Light and Momentary

Argentina-bound

It's been nice knowing you, Gladlyville, but I am off to Argentina. Tonight I discovered that Argentina is home to a creature called the pink fairy armadillo, the little palm-sized friend I have been waiting for all my life. Seriously, click that link and look at that picture and tell me you are not (a) sorely tempted to move to Argentina to cozy up to one of those and (b) mildly curious about whether you are being punked, because it looks more like a Pokemon than an actual live mammal.

They die in captivity, so I cannot keep one as a pet, but if I go to Argentina I am confident I can befriend one. Or six. You know. Maybe if I am very gentle with them and kindly bring them some especially delectable grubs, they will dig me a hobbit hole with their adorably oversized claws.

Doesn't that video make you pine for an Argentinean hobbit hole in which you can drink yerba mate with your pink fairy armadillo friends? No? Just me?

Apparently they hate the rain and sometimes die if there's too much of it. They do not sound especially resilient, I have to say, but they couldn't really be any cuter.

Sister Jamie plays her mandolin

Tonight, you guys, I did the thing I have been a little nervous about doing: I took my mandolin to the jam session at the old courthouse. Everybody was welcoming and encouraging, and it was big fun in a brain-bendy way. It's hard: there's no sheet music anywhere, so you just have to pick up the tunes by listening. And they move at a brisk pace, so it had my brain firing on every single cylinder.

I was inspecting my calluses at the end when a big bearded guy walked up to me and said, "So are you a nun?"

I said, "...No. Thirty years married, five children."

Today I am wearing a swingy black tank dress with a teal underlayer, like so:

I'm also wearing highly visible festive handknit socks, with shoes that show them off. Do these look like nun socks?

Apparently the nuns in his world wear stripy slightly mismatched handknit socks, maybe?

That's kind of a weird opener, is it not? I think I'll go back anyway, but who knew mandolin-playing nuns were a thing?

Maybe they will be warm bananas this week

"How's your first week going?" my colleague across the hall asked me on Thursday. I told her the hot bananas story, and she laughed and agreed. I am hoping the bananas level will ease down to warm this week, but we shall see.

I did not work out all week (because: bananas, so many bananas and so hot), and then I waltzed into the gym today and pulled a deadlift PR: 160 for 2. Joe thinks I could get to 200 pretty speedily but I took a video of myself lifting 160 and I think he may be optimistic there. I took the video expecting the bottom part of each rep to be the problematic bit, but my form on the bottom half looks fine to me. The top half of each rep, however, looks like garbage: I am laboring to lock out 160. But lock it out I did! Nevertheless she persisted, huzzah!

Have you read This Is How You Lose The Time War? It was recommended by someone whose judgment I respect, and so I was a little surprised to find it pretentious, with a twist that seemed obvious from far away. There is a very emphatic community of people who love this book, though, so tell me what you liked about it if you have read it and disagree with my assessment.

I have the feeling that I was going to tell you some more things, my friends, but as I sit here typing I can feel myself sliding into a state of torpor that is unlikely to yield any especially scintillating blog content. I am going to throw up this quick and fairly random post, and come back soon.

Books I have been reading recently

I forgot that I pre-ordered Lauren Fleshman's Good for a Girl until it showed up in my Kindle library yesterday. I devoured it. I loved Fleshman's voice when she was writing for Runner's World and so the book was an easy sell. But it was a hard read. It was an extended reminder that we live in a world where people just keep looking at women's bodies and saying, "Hm, you know what would improve this situation? If there were less of you, that's what." In competitive running as in the rest of women's lives, weight loss might offer a small short-term improvement but it does so with enormous medium-term and long-term costs. Fleshman does a nice job juxtaposing the joy of running against the train-wreck-itude of vast swaths of women's sports. I found it both sobering and encouraging, reading about all the damage that has been done to female athletes, and her determination to put future coaches on a better path.

I also forgot that I pre-ordered Catherine Newman's We All Want Impossible Things until it showed up in my Kindle library, but I did not devour it right away. I read the first half of the first chapter a few times and then got distracted. But once I got out of the first chapter I couldn't put it down. It is riotously funny -- the kind of snort-laugh funny that I can't read in bed because I might accidentally shake my husband awake giggling -- which is a little weird for a book about a woman losing her best friend to cancer. It is also hauntingly sad. In hindsight there are some implausible parts (like the hospice doctor's on-the-clock extracurricular activities, excuse me? and also the whole setup of the book -- would this character really leave her kid to go to an out-of-state hospice facility?), but I enjoyed the heck out of it anyway.

On the last day of 2022 I finished Four Thousand Weeks, which I had seen recommended in a zillion different places and started a few times. I found the first two-thirds of it every bit as thought-provoking as promised, but then he kinda lost me in the last chunk. I'm curious about whether you've read it and what you thought. Biggest takeaways: I would like to travel more, and I would like to dedicate more time to creative pursuits (specifically, music and fiction-writing). This book was a factor in my decision to finish the recording I posted on Monday. In the sections where I am singing harmony with myself I just could not find the F♯ in the alto part. I got it wrong an exasperating number of times, but I stuck it out because it's too easy for me to say to myself, "I don't have time to become a better musician." This is a less vulnerable way to live, but it is not a true statement. 

One more recommendation: it has been a month since I finished Demon Copperhead, and I keep meaning to tell you how much I loved it. It's one of the best books I read in 2022, my favorite of the Barbara Kingsolver novels I've read, and a really well-done homage to David Copperfield. If you had told me up front that the Dora character would be an opioid addict I would have given the book some serious side-eye, but it works amazingly well. I'd love to chat about it with somebody else who loves Copperfield, so say the word if that's you.

Resolutions for Ordinary Time

I have been in a bit of a funk, friends. My mood always dips in the short gray days of mid-December, but this year it dipped more deeply than usual and it has been taking longer to rebound. The day after Christmas we were driving to my in-laws' house and I could feel my anxiety pulsing, squashing me flat like a malevolent invisible anvil. "If I am not feeling much better in ten days' time," I said, "I should make an appointment to go to the doctor and request an SSRI prescription."

It is now 15 days later and I am definitely better, a largely-back-to-normal kind of better, but I am still riding intermittent swells of grumpiness, irrational anger, and melancholy. I do not really want to take an SSRI and, for separate (possibly dumb) reasons, I do not really want to go to the doctor. So for today I am just going to blog about it, and watch for a continued upward trend, and reassess as needed. So this is the frame of mind in which I am thinking about post-Christmas resolutions: they have to be reasonable and gentle. 

1. Soul.
1. Elwood and I are going to join a small group our church is sponsoring? I am not sure how it is going to go? I will report back? This first resolution does not sound very resolute, I know, but that's where I am right now.
2. After 7 consecutive years of reading the whole Bible every year, I am taking a break from the law/history/prophecy parts of OT (see above re: reasonable and gentle; I can't deal with Judges and Ezekiel right now). The 2023 morning reading plan is NT + wisdom books + some other spiritual reading, currently Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa. (I am a total Fr. Cantalamessa fangirl, but his book is not stirring my soul at the moment. We shall see.)
2. Body.
1. Prioritize joyful exercise, including daily mobility work. Nobody else is going to prioritize exercise for me, my friends, and it makes such a difference in my mood, energy level, and capacity to take ridiculous emails in stride. I am going to try to focus on M/W cardio and T/Th lifting, with some of each on Sat/Sun and Friday as a rest day.
2. Make more yummy food that I enjoy. Each week, I want to plan a couple of dinners to look forward to, and make enough to pack leftovers for lunches. I also want to find a couple of appealing salad dressings. Recommendations are welcome.
3. Mind.
1. Keep going to bed with Victorians, with the goal of finishing another three Trollope novels and some Dickens novellas/nonfiction. This was an excellent 2022 resolution.
2. Read the Dorothy Dunnett Game of Kings series.
3. Prioritize writing at work. I feel SO MUCH BETTER about every facet of my job when every day starts with an inviolable writing block. Even when I have to get to the office at 7:15 to make it happen, it's worth it.
4. Wider world.
1. Maintain a small-tasks block à la Laura Vanderkam with the goal of keeping my household in order. So many frustrations can be diminished or eradicated with a modest amount of effort. It feels better to expend the effort than to live with the frustrations.
2. Take myself and my mandolin to a local music group that meets each week and see if it seems like a good fit. Don't be bashful about being a beginner.

'Tis the season, but not for long

Tomorrow is the beginning of Ordinary Time for Catholics. It's a little weird for the new season to start on a Tuesday, but that's how it goes when Christmas falls on a Sunday. This means today is the last day on which it makes much sense to talk about a Christmas carol, and so I am going to squeeze in some Christmas carol thoughts.

The nutshell version of the post is this: if you have any influence over which Christmas music will be performed live at a venue near you, be VERY CAREFUL about selecting What Child Is This. It is a pain to sing solo, because the phrases go on a leetle too long. But it is a MINEFIELD to sing with others. CAUTION NEEDED; hazards await.

By my count there are six different spots in What Child Is This? where the interval between two notes changes from version to version. Some sheet music will have half-steps in some of the spots; some will have whole steps in some of the spots. All of these divergences happen on sixteenth notes, which means that the dissonance between the half-step singers and the whole-step singers will be brief, but it also means it's very very hard to correct reliably. Here, I will play you a little sample to show you what I mean:

Yesterday I had agreed to substitute for the usual cantor at the early Mass. When I got there at 7am, there were two junior high girls who were planning to sing as well. Normally it's a more-the-merrier vibe, but normally we don't sing What Child Is This. I asked the accompanist to help us practice the tricky whole steps, but you guys, it's just really hard to sing the right notes in the right spots, especially as you wade into the verses where you to think about the lyrics as well as the intervals. I decided I would just fade out for the sketchy whole-step bits and let the girls sing what sounded right to them, but I didn't realize that this would mean a livestreamed clash between their voices and the keyboard. Was that better or worse than throwing my at-least-intermittently accurate vocal in the mix? Who can say?

The version that lives in my head is all half-steps, all the way through, all six times. I do not have a single sheet-music version that does it this way, but that's the version in my head regardless. So here on the very last day of the Christmas season, for those of you who are not too weary of Christmas music, I have recorded the Jamie Gladly All Half-Steps version. 

What child is this, ALL HALF-STEPS ALL THE TIME

And remember for next year: if you're picking Christmas music to be performed live somewhere, go with Hark the Herald Angels Sing over What Child Is This.

Calling it good

I was slogging through the pictures, three months per day, and I was finding it time-consuming and unpleasant, like always. It was satisfying, though, to be pushing through the backlog. I love having made photo albums; it's just the making of photo albums that I dislike.

On Saturday I noticed that Snapfish had an enticing coupon code: 65% off for photo books purchased by January 8. "Hm," I said to myself, "how much headway could I make by tomorrow if I really made an effort?" 

A lot, it turns out. I just clicked purchase on a photo book that runs from September 2020 through the end of July 2022. There are three helpful things I want to remember:

1. Pete did a couple of two-page spreads with just a little input from me. I asked him to help with pictures from his 2021 Scout trip to Philmont, and he wound up being so independent that I asked him to do his 2022 trip to Germany too. It felt great to be able to delegate. I don't have to do it all myself these days.
2. The kids kept asking to see my progress, and laughing and reminiscing while they looked at the in-progress version of the book. This was much more motivating than solo late-night slog sessions.
3. I have figured out a method that works better than my old approach: if I keep uploading small batches of pictures, I don't have to scroll through a ton of images with tiny sidebar thumbnails. I use Photos to look at my pictures and decide which ones to upload, and copy them into a folder called "for upload," which I empty after each batch makes it into a Snapfish album. This gives me something like 5-10 pictures to pull from; I use them to make a couple of pages and then repeat the process. Back when we had slower internet, I used to do all my uploading at once because it took a while. But these days it is quick and painless, and the result is that I'm not wading through 80 itsy teeny thumbnails in the Snapfish interface to find one particular shot.

PHEW, I am relieved to have that item crossed off my list of nagging tasks.

Lentil bowls for dinner

I decided to make lentil bowls for dinner tonight, and the kids liked them more than I expected they would.

I put a cup and a half of little French lentils in the Instant Pot with two cloves of garlic and 3 cups of water. I gave them 18 minutes and let the pressure come down naturally.

While they were cooking I cut up the sad remains of a bag of Brussels sprouts (halved vertically, browned slowly in olive oil, tossed with salt and lemon juice and a spoonful of preserved lemon paste). I wanted something crunchy and tangy to go on top, so I steeped a grated carrot and a cucumber that I had peeled and seeded and cut into spears in a speedy mix of rice vinegar, lime juice, sambal oelek, and honey. 

When the lentils were ready I added some Middle Eastern flavors to the pot along with salt and the juice of half a lemon: ground coriander, za'atar, a spoonful of NY Shuk's olive matbucha and another of preserved lemon paste. I also added a shake of Kafe Hawaij but I'd probably leave it out next time -- I didn't love the cinnamon.

We also had a sad little bag of wilting parsley in the crisper drawer, which I turned into a speedy dressing by chucking it in the blender with a clove of garlic, the juice of half a lemon, a handful of walnuts, salt, and enough olive oil to make it pourable. 

I put everything on the table along with a dish of reheated leftover rice, some sliced avocado, and plain yogurt. I love meals where everybody can choose whatever combinations look tasty to them. Of the four kids at dinner, three were very enthusiastic. "It would be easy for lentils and rice to be really boring," said my most carnivorous kid, "but there are so many pleasant flavors here."

They ate up every bite, which probably means they thought it was delicious. But it might also mean that I'm out of practice cooking the right amount of dinner for 6 people.

Dead Bodies R Us, Apparently

The first time one of my kids came home with a result from one of those find-your-career quizzes, it was "taxidermist." We all laughed, because it was a ridiculously bad fit for this particular kid, and didn't think much more about it. When Pete's result was "mortician," we thought, "Hm, two weird results in a row." My great-grandparents owned a funeral home for many years (my great-grandmother was in demand for embalming women, as there were very few female morticians in those days), and one of my cousins still runs the business, but it's not a career any of my kids have ever considered. Again, we shrugged: there are so many factors that go into a career choice, and it's not surprising that a short quiz would offer up some surprising answers.

Today Stella came home with her quiz results. She is supposed to be well-suited for life as a pathologist.

There can't be a quiz question that asks "do you feel comfortable manipulating dead bodies?" -- right? What is happening here, exactly?

Two weeks

I will be back in the classroom two weeks from tomorrow, and I am making myself a list. The work tasks always get done because they have to get done, but the home tasks can swirl around and cause low-level "I should I should I should" kinds of thoughts for a long time.

Every day for the next ten days, I want to put 3 months' worth of pictures into a Snapfish photo book.

Every day until it's done, I want to repair one knitted item. Mostly these repairs do not take long. I just don't like doing them and so they linger. I think posting pictures will be motivating. I also want to finish up three lingering UFOs with a low volume of actual knitting/crocheting but a medium-to-high irksome factor.

I have some annoying phone calls to make but I am going to make them instead of thinking about how annoying they will be-- one set for home needs, one set for people needs.

And I am going to make time for music and exercise every day, because all work and no play makes Jamie a grumpy lady. 

Watch this space!

FO #1

I have been nibbling away at the Princess Bride-inspired stole that I told you about back in November, and yesterday I bound it off and blocked it. (It is not actually trapezoidal, just asymmetrically positioned.)

This morning I trimmed off all the knitted-in ends and wove in the others. Marie was admiring it before she went to work this morning. "I've always loved purple and green together," I told her, "ever since I was young. Not a popular combo, but I love it anyway."

"Yes," she said, "I think most people associate purple and green with the Joker and Green Goblin and characters of that ilk."

So maybe it will read as a supervillain cape to the Gen Z-ers in my world, but I am pleased with it anyway. The pattern is clearly written and nicely structured, with a pleasant mix of easy and intermediate sections. It's a great choice for harmoniously colored fingering-weight leftovers, if you have a collection of your own awaiting their destiny.

Afloat on a sea of endorphins

Alex gave me a mandolin for Christmas and it came in the mail today, after he had already gone back to NYC. I opened up the box and found the mandolin setting on my tuning app, and flipped to the beginning of the beginner mandolin book that had been sitting on our shelf since Alex was in high school, learning to play a different mandolin.

I knew, somewhere in my brain, that a mandolin was tuned like a violin, but about 15 minutes into my exploration that bit of stored knowledge connected itself to the things that my fingers were doing. It was like a fireworks explosion in my brain: OH [said my brain] THIS IS A SIDEWAYS VIOLIN! THIS IS LIKE A GUITAR AND A VIOLIN HAD A BABY!!!

I am having so much fun -- I do some mandolin-specific stuff in my beginner mandolin book, and then I play some of my faves from Fiddler's Fakebook, and then I feel my way through some chords and practice my wobbly tremolo.

Once when I was in high school my grandmother said to me, "Imagine what kind of musician you could be if you had put all of your practice time into one instrument instead of spreading it around." I felt guilty about it at the time, and I still think about it when I am frustrated with my more amateurish efforts. But this is me: I love to dabble. I get so much joy from being a beginner. I think it is partially because trying something new, with modest expectations, is a powerful antidote to perfectionism. And of course it is also because there is something magical in the way that ears and fingers and brains and instruments work together to create music where there was only silence before.

I took a break shortly before I wore a raw spot in my index finger. I hope my calluses organize themselves quickly so I can practice some more.

More about that wacky challenge

You have questions about wearing the same dress for 30 days; I have answers. 

Colette asked what I am doing about leggings and the answer is a mix of things. I have a pair of cheap cream-colored fleece leggings. I bought a pair of secondhand Woolx leggings and they are AMAZING. (I think this link will give you a $20 coupon if you want to try some Woolx leggings yourself, but I am not certain about that.) I had thought wool leggings would be impractical because I always wash leggings after every wearing. But! I do not have to wash them after every wearing, and they can go in the washing machine. They are cozy outside and also comfortable inside -- it's magic. In the picture from that last post I am wearing a pair of ordinary brown tights, but brrr. Leggings are better.

Nicole asked about whether it made getting dressed less interesting and I would say no. It's been fun to try different combinations. Navy cardigan? Sure, why not. Taupe tunic on top? Okay! Golden-yellow tank underneath? Can do! It goes with a lot of my existing wardrobe and so there are lots of possibilities. I felt a little weird wearing the same dress to work every day, even if it was clean and un-smelly, but I am going to be mostly home for the rest of this 30-day challenge. I can wear it with an apple-green underlayer and fuchsia socks if I so choose, and my children will probably not even notice. 

Day 18

I am doing a weird thing, my friends: I am wearing the same dress every day for a month.

Have you seen the Wool& ads? Their branding is all focused on the idea that you can be happy with fewer high-quality items in your wardrobe. Be free of fast fashion! Wear a wool dress instead! They do these challenges, in which you wear one of their dresses for 30 consecutive days or -- if you can believe it -- for a hundred consecutive days. At the end of that time they give you money (either $30 or $100) to spend in their shop.

My friend Beth did the 100-day challenge and I saw bits and pieces of it on Facebook. Last month we got together for coffee for the first time in a long time, and she was telling me that she thought I'd like these clothes. Wool doesn't retain odor, she said, and I made skeptical faces. Wool assists with temperature regulation, she said, and I thought skeptically about all the times I have removed my wool shawls and scarves in a hot classroom. 

But the dresses are beautiful. I had thought about buying one for years. Last month they had some of my favorite colors at warehouse clean-out prices, and so I took the plunge. This is not a sponsored post; they don't do coupons or affiliate links or any of that stuff, as far as I know. My entirely unsponsored opinion is that this dress is amazing. I love the color, I love the swing, I love the pockets, I love the fabric; the length and the sleeves and the V-neck are perfect. It is cozy without being too hot, and to my astonishment it actually does not appear to retain odor. (Most people seem to get by with nightly airings coupled with spot-cleaning and occasional washings, which is my strategy so far too.)

I had always thought that if I were ever to try one of these challenges, of course I'd have to do it in a black dress. It would be conspicuously weird, I thought, to wear the same green dress every day for many days, but wearing the same black dress every day would just be a clandestine flavor of weird. Last night I asked everyone in my house if they had noticed that I'd worn the same distinctive rust-colored dress every day (though not necessarily all day) for 2.5 weeks straight. "Nope," they all said, all four of them. "Not a clue."

So if you have been thinking to yourself about sustainable clothing purchases, or wishing for a little less laundry, or if you have perhaps eyed the Wool& website while wondering if the dresses are worth the price tag, I can tell you that this one has exceeded my expectations by a wide margin so far.

Girl Cooties

As a kid my husband read plenty of Hardy Boys and no Nancy Drew. He read voraciously, but he never made the acquaintance of the female characters whose stories filled my childhood: no Anne Shirley, no Rebecca Rowena Randall, no Caddie Woodlawn, no Laura Ingalls, no Sara Crewe, no Mary Lennox, no Heidi (whose last name I have forgotten if ever I knew it). No Ramona Quimby or Ellen Tebbits, no Harriet the Spy, no Judy Blume.

I have known this for years, but for some reason we were just talking about it at dinner. "What would have happened if you'd read a Nancy Drew book?" I asked him. He shrugged. "I would have been a sissy?" he suggested, struggling to remember the logic of late 70s/early 80s playgrounds and classrooms.

This morning I read Nicole's recent post (HI NICOLE) in which she mentioned The Mists of Avalon, and it sparked a memory for me of a high school friend who loved that book. I asked Elwood, who read boatloads of science fiction/fantasy as a kid, if he had ever read it. "Nope," he said, "girl book." "ELWOOD," I said with a certain emphasis, "do you hear how ridiculous that is? It would not have caused your penis to shrivel up and wither away if you had read a book about women!" He agreed with me, because that particular piece of logic is inarguable, but I do not expect that he will hasten to rectify the imbalance.

I have known about this asymmetry for years; I perpetuated this asymmetry with the books I gave my own boys to read. But it struck me forcefully this morning: this is patriarchy propagating itself. If girls are expected to read books about boys, but a boy's masculinity is threatened by reading books about girls, we are going to live in a lopsided world. Things get better more quickly when we understand each other's perspectives more thoroughly.

So! Here is my suggestion for anyone who is in gift-buying mode: buy a man you love one of your favorite childhood books, written by a woman for an audience of girls. Ask him to measure the number of girl cooties visible on his body before and after he reads it. Tell him it's for science. 

Hold the phone

Guys guys guys, did you know that we have already made it to the earliest sunset of the year?! Did you know that the sunset starts getting later on THURSDAY?

It's true, of course, that days keep getting shorter until the solstice and the sunrises will be later day by day until then. But! weirdly! the sunrise and the sunset are on slightly different schedules and there will be an entire EXTRA MINUTE of afternoon light on Thursday.

Perhaps on Thursday afternoon I will go out in front of my building and soak up those 60 seconds, arms flung wide, spinning in delirious circles.

["Delirious sounds like the right word for that sentence, Jamie," you may be thinking to yourself about now.]

Check it out and tell me if we should have a Thursday spinning-in-delirious-circles party!

I learned about this from Fit Is A Feminist Issue. Analemma -- not a word I had ever encountered before.

Maybe not

This morning I was making coffee glumly, while contemplating (also glumly) the length of my to-do list. "I wonder," my brain proposed glumly, "if there's some kind of, like, pill that a person could take so she could muster the energy she needed to do all of the things that need doing between now and the end of the semester."

And then I had to laugh: there is indeed such a pill. But maybe, Glum Jamie, speed is not the solution to seasonal affective disorder.

Currently Reading

Demon Copperhead. I might be the ideal audience for this book, as someone who loves David Copperfield and enjoys Barbara Kingsolver and grew up not far from the pocket of Appalachia in which it is set. It's good; it's tough to read. You can know what happened to David Copperfield's mom and still find the analogous section of this book pretty painful. I need to finish it before Libby takes it back.

How the Word is Passed. "You must read this," said my college roommate Amy, and so I am reading it. It is also both worth reading and hard to read. It also has an upcoming due date that I am trying to beat.

The Way We Live Now. Excellent. Very long. Finally into the part where I am invested. Aiming to finish by the end of the year.

How about you? What's on your bedside table these days?

December with the Gladlys

Weeks and weeks ago when I asked for post topic suggestions, Celeste asked about holiday traditions. At the time it was too hot to think about holidays, but here we are in December.

When my kids were small I felt a lot of pressure to Make Christmas Magical. The gifts felt fraught; the Santa thing felt fraught. (On which topic, have you seen this guy's posts at Psychology Today? He also hates the Elf on the Shelf. We did neither Santa nor the Elf, but I hope we were less bossy about it.) These days I am grateful for less pressure and more clarity. We know what we like, mostly, and we've mostly figured out how to make it work.

The Advent bin comes out on Saturday afternoon after Thanksgiving (unless TG falls on the 22nd or 23rd, because in those years Advent starts a week later). From it we retrieve two Nativity sets: one for the living room and one for the dining room. It is imperative that the wise men start out on the other side of the room from the stable folks (they have to travel; they'll get there on Epiphany) and the baby Jesus goes back into the basement until Christmas morning. In some years (true confession time) the baby Jesus stays in the basement for part of the Christmas season, because in some years a person gets distracted with all the December goings-on.

We also pull out our little Advent wreath, which I love even though the openings for candles are just slightly the wrong size and the candles are always catawampus as a result, and three decorative items: an angel, a shiny tree, a felt tree. And that's all, folks; with that 15-minute effort I am done decorating until Christmas Eve. Elwood occasionally does a strand of outside lights, but not usually.

We aim to light the Advent candle and pray vespers together consistently, but we probably only do it 4 nights a week. Maybe 5. This was such a battle when the kids were small, but no longer. Instead of fighting over prayer books and yanking on ribbons, they just pull up the iBreviary apps on their phones. We start with O Come O Come and end with The King of Glory Comes (with clapping, natch), followed by mildly competitive candle-blowing-out and a piece of chocolate for everybody.

Once December rolls around, this is followed by the opening of the Advent calendar (Bonne Maman again this year! so fun!) and the placing of the magnetic ornament on the Melissa & Doug tree. Oh, wait, that tree makes a fourth decorative item that comes out of the Advent bin. Oh, ALSO, another thing that comes out of the Advent bin is the SEASONAL WASHI TAPE. I am very fond of the seasonal washi tape. I love to see those little gold foil gingerbread guys bedecking my bullet journal.

A couple of days ago, as Stella and I were walking to work and school I was telling her how much I appreciate the way the liturgical calendar parallels my own frame of mind in the waning of the year. November: we're all going to die! most people are already dead! Most of December: pray, fast, go to confession! Late December: rejoice! the people that walked in darkness have turned a corner at last! I just do not feel very festive in the early part of December (thanks, SAD), and the focus on quiet preparation works much better for me than forced cheer. At the same time, Advent is chock full of fabulous feast days, and we usually observe a handful of them in a low-key way.

We never do all of these things but we always do some of these things.

WEEK 1:

St. Andrew: haggis (usually vegetarian) and a saltire in the dining room. St. Francis Xavier: Indian food for dinner. If I miss St. Francis Xavier on December 3 I have sometimes made felafel in honor of St. John Damascene on the 4th. We do stockings on December 6: St. Nick's Day means a small gift and a stocking with clementines, nuts, and sometimes chocolate; the stockings go back in their basement bin afterward. On the following day we eat birthday cake for the first time this month but not the last.

WEEK 2:

Some years I get fancy with food for Immaculate Conception, but usually we just go to church. And I'm not very consistent about Our Lady of Guadalupe, but it's pretty easy to make enchiladas and maybe dig out the Tomie de Paola picture book for old times' sake. The kids are fond of St. Lucia buns, and I am happy to bake with saffron. I will take my good cheer wherever I can find it on the 13th of December. The skies may be gray but at least the dough is golden-yellow.

WEEK 3: 

We light the pink candle and switch out King of Glory for Rejoice in the Lord Always. This week is often when we make our stelline d'oro, because one round of saffron baking is not sufficient. If I am knitting Christmas gifts it is also the week in which I suspect I have a repetitive strain injury.

WEEK 4: 

More birthday cake! This year there will be fourteen candles for Stella -- can you believe it? Before the pandemic this week often meant music rehearsals, with a couple of kids and me joining in the joyful noise. Maybe we'll be back there this year. On December 24 Elwood takes some combination of kids to cut down a tree, while I stay home and pull out the Christmas bin. Do the lights work? Is our slightly decrepit tree stand going to make it through another year? Let's hope so, because Ace hardware may not be open by sundown on Christmas Eve. We decorate the tree with Bruce Cockburn's Christmas album in the background. The apocalyptic angel goes on last.

CHRISTMASTIME!

We mark the end of the penitential season with a celebratory fish dinner, and go to midnight Mass together. ("Midnight" Mass is usually at 8pm. Our pastor is an early-to-bed early-to-rise kind of guy.) After Mass, everybody opens one present.

This is a long post, isn't it? Maybe I'll do a second installment about Christmas itself instead of making it even longer. I must have told you before about the whole present-opening song-and-dance, but if not it deserves a post of its own.

Dydw i ddim yn siarad cymraeg

J asked me about my Welsh presentation, and here is the story.

I told my phonetics students that they would need to tackle a new language. They'd need to figure out where its sounds overlapped with the sounds of English, and learn how to make the unfamiliar sounds. They'd need to find a way to practice regularly, putting forth a little bit of consistent effort all across the month of November, and do a 5-minute group presentation about their language in December.

I also told them that they could pick a language for me to learn, and I'd present first to give them a sense of what I was looking for. They picked Welsh.

Dutifully, wanting to set a good example, I started the Duolingo Welsh course. But Duolingo changed its interface in November, and I'm not a fan. I had also forgotten that I don't like being a total beginner, and so I kept saying to myself, "Seems like a Spanish kind of a day!"

Good news: I did advance in the Spanish course in November. Bad news: the Spanish course does not help a person speak Welsh.

The other good news, the news that saved my bacon, is that a 5-minute presentation is pretty much nothing and I had told them it should have some interactive elements. A chunk of it had to be in English, because even if I were able to talk about divergent sound systems while speaking Welsh, it wouldn't have made any sense to any of my students. So with a lot of help from Google Translate and the blithe confidence that came from knowing the room held no actual speakers of this language I could not actually speak, I plowed through it.

The title of this post (at least according to Google Translate) means "I do not speak Welsh." Still true, unfortunately.