Merry, Happy and Busy

All twelve days of Christmas are over. I’ve been back in Paris for nearly a week. And only today have I found time to tell you about my Christmas holiday -– a clue as to how busy I've been, as always during this season.
French friends who ask “What do you do in Charlottesville in November and December?” are puzzled when I answer “Christmas”. "What is there to do," they wonder, "besides getting a few gifts -- which the stores gift-wrap -- for members of your immediate family, especially the children, planning an excellent and sophisticated family dinner for December 24th and getting a small tree up and decorated by Christmas Eve? How can that take an entire month for a person without husband, children, parents, siblings or in-laws?"
My North American friends understand better, but wonder how someone who doesn’t work, doesn’t have to bake cookies for the office Christmas party and doesn’t have to juggle visits with family in far away places or share married children with their in-laws, needs the entire month of December to prepare for the holidays.
Neither group understands that, for me, the preparation is the holiday. Over the years, I’ve developed my own form of celebration allowing me to blend past and present and bring together all portions of my double life.
Right after Thanksgiving, my den becomes a workshop.


Christmas shopping is finished early in December – not because I’m so organized, but because everything has to be wrapped and sent -- to France, Italy and Canada as well as various places in the United States. “Why don’t you order off the internet and have things shipped?” asked one friend recently? “I like to wrap”, I answered. But that isn’t the whole answer. While I wrap, I listen to Christmas music, think of the people the gifts are for and remember past Christmases or other times when we were together. Clicking “gift-wrap” on an internet site wouldn’t provide me with nearly as much pleasure.
Christmas cards take up the rest of the month.

Scene of many happy hours writing my cards.

I send cards to the normal range of friends and family members I’m in touch with throughout the year. But Christmas is a time to remember. So I remember some of my friends from elementary school in Canada and one of my father’s former secretaries. I remember friends from high school in Jamaica, my Latin teacher, the widow of one of the salesmen who worked for Daddy as well as our next door neighbors and the wife of the son of one of Daddy’s business associates -- now living in Canada. I remember friends from college, a couple of professors and a 90 year old lady from Texas my mother once met on a riverboat trip. I’ve never met Geneva Thell but we’ve carried on a great correspondence for over twenty years and I spent a delightful evening at the Moulin Rouge with one of her daughters and sons-in-law a few years ago when they came to Paris. All these people have touched and enriched my life and continue to do so – if only at Christmas. And no hard-nosed and practical organization specialist will ever make me drop them from my Christmas card list.
“Is that all you do at Christmas? I hear you asking. Of course not. But this is a start -- to let you know that I haven’t forgotten you. Look for more in the days to come.

Thanksgiving

The Thanksgiving holiday is ending – a holiday brought to us, as Sesame Street might say, by the letter F.
F as in
•family,
•friends,
•food
•football
and
•Black Friday. (that’s a stretch I know but there is an F there!)
For my non-American readers, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving, a holiday for most Americans. Stores open at 5 a.m. or earlier with special sales to entice people to start their Christmas shopping. Some say it’s “black” because of frustrating traffic jams; others say it refers to the profit the stores hope to make during the Christmas season.
My memories of Thanksgiving go back to my early childhood, as is true for all Americans. But, due to my double life, – yes even then – these memories are not exactly those of other Americans.
Until I was 15, I called this holiday American Thanksgiving. I was brought up in Canada, the only other country that has a public Thanksgiving holiday. Canadians celebrate the second Monday of October. My parents and I always sat down to a turkey dinner followed by pumpkin pie on that day, as our Canadian friends were doing. Then, about 6 weeks later, on the 4th Thursday of November, I came home to the same smells and the same meal as our family celebrated Thanksgiving again. (My friends know that I love holiday rituals. I come by it naturally. Every year, our family of three consumed three turkey dinners in about 11 weeks to keep the traditions of two Thanksgivings and Christmas!)
When we moved to Jamaica, we stopped celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving but I continued to come home from school to the aroma of turkey and pumpkin pie on the fourth Thursday of November. The "family" and “food” traditions, thus, became firmly entrenched in my mind.
I was twenty the first time I spent Thanksgiving in the United States. After four “real Thanksgivings”, I went to France where I resumed my expatriate holiday -- “food” and “friends” but no day off, no football and no shopping.
This weekend marked my 10th Thanksgiving in Charlottesville – long enough to have established new traditions. Dinner is at Nancy and Fred’s, my good friends and neighbors. They host a large potluck buffet, inviting friends, neighbors, work colleagues and foreign students. Fred and Nancy provide hospitality, turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes and gravy. I bake a ham. Other guests bring side dishes, desserts and drinks. Our Thanksgiving meal includes egg rolls, samosa, rice dishes, and always something called “Do you know what this is?” provided by one or another of the foreign students. (The answer is always “No but have some, it’s good.”)









The shopping and football part of Thanksgiving have never been my traditions and I can’t seem to acquire them. I do participate in football to some extent, as I live about a ten minute walk from the stadium where the University of Virginia's team plays its arch-rival two days after Thanksgiving.

View leading from my street to the stadium on Game Day


Tailgating -- a picnic in the parking lot before the game -- is a great tradition.


Some never make it to the game.


The stadium fills. All hopes still permitted.




Today is the eye of the hurricane – a calm place from which to remember the fun of the last three days while gearing up for the month of festivities ahead. May we all have the energy to enjoy the ride.
P.S. Pictures of Thanksgiving dinner are courtesy of my friend Jeanne because I forgot my camera. Thanks Jeanne!