Green Christmas part 2

It's not as warm today as when I posted the previous entry, but new snow has not yet fallen. I took a walk around the center of Amherst this afternoon, past the Emily Dickinson house, and stopped on the Amherst College campus to take some photos which I later turned into a panoramic view. This is looking north towards the town green.

I was struck by how much this did NOT look like a scene observed the day before Christmas. It looks much more like a spring day, perhaps sometime in April, right down to the scrubby, stubborn piles of snow -- the ones compressed into hard lumps by snowplows... the last holdouts, grudgingly melting into the warming earth.

I know it's not spring... and we very likely have a whole lot of white stuff left to fall on top of us over the next few months... but I still like this green and pleasant vista. -- PL

"Note gifts"

Many years ago, my parents started a Christmas tradition for me and my siblings (older brothers, younger sister) which they called "note gifts". Here's the way it worked:

All the presents which once were stacked under the tree had been opened, and the typical "post-present letdown phase" was starting to settle in, when my father would say "Wait… what's this?" and point to small envelopes or folded pieces of paper stuck in the branches of the Christmas tree. Each of these items would be found to bear one of our names, and when opened, would reveal directions such as "Look in the closet at the top of the stairs" or "Look behind the toy box in the playroom".

We'd all rush off to the appropriate locations, and there find one last gift… and it was almost always the biggest, most expensive (within my parents' modest means) and/or most wanted present. 

Sometimes the notes themselves were delivered in an unusual fashion -- the one I remember most clearly was when my father handed us each a walnut after all the presents had been opened. We all looked at each other, wondering if note gifts were no more. But then we were directed to crack the walnuts' shells… and inside, tightly folded, we found the notes for the note gifts! My father had painstakingly cracked open the walnuts, scooped out the insides, stuffed the folded notes into the shells, and glued them back together.

It was a great tradition, and when Jeannine and I started hosting our family's Christmas gatherings, sometime about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years ago, I took it over, along with the "making of the Christmas stockings" tradition. For most of those years, I presented the notes in a standard way, but occasionally I have tried to emulate the creativity my father showed when he gave us those walnuts.

One year I created an elaborate crossword puzzle (and this was before crossword puzzle-making software was available) within which certain letters were to be used to spell out where all the note gifts were hidden. And last year, I made small jigsaw puzzles, using those pre-cut jigsaw puzzle blanks one can find at craft stores, each with one person's clue to the whereabouts of their note gift… and to read it, the puzzle would have to be reassembled. That was fun.

This year, I wanted to do that again, but I had eight note gift puzzles to make, but only three small blanks. However, I had plenty of larger blank puzzles, measuring about 8.5 by 11 inches, so I decided to use them. And unlike last year, I only used black marker to write the clues, due to time constraints (last year I included some color elements, as I felt that would help in the reassembly of the puzzles).

Big mistake.

I didn't realize -- until everyone started trying to piece their puzzles back together -- exactly how difficult it would be to put together a hundred-piece black and white puzzle consisting only of black letters written with a broad-tipped marker on a white background. Here's a photo of Emily beginning to work on hers.

After about twenty minutes, it dawned on me that this was going to take HOURS… so, even though some people wanted to keep working on the puzzles, I threw in the towel and printed out simple text directions to the note gifts. That worked much better (and quicker).

So next year, if I try this again, I will either do (a) smaller puzzles, (b) puzzles with colors, or (c) both. -- PL

So this is Christmas...

... and Emily takes a break from making her delicious Christmas cookies to dress up her little dog Henry in Yuletide finery, while a few stray snowflakes drift past our kitchen windows.

Have a great day, everyone! -- PL

Christmas morning...

... and I was up to feed the pets at around 6:30AM. The sky was lightening in the east, with some beautiful color. Things felt very peaceful, even with Louis barking outside.

In another few hours our Christmas guests, family and friends, will begin to arrive, and the festivities will get underway. We still have a few things to do to prepare -- for me, a little cleaning, and making the salad. Jeannine is baking her fabulous pumpkin rolls, and probably doing a dozen or so other things.

My brother Bruce showed up last night, which was great -- we got to spend some time with him on Christmas Eve. I spent a lot of that time talking blogs with him, and I think he is finally going to get going with his. Once he does, I'll put a link up on this site.

Emily actually went to bed before us last night, and has yet to get up -- I suspect she is still tired from her "red-eye" flight home a couple of days ago.

And, in a very mundane yet very sweet way, this is a special Christmas morning for me -- for the first time in probably twenty years or so, I am up at the same time as my wife... and I got to see her initial reaction to seeing all the stockings I made for everyone lined up along the stairs. It's just one more benefit of adopting a sane sleep schedule. I'm looking forward to the rest of the day.

Merry Christmas, all! -- PL

Blast from the Past #331: 2003 Christmas card

Jeannine and I got to talking a few days ago about our Christmas cards, and realized that we don't have an organized archive of all of them, which we both thought would be a neat thing to have. So I am going to try to put that together, which means starting with searching the hard drive on my desktop computer for any Christmas card-related files. So far, I have only come up with three -- not an auspicious beginning.

But one of them is something that before I started looking, I'd completely forgotten about. It's the card I made for us in 2003, and it was unusual in that unlike previous cards, this one was folded differently, in thirds in a kind of accordion fashion. That way, the image of the Turtle on the Segway was on the front of the card, and when unfolded you could see the whole image.

I kind of like this one... I think the colors work well. -- PL

2010 Christmas card

When Jeannine and I shared our first Christmas in Dover, NH, I drew our first Christmas card, a tradition I kept up with for around ten years (I've posted one or two of them on this blog). As time went by, I moved from drawing the cards to creating them with various computer graphics programs like KPT Bryce and Photoshop. And for the last few years, I've just taken some wintry photos and tweaked them a little bit in Photoshop to make them more Christmas-y.

They were fine, and served as decent Christmas cards, but I felt then and now that something was lacking. There was something about actually drawing the card that brought me closer to the holiday somehow… and I'd lost that. I'm not completely sure why -- quite possibly it was in part due to laziness -- but in any case, this year I wanted things to be different. This year I wanted to go back to drawing our card.

And not only that, I wanted to try to recapture some of the -- well, let me be blunt and call it what it was -- wackiness of some of those cards from past years. I recall things like "The Christmas Snail", a drawing which depicted a slightly anthropomorphic Christmas tree riding a huge snail on a beach.

So after I told Jeannine of my intentions, and she enthusiastically approved, I started thinking… and within a few hours an idea came to me in the form of an image of an octopus standing on its head on the ocean floor, its tentacles twisted into a rough approximation of the triangular shape of a Christmas tree, and holding in those tentacles, at the very top of the "tree", a starfish.

I got to work and within a short time had sketched out the idea.

Over the course of the next few days, I inked it with a variety of black brush markers.

Around  this time, I asked Jeannine if she would be willing to write a poem to go along with the art, and to my delight, she agreed. So while she was musing about that and trying out different rhymes, I had to decide how to color the piece. I'd thought about doing the colors in Photoshop, but decided I wanted to keep more of a hand-drawn look (though I knew I would probably tweak the art in Photoshop). So I got out my new box of Pitt brush markers -- I think there are sixty-four different colors in it -- and got to work. This was the result.

I liked it okay, and Jeannine thought it was fine, but for some reason, I wasn't totally happy with it. I decided to try a second version, this time using watercolors over the black and white line art. (I think I was inspired in this not only by that Jerry Pinkney show I talked about a few blog posts back, but also by seeing some of the beautiful watercolor art Jim Lawson has been doing recently.)

I don't have a lot of skills in this medium, but I figured I should just jump in and try it. And it went more easily than I expected, and I liked the results.

Now I had to put a background into the image, and rather than try to carefully mask out the image and attempt to do a watercolor background, I decided to cheat a little bit and use my computer to create something that I could play around with until I got the look I was going for… and after a few tries, I was satisfied with this one.

By this time, Jeannine had finished her poem. I made a few suggestions, of which I think she may have used one, and she tweaked it a bit further. This is the version that ended up inside the card. (You may have to click on it to get a bigger, more readable version.)

(Here's the poem in plain text in case the above is too difficult to read -- it isn't the clearest font, though I like the shapes of the letters.)

"Some say reindeer can't fly to rooftops

and holidays don't happen in the seas.

They say the sky is up, the ocean down,

and octopi can't be Christmas trees.

But there's more than one side to a story

and more than one side to a tree. An octopus

can twinkle. And special stars can swim.

We wish you many merry days with fishy lyricism!"

And because I was a little concerned that my original idea (that of an octopus pretending to be a Christmas tree) might not come across as clearly as I wanted, and also because I wanted to make sure that Jeannine got her due credit for the poem, I put the following on the back of the card.

It took more work than the cards I've done these past few years, but I have to say that it was much more satisfying than all of those. And I believe it marks the first (though I hope not the last) time that Jeannine and I have really collaborated in a words-and-pictures fashion. -- PL

A little post-Christmas miracle (of sorts)

Christmas 2009 is "in the books", as they say, and we had a good time. Jeannine made great food for Christmas dinner, my sister Chris brought wonderful desserts, my brother Bruce and I went crazy making juice with my new Jack LaLanne juicer, and it's wonderful to have Emily home, if only for a short time.

The celebration was a little more subdued than usual, without the energy of our dear friend Pat, who passed away this spring. But I was glad that her husband Ed joined us for Christmas again, an almost twenty-year-long tradition I hope he keeps up.

The house is quieter now, even with Em's friend and roommate Colleen visiting. The Fugitree is not long for the world (we'll probably leave it up for another week or so before I hack it to bits). I plan to carefully repack all of those 'Toids in their original boxes, maybe to use another year, maybe to sell. Anyone interested in a relic of the first (and so far as I know, only) Fugitree?

It rained pretty heavily last night, and continued into this morning at a lesser pace. I was startled when the rain stopped and the sun came out around noon today... and a thought crept into my mind. I stepped outside to gauge the temperature -- not bad, about 43 degrees. That's CERTAINLY warm enough for a motorcycle ride.

So off I went, after first bundling up warmly. I took the latest addition to the stable, a new Honda NT700V (aka the "Deauville" in the UK and Europe). I got this bike about a month ago, and only had a chance to ride it once before the weather got too cold and snowy. It felt great to be out on a motorcycle, even though I only rode out to the Williamsburg General Store for a coffee and pastry. The roads were clear (except for one back road I took which had a few icy patches, though only a few and they were very visible and easily avoided). I stopped on the way home by a swamp to take this photo of the new bike in a winter landscape which felt -- at least today -- like spring.



I don't expect this weather to continue, but I was grateful to get this unusual chance to ride on December 27... not something that happens too often in this neck of the woods. -- PL

Blast from the Past #256: Pasta Claus

Seeing as how we have entered "Christmas Month" (hard to believe the holiday is little more than a mere three weeks away), I thought I would pull out some old Christmas-related artwork. First up is this drawing that I am sure I did for "Hampshire Life" back in the late 1970's or early 1980's, but I don't remember what the article it illustrated was about.



Maybe it had to do with serving spaghetti for Christmas dinner...? -- PL