Running Out the Clock

Steve (bless his heart) was vacuuming our bedroom yesterday, and apparently in his efforts to de-dust our ancient clock radio on the bedside table, he hit some button that sped up time. Not literally, of course, but on the clock every minute began to register as a second. I didn’t notice this until the wee hours of this morning, when all of a sudden 5:10 AM was immediately followed by 5:11, 5:12 etc. We’ll have to fix it, of course, but meanwhile….

It seemed the perfect image for the last day of this dumpster fire of a year. We’ve held on as the economy tanked and the pandemic raged, and the stores and schools closed, and there were protests in the streets. We’ve struggled with isolation and fear and loneliness. This shared time of hardship that should have united us, has only pulled us further apart as a nation. Now all we want is to fast forward past the pain. 

I don’t have high hopes for New Year’s Eve. In fact, my prayer for today is that nothing much happens at all. That no further calamity or catastrophe adds to the wreckage before we turn the calendar page. If things don’t get better during this final 24 hours of the year, may they at least not get worse. 

So I’ll spend some time planning and wrapping up loose ends, both with my church job and with my freelance writing. I just downloaded an Excel spreadsheet entitled My Annual Report, with space for listing up to 12 personal goals for the next 52 weeks. It should probably worry me that I could only think of 6 goals, and have no clue how I will achieve any of them. But considering how this past year torpedoed all planning by everyone, everywhere, I’m not letting it bother me much.

We’ll figure out a movie to watch together tonight after dinner (which will be a non-cooking event featuring a nice charcuterie board). We don’t have NYE film traditions, alas, to comfort us. My sister C and her husband Rob watch the heartwarming Iron Will every single December 31^st, and have for decades. My movie memories are of our usually disastrous New Year’s Eve picks, including Barton Fink (I know, I know, genius, but I had nightmares for weeks afterward) and The Champ, a Jon Voight weeper about boxing co-staring Ricky Schroeder (the main thing I recall about it was that a mouse ran across the family room floor at one point and I watched the remainder of the film with my feet up on the sofa and my eyes scanning the carpet). 

Mainly I just want 2020 to end, as quickly as possible. So perhaps we won’t fix that timepiece quite yet. We’re not going anywhere today, so what’s the harm in our running out the clock and pretending? Our “ball” will drop by 11 AM and we’ll be done with it. 

Let me be the very first to say, Welcome to 2021!

Good riddance!

Old Family Recipe

Such handwriting! No wonder she became a nun!

Tis the season for my Facebook feed to be filled with photos of Grandma’s famous cheese dip, Aunt Mamie’s yummy turkey pot pie and Mom Bradley’s never-fail Snickerdoodles—if I’m lucky the actual recipe is attached to the post. It all looks splendid, and I am always inspired to bookmark a few of these heirloom treats to try with my fam. What can I offer up in return for my interweb buddies’ mealtime enjoyment, I wonder? 

The other day I pulled out several bulging gallon-size Ziploc bags, into which were haphazardly crammed recipes from all over. I spent an afternoon sorting them into file folders, hoping to unearth fabulous family culinary treasures to share with the world. 

Most recipes I found were snipped from yellowed newspapers so fragile that they crumbled to dust when I touched them. Some were photocopies of pages from cookbooks THAT ARE STILL ON MY SHELVES (thought process unknown). There was a period back in the mid-1970s when my late sister Mo took it upon herself to scrawl (in green ink on oversized index cards) the magic formulas for Beet and Sour Cream Salad, Chocolate Truffles, etc.  Hostess Extraordinaire Maureen whipped them all up in her tiny apartment, for elaborate dinner parties thrown for her unworthy young adult friends, whose idea of haute cuisine was the Quarter Pounder with EXTRA cheese. 

My mother-in-law Leona is represented by her (yummy) German Potato Salad and her (tooth-breaking) Springerle cookies. The sole offering from my mom Joanie is “Nana’s Chicken,” a concoction (very) heavy on the sherry and breadcrumbs, to the point that you can chew quite a while before getting to the poultry itself. There were a few pages torn from Fanny Farmer’s cookbook circa 1928, with pencilled notes by my Nana Cunningham--which indicate Nan prepared an awful lot of blancmange and other arcane desserts. In the end, except from the bittersweet reward of seeing Mo’s handwriting again, I found there wasn’t much worth saving, precious little to which I will refer going forward. 

But there was one singular “find” that I am excited about—a homemade cherry pie recipe. This was from a babysitter, Stephanie Schultz, who watched us for five days in 1969, the only time my parents ever went away. “Stevie” was a marvel who cooked and tidied and quickly organized our lives like Mary Poppins, and her pie was a revelation. Shortly after her stint with the Cunningham girls, Stephanie entered the convent. You may draw your own conclusions.

So next week, while I should probably wait for George Washington’s Birthday, I will attempt to make Stevie’s cherry pie for my gang. And whether or not it really is as good as I remember, it doesn’t matter. Every mouthful will spark happy memories of years long gone, which I believe is the whole point.

Merry Christmas my friends. Enjoy those old family recipes, and may they bring comfort, and hope for happily un-masked and crowded post-pandemic meals someday, with the ones you love.

One of the last Christmases for the Three Cunningham Girls

Pandemic Pageantry

 

Looks like the Star decided to walk to Bethlehem!

This is the time of year at church when I put on my Cecil B. DeMille hat and direct the Christmas pageant. I really should wear a traffic cop hat instead, because that’s more what the job involves; preventing angel and wise man collisions has become a specialty of mine. We’ve used the same, minimalist script for eons, and frankly I was very tired of it. 

So, when the pandemic precluded an in-house production this year, I decided to ask our young families to film themselves acting out short scenes, which would then be assembled into one YouTube video. Since things were going to be unusual anyway, I saw it as a good excuse for a re-write. Not to worry! I did not change the essential elements of the Nativity Story, but I did try to inject a bit more fun than Luke saw fit to include in his gospel (Scripture as a whole is not exactly a laugh riot, as we all know). 

My shepherds, for example, are so transformed by their Christmas Eve experience that they decide to change their line of work, and become yodeling goatherds. The angels prefer to sing “Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Frosty the Snowman” instead of their traditional, sacred musical numbers. The Magi have no clue what frankincense and myrrh even are, and comment that Legos might have been a “wiser” gift choice. You get the idea. 

Well, the videos are finished, and “Joy to the World: A Pandemic Pageant” is ready to be put together. There’s still work to do before posting, but the most important part was a big success: my cast did me proud. The parents were the narrators and held everything together, but I must say even the littlest kids were also really terrific. What I discovered was, they may have stepped on a few of my “clever” lines, but they more than made up for it with their hilarious improvisations. A tiny performer fell over at one point, and her big brothers just ignored her and kept right on going. Another family decided to have the father play the part of a sleeping shepherd, lying out in the field for the angels to awaken. At the magic moment, one of the adorable angels yelled, “Wake up, Daddy!!” 

I am keeping it ALL in. 

What kind of baby present is myrrh, anyway?

We are interspersing the scenes with some carols to (hopefully) be sung by viewers. I will post lyrics, and a talented musical parent has recorded piano accompaniment. Not sure if anybody really will sit at their computer and bellow “Silent Night” to an audience of none, but maybe. It just seemed mandatory to include, in a year when so much has been denied us, even singing together. 

Christmas Eve of 2021 we will, please God, be back in church, and I will once again be directing “live” pageant traffic. But you know what? I think I’ll miss our YouTube presentation, and the joy of watching 17 families making this decidedly different Holy Night, very special.

Things Could Be Worse

Uh, yeah. I'd rather be here

3,000 American deaths daily right now. The pandemic seems to have decided that, with the vaccine being rolled out this week, it had better step up its efforts to sicken and kill as many of us as possible. With the help, of course, of those who eschew masks and social distancing and other common-sense precautions for their own strange reasons. At this writing there is no further federal aid coming for small businesses, the unemployed and other hurting folks, so, for many, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents” (to quote Jo in Little Women). Add in the vast array of natural disasters and terrible incidences of racial injustice, and I’d say 2020 has been one for the books (if the books were written by Stephen King, that is).

But I am reminded that things could be worse. 

One of Aiden’s current favorite books is one that his father, uncles and aunts had also read, back in the day. It is written for young people, but the title has undoubtedly kept it off many tot’s shelves (and I frankly question our judgement in purchasing it). Pompeii: Buried Alive! tells the gruesome tale of the day in 79 AD that Vesuvius erupted and turned the city’s inhabitants to sudden ash-covered corpses. That true story was one of the horrors of my childhood memory, seeing those photos from archeological digs of the diners at table, the masters, slaves, children at play—all petrified in place. So yes, that was a pretty bad day (at least for Pompeii).

Even if we just focus on the virus, we realize that things could, indeed, be worse there too—we could be living in 1918, when the Spanish Influenza carried off millions, and, with no vaccine, had to run its deadly course for two years. And I’m imagining the medieval bubonic and other plagues were no strolls in the park either. 

I play the “could be worse” game often, to soothe my soul and help make the miserable present more palatable. And for sure there is no dearth of examples of times in human history that were pretty darned horrible. Hard to compare the relative hardships of no indoor restaurant dining and being buried alive, right?

I think by dwelling on those “worse” times, though, I may be missing the point. Maybe what I should be focusing on is: things could be better. Because that’s where I, where we, have some agency. Unlike the doomed Pompeiians, we are not rendered mute and immobile. We can fight COVID, and honor the sacrifices being made by our front-line workers, simply by wearing that mask, even if it’s stuffy and unflattering. We can pause our traveling and our visiting for one holiday season, to protect our loved ones and ourselves. We can do more to save the planet from man-made destruction. We can treat our fellow humans with respect and kindness.

Things could be better, much better, my friends. And if we all do our part, things will be. 

part of my mask collection

Shelf, Elf-less

The Elf That is Not on Our Shelf

We’re heading into what has traditionally been, for me at least, The Most Wonderful(ly Stressful) Time of the Year. The ticking clock seems to tick ever louder, the way a timer on a bomb in an episode of MacGyver ticks. I mean, you know the bomb’s not going to explode, but it’ll come darned close. In the same way, I know I'll never have a total Holiday Meltdown (but I’ll come darned close). Christmas is a mere three weeks away, and our only decorations so far are the handful of Yule cards we’ve received, festively arranged in a pile on the hall table with the Acme circulars. Par for the Seyfried course, actually, pandemic or no pandemic.

But, thanks to Ya-Jhu, I’m not flipping out this year. She has NOT given in to the temptation to do what millions of moms and dads have done: purchase an Elf on the Shelf for Aiden and Peter’s enjoyment. I have nothing personally against the winsome gnome, but the labor involved in pulling off this bit of Christmas magic sounds quite overwhelming. Seems Mr. Elf moves around the house, observing the kids being naughty/nice, and (I guess) files a nightly report with Santa. Since he is a toy, the elf-moving is left entirely up to the adults, and must be accomplished without the cherubs seeing. 

This amount of follow up has never panned out for me, because I am forgetful. One year I decided it would be lovely to move the figures in our Nativity scene a bit closer to the stable every night, and finally plop little Jesus into the manger late on 12/24. However, by 12/23 the shepherds and Magi were still on the far side of the mantel; this necessitated a rushed maneuver to get them all properly situated for the Big Night. Come Xmas Morn, my offspring didn’t even glance in the direction of the creche, so focused were they on the loot under the tree. I made a mental note never to bother with THAT ritual again. 

Along those lines, while once I filled the stockings with a fortune in little trinkets (we did stockings on Saint Nicholas Day, Dec. 6^th), as soon as we gave up that tradition, I never remembered to put candy in them until Christmas morning. Just before the kids woke up, I would hastily grab whatever Halloween candy was left over and stuff it in each jolly red sock. I learned that, as long as it was chocolate, it didn’t matter a bit if the wrapper had a picture of a ghost saying Boo! on it. 

Clearly, any Elf in my charge would be left in one spot all season, and the boys would quickly learn that they could wreak havoc in any other room and never be detected. 

Since our shelf is blessedly Elf-less, I will try to relax and enjoy this very different Christmas. 

“The stockings were hung with face masks and hand sanitizer!” has a nice ring to it, right?

Not this year (you can tell because Steve has a short haircut)