Twas the Season

So, Christmas happened. We flew out to Ontario to see Paul's family. The trip itself was fantastic. We were blessed by the use of my in-laws (2nd) car for the entire time we were there, so we were able to drive to see a few different friends who live in the area, as well as come and go as we pleased. It was one of the best visits for getting to spend a good amount of time with friends and family without feeling rushed or board.

This was the first year in the life of our family of four where G really knew what was going on at Christmas time. We have made a few traditions in the past, but this year was the first time that she noticed them and cared.
We had the big family celebration on Boxing Day, which was nice. We had our own little Christmas morning together with the girls.
This is also the first year I have really felt caught up in buying presents for my kids. Having a kid with opinions really makes a difference! But we limited ourselves (and I think this will become a tradition) to 3 presents: Clothes (this year it was the dresses in the above pic), a book and a toy. Plus a stocking with a few things and chocolates in it (M was thrilled with the orange in her stocking and didn't care about much else).

The other exciting thing that happened while we were there was M's baptism. Paul's mom, Nancy, is a priest and so it was really special  for us to have her baptize our daughter. When G was born, we were attending an Anglican church, so it was very natural to have her baptized. But with M, we were between churches when she was born and now we attend a Westleyan church, who do not perform infant baptisms. We wanted M to have the same experience as G, so Christmas afforded the perfect opportunity to be surrounded by our family and have her baptized into the church universal. M was a perfectly behaved baby during the whole thing and charmed everyone who met her. She's such a joy to have in our family.


Overall, aside from the not-so-great flights (what is WITH Air Canada? Do they hate people?), it was a fun and relaxing Christmas season.

Merry Belated Christmas.

Paul and G sing Jingle Bells.



My personal favourite is at 1:12 when she yells out "Like a lightbulb!"

Christmas Books

It's my favourite time of year for reading! We had a Dickens Party on Friday, complete with Plum Pudding and Smoking Bishop. We read all of A Christmas Carol aloud to each other and it was fantastic. It took about 3 hours to read the entire thing and since the wine was a-flowing, the ghost of Christmas Past was a bit more rollicking then usual. We were all pretty happy to call out "God Bless Us, Everyone" in unison at the end.

I have discovered two books in the past few years that have become my favourite ones to read for Christmas. They are not as commonplace as A Christmas Carol, but both are fantastic. I don't yet own either of them, but I may just have to buy them soon.

The first is Mortimer's Christmas Manger by Karma Wilson.

It's the story of a mouse who climbs the tree and finds a nativity scene. Every night, he drags all the pieces out, including baby Jesus and sleeps in the manger until he hears the story of Christmas told by the family who lives in the house. He has a change of heart and realizes who it is that he's been dragging out of bed each night. It is an unexpected ending to a very sweet book, and one of the few picture books I've found that tells the true meaning of Christmas in a meaningful way.

The other book is The Christmas Mystery by Jostein Gaarder.

Gaarder is the author of the fictionalized history of philosophy, Sophie's World and the fantastic twisting, turning tale The Solitaire Mystery. He writes in Norwegian, but most of his books are translated to English. The Christmas Mystery weaves the story of a boy who finds an old wooden advent calendar with the story of a young girl many years earlier. The narrative draws you in and twists and turns. I couldn't put it down. Like Mortimer's Christmas Manger, it manages to tell the true story of Christmas without being explicitly about the Nativity.


If you get a chance to read either of these books this Christmas, I highly recommend them!

Of Christmastime and Thereafter

So, Christmas happened, and New Years and Epiphany... and now here I am, it's January somethingth and I'm officially at home with TWO girls. So far, it's been good. M eats and sleeps and poops and spits up, G eats and sleeps and talks and talks and talks...
Christmas was a great and relaxing time in Ontario, even though we did spend a good part of it sick with the flu (we were asleep before midnight on New Years). I'm really glad that I had time with my parents here and then two weeks with Paul's parents so that the adjustment to a new baby at home alone was after a full month. Having two kids is definitely an adjustment, but it's also so much easier since I feel much more confident this time. I am not stressed out to leave the house without M. In fact, it was fantastic to go to the grocery store by myself yesterday.  It's also great for Paul to get a chance to be at home with the girls by himself, even if it's just an hour.
Not that it's all sunshine and roses. G seems to pick every time I'm feeding M (which, granted, is often) to want to do something that requires my hands. She'll ask for a snack, a story, for me to play with her in exactly the way she wants to be played with and get a bit frustrated when the answer is "in a minute". But, I keep congratulating her when she's patient and playing with her when I can.
Her new toys are great for distraction. She got a very fun new play kitchen for Christmas, and we got her an adorable fake sushi set, so she makes dinner in her little kitchen while I'm making mine.

One of her new toys is a doctor's kit, which she loved - in fact, it was the hit of the family Christmas, most of her cousins also played with it. The best part is that she will take the stethoscope and go around listening to people's hearts, except she heard heartbeats as heartbeeps, so she'll put the stethoscope on your chest (or any other random body part) and loudly say "BEEP!". It's pretty hilarious.

A followup to our new 12-days of Christmas tradition - it went quite well. I divided two boxes worth of Smarties into little origami boxes, which were in her shoe outside her door each morning. I don't think G really got the meaning, she was just excited to eat Smarties before breakfast, but it's the beginning of something she can expect every year. I think in the future, I'll try mix up what they get every day, so it's not just the same thing. I don't want to add too much extra stress to future holidays, so my hope is to keep it pretty simple.

What's on the horizon this month? Buying our very first car, since the bus strike continues (2 months and counting!).

Merry Christmas!

Tomorrow is Christmas! We are visiting (most of) Paul's family in Ontario and it is beautifully snowy here. We traveled at the perfect time - just missing big windy storms in St. John's.

As Paul wrote in the previous post, it's complicated to make our own traditions when we are always visiting someone else's house, but we are trying to be active about what we want Christmas to be. One of the things we do every Christmas day is go for a walk as a family, a fairly simple tradition, but a necessary one to help us be just our core family. Our other tradition (decided a few years ago on one of these walks) is starting this year. We love the church year and the feasting/fasting aspects of that, so we are making sure that Christmas does not end on Christmas day. There are 12 days of Christmas starting on the day and lasting till Epiphany (the visit of the Magi). So, our tradition for our children (starting with G this year) is that they will get a tiny gift in their shoe every morning for the 12 days of Christmas.
We're really excited to start that tradition this year! It will be really simple - just a chocolate or two, but it will be a reminder that Advent has come to an end, and the feasting season of  Christmas keeps going.

Anyway - from our family (now of four!!) to you, Merry Christmas!

Since it's Christmas let's be glad, even if your life's been bad

Every year, Jan and I travel at Christmas.  We alternate between spending Christmas with Jan's parents in Saskatoon and with my parents in Ontario.  This year we're going to Ontario.  We're leaving tomorrow, and we're looking forward to it.

I love my family, and it's very good to see them when I do.  But there's something a little bit unsatisfying about this travel arrangement.  It's not unsatisfying enough that we are likely to change anytime soon, but there it is.  When we're in somebody else's home--even our own parents--we are having their Christmas.  It makes it hard to make our own Christmas, our own traditions, stressing what we think are the most important parts and de-stressing other parts of the holiday.  Even though we are both pushing 30, and have two children of our own, Christmas in our parents house makes it hard to feel like grown-ups.  Also, Christmas time is so steeped in nostaligia and tradition that each of us becomes acutely aware of how our families are different from each other.  One simple example of this is in Christmas music.  Jan and I each grew up with music around Christmas time, and it's not the same music.  So when we each think "Christmas music", we're thinking of different things.

We've been making our own Christmas playlists for the past few years, and Sufjan Stevens' Christmas music is featured prominently.  Part of why I like Sufjan Stevens' Christmas music so much is that he hits a really good balance between joy and melancholy.  There's just a touch of sadness in his Christmas music, but not enough to overwhelm the fact that Christmas is a happy time.  It's a common thing for Christmas to be tinged with melancholy.  For some people it's mostly melancholic, and for others it's just the barest touch.  But Christmas naturally has a touch of melancholy to it.  Partly this is because to the degree that it's a secular holiday it's a bittersweet one.  Firstly because of the nostalgia; Christmas is a reminder of what we used to have and don't anymore.  We miss the sentimental (fictional) childhood Christmas of pure excitement, but we can't recreate it.  We try to make it for our own children, but it's not always obvious how.  Commercial Christmas is ultimately unsatisfying, because you can't actually buy your childhood back.  And non-commercial secular Christmas is almost worse.  We try to make some kind of transcendental meaning out of imminent things like family and friends.  But that just emphasizes what we have lost or are going to lose.  Friendships and families change, and attaching a deep transcendental meaning to family can really add melancholy to the season, because on some level you know that these people are not going to be with you forever--and because your family is never what it should be.

Even religious Christmas is tinged with melancholy.  It's not the outright, straightforwardly happy holiday that Easter is.  That's why the magi bring Jesus myrrh.  Myrrh is an embalming spice.  There is a hint of sadness, of loss, right in the Christmas story.  This child comes with tidings of great joy for all people, but he is also a child born to die.  T.S. Eliot grasps this in his poem "Journey of the Magi":

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

I can lose patience with the modernist tendency to make everything depressing--to act as though art isn't "real" unless it's forcing us to confront the sadness and brutality of our lives.  There's a lot of joy in real lives too.  I get annoyed when friends dismiss some styles of church worship as "happy-clappy", because though it's true that the Psalms show the whole range of human emotion, "bittersweet" isn't a range either, and we can sometimes rush through Joy to get back to modernist bittersweet melancholy.  But Christmas seems to me to be naturally bittersweet.  It's an emotionally complicated time, both as a secular holiday and as a religious Holy Day.

I think that part of what we need to do with Christmas is accept the bittersweet for what it is, like Sufjan Stevens does.

So this Christmas I'll be very glad to see my parents, and my brother J and his family, and my sister C and her family, but I'll be sad to miss my sister J and her family.  I'll eat lots of yummy treats, but I'll probably feel a little sick.  I'll enjoy the time off, but I'll probably feel a little stir-crazy.  We'll go to church on Christmas Eve, but not our home church.  We'll give and get presents, and we'll be glad.  We'll experience the nativity but not the second coming.  We'll celebrate the end of Advent, but we'll know that Lent is still coming.  And knowing all of that, maybe we'll be able to rejoice in Christmas more fully.

God bless us, everyone.
Merry Christmas.