Christmas

 

I visited on the telephone with my mother this Christmas morning. We made plans to connect later in the day when we stop to deliver her Christmas dinner in exchange for the figgy pudding with lemon sauce and hard sauce she put together using Wanda Metzger's recipe. Wanda would be pleased to know that the Christmas pudding she so lovingly shared on the family table over the years is still part of the Christmas feast.

Do we all remember childhood Christmases in a blur with all the years running as a highlight reel? With the perspective of age, nearly all my memories focus on the thoughtful and loving ways gifts appeared under the tree each Christmas morning - not just for me but for my brothers and for Mom and Dad too.

My Daddy built me this doll house for Christmas one year. I believe the plans may have come from a magazine and were in the style I recognize today as mid-century modern. It slid together to form a sprawling one-story doll house with a garage. My childhood chum Susan Frederick (pictured with barrette in her hair above) loved my dollhouse and always wanted to play with it when she came over.

The dollhouse survived my childhood and was pulled down from the attic in the garage for my nieces and nephews to play with from time to time. I believe my daughter and her grandmother must have used wrapping paper to update the wallpaper back in 1980s.

My Mommy was the one who spent endless hours outfitting all my dolls in beautiful handmade wardrobes - from the matching red polka dot flannel bathrobes that Mom, me and my baby doll had to the sophisticated garb for my beautiful tall black-haired ballerina doll.

That ballerina doll had black taffeta lounging pajamas with bright magenta piping. Her green winter coat with furry collar and cuffs had a matching hat and muff. She had a wide-skirted summer dress with a bright summery print and colorful rick-rack trim. There was even a filmy pink nightgown.

Those clothes were much easier to sew than the ones she made for Betsy McCall. Betsy was a diminutive six inches and making those clothes was truly an act of love. I remember a reversible jacket with a black and white print on one side and black with white stitching on the other side.  Her little dresses also had little rick rack trimmings.

One year I was given a record player - a Silvertone from the Sears catalog and it was blue. That was the year I spoiled my own surprise by snooping around to find my Christmas presents and discovered a record album - the soundtrack to Bye Bye Birdie. I've never had the urge to snoop again.

I Just Can't

I just can't do it anymore.

I just can't look the other way when someone strolls by me at the store without a mask.

I just can't drive by the service station on South Main Street festooned with all manner of Trump paraphernalia more than one month (the pink Women For Trump signs really annoy me - I mean really?) after the election was over and that guy lost by more than 7 million votes.

I just can't listen to the strident 'pro-life' rhetoric spouted by people who choose to ignore the staggering death toll of the pandemic (314,000 and growing in numbers we just couldn't imagine when this all began in March and we were told it would 'just go away'.)  I just can't.

I just can't take seriously the arguments put forth by the Republicans in the Pennsylvania House about 'voting irregularities.' I voted by mail in the 2020 election. The reason I chose to vote by mail this year was simple - I did not want to subject myself to the tiny, overheated room where I could have cast my ballot in Hebron Township. The reason: Covid-19. The other reason: I suspected that since I had seen many of the people who traditionally worked the polls without face masks in social media posts, I would have no assurance that they would care to protect my health by masking up. So I cast my vote by "absentee" ballot and dropped it off at the Gunzburger building after donning my mask, sanitizing my hands and standing in front of the temperature sensor provided there.

It is insulting to all of us for Republicans such as our State Representative Martin Causer to suggest that such precautions were not a necessity.

And may I remind everyone that the numbers of confirmed Covid-19 infections in Potter County began to rise soon after Election Day. And then there's that Monday not two weeks later when a charlatan who goes by the name of Prophet Dutch Sheets felt it was necessary to hold a superspreader "prayer meeting" at the Gospel Tabernacle that attracted hundreds of followers. The sole purpose of the event was to pray for the election results to be overturned to hand the victory to the one they have deemed to be God's chosen one, Donald Trump.

But what about me and the myriad others who identify as Christians, who prayed for a different kind of chosen one. We're the Christians who believe that God's will was for Donald Trump to be voted out of office and take with him hate, lies, racism, bigotry,  incompetence and Melania and Jared and Ivanka and Eric and Lara and Junior too. Oh yes, God decided that we would be done with Mike Pence and his newly-de-matronized wife who's known as "Mother."

I just can't understand how others can go swimming into the same deep pools of information I'm diving into and come up with any other conclusion than this: We've been had. All of us. And particularly swindled and mistreated are the Christians who really believe in their hearts that this man who knew exactly which coded language to use to woo them, was the annointed one to make the country a "Christian" nation.

As a former Republican strategist wrote: "It's just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City. Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show that branded him as something he never was - a successful businessman.Well, he's the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he's brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale. And let's be clear. This isn't happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United states. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you're the most likely to die from this disease. We're the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are because of the fool that sits in the oval office behind the Resolute Desk."

I just can't see why others just can't see. 

Boys Will Be Boys

My three older brothers and their friends always seemed to be involved in exciting adventures in the neighborhood. They built "forts" on Niles Hill in a mysterious place known only as the Big Rock. They had a cabin in the back yard and once even began digging a deep hole until my mother discovered that there was iminent danger of collapse and put an end to it. Then there were the wars with the kids who lived across the river on Woodlawn Avenue.

As the pesky kid sister, I wasn't included in their adventures but I took advantage of one of their abandoned tree platforms, spending many a summer afternoon there with fictional girl sleuth Judy Bolton. I did not endear myself to them when I snuck into the cabin one afternoon while they were off fighting their wars and tattled about the contraband cigarettes I found there.

So when I was introduced to my friend Jeffrey's "Cousin Artie," I heard tales of their childhood adventures on the family farm ....cap guns, caps being exploded with rocks and carbide cannons. 

carbide cannon fun on Crandall Hill
Jeffrey and Arthur demonstrate to a young Tommy Gilliland

A carbide cannon is still known to be among the safest noise makers. The carbide reacts with water to form acetylene gas and when mixed with oxygen inside the cannon's chamber, it creates a small explosion. Google showed me examples of pre-made carbide cannons for fun and for chasing pesky birds 

 Arthur tells me that coffee cans worked the best back when coffee cans were really cans with a lid that you removed using a key to twist off the seal. What worked even better were glass jars and that process involved knowing exactly when to throw them against a tree. He scanned his palm to find the scar from the time he held on to the jar a little too long.

That little can of carbide is still around here somewhere ...

Keeping Track

 

I wait until after Christmas to buy my new appointment book, waiting for the half-price sale. Some years, the shelves, either at the Barnes and Noble or the shelves of the virtual kind, are still well-stocked. Other years, I have to settle for a book that's either too small to receive all my scrawled notes or too big to fit on the old dry sink that holds my old fashioned telephone with the wires that disappear into the wall.

Like the telephone, the appointment book is old fashioned. I could choose to download an app on my cell phone or use one of the many suggestions that pop up every time I log into Zoom. But I don't. I instead choose to continue my old fashioned ways.

I record many things in these books - certainly appointments if I happen to be near enough the book when the appointment is made. But then again, most appointments come complete with either telephone or text or email reminders these days. When it's relevant to remembering, the temperature gets recorded - mostly in the spring when I'm in the early stages of growing things, or to track the string of hot summer days that have become more common these days. Other weather, like the 14+ inches of snow we woke up to yesterday morning also finds a place on the calendar.

It also serves as a recordkeeping space for the farm. I once spent a great deal of time entering all the farm records into a beautiful web-based farm management application, only to revert back to my appointment book when it seemed impossible to find the time to log it all into the program. 

A look back at 2020 is different. There among records of the first lettuce harvest, the first ripe tomato, the 23-degree night that took out the tomatoes in the high tunnel are these kinds of notes "Jane to town: post office, grocery store (for Mom too)" "Arthur to Close's" "A & J to Wegman's in Corning" "S.D. visit with Aucotts on deck"

"You know there's an app you can set on your phone to track everywhere you go," I can hear a much-younger person tell me. But, the app couldn't tell me that I arrived on back Crandall Hill on a warm sunny March 18 after a drive across the country, just as pandemic was becoming a common word.