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Santa Makes a Comeback

Because our youngest child is 17, Christmas morning has pretty much lost its magic for us. How exciting is it likely to be to open the pair of shoes you picked out for yourself, plus a card with a check in it? Gone the days of wide-eyed wonder, of awestruck amazement, of knowing Santa must have brought that present because Mom and Dad never would have sprung for it. Don’t get me wrong–we love Christmas, and we always have fun, but Santa hasn’t really been to our house in years.

Until last week.

Last week, our son opened a smallish package tagged from Santa to find a Nunchuck Controller for a Wii. He held it up, confused, not comprehending. The light dawned first for his sister, who shouted, “Quick, get that bigger box! Look in there!” They ripped off the paper and shouted in gleeful disbelief, just the way they used to when they were four years old.

We got the Wii for us, of course. Most of those kids don’t even live at our house anymore. I was hoping that a distracting, gamelike experience might be what I needed to get me exercising. That’s the party line, anyway. The truth is, we shamelessly invested in a kid magnet. “Come to our house, guys, and we’ll play with the grandbabies while you play the Wii.”

Whatever the motivation, the bottom line was that Santa truly got to surprise our kids one more time.

It was a good moment.

Faucets on Full

We went to our youngest daughter’s choir concert on Monday at the high school, and I found myself tearing up several times and weeping openly when the women’s group sang “Breath of Heaven.” (That one gets to me every time. I often apply to myself the line, “Do you wonder, as you watch my face, if a wiser one should have had my place?”) I love that song. I love high-school-choir Christmas music in general, and performing this time was our baby, so I’m not sure we’ll ever hear it in quite the same way again. So I cried.

Then, on Wednesday we had a staff meeting, and we were brainstorming Christmas titles, and I started to talk about the plots of some of my favorite sentimental Christmas stories, and I started crying. This is profoundly embarrassing to me. Excessive emotion feels unprofessional and drives others around the table to suddenly need to look at their fingers or fiddle with their pens or their cell phones.

Last night my husband pushed me too far in a teasing vein, and I threw a stack of paper plates at him and stormed off to my bedroom crying. He came in about 45 seconds later with my two-year-old granddaughter in tow. She said, “We’re sorry, Ammy. I have a hug and a kiss for you, okay?” Of course that made me cry some more.

Is this menopause? Christmas stress? Or some insidious combination of the two?

Kristy says: Maybe it's not so much that YOU are emotional, just that everyone else around you is dead inside. Ever think about that? It's aaaaall about perspective.

Lisa says: I don't know--I cry all the time, too! It's nice to know I'm not the only one. . .

Shopping with a Friend

A disclaimer to start with: If you read my other blog, EmilyWatts.com, you’ll notice that this same post appears there. I wanted to catch everyone who might be remotely interested, but I was too lazy to reword the blog entry and too techno-stupid to link to it, so please forgive the redundancy!

I  am not a good shopper. I never have been. It may stem from the fact that in my adolescence it was virtually impossible for me to buy “off the rack,” the only acceptable styles of the time being either mini-skirts or floor-length maxi-skirts. The former were, predictably, way too short for a person of my six-foot height, and the latter worked only with the dreaded phrase, “Well, we could always sew a ruffle around the bottom.” When the woman at the bridal shop suggested a ruffle around the bottom of the wedding dress I had selected, I burst into tears.

Anyway, there’s only one thing I like to shop for, and I could do it for hours. Books. Well, books, DVDs, music, anything that entertains and inspires and engages me and doesn’t involve the addition of a ruffle around the bottom.

So when my friend Sonia asked if I would participate in a “Shop with a DB Expert” event, I was so excited to say yes! On Thursday, December 18th, my colleague Chris Schoebinger and I will be at Deseret Book’s American Fork location (468 North 990 West) to discuss books, make recommendations, and just generally help people find exactly the right thing for that nephew, granddaughter, mother-in-law, sibling, home teaching family . . . you get the idea.

Here’s a link to the invitation, and if you’re out and about and want to drop by, I’d love to meet you! (And hey, there’s a cup of hot chocolate in it for you too, and stories will be read to your children while you shop at your leisure, so it’s going to be a blast.

And if you’re nowhere near American Fork, but still want some product recommendations for that hard-to-buy-for person on your list, just make a comment below and I’ll email you some ideas! Sorry I can’t send the cocoa down the cable line!

Kacy says: A book for my mom? A book for an 8 year old girl? A book for an 11 year old boy? And, finally, what would you recommend to someone who asked you what they should get for me?

Lisa says: What a great idea~!

Why Does It Always Happen This Way?

It’s being one of those weeks.

Saturday I helped out in one of Deseret Book’s retail stores for a few hours, then made a double batch of clam chowder to take to the ward Christmas party in the evening.

Sunday I taught Gospel Doctrine, we went to tithing settlement, and we attended a family gathering in the evening.

Monday we went to “Light in the Piazza,” the play at Pioneer Theatre Company. Our season tickets were for the next Monday, but we had to exchange them because THAT night is our daughter’s Christmas choir performance at school.

Tonight (Tuesday) is the Relief Society Christmas social, to which I need to take an appetizer and which my husband also has to attend to run a projector for them.

Wednesday we’re going visiting teaching so the month doesn’t get away from us altogether. I need to make treats to take, since it’s Christmas.

Thursday I had to cancel my book group because we got tickets to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert, and my understanding from my colleagues is that Brian Stokes Mitchell is too yummy to be missed.

Friday through Sunday we take our monthly turn to baby-sit my husband’s Down Syndrome sister. Their mother died of cancer last February and we’ve been taking turns caring for her until we could get her into a good group home, which was supposed to happen early in 2009 but is now looking like 2010 at the soonest.

Next week—nothing (except the choir concert on Monday). Go figure.

 

Kristy says: Take 2 chocolates and call me in the morning.

What I Really Want for Christmas

I’ve done a lot of thinking about this, and what I really want for the Christmas season this year is guidance.

I want to be generous with my means. We’ve had a blessed year at our house. But I see so many people who are struggling, and I don’t quite know whom to help or how to do it.

I want to be generous with my time. I’m feeling healthy and my nest is nearly empty, so I’m not nearly as stressed as I used to be at Christmas. But I can see so many places to put every minute, I don’t quite know where to start.

I want my home to be a welcoming, Christmas-filled place. But right now it’s kind of a wreck. Our main-floor bathroom has been “under construction” for several weeks, I’ ve barely finished the dishes from Thanksgiving, and the shelving unit we bought eight months ago to help us get the basement organized is still sitting in its box in the carport. So you can imagine how the basement looks.

I have a feeling Santa can’t help with this. But I know Who can. I’m praying to know where to put my money, my time, and my emotional energy. Guidance in those areas would really be the gift that keeps on giving. And if any of y’all were planning on getting me a gift this year (aw, thanks, you shouldn’t have, no, really), what I’d love is a prayer. I need it in advance of Christmas, if possible, in order for it to really help. Don’t worry about size or cost; I know if it comes from you it will be just right.

A Little Something for My Friends

Last week at my work, Deseret Book’s retail division e-mailed us all this “friends and family coupon,” which they said we could share with, well, our friends and family. I e-mailed back immediately and asked if I could consider the people who visit Light Refreshments Served as my friends in this context. I find that I do think of you as friends, even though most of you I have never met personally, and I thought I would love to give this little bonus opportunity to every one of you in person.

Anyway, they e-mailed me back and said yes, it would be okay, so I’ve posted the link to the coupon below and I hope you’ll enjoy using it. (It works in any of our retail stores and, hooray! online at DeseretBook.com as well.) And if you want a personal recommendation, I would say that if your heart is at all troubled this season, Broken Hearts to Mend, by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, is one of the most calming and intelligent and personally motivating books it has ever been my privilege to edit. His reasoned counsel in the chapter “Terror, Triumph, and a Wedding Feast” is alone worth the price of the book.

So, here’s the link. Have fun!

www.deseretbook.com/friendsandfamily

Sports Rivalry

On Saturday, the University of Utah’s football team will meet BYU’s in one of the most fearsome and obnoxious sports rivalries of my experience. My son-in-law and I always place a little baked-goods wager on the outcome, so I will watch the game with interest. But I can’t really bring myself to get all worked up about it.

What worries me is that (setting aside the prospect of baked goods) I actually want the U to win mainly to wipe the smirks off the faces of a number of really annoying BYU fans of my acquaintance who will view it as a religious victory if the Y triumphs. And I hardly even want to go to Church the next day because whichever team wins, their fans will rub the noses of the losing team’s fans in it. That’s okay on Saturday night. I just don’t feel good about it in priesthood meeting. (And I don’t even GO to priesthood meeting, but I sure hear the gossip. Peripherally, anyone who thinks Relief Society sisters have the corner on gossip must not be all that acquainted with high priests.)

Anyway, it should be a beautiful day for a football game, and I’m sure it will be an exciting one, and I hope we’ll all be friends when it’s over!

It’s Hard to Get Up These Days

In the wintertime, I fall in love with my bed. I can’t help it. It is so warm, so cozy, so personally inviting. I crawl into it gratefully at night and depart from it with a reluctance each morning that increases as the days grow darker and colder. So today the muse has inspired me, and I have composed the following poem:

TO MY BED

Ah, beloved place of rest

Refuge on a stormy day

How I long to stay with you

To while the winter hours away.

But, alas, the morning dawns

And with it all my dreams take flight

My chiefest solace is to know

I’ll be with you again tonight.

Kristy says: For this exact reason I found myself in bed by 9:00pm TWICE last week.

Plowing the North Forty

A few weeks ago, a call went out in our ward for volunteers to help prepare ground on a patch of land that the Church had secured for a new welfare farm. This news was very exciting to my husband, Larry. We have worked at the cannery and the bakery and the pasta factory, but there has never been a welfare farm within the confines of our stake’s jurisdiction. Part of the attraction was that it was “man’s work,” clearing virgin ground just as the pioneers had done. He immediately rallied our sons to the cause, but when he tried to recruit our daughter as well, she offered instead to rustle up a he-man’s breakfast for the workers.

So, naturally, Larry announced in priesthood meeting that anyone who wanted to come to our house at 7:00 on Saturday morning prior to going out to haul rocks at the welfare farm would be treated to a he-man’s breakfast cooked by his wife and daughter. And then he came home and announced to me that we would be serving a sit-down breakfast for 15 (not counting me and Sylvia). This was not a bagels-and-cream-cheese proposition. This was not a matter of a quick Krispy Kreme run supplemented by a gallon of milk. This needed to be a breakfast to sustain a man on the prairie, including BOTH bacon and sausage as well as hash browns, pancakes, scrambled eggs, milk, and juice.

Midweek, my husband called me at work. “You really need some help with this breakfast,” he said. “Why don’t you call K. and E. and ask them to come over and cook with you?” When I sat silent on the other end of the line, he said, “Do you want me to call them?” Yes, I wanted him to call two women whom we loved but who never came to church and ask them to be at our house at 6:30 on a Saturday morning to cook for a church project. So he did. And they were absolutely delighted. Eager, even.

Cutting to the chase, we cooked the breakfast (and he was right; I couldn’t have done it without the help), fed eleven men and four women, and sent the men off to serve. It was hard work all around, as anticipated. And it was a blast, as anticipated. Our men supplied 11/12ths of the workers from our stake that day, and I know most of them were there because someone said, “Hey, let’s do this thing together.” That someone was my husband, who didn’t have an assignment to do it or a calling to do it or anything but a personal sense of mission that told him we could make a difference.

Three things I learned:

1. People like to feel needed. That’s not a Church thing; that’s a human thing.

2. Sometimes it’s especially rewarding, in an increasingly abstract world, to do some kind of excruciatingly tangible work that you can actually look back on at the end of the day and know you’ve accomplished something.

3. I myself am always squeamish about asking people to make sacrifices. I’d rather just quietly do things myself than inconvenience others. But sacrificing makes people happy. It helps them grow. It draws them closer to God and to each other.

And that’s just one more reason why I love my husband.

Fair Warning

If you are 16 years of age or older, do not knock on my door tonight mooching candy. Use a couple of bucks of your own gas-movie-iTunes money to pick up that bag of fun-size Snickers. It’ll probably be half off tomorrow morning. You probably have more disposable income than I do. You’re probably not even wearing a costume; I’ll bet you go to school dressed like that.

I don’t want to seem unreasonable, but I have limits. If you’re old enough to shave, you’re old enough to purchase your own Skittles and Pixy Stix. I swear, next year I’m giving out pencils. We’ll see if THAT’S worth pounding on my door at 10:00 at night for.

Do Not Eat

I just got a new purse, and inside was the obligatory packet of “desiccant silica gel” that apparently gathers up all the moisture from the bag, hence keeping it from getting all moldy in the store before I buy it. And, as is customary with those silica gel packets, it is printed with the warning: “Throw Away. Do Not Eat.”

This sort of instruction always gets me wondering. What happened, somewhere in the history of silica gel packets, that compelled the manufacturers to include such a warning? Are people in general really so starved that they would eat a packet of something labeled “silica gel” that they found in a purse they had just bought? The silly thing is, whereas it would probably never have occurred to me to eat that silica gel, now that it says Do Not Eat on it I can hardly resist taking a little taste, just to see what the fuss is about.

My other favorite warning/packaging labels:

On a bag of Good ‘n’ Plentys: “Serving size: 1/5 package. Servings per container: Approximately 5.” (Approximately?? What happens if I get a bag that doesn’t contain all five 1/5ths of a package in it?)

In the instructions for a straightening iron: “Do Not Use While Sleeping.”

On a can of Easy Cheese: “For best results, remove cap.”

I like instructions like those. They make me feel all virtuous right out of the chute for having figured out the really important things before I even had to be told.

Kristy says: 1/5 of the bag is a single serving? That doesn't seem good, and blatantly disregards the plenty.