The Special People Club

It's that time of year again. Time for you to learn more about how I ended up this way, how I've spent my Christmases lo, these last forty-odd years. This year I expect we'll have some sad ones - it's my first year with both my parents gone, and it's bound to make me kind of melancholy. Heck, I just started crying by the flatbread at Whole Foods because I used to buy it and bring it to my mom as a treat. But the thing is, the reason I miss my folks so much is because my life is filled with happy memories. They were people worth missing. I'm sitting in public right now, so I think we'll start off with something kind of innocuous. Public tearing-up garners worried glances, and I don't want to stress out that nice man at the next table who's selling Comcast subscriptions to unsuspecting callers who think he's in an office somewhere. (SECOND time I've see one of these guys out in a public place - last time it was in the waiting room at the tir...

Nice camera angle. No wonder my mom was always telling me to sit like a lady. Luckily, though, that's just a bit of teenage cellulite and not a full Britney.

Thirteen years old, and my pajamas still had rubber feet. We don't call this "The Special People Club" for nothing.

My mom is not much of a cookie baker. There are many things she does well, but her cookies are so-so. Actually, I'm not sure it's so much that her cookies aren't great as when we were kids she didn't bake them that much. My Grandma B did. Grandma B was a precision sort, so baking worked well for her. She wanted to do something to help my mom out at Christmas time, and somehow it evolved to a process whereby we would request cookies and she would bake them...when we went to her house to pick her up, there would be treats galore as well as luggage and Grandma. It was excellent. Christmas cookies weren't necessarily Christmas-specific ones. For example, one of my personal favourites was the scotheroo - these are known by many names, but they are basically that rice krispie /peanut butter/ karo syrup base with milk chocolate top thing - which is actually an acceptable treat year round. However, since we weren't really a cookie family, any occasion where cookies...

I grew up in a small, small town. It is a picturesque little place...if you have never been to a place that looks like small town storybook America come to life, then Decorah would be an excellent place to start. It has a downtown of cute turn of the century (19th-20th toc) architecture, with independently owned shops in every storefront. It looks exactly like a quaint little town should. But it was in the middle of nowhere and catered to a local audience, and when I was a kid they simply didn't have the wide selection available in the larger cities. We would therefore make shopping trips to malls in the tri-state area to get access to more choice. There were back to school shopping trips, and trips in the spring for lighter-weight wardrobe items, but the best ones were at Christmas time. My dad's family lives in Cedar Rapids, so we'd head there to visit and take in some shopping at the same time. The first day was always about Armstrongs in downtown. It was one of tho...

Our heroine dishes out some tough love to keep the family on task..."Focus, Grandma, FOCUS! These presents aren't going to open themselves!" I TOLD you I was a taskmaster with the present opening.

Obviously an action shot due to the slight blur from movement, nothing says "thanks for the present!" like a tackle kiss given to a reluctant brother afraid of girl germs. Christmas eve was always a bit of a bustle at my house. To this day, I believe that it is the longest day of the year. Endless. The morning would start with kolache baking , but while the bread baking lasted the whole day that was pretty much my dad's thing so we were not allowed to assist. If we hovered in the kitchen mom would sternly reprimand us for spoiling our appetites, so we'd be expected to go entertain ourselves in the afternoon. A cruel, cruel expectation, I tell you. Likely I read a book or played Barbies, but still...not enough to to take a kid's mind off of the impending present orgy. My mom hates wrapping gifts, but she likes shopping. And, especially since we were wrapping cans of stew for my Grandma B , there was a lot of wrapping to do. As a hated chore it got put off until ...

It had an elevator. Or lift, as we call them in Britain. Of course I was ecstatic. In fact wide-eyed with enthusiasm, as you will see if you enlarge the photo. This one's for my brother. Poor guy has been plagued his whole life by a geek freak sister, bless him. But at least I'm funny. And have exceptionally good taste in clothes.

I like to sing. I always like to sing. I'm not great at it, but I get immeasurable amounts of joy from it. And there is nothing better to sing at the top of your lungs than a Christmas carol, unless maybe it's Nanci Griffith after a few glasses of wine. I have no shame. Once December rolls around, I sing Christmas songs whenever I hear them, on the radio, on the sound system of a store, or even just in my head. Full voice. Doesn't matter where I am. Doesn't matter who is near me. It's Christmas, damn it, and it's time for singing. I always loved attending the midnight carol service at church, partly because you got to hold a candle in the dark, but mostly because you could sing really loud and harmonise any way you wanted and no one cared. It was delightful. If you've ever done a holiday season in a mall store, you know that sometime in November they send you a tape that has about four hours of music in a loop. This means that in an eight to ten hour shift...

My father was a civil engineer for Winneshiek County, and as such he was responsible for all road and bridge construction and maintenance of the county's road system. He had many miles of roads and bridges under his control, and he used numerous contractors to do the work required. My dad was an honest guy. As straight an arrow as they come, really. He would run a closed bid process, and he didn't engage in cronyism. And this isn't just the biased opinion of a daughter...one of the most common things I heard about my father at his visitation and funeral (from many of these construction contractors, in fact) was that he had impeccable integrity and people trusted him to be fair. But if you've worked with contractors, you know that they like to send their thank you gifts at Christmas time...even if they know that it will have no effect on whether or not you will give them business in the future. And BOY do road construction contractors give gifts. Dad would turn do...

I do not send Christmas cards. It is not because I don't love you, or because I don't wish you a happy holiday...it is solely because I am too lazy to dedicate the hours to it, and too disorganised to have a complete list of your updated addresses ready to make it an easy task. My parents were religious senders of the Christmas card. They were of the modest note and picture of the kids variety. Sometime in November, Bob and I would be asked to dress in the year's themed clothing and we would spend an afternoon or an evening posing in various places to capture the perfect image to send out to the world. We HATED this. It seemed to take FOREVER. We would put on pained, plastic smiles...which would prolong our agony...and we could never get comfortable in any position because as soon as we did we would have to change the pose for a different shot. Here above is an example of why it took so long. When I go home, one of the highlights of my first few days is the review of t...

My company in the states is a touchy feely kind of place. Not in the pervy sense...that goes against their mutual respect policy...but in a warm fuzzy happy family way. The founder is very Catholic, so company holidays revolve around Christmas and Easter, and there is much emphasis on good clean family living . For example, before Thanksgiving there used to be a bit of a prayer over the loud-speaker on Wednesday before we were sent off to "spend quality time with our families." We got the same speech on the last working day before Christmas Eve (a holiday) and the Thursday before Good Friday (also a holiday). The first few years I worked there all employees were given two things for Christmas. The first was a frozen turkey. These were never handed out until at least noon. I mean, they wouldn't want you having your turkey too soon in the day because it might be a distraction. (Though what exactly they thought we'd be doing with a frozen turkey beats me.) Each de...

It's that time of year! Time for you to listen to me tell you stories of the many delightful things that roam my mind at Christmas. We'll start you out slow, not with a poignant yet funny vignette, but with a general list of some things I love about the holiday season. How about 12 things, both because this is the twelfth installment in the series and because there's that one song about the french hens and milking maids (which I love to hate, though the Bob and Doug McKenzie version rocks.) 1. The smell of those holiday scented candles - not cheap ones from Walmart or even Target, but proper expensive Christmas scented candles from those Partylights people or Bibelot et al . 2. Christmas music. All of it. Heck, I'll even throw in the Dradle song. I love Christmas music almost as much as I love Christmas lights . 3. Finding the perfect parking space at Target on a busy Saturday. Talk about the holy grail. 4. Holiday sweaters. Mind you, I wouldn't wear one, not...

Back to Tom and my fabulous West Coast years for this memory. Tommy and I often spend holidays together. In 1996, we decided to meet in San Francisco at Tom's cousin's place for Christmas, followed by a holiday extravaganza trip to LA to celebrate Tom's birthday before I flew home. I flew down on the 23rd and Tom picked me up at the airport. We had a lovely few days in Beautiful San Francisco...we toured the city, we had dim sum in Chinatown, coffee at a dinky little cafe in North Beach, wandered around making fun for ourselves, went to the Contemporary Museum of Art...all sorts of exciting San Francisco things. Tom's cousin Michael is a charming host, and we had lively meals on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, with many delightful (if eccentric) fellow guests. Tom and our friend Greggie and I rented Crumb and watched it on Christmas night, full of shock, horror, and fascination at this odd little man and his even odder siblings. On the 26 th , we headed back to LA...

Although I've never been a girly girl, I've always liked dressing up in pretty clothes. I know I've mentioned here before that I've had some serious opinions about what I wanted to wear since I was about two. And my mother, bless her, may have disagreed with my preferences, but she has always done what she can to help me realise my fashion dreams. I think it comes from being a chubby child, something my mom and I have in common but my grandmother did not understand. Grandma didn't encourage my mom to express herself...just encouraged her to lose weight. So my mom made sure that, regardless of how misguided my fashion sense was, I was able to feel pretty and stylish on my own terms. My mom scoped out all the best stores to find places that carried cute things in my size. This was before the rest of America caught up with me, and so there wasn't a vast array of choice for a chubby/stocky kid. (Please don't tell the AMA that the obesity epidemic is my faul...

My friends Susan and KB are two of my closest girlfriends. I met them when I transferred to Luther my junior year in college. I got to know KB over the summer before classes began. My childhood friend Blane knew her from many college theatre productions and so our social circles overlapped quite a bit. This is bound to happen in a small college town, and since we both spent many a night at Zahasky's drinking Blatz and singing along to Hank Williams on the jukebox, it was only a matter of time until we bonded. My friendship with KB led me to Susan, who came on campus a few days early to help with orientation for incoming freshmen. As fate would have it, her first night back in town was the night we were out with the Biseks celebrating the new microwave in the RV...it was a wild, crazy evening full of pickled eggs and Wisconsin beer, sure to cement any friendship for life. Though we were very tight in college, when we graduated we went our separate ways and were only in cas...

My mother had great holiday decorations. She's a decorator anyway. There are two bright orange porcelain sinks in my childhood home, chosen because they were really cool in 1976 and went with the hand-painted poppy plates in the kitchen and the earth-toned "first bathroom". But at holiday time things went crazy. Things heated up in October with the onset of Halloween. We had pumpkins and witches and black cats printed on cardboard that could be put up around the house. There was a felt bat that could hang from the ceiling (and never screeched or got caught in my hair), and Hallmark made these cool wax candles in shapes for sitting on tables. (We never ever lit them, so there are still wax jack-o-lanterns in a box in our basement, I'm sure.) Thanksgiving saw more of the same, including wax candle pilgrims and turkeys, as well as these FABULOUS paper honeycomb 3d turkeys. (We had pumpkins for Halloween, too, but the turkeys were the best.) But these were just warm...

When I moved to MSP after college, I lived with my friend KC. We started off in a two-bedroom apartment in Minneapolis, but in the spring we got a chance at a great three bedroom in an old Victorian house in St. Paul. I convinced my friend Chris to join us and the three of us set up house. Our place was fabulous. It was the entire downstairs of this giant house. The rooms were huge, the ceiling was high, and there were three formal fireplaces...Chris and I even had them in our bedrooms. It was in a "transitional" neighborhood so the rent was cheap. There was a crack house across the street, a woman from the building across the alley used to knock on the door regularly and ask for money, and the day after we moved in they found a guy "expired" in a vehicle in front of our house. (Or so the nice policeman told me when he knocked on the door at 6AM. I still imagine him with a date stamped on his forehead.) But these seemed like minor irritations to 22 year olds who...

1992 was my last year in retail. Over the course of four years, I'd worked my way up from plebian sales associate through various levels of management, and finally was a store manager with a fabulous new store. They had high expectations of us, and we were having a killer sales season. We worked crazy hours and I was exhausted by the time Christmas Eve rolled around. But I knew there was much kolache baking and merriment happening in my absence, and I was itching to get to my brother's so my holiday could start. By the time I arrived, things were buzzing. My nephew Sam had just turned one, and this was the first Christmas in years with an excited little kid in the mix. Everyone was poised with cameras and anticipation of the fun they would have as he opened package after package of unnecessary toys. Appetizers and wine were set and ready, dinner was on the stove, and everyone was excited. I blustered in all chatty from my busy day and entertained them with my stories of stupid ...

I think tonight we'll move to the Seattle Years for the Christmas memory. My friend Pam got me thinking about this when she commented on my tree decorations and my reference to the forest of trees. In fact, it's this memory that started this whole series, because it got me thinking about the many good Christmas memories I have. Certainly I, like most people, have some unhappy ones, too, but I'm electing to focus on the ones that make me smile. I lead a pretty blessed life, actually, and I think I lose sight of that sometimes. For those of you who don't actually know me, a brief history...I moved to Seattle basically on a whim. I needed a change, my friend Ben was going and it just seemed like the right thing to do. It was. It was difficult to get settled and, as with all new places, it took me some time to get my bearings. I'd moved there with my friend Sonja, but she moved back to Minneapolis for love. I found a true soulmate in my friend Bethany, and El Ben has al...