This Christmas

   If you are a writer in any way, shape or form then it's pretty difficult to view all that goes on during the Christmas and holiday season and not feel compelled to write about it. It's an all-consuming time of year, for a variety of reasons, and one's personal energy is directed towards it and very little else, for the duration.

   The whole season has a marathon quality to it; in order to successfully complete it, you must balance short bursts of energy with stretches of easier running wherein you are able to catch your breath. But you never really rest. If you are not physically involved with all that needs doing, you are at least mentally consumed with Christmas and all its preparation.
   Apart from the actual work involved, it also seems like a time of year for reflection. Christmas always for some reason brings thoughts of Christmases past. Sometimes you remember the gifts you got, sometimes you remember weather and a trip you needed to make, sometimes you recall a relative you were able to see for the first time in many years.
   Your remembrances of Christmas when you were a child are likely vastly different than the ones as an adult. Mine as a child were strictly of the magical variety--the almost unbearable excitement of bedtime on Christmas Eve, the irresistible urge to peel back the wrapped corners of presents, just to catch a glimpse of what was underneath, the appearance in the house of mandarin oranges, waking up Christmas morning to a stocking lying on the floor beside our beds, the laying out of milk and cookies for Santa and the discovery of elf footprints on the windowsills. Pretty heady stuff for a couple of young boys.
   As an adult, of course, Christmas took on a whole different significance. There is a space of time wherein you are an adult without kids and Christmas, more than anything, becomes a time when you travel back home to briefly reconnect with family. This may be only a trip across town or it may be a trip across the country. It is a time in your life when you have begun to view your adult parents as an adult yourself. This can sometimes be an experience.
   Then, at some point, you hopefully will begin to experience Christmas as a parent for the first time in your life. This is a stage when suddenly the magic around Christmas can creep back into your life, as you begin to impart it to your children.
   As you then get older and your kids have figured out the whole "Santa" thing (for you "still-believers" out there I am not going to reveal what the "Santa" thing is...) Christmas may begin to take on new significance.
   Suddenly you are trying to cram Christmas into an already jam-packed life and in an effort to maintain the spirit of the season and provide positive experiences for people, you try to accommodate everyone. When (and if) you make it through this experience, you are likely exhausted and wondering why you do this to yourself every year.
   I am at a point in my life when suddenly I am wondering whether Jesus even actually existed and, if he did, was he all he is said to be. Celebrating his birth to the extent we do has now become problematic for me.
   On Christmas Eve, I found myself in a church with friends and family, taking part in a candlelight service. My forays into churches for the last thirty years or so have been relegated to weddings and funerals so this was a bit of a different experience for me. I know what the idea was. The idea was for a couple of us adults to recapture some of the Xmas magic we remembered from growing up. Also, I think part of the idea was pass on some of it to our kids who were present.

   It was a "nice" service and probably even nicer for true believers. It was also fairly easy to appreciate the sense of community involved. At some point, we recited the Lord's Prayer. This was not a problem for the adults. We realized at the end of the service, though, that our kids had no idea what the words were. In a way, this surprised me but, in a way, it didn't. The Lord's Prayer has long since been removed from  schools and, barring regular church attendance, there is no reason that a young person would be familiar with it. I, myself, felt strange and somewhat hypocritical reciting it, due to the afore-mentioned lack of belief. All in all, it was a strange kind of experience.
   If anything, the value of Christmas for me is that it is a reason to get together. You take the time to think about your family and friends and their situations and arrange to be with them, even if only for an evening. Regardless of the reason, this can never really be a a bad thing. I think one of the best parts of this Christmas was having my two grown boys sharing the same room with us again. This happens way too infrequently and is something to be savoured when it does. Strange to think that it may have been an imaginary child from two thousand years ago that was the reason for it!
  
  
  

The Last Thing I Wanted To Write About

   My modus operandi for writing blog posts is pretty basic--I realize that a thought is consistently running through my head and, if I think I have anything worthwhile to say about it, I sit down and get busy writing.
   I have been avoiding this process for the last few days, however, simply because the most persistent thought in my head has been the massacre of twenty young children.
   This, I think, has been inescapable for most of us. It's the time of year when we should all be involved in some kind of holiday preparation but the pall hanging over Newtown, Connecticut surely has enveloped us all. Random acts of violence are not uncommon anymore but this particular act hits harder and more bitterly than most.
   The fact that we lost children and lost them in such a manner is what rends us. It would have been horrific enough to have lost them in a school bus accident or a building collapse but the notion that an individual planned their deaths and then carried out that plan seems unfathomable.

   Along with all this pain comes politics. In our agony, we feel the desire to take a line of action that will fix things, prevent the pain from afflicting us again. Amidst all this, what you get is reaction mixed with over-reaction and, quite possibly, inaction.
   It's difficult to say whether or not, politically, things will change in the States. At the moment there are calls for greater gun control and there are calls for a greater mental health care presence. Regardless, in a world full of evil ways to commit murder, the unthinkable will occasionally continue to befall us.
   Volumes have been written already about this tragedy and most of my inner conflicting feelings have been voiced. In light of this, I have nothing new to offer, really. My first reaction is that the perpetrator should be as anonymous as possible. I truly don't know that we have anything else to learn about what motivates people to perform such acts and to have this person's face, name and history pasted all over the place seems to serve no purpose. Frankly, if there were a way to expunge him totally from our collective consciousness, then that would be fine with me. At that point, we could concentrate solely on lives of the children and the teachers who were lost.
   The twenty children, in an effort to explain what has happened principally to other children who are still with us, are now being referred to as angels. This seems to be the most hopeful outcome we can have for them. I am blessed with never having lost a child so I don't know how much suffering this angelic declaration alleviates. I suspect it helps, but not much, and maybe not this soon. My own belief is that these children are somewhere now where they will be eternally safe and loved. Perhaps this is not far off from being angels.

   I could have gotten away with not writing anything about this tragedy. I am not sure that anyone wishes to read anything more about it, anyway. Given the prevalence with which it has been in my thoughts lately, however, I would have been dishonest not to address it here, in writing.
   I am posting a picture of the victims, along with their names. This certainly needs doing and perhaps is reason enough for this post. Their killer will be nameless, at least in this forum. This also needs doing.

Carving

   Yesterday we celebrated the Buren family Christmas, at my brother-in-law Rick's place. What you end up with is a house full of busy adults making dinner preparations and a house full of busy kids being, well, busy!
   Christmas dinner prep has always been a time-honoured tradition, generally with a host of grown-ups (sort of) shoulder-to-shoulder in some one's kitchen doing the where-are-your-serving-bowls-are-the-potatoes-ready ballet. There is a madhouse kind of feel to things somehow and it always seems slightly miraculous to me that a meal actually emerges from all the chaos.
   And in the midst of the chaos, there is imbibing, laughter, reminiscing and a healthy dose of family solidarity. There are not too many other occasions during the year when families are able to take the time to get together like this and, unfortunately minus one bro-in-law, Jim and his family, we were able to accomplish the feat last night.
   At some point in the dinner preparations, there comes the moment when the turkey needs carving. For whatever reason, this has always seemed the most ceremonial part of the Christmas meal to me. The carving responsibility seems to always fall on the shoulders of the man of the house and I guess this is part of the ceremonial quality it holds for me.
   When I was a kid, I have very clear recollections of my Dad at the dinner table, sharpening the carving knife with a sharpening steel, the metallic swish-swish sound making this magical. I'm sure that I associated this sound with the wonderful meal which always followed and just the general excitement for a young boy at Christmas. The sharpening steel itself was always something that intrigued me as a boy, I liked the way it felt and the fact that, as a utensil, it was so different from anything else in the drawer. I would often take it out at other times of the year and drag butter knives along it just to hear the sound. I can remember my brother Bob and I sitting at the dinner table with our knives and forks, swishing them together, simply for the sound they made.
   It didn't even occur to me until I was an adult, however, what my Dad was actually doing, that there was an actual purpose behind all the swish-swish and arm-waving at the head of the table. I had no idea that the knife was being sharpened so that it could slice through the meat that much more efficiently. I now have new-found respect for the whole process.
   At some point when I was a teenager, Dad discovered electric knives. This changed the carving dynamic quite a bit, as you can imagine. Gone was the swish-swish of steel on steel, this being replaced by the bbbbbrrrrttttt of the electric knife. It wasn't quite as traditional as the old way but Dad loved this knife and I'm sure the idea that he was actually able to bring a power tool right to the dining room table and then use it there in front of an audience held enormous appeal.
   I guess I must have watched my Dad carve the bird enough over the years that I somehow was pretty well able to take on the task myself, when the responsibility at some point fell on my shoulders. Carving a turkey was and is no big deal but, at the same time, I don't do it with the same kind of panache as my Dad. He always did the carving at the head of the dining table, with all present. He would go around the table, asking each person what kind of meat they wanted and how much. He would then carve the bird to order. These days, I carve the whole turkey all at once in the kitchen and present the results on platters which then end up on the table. This seems to work fairly well but, I admit, does lack a little of the old formality and ambiance.
   What I have described has been my family Christmas dinner experience and I had made some sort of assumption that this was true of almost every family. In comparing notes with Doralyn while writing this, however, I discovered that this was not the case in her family. Traditionally, her mother carved the turkey in the kitchen and then the cut meat was brought to the table. Not a bad tradition, kind of mirrors our current one, and eliminates some of the "theatrics" at the same time. My experience is that it gets harder and harder anymore to get everyone sitting down and ready to eat all at the same time anyway, there always seems to be someone who needs to head back into the kitchen for some forgotten item or such. With large families, such as last night, there sometimes needs to be two separate tables, as well. Hard to build a lot of carving tradition around a setup like this!
   Rick, by the way, did a fine job of carving last night. This might even have been one of the first times he's done it but the results were great. It's hard to beat a home-cooked turkey dinner and when you have a bunch of people helping out with side dishes you get to feel the love from all over the place!
  

Scars

   I had brain surgery when I was about five days old. Brain surgery of different kinds is quite a common occurrence these days and London is one of the best places in the world for it.
   I had my brain surgery, however, in 1953. I try not to think about this too much, having delicate surgery like that back in the early fifties. The possible outcome of the surgery was guarded enough that my parents thought it necessary to make sure I was at least baptized beforehand.
   The reason for the surgery, as I understand, was that there was a fear that I was hydrocephalic. This fear was unfounded. As my Dad was so fond of saying, "They went in there and found nothing!" There are pictures of me when I was just a few months old and the healing areas on either side of my head were still visible. They actually kind of looked like devil horns.
   Of course, there were scars.

   I have a dim recollection of being able to see these scars when I was young and had a brush cut. I remember the marks but I really didn't connect them with anything, it wasn't until I was an adult and had been told the whole story that I made the connection between the scars and the surgery. At some point, though, my hair got longer and the scars were more or less forgotten.
  Now, they are back. My hair has receded over the years to the point where the scars are clearly visible. They have grown with me over the years as well. They are much longer now than when I was a little boy.
   Thankfully, I am at that point in my life where their presence on my head does not bother me, they are certainly nothing to be ashamed of. No one has even ever mentioned them to me (although they might look a little more closely now, I imagine) and I myself have to look pretty closely just to see where they begin and end.


Not THE bird bath...but you should run AROUND them!

   My other favourite scar is the one on  my right leg. It's about ten inches long, shaped like an elongated "s" and, this far removed from the initial incident, is almost impossible to see. When I was a teenager, my friends and I were playing football in a friend's backyard. We were using his neighbours' back yards as end zones and when I went running through one of them to catch a pass I ran into a plastic birdbath. The birdbath shattered and one of its jagged edges ran up the inside of my leg. It was a deep enough gash to leave a scar but not deep enough for stitches and was a topic of conversation for a few months, as it healed. After the injury, I went back to the neighbour's house and retrieved the shattered top of it, with permission, and hung it on the wall of my bedroom, kind of a trophy I guess.

A surgical clip in some one's brain

    Back to the brain surgery for a minute. Only about five or six years ago, I had a CT scan on my head. My family doctor called me at home one evening a day or two after this, much concern in his voice. He asked me if I'd forgotten to tell him anything about my medical history. I told him I didn't think so and he then went on to tell me that the CT scan had clearly showed a metallic surgical clip still embedded in my head! It then clicked on me about the surgery I'd had as a baby, something I hadn't even thought of mentioning to my GP. I couldn't quite understand his big concern but then he said that if I ever had a MRI done on my head for any reason, I'd be in big trouble, given that a strong magnetic force would be interacting with the metal already in my head. I have filed this one away, believe me.
   So this is my little story about scars. These are physical scars and are simply a part of you, the same way your eyes might be blue or your hair could be brown. Generally, there is little we can do about them and however much they might bother you, you can rest assured they bother the important people in your life that much less or not at all. Revel in their uniqueness and then revel in your own.