It’s A Wonderful Life

This is a very random holiday post to end the blogging year. I’ll see you again in January – Happy Holidays!

Downshift Like You Mean It

George Bailey having his holiday nervous breakdown.

I’m shutting down all my work for half of December. Last year I tried to work and it was too stressful. Preschool is closed for two weeks and trying to type with two little spawn climbing on your back is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. I can pull off articles or ad copy with distractions, but writing opinion or fiction is impossible with toddlers. Luckily I got everything done early and pushed the rest to January so I can spend this time with them. The plans are pretty modest. We’re going to make gingerbread cookies, dance to retro Christmas music, decorate our stockings for the fireplace and vege on the sofa with chocolate and Christmas movies. I’m relishing this while I can. I hear these days they don’t believe in Santa and ask their parents for iPads – at five years-old. How depressing.

Just as I was looking at my big work stack and wondering if two whole weeks might be a little too indulgent I stumbled across this article. It’s pretty morbid reading for the holidays, but to me it has an uplifting message. The Top 5 Regrets In Life By Those About to Die is written by a palliative care worker (care for the terminally ill) who asked her patients if they had any regrets or would do anything differently.

“’I wish I didn’t work so hard’ – This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence. By simplifying your lifestyle and making conscious choices along the way, it is possible to not need the income that you think you do. And by creating more space in your life, you become happier and more open to new opportunities, ones more suited to your new lifestyle.”

Q calls this “Killing Fields Therapy”. Before we had kids, whenever I’d get all depressed about lame first world problems (Oh, my master’s degree program sucks. Wahhh!), Q would put The Killing Fields movie on (Beta tape or CED disc, I can never remember). At the end he didn’t even need to say it. After that, you feel pretty stupid for being depressed about anything short of genocide. You look at your life, feel pretty ashamed and decide to (wo)man-up. My instincts had made the right decision about this holiday break, but I was over-thinking and over-complicating it. So I cleared my desk and hid all evidence of work, then I made a list of things we’d do and not do over the holiday break. Q is also off of work for a week so we’re going to make damn good use of this at-home family (and couple ;-) ) time.

Stuff and the Best Recycled Gift Ever

Stuff is the topic of much debate in our household since I’m a minimalist and Q is a “collector”. I don’t throw away everything, in spite of what Q says. I keep things that are well made and multipurpose. For instance, the only major thing I kept from my childhood is my dollhouse and my Barbie doll collection. The reason I kept it was because my grandfather handmade it when I was four years old in 1979. He also designed it to be convertible so you could take the dollhouse roof off and it would simply look like a bookshelf or entertainment center. I’ve used it my entire life. In my teens and twenties I used it for my books, TV, linen storage, an aquarium and a hamster cage. When I met Q it got moved into his lab where it archived everything Q-ish from circuit boards to 60s keyboard service manuals and other hellish looking bits I can’t identify. Thankfully, it was safely tucked in our Uptown attic when Katrina hit.

This month I started renovating the dollhouse so I can give it to my three year old daughter Évariste for Christmas. She asked Santa to bring her one, but I’m not giving that creepy jerk the credit. I’m telling her the truth – her great-grandpa made it. Santa doesn’t make shit. He can give her the crappy 99 cent bin presents.

So I removed all of Q’s spare parts from it and started cleaning it up. It was covered in dust and had a few nicks in the wood from being moved so many times over the last thirty years, but it was fine otherwise. Q is installing lights in it and I’ll decorate it with all the wee furniture before Christmas morning.

I keep feeling like something is missing, but I realize now that it’s the feeling I should be buying something. Americans are definitely trained to buy and my brain is desperately trying to grasp that, yes, you’re giving her a hand-made hand-me-down present. Oh crap, I’m a cheap hippie! But when I talk to myself (it happens) I decide that I really wish ALL toys could be like this – well made and passed on to each generation. Parents wouldn’t have to stress about how to pay for tons of toys every year, they could just keep theirs and clean them up every 25 years. Fewer things, but higher quality. We just don’t do things like this in America much anymore. But the resurgence of the DIY and simplicity movements do give me hope that someday it won’t be completely odd to not have tons of mass-produced plastic strewn about your home.

Speaking of cheap plastic crap toys… After the dollhouse I started to go through my Barbie doll collection and see if there was anything left after 25 years in storage. I sneezed wildly then laughed pretty hard at my 1980s Barbie and The Rockers band and Barbies of the World collections. Ken’s hair made me snort my hot chocolate. He did not look like this to me at age ten. Anyway, what made it even more amusing was that I had MY mother’s Barbies too, complete with 60s bubble cut hair, thick upper eyelid liner and Jackie Kennedy looking suits. I erupted into a full-on giggle fit at the idea of my kid having to play with this junk. I couldn’t wait to see her reaction.

After sorting I realized this was way too much stuff to give for one occasion (I’d kept nearly everything Barbie I received over a 10 year span) so I boxed most of it up again and decided to just give her one doll of her grandmother’s, one of mine, and one of her own. I’ll give her the rest for other holidays or birthdays. But now I actually did have to buy something – Éva’s first Barbie. Thankfully it’s much easier now to find a Barbie with coloring like your kid’s. When I was little I didn’t relate to blonde/blue-eyed Barbie at all so I played with Asian and Latina Barbies instead because they had brown eyes and dark hair like me. Nowadays it’s easy. One or two clicks on Amazon and I found my daughter her first Barbie (photo below) – a light brown-eyed brunette wearing purple (her fave color) with cat eye glasses!

I have a weak spot for cat eye glasses. They remind me of my late grandmother who was a brilliant, beautiful goth-before-it-existed type. I remember her sitting at the kitchen table playing Scrabble with those pointy glasses on, cigarette smoke glamorously swirling around her face, black hair, black eyes, pale skin, her head tilted up slightly, the light catching her very high cheekbones… Those glasses are the only thing I kept of hers. They are black with silver designs and made of some kind of metal. I could try and recreate the image but I can’t. Ok, here, I tried… but I don’t even know how to smoke so I just look like a nerd blowing a Bic…

It’s A Wonderful Life

My favorite holiday movie by far is It’s A Wonderful Life, and I’ve watched it every Christmas Eve since I was a young kid. Made in the mid 1940s it’s still eerily meaningful today. George Bailey embodies the modern American condition – people with everything who still can’t be happy, he was “first world problems” before it had a hashtag. He feels trapped by duty, his job and family, and gave up his dreams to “settle”. He can’t see past materialism and ambition and thinks his life is a meaningless failure. He’s frustrated, angry and depressed, and the holidays are making him snap. He faces financial ruin right before Christmas and has to swallow his pride and actually beg the man he hates most in the world to save him. There are so few movies that make me cry, but this is one that manages it consistently. You can really feel this man losing his mind, and you get so wrapped up in his perspective that you understand why he wants to kill himself. I pretty much cry through the entire sequence when the crazy-ass angel shows him how dark and miserable the world would have been without him. It takes so much, but when he finally gets it, and then you know he’ll never forget it… This is the best feeling in the world to me…