Enjoying the remaining quiet moments and simple scenes of the season. Thankful for traditions, family, old friends, sweet children, happy times with my beloved, onion rings, pound cake, impromptu rain boot purchase, and sockless warm weather.
Marking time as a family means evolving traditions and habits. We’re lighting candles, opening doors, telling the story, moving shepherds and magi around like action figures, hanging stars, and tying bows. These are all waiting ways, and each is lovely.
Pumpkin seeds are roasting, costumes are coming together, cardboard is being painted, and this song is on repeat.
We’re not super big on Halloween (unlike my friends who set up a cemetery in their yard on October 1), but our middle-of-Autumn rituals are more and more fun each year.
I loved looking at this blog today and seeing older children as they created their jack-o-lanterns.
The Boy drew his design on paper, and My Love carved it out with considerable supervision and input from The Boy. Lots more fun to anticipate as the week begins. BOO!
Thinking of family today and the anticipated shift of one less chair at this year’s holiday table. Thinking of a strong great-grandmother who raised seven children with wild names. Thinking of the legacy I inherit through these women and wondering what parts of each one live on in me.
The start of the school year always feels like the right time for embracing new structure. As we have prepared for The Boy to return to school today, we have shopped for supplies, completed all the proper forms, started a new folder for all of this year’s information, and purged his wardrobe of too small clothes. I am ready for some of that organizing, preparing, straightening, and purging, as well. Though many new beginnings will need attention in the next month, I began with a fun one.
The cookbook shelf.
There are moments when I am able to sit and thumb through cookbooks in search of something new. Rare are the moments when there is actually time for seeing those new ideas come to life, however. I am more likely to try something based on what is in our pantry or treats that arrived in our weekly CSA share. With two small children, a fast approach is almost always the best approach. Lately, my filing system has turned into a piling system. Time for order. I moved forward hoping to create something useful, beautiful, and a tool that will truly nourish my family.
The new supplies.
I ran out to a big box store (yep, sure did) and bought two binders that I’ll love holding, flipping through, adding to, and seeing on my shelf. I also bought a large box of sheet protectors. For a decade or so, I have kept favorite recipes from family, friends, magazines and whatnot in one of half a dozen file folders. I typically pull from these folders rather than actually sit and flip through cookbooks because they are favorite, tried and true recipes. And the best ones have a story.
Like this one of my mom’s persimmon recipes.
My father planted persimmon trees along the front walk of the home where I grew up. There are legendary tales of strange folk stopping by to steal persimmons. The paper is stained from batches of pies and cookies past, and one sheet has the fax date from the day my mother sent the recipe to my work. Hilarious! Our kids won’t know what fax machines are.
The legendary cheese ring.
Found at every important function in Mobile, Alabama, including my wedding reception in 2001 and my brother’s wedding reception in 2009, this cheese ring sometimes includes bacon crumbles. My mother has noted below the recipe that pre-shredded cheese is just too dry. Although the treat calls for a gracious helping of mayo, you still must grate your own cheese for proper moisture. No wonder my home is one of the fattest states in the country!
My grandmother’s Thanksgiving dressing.
My interest in this recipe came along a little late as she no longer cooks a hen to include in the family holiday staple. She doesn’t have a single thing in writing, but we arranged a lesson one year well before Thanksgiving when I was in Mobile for a visit. I quickly scratched out notes as she threw ingredients together, and the scrap paper has already been torn in half once by my kiddos. I love that the instructions include phrases like “already pretty soupy before you add the water.” It’s a family concoction with little precision and lots of second helpings.
Now, instead of losing these treasures to time or a kitchen mishap, I have two beautiful new cookbooks that will evolve with our family and with my own culinary skills. If you’re curious to try one of the favorites above, just click on the photo above or give me a head’s up before you drop by.
I am from the Gulf Coast, just two hours east of New Orleans and a quick drive from shrimping communities still reshaped by Hurricane Katrina. Some of my best and favorite memories of home revolve around the water. Whether the hope of Jubilee on the Bay, fresh shrimp and crab at the dinner table, falling asleep on a friend’s wharf, watching my parents slurp oysters on the half shell, or summer days spent at Gulf Shores and Dauphin Island, the water forever speaks to me of home.
I don’t have coherent words to articulate my feelings about BP & Halliburton’s oil spill in my Gulf. I cannot imagine it filling with oil. Savitri D wrote this week of the Gulf oil spill, “I weep. I get angry. I want to look away, I can’t look away.” My anger is so raw and almost paralyzing. I know my own addiction to oil is to blame. Yet my raw, pulsing fury for BP is more than I can stomach. Fewer safety measures means more bucks for big corporations and executives living far away from us back-woods, shoeless Southerners, right? If Massey & JP Morgan Chase can rape the mountains of Appalachia, then it should come as no surprise that BP or Exxon or any of their ilk can and will wade right out into my home waters and destroy them, too.
Right now I’m still too lost in the anger and disbelief of it all to move onto how I will respond. I want BP to suffer and pay. Do you know that they’re already trying to pay us off?! My instinct is to fight. Don’t they know about the University of Alabama School of Law? Surely they’ll discover that my home will fight for its oak trees, and we damn well plan to fight for the water that shows us life, gives us life, shapes our life. But that rage needs some reason and some rest. Better words will come. Clearer words will come. Sadly, I know they will not suffer. This is but a blip on their quarterly statements that will all smooth out with bonuses for all. Truly, it grieves me in a way I cannot describe.
It is always stunning to discover I have been in lock-step with the dominant culture when I long to be conscious of those ways and profess to live differently. Yes, life with very young children sometimes calls for short-cuts. Yes, I know better than to hand over the Wendy’s chicken-like nugget concoctions to the little hands in the back-seat. Yes, we should own stock in Morningstar because the top shelf of our freezer is forever lined with green boxes.
But as we move out of the infant year with our second child, we are finding new energy and renewed desire to increase our time in the kitchen and invest in our children’s experiences with food and with the earth. The Boy is big enough now that he, too, is excited about Spring planning and planting. He is ready to build a new compost bin, eager to find wiggly worms, and ready to join us as we turn the soil.
Until then, we are finding new celebrations in the kitchen. Here’s where my lock-step awareness is a bit embarrassing. The bread is not only so good, which I expected, but so easy. There’s nothing impressive about my skill or some magic touch I have. The miracle, the impressive work of the thing, is the way yeast and salt and water and flour produce something so perfect and so simple. My little ones stood, faces pressed against the oven door, and waited for today’s second loaf. No plastic bag wrapped around it, no big-rig truck delivering it, just the fragrance shared between centuries of family kitchens.
My husband and I were equally giddy last night as we tried very hard to let the first loaf cool before we attacked it. “Why have we not been doing this for the past ten years?” was my husband’s immediate question. There are lots of answers, but I’ll not explore them now. The good news–yes, the gospel of it!–is that we participated in the miraculous simplicity of bread baking and bread breaking in our home this weekend. We are dreaming already of sharing this simple gift with others, and thus we see glimpses of God’s miraculous economy; simplicity and abundance and community are connected and take root in our little kitchen. It worked.
Buy Nothing Day has come and gone, but the intent of the day should inform all of Advent and Christmas preparations (into the whole of the new year). For the past three months, I have been consumed by the two tasks of my life: family and writing. A project that would take a more independent person a month or two has become all consuming as I find 2-3 hour stretches to study and write. This reality has been magnified by almost unending illness since preschool started back in mid-September.
All of that matters because it means my goals for giving handmade, homemade, loving gifts has now gone out the proverbial window. If all goes as planned, I might have one or two moments next week to make anything I’d hoped to give. And this makes me feel amazingly guilty and inadequate as I enter a Christmas celebration with extended family in which many, many, many gifts have been purchased and will be given to my little family. It does not matter how many times or ways I communicate a desire for another way, this is simply unheard by some (not all) of my elders.
And, despite my conflicted feelings about it: Santa is coming this year. To deny that visit would require a violent overthrow of family traditions that this first-born child is incapable of launching. It would also mean living in isolation and constant fight mode. Between school, the library, the grocery store, complete strangers, and family members who want to make sure I’m not screwing this up, there is simply no way my son won’t believe Santa is coming.
And I feel deep guilt about that.
And I feel secret excitement about that.
And you know what? There should be no guilt in this season. There should be only great hope and anticipation that something amazing is happening. I cannot control what gifts are given, but I can address my own feelings of inadequacy for not reciprocating in the same ways and on the same level. I will not overthrow family traditions of Santa excitement, but I will whisper stories to my children of One who came and will come to show us that we are not alone. Perhaps, if we could capture it, that childhood excitement about the big fat man would be the better response from all of us to the news that we are loved, precious, and honored in God’s sight (Isaiah 43:4).
I have many thoughts brewing this morning about: this year’s Christmas with an almost-four-year-old, the pornographic toy catalogs that raid my mail chute each day to seduce our imaginations away from the mystery of the Christ child’s birth, the failure of an attempt to express my hopes and feelings to some family who find me eccentric and over-the-top for challenging the culture’s ways.
Rev. Billy blogged in the wee hours before heading out to witness before the crowds at Macy’s as he and the choir testify to another way of experiencing the upcoming holiday season: time not stuff, love not plastic, less not more. While I often write and preach about the influence of the dominant culture on our lives and faith, he refers to the push of the demon monoculture. It’s a push and swell to move us all into one homogenized mold of stuff stuff stuff same same same–from the big box stores to the uniform, McMansion suburbs.
I traveled to Appalachia almost two years ago and spent about twelve days going up and down mountains with a group of seminarians to learn about the unique culture of western North Carolina. I read about snake handlers and mountain religion, I anticipated folk art and handmade wears, and I imagined standing witness to great poverty as we encountered folks our nation used and forgot. That Appalachia still exists, but it has satellite television. Truly, the demon monoculture started creeping up the mountain through the air. As my traveling companion and I drove up and up and up and around the bend, nearing our destination we saw it. There, nestled against rocks, founded on land that was blasted flat with dynamite, was a Super Wal-Mart. The demon monoculture had climbed the mountain and unleashed its discount prices.
Our immersion trip became one not of understanding the old ways, the preserved culture, but of asking how the not-from-heres had literally and metaphorically changed the landscape of an entire region. In other words, how was the demon monoculture erasing the existence of a people?
Rather than resting in warm beds or visiting with family over coffee, way too many Americans spent last night in line for cheap stuff they don’t need so they came be more like the person across the cul-de-sac. My family is observing Buy Nothing Day today; a tiny push back against the lure of shiny and new in hopes we might be saved. Won’t you join us?
