I lived almost exactly one mile away from school, and from a relatively early age I preferred walking to and from there each week day rather than enduring the school bus. For some awful reason, the bus routes always picked the kids up from my neighborhood last, and dropped them off last. Getting on last meant I always had to sit with someone else, and that was always awkward and unpleasant for me. Even though the ride home itself took two minutes and I could see my house as we drove by, I generally had to wait an hour and a half for the bus to lumber along its rural route, before making its way back down the street towards my residence, insisting on taking another ten minutes to drive the entirety of the neighborhood before finally opening the doors and letting us off. I don't know who designs those things but ugh.
I uncharacteristically insisted on my own two legs to get me to and from school, and worn down from arguing, my parents started letting me. I adored the exercise, the short commute (lol), and the chance to have thinkythoughts without interruption from anyone else walking with me, as I nearly always walked alone. I didn't care about the weather, I just wanted time to myself and not in a crowded, stinky, stuffy, uncomfortable bus with shouting children and bullying. I often had conversations with myself to pass the time, anticipating school work that day and organizing my thoughts on priorities for such.
My favorite season to walk in was late fall through early winter, not so much the days where it rained two inches in 24 hours, but the cloudy or even sunny days, when the temperature was often below freezing, with a thick frost on the ground. For one, stepping on a well-frozen mud puddle was really really fun and I'd play on the slippery ice for a few minutes before venturing on, and for two, the hoarfrost was fun to step upon.
I really don't know what was so appealing about that practice, but the sensation of dried frozen mud crunching below my shoes was just *chef's kiss*. I suppose it was /different/ and /rare/, and therefore sought after. Iunno, I was a weird kid. Sometimes, without hoarfrost present, I had to appease myself with stepping on frosty grass. But that was never as appealing as the frosty ground.
My landlady used to decorate the house because her then-partner's kid lived here with them, and she felt an obligation to go through the motions. Once the partner and kid got booted, she felt much less inclined to bother to dig out the boxes and put up the holiday fluff. And she hasn't bothered since.
A few years ago, /I/ felt like doing the things, and she came home from work to find all the usual goodies up due to a day of gremlin elf shenanigans. She made such commentary about it the entire month that I haven't bothered with it since, repeatedly saying things such as, "You better put this all away after the 25th" and "I hate the holiday, I hate looking at it." It's her house, I'm happy to oblige. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't bother if I had my own place, either, although I might make an exception for some lights around windows or something. Oh, right, that was also the year I put wrapping paper and a big bow over the door, her reaction to that was at least funny.
Anyway, I like to tease her that her favorite holiday is Halloween. She goes all out to decorate for that holiday like most do for Christmas, digging out the skulls and skeletons and bats and black wreath and themed lawn ornaments. She always invites people to a party here, tables brimming with potluck food and alcohol, the living room set up for card games, the back yard featuring seating, a fire in the firepit, and no shortage of alcohol out there as well. People tend to stay overnight, her hospitality stretching well into the day after. She purposefully takes the day off of work to facilitate her shindig.
Landlady, and all of her friends, identify as "pirates," and they do things together throughout the year where they wear their costumes, such as weekends out camping, selling fireworks in July, or choosing a struggling business to drum up business for by behaving as pirates, waving at cars like they're an attraction for the business in question.
Anyway, because Halloween is her personal version of Christmas, after she expressed disgust at her own December decoration options, I teased her that she should make a pirate tree. Tinsel and garlands of black and silver. A parrot for a tree topper. Ornaments featuring skulls and ships and those tiny sample bottles of booze. The part that made her laugh most, was me pointing out that the tree trunk made a perfect peg leg.
(Oops, I missed an entry yesterday. I just could not be arsed. C'est la vie!)
I homecook at least two meals a day as it's most frugal to fiddle with raw ingredients than warming up something that's prepackaged, I make casseroles and spaghetti and hamburgers for the most part. Occasionally, partner will lug home something else and I'll do my best to make a meal out of it. Even more rarely, I will request ingredients and go to town on something a bit more labor intensive, usually around the holidays when I get a taste for nostalgia.
Apple Crisp. This is one of those recipes that's just in my head, a dessert my mom once showed me how to make and I committed to memory. It's a very forgiving recipe and doesn't require exact measurements, which pleases this chaotic kitchen witch quite well. Core some (10? 20? how big is your pan?) apples, nuke some butter, mix the butter in with equal amounts of flour and oats of whatever kind you prefer (and I like to use twice as much oats as flour because oats), mix in however much cinnamon, brown sugar, and other seasonings you think you can handle, dump the mixture on top of the pan of apples in a semblance of uniformity, cover it, dump it in the oven at 375°F for an hour or so, take the cover off and let it cook for 10 minutes more unless the topping is starting to smoke, take it out, nom with vanilla ice cream. I make this several times a year because it's so easy and messy.
Turkey. Get a pan that's big enough, wash the carcas off, get the gizzards out (or forget them to your doom later), slather with some olive (or whatever) oil, sprinkle on ample amounts of salt, sage, thyme, and whatever else you have a taste for (I like rosemary, myself), slam it into the oven, 375°F until the meat thermometer says it's done, baste it every half hour or so, cover it when the sides begin to brown up or cover it until the temperature's correct and let it continue to cook 10-15 minutes more. I cook the stuffing on the stove. Bam, leftovers for a hundred years. We usually indulge in this one after the major holidays, when the grocery store is getting rid of their stock and halve the price.
Ham. Another simple thing we get half off if the store's trying to unload their product, cover it, yeet it into the oven at 375°F (sense a theme?), yoink it out when the meat thermometer says to, roughly 1.5 hours later. I'll usually throw a cup or so of water into the pan to keep the meat moist.
Cookies. I look for a recipe online and make the thing. My go-to is chocolate chip cookies. For laziness' sake, I'll sometimes indulge in the Papa Murphy's cookie dough or the premade packages from the grocery store's refridgerated aisle and call that good.
Cake & brownie mixes. Sometimes I have a craving for hot cake in the middle of the night. Many have been the nights partner has awoken and bumbled down the stairs to demand a share. lol Whatever directions the box mix says, I always throw in an extra egg because I enjoy the extra fluffiness.
I suppose that's enough from the diaries of the domestic goddess for today!
I heard an interesting story about one winter-centric song, and decided to research more of them to compile in an entry. Why no, I'm not running out of ideas for daily yammerings. Aheh.
A familar, known instrumental tune with no title nor lyrics appeared in a manuscript compiled by Scottish songwriter John Perry in 1781, a collection of guitar-centric songs passed down through oral Welsh history that Mr. Perry felt should be preserved in some written form. In 1784, fellow Welshman Edward Jones added this song to a similar compilation of songs in his own publication devoted to the harp featuring older known Welsh songs in that language, providing the title and lyrics as he knew them to be. "Nos Galan" means "New Year's Gift," and the first line reads, "O mor gynnes mynwes meinwen," which translates to, "Oh! How soft my Fair one's bosom", which obviously has nothing to do with the close of the year, hehe. The original song is reported to be a melody suited for a dance game, with people improvising lyrics as the familiar tune progresses. The song was given the modern, known English lyrics in 1862 by Thomas Oliphant, yet another Scottish songwriter. The song as he presented it was much more about merriment and the consumption of alcohol, until someone else sanitized it somewhat for the 1877 edition of the Pennsylvania School Journal, therein making the song more about preparing for the holiday season rather than partaking of the year-end feast many cultures celebrate. The song has been appropriated by various artists and composers over the years, including Mozart, who made his own piano-violin duet of "Deck the Halls."
"Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht!" was written in 1816, originally as a poem by an Austrian Catholic priest, Father Joseph Mohr. Two years later, he requested a musically inclined friend named Franz Xaver Gruber to compose a score for the poem on guitar. It was performed as we know it for the first time, backed by a choir, on Christmas Eve, 1818. An Episcopal priest named John Freeman Young translated the song into English in 1859. Interestingly, while we know the song "Silent Night, Holy Night" today, we didn't know its true origins until a manuscript was found in 1995 that identified its history.
There was a lot going on in the nation of Israel during the 1860s, including a grand expedition by British and French scholars and archaeologists who wished to identify locations mentioned in the bible throughout the modern day Middle East, financed by the Palestine Exploration Fund. One such project, the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem, centered around the city, wherein an indepth map of topography and archaeological digs were conducted. While all of this was going on, a well-to-do Boston preacher named Phillip Brooks, graduate of Harvard and Virginia Theological Seminary, and rector of Holy Trinity Church in Philadelphia, took a sabbatical during the autumn of 1865, touring the area and taking in the sights and experiencing it all first-hand. There was to be a religious ceremony in the Basilica of the Nativity, a grotto in Bethlehem, some six-mile journey from Jerusalem at the end of December, and this pastor rode on horseback to make the journey. As he neared the place in which the ceremony was in progress on Christmas Eve, he was struck by the experience, so much so that three years later, he wrote a poem to be sung during the Sunday School Christmas program back at his church in Philadelphia. He showed the poem to his friend Lewis Redner, organist and Sunday School administrator at Holy Trinity Church. Redner was encouraged to hurriedly compose a simple melody that children could sing. He struggled, but woke from his sleep with a song in his head, and the carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was performed for the first time in 1868.
James Gillespie was born in a rural area of Kentucky in 1888, making his way to Chicago as a teen to join his older siblings, where he worked as a typesetter for a major newspaper. As a side gig, he wrote and performed songs for the local Vaudeville circuit, and became well-known for it. After a major heart attack and alcoholism at an unusually young age, James struggled financially for periods of time throughout his life. It was during one of these difficult droughts that he got the news that his brother had passed away, just as a fellow Vaudeville star-turned-radio-host approached him to write a holiday song in 1934. He originally declined the job to focus on his grief, but he thought about his brother and his mother, both of whom told him as a young boy that Santa was watching and to behave. It is said that 15 minutes later, "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" had its lyrics, composer John Coots gave it its melody a short time later, and the song became an instant classic the moment it debuted on air.
New York school teacher Don Gardener, and his wife Doris, sat with a group of second-graders in 1944, seeking the children's assistance in writing a song for Christmas. The children were prompted to finish the line, "All I want for Christmas is…" No child supplied the words that would become the iconic lyrics, but the pair were amused by the children who spoke with a lisp due to missing baby teeth and growing adult teeth. The resulting song was reportedly written in about 30 minutes after returning home for the evening, and performed at his school for the holiday concert. Somehow news of the song reached the Witmark Music Company, to which Spike Jones and the City Slickers recorded the ditty in 1948. Mr. Gardener received royalties for the song "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" until his passing in 2004.
In 1939, a Jewish man named Robert May was working a low-wage job as a copywiter for the advertising department of Montgomery Ward, a huge mail-order company and retailer in Chicago. His wife Evelyn was ill with advanced cancer, and it often fell to him to care for their young daughter. The man was tasked with creating an animal-centric, happy children's story to be published in booklet form, a coloring book printed by Montgomery Ward to lure shoppers to their stores for holiday gift-getting. He drew inspiration from his surroundings, his daughter being particularly drawn to the reindeer at the Chicago Zoo, and his own youth as a withdrawn and shy child, creating Rudolph as the main character. Sadly, his wife passed away soon after he began his work, and while his boss offered to release Mr. May from his assignment, he was encouraged by his daughter and pushed through revisions and read it aloud to his daughter until they both decided it was ready for publication. The coloring book was distributed that year, and re-released in 1946 after World War II, selling 3.6 million copies. The rights to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer were owned by Montgomery Ward, but the company's president gave ownership of the copyright to Mr. May, who subsequently published the story as a proper length, illustrated book in 1947. In 1948, the story was rewritten into a song by Mr. May's brother-in-law, Johnny Marks. The pair of men attempted to find a well-known artist to record the song, and after being declined by a number of singers, the song landed in the lap of Gene Autry. At first, Gene was set to reject the song as well, but his wife was moved by the line, "All of the other reindeer, used to laugh and call him names," and encouraged Gene to lend his voice. The song first aired in November 1949, reaching #1 on the U.S. charts by the first month of 1950. A slew of other artists hopped on that train immediately afterwards with their own renditions, of course, to cash in on the song's popularity, particularly between 1950 and 1964.
Holidailies 2022, Day 17: Puts the Thing in the Basket
My most recent stint of employment was an annual seasonal thing for ten years; I was paid to put various things, usually fruit, into baskets and wrap them up to sell, something this particular grocery chain did. I had some funny and interesting interactions.
There was the day the lady bashed her cart into my collapsible table, making round fruit scatter under aisles everywhere, and then complained that somehow my stationary table was at fault. Later that same day, another woman brought her groceries to my table, started unloading them, asked why I didn't have a conveyer belt, and where my cash register was, and that she didn't want the basket I was presently working on in front of me. Trying to guide her to the actual cash registers met with failure as she wasn't having it, she wanted me to "do my job." I finally had to wave a manager over and have her shepherded away. She vowed to talk to my manager about my terrible work ethic.
There was the stint of five days I was inexplicably given off, and my work partner neglected to do any work, clocking in but standing around for her entire shift. On my first day back, my boss showed me all the baskets with rotting fruit and demanded I explain myself. He had a later conversation with my coworker about the neglected merchandise.
There was the time I arrived at my table to begin my day of work, to find that my partner had helpfully placed a veal cutlet and some lotion on my table, an homage to that one movie about quiet sheep. I had to go place the items back on their respective shelves before finally starting my shift.
There was the time I suddenly heard some shuffling behind me, and observed a man taking every single bunch of bananas out of the box I was working with, muttering something about finding the green ones. I had plenty so I let him have his choice. He spent about ten minutes raving excitedly to me about this new diet he'd found, and that it only required him to eat really really green bananas that would help him poo. I saw him the next few days after that and made a point of setting out all the fruit for him to yoink at will, and I got treated to updates about his diet progress.
There was the day the deli manager marched over, pulled me aside, and told me in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to use any of her products in my baskets, did not accept the explanation that I had used nothing from her portion of the store and that it was all shelf-safe. She demanded every single shift that I show her the long list of items including UPC codes that I had utilized for each basket, and why I was wrapping more than just fruit. She made my work day less than productive because she insisted on going through every item and did not let me work while she did so. I finally had to let the produce manager know what was going on and she was encouraged to leave me alone after that. :P
There was the day I finished my shift early, to which the home manager asked if I wanted to work another five hours assembling baskets of themed goodies for his department, and told me to go nuts with whatever ideas I saw fit. I assembled 20 baskets in that time, full of home decor, power tools, bath sets, compilations of garments, toys, and a whole bunch of other stuff, one set per basket. Apparently they all sold really quickly as well, taking only two days to completely decimate the shelves devoted to them. That day was long but very fun.
There was the day I completed my last shift, to which my manager handed me an apron for some reason. I exclaimed, "Boss lady has given Dobby, an apron! Dobby is freee!" She bent over laughing for quite a while after that.
I was very thankful that while select individuals brought things for me to wrap, it was never inappropriate, like cucumbers with condoms or underwear and duct tape or whatever.
Holidailies 2022, Day 16: Sentimental and Sad End-of-Year Thoughts
I'm trying to space out all the less warm and fuzzy entries throughout this year of Holidailies so that there isn't a streak of them all at once, hehe. I'll mention that I speak of the passing of people down below; skip this entry if the topic is too morose for you.
One of the things I do, as the year draws to a close, is to reflect on the passage of time. More specifically, the death of those I knew or knew about. I can't rightly remember when I started this practice, but I felt compelled to do this with the passing of my cat Bear. I'd had thoughts about him throughout that year, as he'd passed in January 2014 and there's something about the changing of the calendar year that signifies closure to me. "This is the first day without him," I noted myself that first day, and burst into tears. "This is the first week without him," I remarked the next week. And so on. More time started getting stuffed between the last moments of knowing him, and the present.
The passing of people and animals is not new to me, of course, but I've never been good with the topic. Talking about those who were dear to me always makes me cry. Sometimes just thinking of them, as I am while typing this, makes me cry. It's not a simple matter of tears, either, we're talking full-blown ugly sobbing if I think or talk about it enough. I don't attach any particular connotation to the tears, I am just that intensely triggered by sentimental things as memories. Sometimes I wonder if that's healthy, but I let the tears fall all the same when there's an appropriate moment to do so. I don't obsess over it or anything, but like, once a month I'll think of someone off-hand and my thoughts will bring them to life once more, frozen in time as they are. It's kind of nice to dust off the boxes in my mind and select one to contemplate for a spell. And an opportunity to clear out my sinuses. :P
There isn't anyone in particular in my thoughts for this year: some famous people I'll miss seeing, some famous people I've missed seeing, and varied friends, family members, other loved ones, and so on. In December, I tend to have a candle near me that I light for a short time, filling the air with a subtle, pleasant scent, an uncommon gesture and nod towards those who were known to me. I've mentioned a few of them in previous entries. I let it burn while I'm puttering on the computer or otherwise nearby. When thoughts of a nap or a meal start distracting me, I regard the candle for a long moment, and then softly blow it out.
I'm not one for holidays, but this feels right to me.
It wasn't common to have an unscheduled full day off of school in my youth; it was more common for them to announce a two-hour delay due to a literal inch of white stuff, in deference to those who had to travel a significant distance from their remote homes to town, a distance often not traversed by the public busses on these particular days. In the event that a lot of snow, north of four inches, dropped overnight, and the local snow plows were just beginning their work in the predawn, they'd announce a snow day for safety reasons. I remember a couple of occasions where snow started in the morning and accumulated quickly, and by lunch time they made the executive decision to call off the rest of the school day, which was always a clusterf* because they tended to require parents to pick up their kids via personal vehicle, and these parents and guardians often worked during these days because of course they did.
Sometimes on these days off, and more often on weekends, my dad would also be off of work, and he'd invite sibling and me to grab our warmest clothes, and venture to a deserted parking lot or a hill not far from town, and we'd go sledding, be it in those cheap plastic shells, or on old tire inner tubes dad got from work. A few times he'd hitch a rope to the truck and do some gentle donuts with us screaming with laughter and hanging onto the donuts for dear life, only stopping when we'd both been flung into the snow drifts. Occasionally, other kids in town would notice us and join us for a bit. There was always room for everyone.
We'd stop every so often for a drink of hot cocoa from his work thermos, and we'd toddle home when he and we had had enough. I think he had more fun than we did, and that's saying something. There'd be a pile of wet clothes and boots drying by the front door, and sibling and I were well set on energy-draining for the remainder of the day, settling in for books and television and meals by the pot-bellied stove.
The first apartment I rented was on the ground floor, and it pleased me to look out my bedroom window towards the parking lot, ignore the cars, and enjoy the greenery. My first autumn at this residence, I noticed that the leaves on one of the short, manicured trees were changing color. I've seen leaves change color, of course, but this variation of orange and red was so vibrant that it really drew the eye. I wondered if there would be other colors present as the season continued to segue into winter.
One particular evening not long after, the weather forecast called for a light frost. I remember looking at this tree before going to sleep, wondering once more what other colors it had in store.
I woke up the following morning to find a much different feature out the window. The tree had entirely lost its leaves. All there was was a scraggly mess of bare branches. Like, no leaves at all, not even brown ones. "Huh," I thought to myself and grabbed some coffee. I pondered if a wind had blown through. But I hadn't heard anything…
A bit later and not so groggy, I regarded the tree once more, and noticed something at its base. A small ring of its leaves, settled nicely upon the ground beneath it. It was as if the tree had sneezed violently, and all its leaves dropped all at once as it shuddered.
For some reason this thought amused me greatly for some weeks.
