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  • My Holidays are Black & White. Except When They’re in (Techni) Color.

    My Holidays are Black & White. Except When They’re in (Techni) Color.

    “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,”
    grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

    -Louisa May Alcott, Little Women

    335 days of the year, you’ll hear me harp on how bad TV is for your brain and how you should really be shutting it off, getting outside and moving your body.

    But 30 days of the year, I love TV.

    No screen time on school nights? Pshaw, in December I’m breaking all the rules.

    The specials are on.

    It starts on Thanksgiving Day with the parades, flipping back and forth between Macy’s and the Mummers. (It has recently come to my attention that not every town has grown men that dress up like fancy chickens and strut the streets playing strings and brass. If you don’t know what a Mummer is click here and enjoy… this is how we do parades here in PA.)

    Thanksgiving 2011 also meant A Miracle on 34th St.— the Natalie Wood version, black and white, don’t try to tell me any other exists— and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving.

    As we near the big day, the coming of the man in red, I’ll insist on steaming up the hot cocoa, popping up the corn and watching:

    • White Christmas
    • Holiday Inn
    • Babes in Toyland (either Laurel & Hardy or the Keanu Reeves will do)
    • Scrooge (Seymour Hicks version), Scrooged (Bill Murray version)
    • Mickey’s Christmas Carol, Muppet Christmas Carol (but not the version that Jim Carrey ruined)
    • Little Women, Katherine Hepburn version (I also reread the book every year)
    • How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Chuck Jones and Boris Karloff, not the version that Jim Carrey ruined)
    • Jingle All the Way
    • Mixed Nuts (one of my favorite movies of all time)
    • Love Actually
    • Home Alone
    • National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
    • The Year Without a Santa Claus (aka the Heat Miser & Snow Miser special)
    • Rudolph
    • Frosty
    • Santa Claus is Coming to Town
    • The Ref
    • The Santa Clause (not one of my favorites but the kids like it)
    • The Nutcracker (Baryshnikov, we also go see the local ballet troupe production)
    • A Christmas Story
    • Elf
    • A Charlie Brown Christmas
    • the Garfield Christmas special
    • Christmas Eve on Sesame Street
    • the Claymation Christmas special, available on YouTube (featuring the California raisins; if you don’t know what I’m talking about you must have been born after 1985)

    The holiday TV special extravaganza ends with It’s a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve. I let the kids stay up to watch it and we all snuggle under blankets and struggle to keep awake until the end.

    Last year, Cassie stayed up for the first time to see it, and she was so emotionally captivated by the story that I fell wholeheartedly in love with it all over again.

    We grow so jaded, throughout the year and as we grow older. It’s a Wonderful Life in particular is such a regular, clockwork comfort that it has become a cliché. I don’t remember ever being saddened by it. But to Cass’s fresh eyes, it was an engrossing and heartwrenching story, and she sobbed with sadness and then with joy.

    In my first Comparative Religions class, we learned that “ritual” is a returning to a sacred time and place. Not just symbolically, but in some way a literal joining of those times and spaces.

    They may be so much pop culture schmaltz, but those familiar faces and voices and words that come from the screen are a ritual of my childhood. They reopen a door to my childlike mind, so excited and hopeful for the holidays ahead.

    They remind me of what it was like to believe. In magic, and in humanity.

    I revisit my childhood while snuggled with my children; my hope is that they may carry these same memories into their own adulthood and share them with their own children. It is, in some strange way, a gift.

    We have other rituals, some from my upbringing, some new, but no other that brings me so much comfort on so many levels.

    ______________________________________

    We never had much money when I was a kid, but I never noticed at Christmastime. There must have been some years when I was disappointed, but I don’t recall any.

    What I recall are the rituals, the hot chocolate, the warm blankets and the crackle of the fire.

    The memories of comfort, security, hope and love.

    As we swing into the hustle and bustle of the season, I hope we all stop to ask ourselves what memories we are creating for our kids; what moments they will choose to return to year after year.

    “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” Jo grumbled, but she discovered she was wrong.

    The Grinch found that Christmas couldn’t be bought from a store.

    The ever cynical Garfield takes a sentimental moment to remind us that “it’s not the giving, it’s not the getting. It’s the loving.”

    Take away the presents. What makes Christmas Christmas? What makes the holiday season merry and bright for you?

    (What’s your favorite Christmas special?)

     

  • Review: Surface Hair Care (Vegan, Organic, Gluten-Free)

    Review: Surface Hair Care (Vegan, Organic, Gluten-Free)

    portrait

    “I hope your hair curls naturally, does it?”

    “Yes, darling, with a little help from others.”

    Oscar Wilde, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’

     

    I have spent my life trying to coax curls from my classically Asian stick-straight baby-fine hair. I have used curlers. I have used curling irons. I have had perms, salon-inflicted and self-inflicted and spouse-inflicted, all bad. By the end of the day I always had stick-straight Asian hair. Only now, with frizz.

    And then completely out of the blue a few months back, a decade after I’d stopped really caring about my hair at all: waves.

    I am now the proud bearer of naturally wavy hair.

    I don’t know if it’s hormones (I also now have the acne one associates with being 16; personally, I’d rather have the hips I had then) or the cumulative effect of all the hair coloring I’ve done over the years or just a very effectively multi-tasking haircut, but I’ll take it. And I’ve become somewhat obsessed with how I can encourage the most curl with the least amount of effort.

    I may be vain, but I am also lazy.

    vegan haircareGiven a choice of products to review from Surface Hair Health Art, I went with Taffy Whip— a sculpting cream that texturizes for curly or straight effect.

    Now, I have used it to straighten my hair, now that I think about it (meaning I worked it in my hair and then blew it dry by aiming the dryer down the hair shaft. I don’t have the patience for things like straight irons, or hairbrushes) and it did result in nice straight, unfrizzy hair. But I don’t find straight hair interesting so I’m moving on.

    Please see Exhibit A: above featured photo. (Yes, the dog is photobombing us and yes, I still have braces.) My hair is usually just like Cassie’s, only frizzy and usually striped with Manic Panic red. I’m overdue for a salon visit.

    But on Thanksgiving I had nice curly hair. And all I did was put a dime-sized amount of Taffy Whip on my hands, rub them together, and scrunch it into my hair. It dried about 95% of the way naturally, I repeated the dime-size process again, then hit my hair with the hair dryer on low for about 2 minutes to finish drying. And yippee skippee: bouncy, soft curls that stuck around until the end of the day, withstanding the repeated blasts of heat and humidity from turkey-basting and sweet potato baking.

    Also, it smells nice. Not so much like taffy, as it is like hard candy when it’s cooking. That’s a really fine distinction. Let’s say it smells sweet but very light and not at all offensive (my sensitivity to fragrance being well-documented at this point).

    About the Surface product line:

    • Vegan. Organic. Gluten-free.
    • Cruelty-free, never tested on animals.
    • No Sodium Laurel Sulfate. No Sodium Laureth Sulfate. No parabens. No petrochemicals. No added dyes. And no animal or wheat protein.
    • Made with sustainably harvested ingredients and certified organic botanicals.
    • Environmentally friendly packaging (according to the website. No real details given).
    • Portion of profits go to sponsor a child through World Vision.

    Does gluten-free make a difference when it’s going on your skin as opposed to into your stomach? I honestly don’t know, but I’m thinking that if you avoid gluten, avoiding it everywhere makes a heck of a lot of sense. Please feel free to agree or disagree in the comments. I have no horse in that race.

    In short: great hair product that doesn’t knock you over with fragrance and does exactly what it claims to do, without any toxic ingredients! I know, I can barely believe it myself.

    Surface makes hair product lines dedicated to strengthening, hydrating, awakening (for scalp health & thinning hair), styling, and protein smoothing. It looks to be sold only in salons, you can search for a retail location near you here.

    Now, tell me how pretty my curly hair is. Go on.

    I’ve been waiting 35 years to hear it 🙂

    Disclosure: This review was made possible by Mom Spark Media. Thoughts are my own. Hair is my own. No compensation was received other than product to try out for review purposes.

     

  • I Burned 10 Million Calories

    I Burned 10 Million Calories

    red-leaf-droplets

    Autumn is a second spring
    when every leaf is a flower.

    -Albert Camus

    We have lots of autumn “flowers.”

    Lots and lots of flowers.

    so many leaves

    (That’s an old photo. I forgot to document this year’s “garden” before we’d already started raking it.)

    Every year, Jeff and I have The Great Leaf Debate where I argue that leaves are God’s mulch and by raking them we are interfering in The Master Plan and The Way Things Happen Naturally.

    Brandishing my copy of Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Backyards, I contend that we’re disturbing all kinds of beneficial insects and salamanders and who knows what all from overwintering by removing their leaf cover habitat, and we’re depriving birds of protein-filled meals, and we’re making more work for ourselves by removing leaf litter which decomposes into humus which is good for soil. Which means we’re going to have to amend the soil to grow any vegetables in the spring.

    At this point I always remember too late that I’ve overdone it, because now Jeff can remind me that he’s the one who does all the work amending the soil for the garden, and also weeding it once I’ve lost control. And it’s true. I just can’t seem to keep up with the dang weeds.

    Dang. I lose again. Stupid weeds.

    So I concede that the yard is his domain and since he never ever tells me how to keep house, I should take direction as to groundskeeping.

    (Ha! That’s a joke. Jeff is always telling me how to keep house, but I just ignore him. And that’s how we’ve stayed married all these years.)

    Anyway, he does the bulk of the leaf-wrangling too, so I really honestly can’t complain about the workload. And since I’m not going to win The Great Leaf Debate I choose to think of the whole endeavor as a really awesome outdoor workout.

    I’m not stripping my lawn of its natural security blanket, leaving it naked and vulnerable and bare! I’m doing cardio! I’m getting my heart rate up! I’m feeling the burn!

    According to CaloriesPerHour.com, raking leaves burns about 260 calories per hour for a person of my weight. More, if you’re raking very vigorously so you can get it over with and get your self-righteous ass back to the work you’re seriously behind in.

    So by my estimate, if you spend two hours raking very vigorously AND you’re constantly chasing down the St Bernard puppy who keeps stealing rakes/unpiling leaves AND you’re making up leaf-raking choreography that involves high kicks, rake baton twirling and singing songs from A Chorus Line in a warbly falsetto? Roughly 10 million calories burned. Give or take.

    If you’re raking leaves against your will, you may as well enjoy yourself. Next year I think I’ll give it a go in heels and a full-skirted party dress. And a beehive hairdo.

    That is, if anyone asks me.

    ____________________________________________

    This post brought to you by someone who has not had a lot of sleep all in one place lately, and genuinely hopes that her husband still has a sense of humor.

    Seriously, don’t you think raking leaves is dumb?

     

    raking leaves

    dog helping with yardwork