallied it, and - I'm sorry to report - was forced to add a few charities to the naughty list.

Most organizations are either sophisticated enough to flag their database in such a way that they did not, in fact, send out multiple solicitations. Others are so unsophisticated that I never get, nor expect to get, more than one or two a year - the local volunteer fire department comes to mind.

After the great sorting, we sat down to discuss the various solicitations, en famille. Some were rejected:

• Boys & Girls Club: "I don't swim there anymore."
• Care: Seven solicitations in one calendar year is too many, especially since we've never given to you.
• The local Police Benevolent Association: "They can always ask the Girl Scouts to fundraise for them." (Um, huh? Don't ask me, I'm just reporting what the nine year old said.)

Some were newly added to the list:

• American Museum of Fly Fishing: "We have to do that because of Daddy", who does like fly fishing but doesn't get to do it much at all.
• Fair Girls: They work to prevent the exploitation of girls worldwide and Nick Kristof told me about them.
• EarthJustice: mostly because I liked their tag line about the earth needing a good lawyer (and Charity Navigator gave them 4 stars).
• Dr. Hawa Abdi (via Vital Voices): Dr. Abdi runs a hospital, school and refugee camp in Somalia, and and Nick Kristof told me about her too.

In the end, we sent contributions to a mixed bag of local organizations (the afore-mentioned fire department, the local historical society, the day care center the girl attended) and bigger ones (Planned Parenthood, Unicef, International Rescue Committee), domestic and international.

And, because I am a crank, I sent notes - without contributions - to four organizations that we've supported in the past, because they really irritated me.

• The NRDC sent us ten pieces of mail in 11 and a half months. Six of them included a return envelope with a live stamp - 45 cents right there in each solicitation! I used one of those envelopes to ask them to take me off their list, and had no compunctions about readdressing the remaining five to use to give to small charities who didn't waste their money giving me a stamp.
• Doctors without Borders sent us six pieces of mail, and they get extra demerits because not one of their envelopes included a return address, which is a sneaky way of getting someone to open your envelope in the first place.
• Partners In Health sent us five pieces of mail, three too many. (Even though I asked for only one solicitation a year, two doesn't offend my sensibilities hugely because, well, I'm not that rigid, and anyway, the lists do get prepped in advance.)
• Riverkeeper sent us four pieces of mail - too much mail, compounded by the fatal error of not having thanked us for last year's gift.

When I ask that a charity only solicit us once a year, I mean it. I don't want paper and stamps and time wasted on asking me for money; I want the money spent on the cause that I'm supporting. It's simple, really. It's all about stewardship.

You can, though, be sure that I'll keep opening the envelopes from the NRDC. I mean, you can always use a nice first class stamp to pay some bill or another, right?

Two times Two times Thirteen

A deck of cards (without jokers).

The white keys on an 88 key piano.

Weeks in a year, rounded off to the nearest week.

And me.

I'm divisible by 13 (and 2 and 2), and sometimes added into metal alloys.

I'm 52 today, and as I always do, I sent off a check in the amount of my age, to the New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. It's my little way of marking my birthday.

Great Mysteries of Blogdom

Sometimes - but not very often - I look at my blog stats, the ones that Blogger provides. You can't drill too deeply (or I don't know how), and sometimes the results are just weird and mysterious.

Here are the top 10 search keywords, as of the other day:

• bruce the shark
• monkey bread
• cats in hats
• mix and match ideas for school
• need christmas certificates
• reading log
• azalea
• boredom
• underpants enema
• apple clafouti julia child

At the same time, the post with the top number of hits was one titled IVF Shoes - about the shoes you buy as a treat for yourself while you're in the middle of your in vitro ferilization cycle. How those two things - those keywords and that top grossing post - are related is a mystery to me.

Also, "underpants enema"? WHY?

Instead Of An Apple

I confess to a great distaste for giving gift cards or money to people at Christmas time. In fact, I'm not really a fan of tipping in general. I do it, because one must, I tip in restaurants and taxi cabs, and I mailed a Christmas check to the newspaper delivery person who I've never laid eyes on, and certain young people of my acquaintance are getting Amex cards, but I've never felt inclined to give a cash gift to my child's school teacher - it's too much like a tip, and Amy Vanderbilt says you don't tip professionals. I know, it's just me, and you may well have lots of arguments as to why the teacher needs the money, and how it's likely that that money will be spent back into the classroom. That said, I very much like giving little gifts at Christmas to people who are important to me and to us, and my kid's teacher certainly falls into that category.

Remembering that on open school night my daughter's teacher had confessed to an Amazon habit to feed her classroom library, and knowing that she had a Scholastic wish list, I decided that a book would be the right gift. I ended up getting a copy of The Doll People, a book my daughter had recently read and loved, and which I knew (from her) not to be on the classroom shelves.



To gussy up the gift, I printed a set of bookplates using art work from Helen Dardik's Orange You Lucky blog. I cut and pasted the art (free to use as long as it's credited back to Helen, thank you Helen!) into a Word template for Avery 5163 labels, figured out how to type on top of the image (so they could be personalized), printed them out, and whacked them a bit with the paper cutter. A spare label (from the outtakes) went into the book; ten more bookplates were tucked into the card. I was really pleased with the end result.

Happy Christmas to a super wonderful teacher!

The Holy City, O Holy Night

For a good 35 years, most of my life, the Christmas celebrations included a big, raucous Christmas Eve party. Everyone came - kids, neighbors, boyfriends, grandparents, friends from here, friends from there. We'd make lots of Christmas cookies, and buy lots of cheese. My mother would make chicken liver pate, the kind that's so not kosher because it's got two sticks of butter in it, and pack it into a small brown crock with a lid, a crock that wasn't ever used for anything else. [That crock now lives in my kitchen; I'd better lay in some chicken livers.]

Eddie, the Joyce scholar from down the street, banged out Christmas carols on the piano, never stopping even when he'd miss a note (a blessing, that ability to keep going, the sign of a good accompanist). And everyone sang, at least everyone who wasn't in the kitchen with the red wine and the pistachios. Jingle Bells, Angels We Have Heard On High, Adeste Fidelis, O Little Town of Bethlehem. Sometimes people would get fancy and sing harmony or descants; I've always been partial to a descant in the second verse of Stille Nacht, even though I'm really not a soprano by any stretch of the imagination. Eventually, Eddie would get around to playing O Holy Night, out of a book called "Sing For Christmas" where it was inexplicably in something like G flat major, or maybe it was C flat major. In any case, it had way too many flats in the key signature, but Eddie courageously soldiered on. We'd belt it out, and move on to The Holy City, not really a Christmas carol, but full of great thumping Jerusalems.

Christmas was also a time for iconic records: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Britten's Ceremony of Carols. The Messiah. Luciano Pavarotti. The Nutcracker. Jessye Norman. Kathleen Battle. A Music Box Christmas. The Robert Shaw Chorale.

Two of those iconic records included those two oft-belted carols from our Christmas Eves. Pavarotti does a thoroughly charming and idiosyncratic O Holy Night, sung in English, with a heavy Italian accent and prodigiously rolled Rs, it is the night of the dear Savior's bert. Jessye Norman sings The Holy City tenderly, not bombastically, a lovely rendition.

Funnily enough, I have but two copies of The Holy City in my full-to-bursting list of songs tagged "holiday" in iTunes: the afore-mentioned Jessye Norman, and Herbert L. Clarke (the cornet soloist of the Sousa band). But I have 29 versions of O Holy Night - ranging from Pavarotti and Anne Sofie Von Otter, to Dave McKenna, Aaron Neville, Ella Fitzgerald and Sufjan Stevens. Presumably that's because The Holy City isn't really a Christmas song at all; it's just a bit of religious Victoriana. But it feels like Christmas to me, because Jessye Norman's Sacred Songs had been absorbed into our family's Christmas music collection, and because Eddie almost always played it on Christmas Eve, the thundering triplets shaking the very floorboards of the house I grew up in.

---

This post is part of a blog chain about holiday music. You can read more about the chain here, or just check out all of these links:

• Harriet at spynotes
• Hugh at Permanent qui vive
• Jeanne at Necromancy never pays
• Cranky at It’s My Blog!
• Dr. Geek at Dr. Geek’s Laboratory
• Lemming at Lemming’s Progress
• Readersguide at Reader’s Guide to…
• Freshhell at Life in Scribbletown
• edj3 at kitties kitties kitties
• My Kids’ Mom at Pook and Bug
• joyhowie at The Crooked Line
• Me!
• Dave at The Ideal Dave
• Harriet at spynotes (redux)

What Do We Want?

What is there to say that hasn't already been said?

* * * * * * * * * *

We don't watch television news, and we rarely listen to the radio, and we read the weekend's newspapers carefully, furtively. We needed the time, to process the shooting ourselves, to wind around what to say to our nine year old. And I think we worried for naught, for her stoic little practical nature shone through when we talked about it at dinner last night: he killed himself? okay, we don't have to worry about him.

But that it were so easy.

* * * * * * * * * *

The thing is, there are a lot of way to analyze this situation. Do we need better treatment and resources for mental illness? Yes. Should we clamp down on guns and ammunition? Yes. Are video games too violent? Who knows? But to try and use the excuse that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" as a deflection away from the very politicized gun control issue is missing the point. A crazy person in China went on a knife attack on Friday - but because he was using a knife, those 22elementary school children were injured, not killed. Guns kill people. As Nick Kristof pointed out in the Times the other day, we regulate the hell out of cars and buildings and food, but "the only things we seem lax about are the things most likely to kill."

What do we want? Gun control. When do we want it? Now. How are we going to get it? I don't know, but I emailed President Obama (via the White House website), and I signed a petition to "address the issue of gun control through the introduction of legislation in Congress", and I signed an open letter to Congress and the NRA to "make today the last day that they block common sense gun regulations that protect all of our families". I'll probably write to my congressperson and my senators, even though I'm pretty sure they're already in favor of gun control. Because what we need is a good strong gun control policy, complete with background checks, waiting periods, restricted access to semi-automatic weapons, ammunition microstamping, a ban on high-capacity clips, and halt to gun sales at gun shows. And you know what? A CNN poll from a couple of years ago shows that a majority of the American people want a ban on semi-automatics (61% in favor) and background checks before gun purchases (94% in favor). I'd venture that those poll numbers would be even higher today.

* * * * * * * * * *

I was a little stunned to learn, over last night's dinner, that they do in fact have "lock down drills" in my daughter's elementary school. Fire drills? Sure, I get that. But lock down drills in my bucolic suburban town, where the kids huddle in the corner away from the windows and the door, just for practice? The innocence of childhood is gone.

Enormous Balls

We decked the halls the other day. There's a wreath on the front door, some new lights around the front entry, and new "candles" in the upstairs windows. I always wanted some of those dorky candles but I'd never gotten around to getting any. The opportunity presented itself when I had to make an emergency run to the hardware store for a new string of outdoor lights since the ones that had been stored away last year were toast. The battery-powered “candles” are crappy looking if you actually look at them but from a distance, like from the road looking at the house, they look great and have an eerily realistic flicker.

And the tree is up. After my husband and I got the lights on, the girl helped me hang the ornaments. This meant that we completely forgot the glass beads, and the ornaments were allocated without much regard to let's finish one box before we start the next, shall we? As a result, there are several half full boxes back down in the cellar, because I have more ornaments than tree. I’d have done it differently, but hey. She’s nine. She was having a good time.

Because I'm me, I narrated the history and provenance of nearly every ornament.

• Aw, Granny bought this at Martin Viette's, it was a fund-raiser.
• This box came from my grandmother, look, here's her handwriting on it.
• Look, it's a pickle! Look, it's another piece of cheese! Look, it's a potato!
• Pinky gave this red one to me.
• I love this really old one even though it's broken.
• Here’s the box of the really big balls that Daddy's mother brought back from Poland.

While I tend to contemplate the appropriate placement of each and every ornament, small and antique up high, large and less fragile down low, really heavy ones on a sturdy branch, the girl was kind of hither and yon. One thing lead to another and I found myself saying hey, that enormous Polish ball is too close to the floor, and somehow from there I ended up teaching her "do your balls hang low?" It may be our new Christmas-tree-decorating anthem.

All I Want For Christmas...[redux]

Incidentally, until I looked it up, I had no idea that Mariah Carey had written All I Want For Christmas Is You. Maybe that's partly because I've never paid any attention to Mariah Carey ever at all, but it also speaks to the fact that the song feels old, it feels like a standard from decades ago. Even The New Yorker thinks so: Sasha Frere-Jones called it "one of the few worthy modern additions to the holiday canon".

I think the only version of it that I have is a charming and perky cover by the Puppini Sisters - and I do have a lot of Christmas music.

Part of my Christmas music obsession is that I really like listening to covers, versions of things I know well. When you listen to 47 different versions of a really simple song like Silent Night, you really start to hear what's going on. Lyrics morph, rhythms shift, tempos change. Poking around the 'tubes today, I found a site that may lead to a complete and utter trip down the rabbit hole. Called Who Sampled, it's a "site for discovering and discussing sampled music, remixes and cover songs...about the discovery of new and old music, the exploration of musical influences and the sharing of knowledge". Plug in a song, and get a list with a whole mess of other versions. Click through to one of them, and you get a page with YouTube links of cover and original side by side.

Who Sampled lists twenty four covers of All I Want For Christmas Is You. Most of them are probably execrable, maudlin twaddle, but twenty four! A person could really get lost.

Tell me, what song are you going to look up?

All I Want For Christmas...

And...it is December. It is December 7th, even. There are two full work weeks, or 17 calendar days, before Christmas. Most of my shopping is done, though not all of the packages have arrived. Nothing has been wrapped, though I got some new Happy Tape in the mail yesterday. The cards are in hand, but only a small handful have actually left the premises. We plan to get a tree and a wreath tomorrow, and to put them up on Sunday. (Well, I could put the wreath up tomorrow, but I always like to wait a day for the tree to relax. After all, it'll have been tied up with twine for who knows how long.) The cats don't have stockings, yet, and the nine year old is concerned about this lack of readiness, so perhaps we'll do a bit of sewing tomorrow. I've even converted the car's iPod to all Christmas music all the time, but, I don't know, I'm just not feeling it yet. And I want to be.

That said, there's a video clip of Jimmy Fallow and Mariah Carey and The Roots singing All I Want For Christmas Is You making the rounds. It's kind of genius and thoroughly goofy, and it totally put a smile on my face.



Go ahead. Watch it. Grin a little. Christmas is actually on its way.

Homonymy

Oh how I love to read the obituaries in the good grey lady. Today's was a gem.

From the second paragraph:

"The cause was complications of liver cancer..."

From the third paragraph:

"Flamboyant and loquacious, wealthy and generous, Mr. Richards was a high roller in the theater world, and a high liver..."

Swoon. Liver, liver.

Give On Tuesday

Over dinner, while she was inhaling some pasta, the girl asked me "when's Black Friday?"

I immediately thought shopping frenzy, day after Thanksgiving, oh no, how do I get out of this and asked her, blandly, "what's Black Friday?"

"Oh," she said, "it's the day we can send our letters to Santa Claus."

Oh that. That I can handle. Going anywhere near a mall, a big box store, a national retailer on the day after Thanksgiving? No can do. Hell, I avoid all of those places pretty much all the time.

It's funny how the few days after Thanksgiving have become an all out shopping frenzy, with a different shtick for each day: Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, [Blue Law Sunday], Cyber Monday.

As an antidote, we've got a newly minted concept: Giving Tuesday. I know that I don't need to be reminded to give, but maybe other people do. Do you?

Giving a bit to charity each year is a good thing. It's good for you, and good for the recipients. Think about it. And maybe, just maybe, set aside some of that money you save at the mall on Black Friday, or the $25 rebate from American Express from shopping locally on Small Business Saturday, and sit down and write a check to a charity on Tuesday. If it's something you've never done, and don't know where to begin, start locally. Do you have a local animal shelter? A food pantry? A daycare? How about a nearby historic site, or the volunteer ambulance corps? Does your high school have a scholarship fund for kids who need help paying for college? Is there a center for victims of domestic violence in the next town? Maybe there's a little county-wide orchestra - they need your help to keep playing Bach, Beethoven, Monteverdi. Really, if you just look around, there's a place that needs your help.

The Giving Tuesday site has a list of ideas - talk through the list with your family.

And remember: every little bit helps. I know this in my bones; I've spent my life working for non-profit organizations. We love your contributions - big and small. They validate us and our work, and we appreciate you every single day.

Give. Next Tuesday.

A Weekend In The Country

I'm not sure that there is anything more exhausting than spending three days on your feet selling the contents of the house you grew up in to friends and strangers. It is also cathartic, sad, funny, and odd. But most of all, it's exhausting. I got home at 7:00 last night, and was in bed by 8:00.

While the chief proprietors of the estate sale were me and my two siblings, lovely friends came and helped out, like the (gay male) matron-of-honor from my wedding, and my (also has a blog) best friend from college. Neighbors floated in and out, bearing cream cheese be-smeared bagels and pumpkin oatmeal cookies. Old friends carted away trinkets and clocks. More than one person needed stuff to replace stuff lost in the hurricane. A lady bought two percolators and two coffee grinders, and told me she was going to mail them to family in South America - so my sister threw in some coffee filters. One woman was the first one in the door on Saturday morning, and berated us because the cast iron skillet she'd seen hanging on the wall (in a picture on the internet) was no longer there. Sorry, lady, we sold it! You should have come on Friday!

Friends from inside the computer showed up - and tweeted and blogged about their purchases. Nice to have seen you, Jean! Great to have met you, George! Thanks for hanging out, Heidi! Glad you got that shell, Jane!

A strange woman came up to me and told me that Kathy from California had sent her. I was momentarily flustered, until the gears clicked into place and I blurted out "Kathy With Cats"? Yup - someone I know on Facebook had forwarded a link to a friend of hers who lived not too far away. It was like Kathy by proxy.

Tom came a couple of times and bought a mess of stuff. I'm sure he made out like a bandit, but whatev. Somehow, I can't remember why, he ended up with my phone number. My cell rang at about 9 on Saturday night; it was Tom. "I unpacked all my stuff, and remember that little pepper mill? It's not there. Remember that guy who picked it up from my pile? I think he boosted it." Tom wasn't calling to ask for his money back or anything - he was calling to caution us about the people who don't want to pay for anything, "they boost stuff all the time". [There was a little racial profiling going on, but his impulse was well-meant.]

Amanda came a couple of times and told us her entire sordid life story, and bought a mess of stuff. She might have boosted something; we know she dug the sterling ice bucket out of the liquor cabinet, but we reclaimed it.

Tracy came back three times, the first two times buying for her boyfriend, the third time WITH her boyfriend. They were great and enthusiastic and charming. Also, I loved her raincoat. They probably took us for a ride too, but again, whatev.

My high school flute teacher bought my grandmother's punch bowl and its dozen matching cups. Someone I babysat for bought the dresser from the front hall. Darius, who I'd never met before, but whose sister went to college with the woman I babysat for, asked me if I thought he could sew a cell phone case from a piece of leather he scrounged up. I told him how, and gave him the leather.

When we weren't selling and schlepping and talking and learning the names of almost every single buyer, we were running up to Starbucks and the train station and nailing signs to trees. Starbucks was supposed to be open at 6 on Sunday morning but when we got there at ten to 7, they were locked up tight - with all the lights on. I banged on the door, needing that double shot skim latte, stat. Finally, a woman came to the door. Apologetically, she told us she couldn't let us in, because no one else had shown up to work. But she took our orders, locked the door again, made the coffee, and came back with the two cups. Free! Brownie points to Starbucks for doing the right thing.

And in a fit of debauchery after dark, we drove around town with a slit-open dead feather pillow, sprinkling feathers up and down the streets, hoping people would think some chickens had run amok. Some of them are still there.

Almost. We're almost done.