Happy New Year

Happy New Year – I hope every day next year is lucky for you.

And for those not in the know – black eyed pea eatin’ for us is like dram drinking or first footing for the Scots.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas!

Things I’ll never do

Did I ever tell you about how I used to sell Christmas trees? I don’t think I have. Anyway, I did. When I worked at a garden center in Knoxville we sold Christmas trees, at Christmas obviously. Mostly it was pretty good fun. The smell of the firs and spruces. Using a chainsaw to put a fresh cut on a Christmas tree. Chainsaws are fun.

Mostly it was fun. But sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes people weren’t as nice as they could have been. Like the guy who threatened his wife because she ordered a big ass live blue spruce for their entry foyer and he was gonna pop her if it scratched the marble tiles. (It was a questionable choice of tree, but hardly an excuse for domestic violence)

Another time, I saw this mom tell her kid who was – I don’t know – seven? – that he could pick out any tree in the lot. He was a thoughtful little guy and he wandered amongst the trees and picked one out. It was a good tree. Even, full, of a harmonious conical shape, nice good limb development for optimal ornament hang-age. Well, I can’t remember, but I do remember being pretty impressed with his choice. On the other hand, we didn’t have many duff trees.

All the trees were hung up with twine from the marquis frame, so the kid pointed out his tree and Bruce (a co-worker) and I cut down the tree and started to take it over for the fresh cut to the base. Now once we make that fresh cut, you have to buy that tree – that’s the rule. But mom comes out and directs dad and kid inside to look at the poinsettias – and tells us that she really wants this other tree instead.

The tree is really no better, really not that much different. But mom’s the one with the money, so we do what she wants and we don’t say anything.

Bruce and I feel bad about it, so we work quick. Normally the fresh cut and the baling will be more or less a one person job, but we worked together so that we could get that tree baled up and tied onto the roof of their car before the kid comes back out again.

We were just tying the last knots on the luggage rack when the kid comes up to us and says, in a quiet voice. “That’s not my tree, is it?” He seemed more resigned than upset. We could have lied – cheerfully. We could have. But something about the way he said it – we just looked at each other and said “No, it’s not.” And the kid was not surprised, it clearly wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.

Anyway, I swore when I had a kid, this would be something I’d never do. If it mattered that much to me, I wouldn’t offer a choice. Cause a kid can tell his own tree even baled up and tied to the roof of a car.

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Chris is wrestling with the things he said he’d never do as a parent. Like use the tv as a mollifier. I think I said something like that, too. Plus we agreed we’d stop swearing. Well, that hasn’t happened. Never say never. But I’m still sticking with my promise not to pull a stunt like the Christmas tree swap.

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all my American readers, wherever you are. We’re fixing up a turkey day repast. Things are simmering as I type. My dad is here and I reckon we’ll have a wonderful meal in about 90 minutes. Giving myself the excuse of the baby, I bought prepared mash and an “easy cook” turkey joint and gravy in a carton. The cornbread dressing, pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce are all made from scratch.

By the way, if you’ve never made cranberry sauce from scratch it couldn’t be easier or more delicious. Just plunk the berries and some water and some sugar adjudged to your taste* in a pot and simmer until all the berries have popped plus a couple minutes little longer. You don’t even have to stir it more than once or twice. Let cool and serve.

Thanks again to Newscoma and Genderist for the dressing recipe. (In the comments of this post).

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*Quite a lot of sugar is required even to get a tart sauce

Happy Run-up-to-Christmas Day

By 4pm yesterday, I had bought no Halloween candy. Last year, we got no trick or treaters and I had to bring the candy in to my work (and eat a fair bit of it myself). But in a last minute glow of Horror Holiday nostalgia I rushed to the local grocery store to find the shelves picked nearly bare. I managed to find some Werther’s originals and some kind of strange candy stick thing in boxes, probably the politically correct offspring of candy cigarettes.

I also checked the “seasonal aisle” to see if I could find anything to top up Cletus’s outfit. Nope. Where accessories had been reasonably well stocked only days before, there were only a few vials of fake blood and some tatty witches hats. An Arabic speaking father and daughter where tearing through the remnants in search of costuming for a little boy and they sought my help. I pointed to some novelty skull spectacles in a child’s size and he seemed happy enough with that, but the distressed daughter was pointing to the spot where £1.50 ($3) capes used to sit.

On the way home I noticed two jack-o-lanterns on my street. Two more than I had ever spotted before. And it warmed the cockles of my halloween heart.

We had two sets of trick-or-treaters – though I did have to go out for a while during peak trick-or-treating time, so we might have had more. At any rate, I did give away some candy – although we do have an awful lot of Werther’s original.

Anyway, despite much sneering for many years by the English about this “American” holiday, they finally seem to be taking to it. I’ve always wondered why folks haven’t taken to it more – I mean c’mon, dressing up and free candy. What’s not to like? Who doesn’t have room on their calendar for an extra fun holiday?

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And as we all know, Halloween is no longer All Saint’s Eve, but the Run-up-to-Christmas eve. And in recent years it marks the beginning of the “War on Christmas”, too. And here’s the first story in the gruesome advent calendar. Because this story appears in The Daily Mail – it’s hard to tell exactly what the truth is. They distort everything to make it “political correctness gone mad” – I know this because this happened to a project I worked on.

But it appears that a favorite Labour think-tank, the IPPR is about to issue a report calling on us to “downgrade” Christmas. Leaked recommendations include:

“If we are going to continue as a nation to mark Christmas – and it would be very hard to expunge it from our national life even if we wanted to – then public organisations should mark other religious festivals too. We can no longer define ourselves as a Christian nation, nor an especially religious one in any sense.

Britain may no longer be particularly religious, but this country is still ethnically and culturally Christian to a large degree. And folks still love their Christmas.

I’m all for celebrating other holidays – as long as they’re about fun and feasting and not scourging and fasting. But I don’t see why we need to downgrade any existing holidays to do so.

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Slight digression:

Another finding of the IPPR report was that the state should make a bigger deal of the birth registration.

The system in which parents are required to register a new baby at a register office is dismissed as “purely bureaucratic”. The occasion should be transformed into a “public rite”, using citizenship ceremonies for immigrants as a model, the report says. “Parents, their friends and family and the state [would] agree to work in partnership to support and bring up their child.”

Hell, NO! I’m not working in partnership with the state to bring up my child.

And anyway, this shows a leaning toward a particular ethno-religious tradition – infant baptism. I guess there are parallels with some other religions, too – the Bris for Jewish boys and I think there’s some kind of thanksgiving sacrifice traditional made for Muslim children (two lambs for a boy, one for a girl, if I recall correctly). But in my religious tradition – hard core Protestantism – we don’t hold with such things.

And besides, the report authors (two men) have clearly never had a c-section. You have to register the birth within six weeks – but at that point I couldn’t even get myself down to the town hall never mind organise some stupid statist ceremony.

Trickertreat

I’m sorry I missed this she first posted it. Here’s Ms Coble’s conundrum. She has some spare Bibles. I’m gathering maybe she has quite a few spare Bibles. She’s wondering if she should give them out to trick-or-treaters on Halloween.

I think I would have been coolly indifferent if I’d gotten a Bible in my treat bag. I’d have been OK with it if there’d been a mini Snickers bar that came with it.

Of course, I didn’t need any Bibles growing up. I had access to plenty. Candy was a rarer treat.

But it’s kind of a neat idea. Giving away surplus items at Halloween. I did once give away a ray gun that I had used as a Halloween costume prop to a trick-or-treater because I had no candy. He was really excited. It’s too bad we just gave dropped off a bunch of books at charity shop only yesterday. We could have left a stack by the door.

Sorry, kids – no candy. But how ’bout this unreadable and depressing tome: The Losing Battle with Islam. All out of chocolate, but here’s a John Irving novel – sorry, it’s not one of the better known ones. Wild Swans is good, if a bit depressing. Take this Harlequin romance, when I was 12 I found them quite exciting. You might like this pulp fiction in Spanish that I thought I could use to improve my foreign language skills but languished unloved on my shelves for years.

And if we had a mad rush, I could give away pairs of shoes I no longer like and maybe scarfs or old sweaters.

Oh yes, Halloween could take on whole new dimensions.

We make a pilgrimage

I’ve always wanted to go to Canterbury Cathedral, ever since I read the Canterbury Tales or heard about the famous Murder in the Cathedral. I’d been to Canterbury once before – but that was to attend a conference on crime and law enforcement* and I didn’t get a chance to take in the sights.

So for our brief little vacation, we decided to head to Canterbury as well as to the zoo.

Seaside resort town of Hythe
We stayed in the seaside town of Hythe rather than in Canterbury itself simply because I thought sea side walks might be calming for baby, and it turns out that Hythe is kind of an interesting town in itself. It was one of the Cinque ports (whatever that was) and was also a garrison town for many years. It boasts a military canal running through the middle of town – it was apparently built to thwart a French attack, but apparently now it’s used for a biennial floating parade called the Venetian fete, which actually looks pretty fun.

Dem bones
Hythe also boasts England’s largest ossuary (there are, apparently, only two). I had visions of visiting the ossuary and taking plenty of creepy photos with Cletus in front of piles of skulls so that in his degenerate teen years he could look back on such a snap and credit us with a smidgeon of cool. But St Leonard’s Parish church and its crypt (where the bones are held) close between 12 and 2. We arrived just in time to see the vicar closing up and crossing the road to his house for lunch. As we stopped on our way out of town, I managed a mere glimpse of the skulls through the window.

The Cathedral
So onwards to Canterbury, where it is difficult to park. And it is even harder to park with a screaming baby. But most things are more difficult with a screaming baby as we’ve discovered. However, even so, it probably wasn’t as hard as approaching the cathedral on your knees as many pilgrims did.

But Cletus was good as gold in the cathedral. Given that he is the child of two heatherns, I was amazed that he uttered not a peep when one of the cathedral clergy led worshippers (one or two) and tourists (many, many) in prayer. He was far better behaved than the gaggle of Italian teenagers who marched through proceedings with shrieks and giggles.

The cathedral is pretty fantastic. I can’t say it’s the most impressive one I’ve seen (St Mark’s in Venice is pretty amazing), but it is absolutely grand in scale. It’s imposing and I was certainly aware of its historical significance, but strangely I didn’t feel in awe of the atmosphere as one often can in places of pilgrimage.

Creepy crosses marking the spot of Thomas Becket’s murder in the Cathedral

Tomb of the Black Prince

Interior of the cathedral

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*I got the coolest name tag at that conference it said “Vol Abroad: The future of policing” which I kept, of course.

Put me in the zoo

Last year on our vacation to Normandy and Brittany, we visited Branfrere animal park where we saw (and petted) wallabies amongst other animaux.

Although our holiday this year was was but three days and two nights, we thought we’d take in a nice big zoo. The Port Lympne Zoo looked pretty good, although had I seen a topo map of the place I’m sure we would have avoided it.

And the philosophy of the park was quite different. At Branfere – the animals were on show – but on their own little islands – giving them the illusion of freedom and us the illusion of proximity. And indeed many animals were allowed to roam free around the park. At the Port Lympne ticket booth we were warned that it wasn’t a zoo, but rather a park dedicated to conservation, where the animals really do come first. And that meant that they kept the night shelters open during the day and that the enclosures were really big (and as turns out full of weeds) which meant that it might require patience to see the animals.

If we hadn’t already stood in line for nearly an hour just to buy our tickets, I might have turned around.

When I pay a bunch of money to go into a zoo, I expect to see some animals. And they should either be available for petting or feeding or they should do some funny tricks.

Many of the cages at Port Lympne appeared to be empty. Animals were either hiding or sleeping in others – and given that the enclosures were so big – that meant that there was a heckuva lotta walking between boring animal displays. And given the steepness of many of the paths and us pushing a stroller full of baby and baby accessories, it was a lot of work to catch a glimpse of a “small cat” that looked suspiciously like the neighborhood tabby.

But they did actually have some cool animals:

We saw baby lions

gorillas

monkeys

(our own little ginger monkey?)

red pandas

and rhinos

Beside the sea side

We took a quick trip down to the sea side and to see some sights, just a short break – two nights away.

It was our first vacation with the Baby Cletus.

Every experience is a learning experience.

Actually, he was pretty good. We’re pretty tired – more tomorrow.

Vacation, all I ever wanted

SAD. I think maybe I’ve got SAD. That’s the good ol’ seasonal affective disorder caused by lack of daylight. Only in Britain could one get SAD in the summer.

It’s dreary here. Oh, sure – there have been the occasional glimmers of sunlight (last week wasn’t bad). But summer has largely been a washout. For many people, a complete washout – i.e. their homes and everything. All I’ve lost is a tomato crop. Vine rot. Blecchh.

I’m not the only one feeling the cool. Apparently, there’s been a rush on last minute vacations to…wherever there might be a glimmer of sun. Carbon footprint and environmental protesters be damned, people are crawling over each other to get off this sodden, gray island.

Us. Not so much with the foreign vacation plans. I haven’t even taken Cletus north of the river yet. Plus travel docs, he doesn’t have any. But I wouldn’t mind a little time in the sun.