FoxCraft

Who Dreamed Up This White Christmas?

South Dakota and its neighbors certainly ended 2009 with a white Christmas. A very white Christmas. Inches and inches of white Christmas. (It isn't really an accident that Irving Berlin wrote "White Christmas" when he was in Beverly Hills, where his dream wasn't about to come true.)

Most of my family were among those who had a much whiter Christmas than they really would have preferred. Some of them, including my parents, were without power for at least a day. At least a lifetime on a farm has taught them to be prepared for bad weather, so they got out the camp stove for cooking and set up the lawn chairs near the propane heater in the utility room. Their biggest problem was the snowdrift that filled up their back porch and blocked the door. Shoveling out took a couple of days even after my nephew opened a path for them.

An aunt and uncle spent hours in the Sioux Falls and Denver airports, finally making it to their Montana destination at about 4:00 a.m. Their stories about the adventure didn't even mention being tired, hungry, or frustrated with the delays; they were too busy describing the wonderful way they were treated by kind strangers.

One sister's family (two daughters, two sons-in-law, and four small children) all made it to her house for Christmas—where they all got snowed in for three days. It's a good thing they're a family that likes to give books, games, and puzzles as gifts.

Other family members emailed notes about the snow that fell sideways and pictures of the huge drifts they had to shovel.

And my Christmas blizzard story? Mostly through luck and a little bit through good timing, we missed the storm completely. We drove from Rapid City to Denver on Christmas Eve, slipping in behind the big storm, and had mostly dry roads. The day after Christmas, we drove to southern New Mexico on completely dry roads.

Most people would say that was a good thing, and I would be forced to agree. Still, I feel as if we wimped out. Never mind that our trip was planned weeks earlier and the timing was coincidental. I still feel a bit guilty, as if we deserted our homeland and our hard-shoveling friends and family during a time of need.

Oh, we had snow here in New Mexico, too. About four inches fell on Tuesday. All of it had melted by mid-morning on Wednesday. No storm, no inconvenience, no shoveling, and no problems expected when we head north again on Saturday.

Of course, by the time we get home, all the snow in our long, sloping driveway will have had time to settle in. The drifts will have melted a little and frozen a little. By the time we finish shoveling a hundred feet of hard-crusted white Christmas, I bet I won't feel the least bit guilty anymore.

Just Another Happy Holiday

Conflict in the kitchen. Heated disputes at the gaming tables. Screaming. Sneaking in and out of strange bedrooms in the middle of the night. Shots fired. Blood spilled.

Nope, it wasn't the latest episode of Desperate House Parties. It was just another ordinary Christmas celebration with the extended family.

Honestly, it wasn't really that dramatic. The good-natured conflicts in the kitchen involved too many volunteers to help cook or do dishes. The disputes at the gaming tables were over card games, word games, and puzzles; they were all in fun and only got loud because the competitors were laughing so much.

The occasional screaming had two sources. One was two preschoolers having fun racing toy trucks down a sloping hallway. The other was a one-year-old whose enjoyment of the occasion was hindered by the fact that he had four molars coming in.

The sneaking in and out of bedrooms was completely innocent. It's just a challenge to make a two a.m. trip to the bathroom when you have to crawl out of a creaking wooden bunk bed, creep across a floor that creaks loudly even when you tiptoe, fumble your way down an unfamiliar hallway in the dark, and find your way back without the flashlight you didn't remember to bring. All this, ideally, without waking your roommates. (As my mother says about family get-togethers, "Better bring pajamas, because you don't know who you might be sharing a room with.")

The shots fired? Oh, that was merely half a dozen people trying out one another's rifles and pistols, shooting up a bunch of reloaded ammunition with lethal consequences to a bunch of targets.

The spilled blood, fortunately, wasn't serious—though it probably didn't feel minor to the unfortunate one-year-old, with his mouth already hurting, who fell headfirst off of a chair. This, of course, happened right before everyone was to line up for the family photos. Some ice for his mouth and some cuddling by his mother restored him sufficiently to get his picture taken along with every else. The family computer geek pointed out reassuringly, "Don't worry—I can Photoshop out the fat lip."

He could, of course, but he won't. After all, the fat lip is part of the story of this particular family Christmas. So are the challenging wooden puzzle that nearly everyone worked on; the Scrabble game that ended up with scores of 175, 176, and 177; the target shooting; and the multi-generational card game that went on till after midnight. We won't necessarily remember all those bits of the story in detail, but they're still part of the shared experiences and memories that hold us together as a family.

Shared play, shared work, conversations, competitions, a lot of laughter, a little screaming, and blood only shed once. Yep, it was another successful family party.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Bells

Do you drop your change into the Salvation Army's red kettles this time of year? Do you slip past, hoping the bell ringer won't notice you? I must admit I do both, depending on how much of a hurry I'm in and how much cash I have handy.

Someone in my family was living in Rapid City in June of 1972, when a devastating flood raged through the area and killed 238 people. Among his memories of that time was the heroic work done by the Salvation Army, even after the leader of the local organization was drowned trying to rescue flood victims.

So one of my Christmas traditions is to put a decent-sized check into a Salvation Army red kettle. I appreciate the work the organization does. I also respect the volunteers who are willing to stand out in the cold for hours, ringing their bells until they must hear them in their sleep and wishing "Merry Christmas" to both those who contribute and those who don't.

My favorite bell ringer this year is the slight, elderly man in front of the drug store. I stop by two or three times a week, and he's almost always there. He isn't the most active red-kettle volunteer I've ever seen. He's usually sitting down. He doesn't necessarily ring the bell with a great deal of vigor. Sometimes, on cold days, he'll be inside the entrance of the store warming up. All in all, he looks as if he should be receiving services from the Salvation Army, rather than raising money for them.

Yet he may well be one of the most effective bell ringers I've ever seen. Maybe it's the way he smiles and wishes everyone a "Merry Christmas." Maybe it's his consistent presence. Or maybe it's the fact that his seat is a folding one that doubles as a walker—and attached to it is his oxygen tank.

I'll put money into his red kettle any time.

No Tree-Hugging Needed Here

These are not trees to be hugged.

Not even if you ignored the stern signs about staying on the path. Not even if you had arms long enough to embrace their enormous trunks. Not only would hugging a Sequoia sempervirens be impossible; it would be disrespectful. Ancient redwoods are too dignified for hugging.

On a visit to California's Bay Area last week, we had a chance to walk through Muir Woods. This stand of old-growth coast redwoods was preserved a hundred years ago by a local couple, William and Elizabeth Kent, who bought the land and later donated much of it to the federal government. It was set aside as a national monument by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908.

Since nearly a million visitors show up every year, we were fortunate to be there in December instead of July. There were still plenty of people on the main pathway, but on the less-visited secondary trails we were able to walk with the silent attention this place deserves.

Muir Woods has neither the oldest nor the biggest of the giant redwoods. Its trees are the taller but more slender cousins of the Sequoia-dendron giganteum. The tallest one here is only about 250 feet high and the widest a mere 14 feet in diameter. Give them time, though. Most of these trees are still young adults of only 500 to 800 years old. They haven't seen half their expected life spans yet.

Redwood trees were around some 150 million years ago—in fact, they covered a great deal of the continent until climate change limited them to the Pacific Northwest. One of the reasons for their endurance may be their unique methods of reproduction.

Seedlings sprout from the tiny seeds carried in the trees' cones, of course. New growth can also come from burls, which are woody growths on the bases or sides of the trees that contain dormant buds. If a tree is injured, new trunks can sprout from these burls.

It's common in Muir Woods to see a ring of trees forming a family circle. Sometimes they surround the fire-scarred hollow trunk of a long-dead giant. Sometimes all that remains of the mother tree is the space where it grew centuries ago. I don't know whether these burl-sprouted trees are genetically identical to their parent trees. If they are, that makes such trees almost immortal.

Maybe that is why such a sense of ancient life and wisdom pervades these woods. Walking here, it's easy to believe in wise gnomes and ageless tree spirits. This isn't a malevolent place like the dark, frightening forests of old fairy tales. Instead, it seems to regard human visitors with benign detachment. We may be a little larger than the squirrels and birds, more numerous than the deer, but our comings and goings are still of little import in the long lives of the redwoods.

One section of Muir Woods is called Cathedral Grove, for obvious reasons. I assume the great cathedrals were a feeble attempt to recreate the awe-inspiring grandeur of old forests like these. But the whole place, with its towering elders, feels like sacred ground. It's a place to walk softly and with respect.

These trees don't need any hugs from the likes of us. But if you happened to see one of the gnomes, and if you asked nicely, maybe it would shake your hand.

Reasons To Be Truly Thankful

How to have a truly memorable Thanksgiving:

1. Buy the biggest turkey you can find, plus generous provisions for all the side dishes, because you're cooking dinner for twelve.

2. Find out Wednesday morning that three of the guests have had to make other plans. Dinner for twelve has become dinner for nine.

3. Wednesday evening, enjoy working with your daughter on the advance preparations, including peeling pounds of potatoes and yams as well as chopping onions and celery.

4. In the middle of that, get a phone call from your son. "The doctor says the kids have pinkeye. Would it be better if we didn't come over?" Reluctantly tell them not to come. There goes the chance to spend time with the grandkids. Dinner for nine has now become dinner for four.

5. While contemplating the huge kettle of peeled potatoes, notice that both sinks are full of water and don't appear to be draining. Oops—maybe putting all those peelings in the garbage disposal wasn't such a good idea. One plumber's snake, several phone calls, one trip to the hardware store, two huge bottles of drain cleaner, and several hours later, the drains are finally unclogged. Clean up the mess. Get to bed early—in the morning.

6. Get up early Thanksgiving morning to put the turkey in the oven. Mix up the stuffing. Pick up the heavy casserole dish of stuffing to put in into the oven. Realize you forgot to take the turkey out. As you start to put the dish down, the handle of the pot holder in your hand catches on the burner.

7. Drop the huge pan of uncooked stuffing. The good news is that it lands right side up. The bad news is that it spews like a horizontal Mt. Etna or a toddler with the stomach flu. Bits of broth-soaked bread, onion, and celery shoot out across the freshly scrubbed kitchen floor, covering the underside of the table, the fronts of the cupboards, the wall, and you from the waist down. Since you're wearing flip-flops, there is even stuffing between your toes. Just analyzing the spatter patterns could keep CSI busy for hours.

8. Clean up the mess. No, despite what you later tell the guests, you don't put the swept-up bits back in the dish before you put it into the oven. For only four people, there's plenty without it.

9. Put the turkey back into the oven to brown while you finish cooking everything else. Smell something burning just as the smoke alarm goes off. Realize you set the oven to "broil" instead of "bake." The turkey is brown, all right. Oh, well, it doesn't matter if the top is a little charred. With only four people, you'll have more leftover turkey than you can handle, anyway.

10. Eat. Laugh. Be thankful. After all, you've survived pestilence, flood, and fire. It could have been worse.

The preceding story is true. I heard it from the lips of the participants, including the one who probably still has bits of sage between her toes.

I didn't think it could be topped until I read the following story in the newspaper the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Here is how a family in Boston had an even more memorable Thanksgiving:

1. Plan to cook dinner for just your immediate family, including your eight-months-pregnant daughter.

2. Have your daughter go into labor halfway through the dinner preparations.

3. Call 911. Stay on the line with an EMT while you wait for an ambulance. The baby seems to be arriving faster than the ambulance.

4. In between contractions, run back and forth to the kitchen to make sure the turkey isn't burning.

5. With tech support from the EMT on the phone, deliver your new granddaughter.

Apparently, both the baby and the turkey came out just fine. There was no report on which one weighed more.

And that leads me to the final point—how to have a truly thankful Thanksgiving. Simply be grateful that neither of these memorable celebrations happened to you.