Solstice: Making do, making new

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Christmas creche ornament on lit tree

We’ve made it through the darkest day of this year, and I’m thinking about silver linings. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been cooped up since March 13. In all that time, I’ve been inside one store, once. I’ve seen a handful of friends at a distance in my yard or theirs. I’ve spent two days with my son and hugged no one but him and my husband. Thanksgiving happened by Zoom. Christmas will as well.

This hasn’t been easy. Emotionally, I’m on a hair trigger, ready to start yelling or crying at any moment. Look at me crosswise, and I’m likely to erupt. And I know I’m not special; there are thousands of us all over the country in the same shape.

But I’m managing to find silver linings this holiday season. Separated by 2,000 miles at Thanksgiving, my son and I got together on Skype, and I taught him to make pie. That wouldn’t have happened in a normal year because he would have had someone else to provide Thanksgiving pie, either me or a friend. Still unable to travel home, he’s now planning to make cherry pie for Christmas.

Silver lining.

I, too, did some extra cooking at Thanksgiving: I made miniature pies for all of the local relatives and friends we normally would have spent the holiday with. And then I made bread for them, too, while I was at it. I sent all of those off with the husband (my personal shopper and task rabbit), and he delivered them—at social distance—with our love. It made me happy, and I think it did the same for him and the recipients.

Silver lining.

Christmas is a different challenge. It will be the first we’ve ever spent without our son since he was born. So I baked a batch of his favorite Christmas cookies and shipped them to him. I also sent him a miniature artificial Christmas tree and his favorite set of Christmas ornaments—five, one-inch-tall “misfit toys” from the original Rudolph cartoon. Then I got out my paper and scissors and glitter and glue gun and made him ornaments from pictures of our two dogs. I can’t describe how excited it made me to put those together and mail them off to him as a surprise. I can tell you, though, that I then did the same for the co-workers for whom I could find pictures of their pets.

Yes, I’m making do. But occasionally I’m doing more than that: I’m making new celebrations and perhaps memories. I’m not going to say it makes up for the horror of this pandemic. It doesn’t. But it has helped me get through, and it helps my mental outlook to focus on these bright spots.

And lest you think this blog post is all holiday lights and cheer, let me assure you I’m still on a hair trigger. Just ask my husband.

Holiday memories

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Christmas tree with homemade cattle dog ornament

One of the things I love most about holidays, especially Christmas, is remembering. Every ornament—and we have a lot (a lot)—has a memory attached, a story. Every recipe comes from someone I love. The very activity of decorating reminds me of putting up the tree with my mother, both as a child and as an adult after she suffered a series of strokes and came to live with us. She couldn’t hold and hang ornaments any longer, so I would unwrap each one and bring it to her to see on the couch. We’d remember together each one from my childhood, and I’d tell her the stories of the ones I’ve acquired as an adult.

Christmas ornament on tree: glass policeman/bobby

Here’s the glass police officer we found in the bargain bin in Marshall Field’s basement on State Street after Christmas one year. Here’s the clear plastic globe with angel inside, which hung each year on the mini-tree in the bedroom I shared with my sister. And here’s one of the glitter-swirled silver balls that were among my mother’s first Christmas ornaments and that she disliked for their ancient tattiness by the time I was born, the glitter all turned dark; she relegated those to the inside of the tree, where they might add sparkle but not be seen for the ancient things they were. I hang them in places of honor because of the memory they evoke.

Christmas ornament on tree: antique baby head

Our tree holds ornaments from my husband’s family, too. Here’s a favorite: a fragile, glass baby head that seems almost macabre on a Christmas tree. (We’ve given it fellowship with other, newer oddities: aliens and skeletons, Krampus, a luchador.) Wait, here’s an equally cherished relic: the faded yellow, lumpen fruit or veg with a face. We don’t even know what it is—melon? squash? clown?—but we love it dearly. There’s the fuzzy old snowman from my husband’s childhood, and scattered around are ornaments we gave to his mother, which made their way back to us after his parents died.

Christmas ornament on tree: antique and unidentifiable

When we excavate the ornament boxes, we find ones we bought as a young couple, ones given to us over the years by friends, and a whole set of ornaments collected and repurposed from special occasions. These started life as table decorations at friends’ weddings, my grandparents’ silver wedding anniversary, and other life celebrations; as Christmas ornaments, they’re mementos that bring back these occasions, along with the loved ones who were there.

And, of course, my husband and I are parents, so there are ornaments our son made as a child. These keep company with two rather ugly baubles that my sister and I made as children, hand-painted and decked out with glitter. Again, the word tatty is apt, but their very tattiness endears them to me.

This, I think, is what makes holidays special: their ability to evoke cherished memories and remind us of loved ones. Perhaps it’s why we reach out to loved ones on holidays also, with phone calls and texts, cards and postcards. Our Christmas cards this year, as in many years, are drawn by my cartoonist husband, so each one we send shares a bit of him with the recipient. I make cookies and pesto and sugared nuts as gifts; he makes a drawing. We give them all as reminders of our love. They connect us with those we love, even in this very distant time.

Winter's Holidays: #frontstooppoem by Kim Kishbaugh

Home movies

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We’re working our way through the holiday movie (and cartoon) season, and I’m trying this year to combine a mixture of old favorites and movies I’ve never seen. Last night was one of the latter, a 1940 entry called both Beyond Christmas and Beyond Tomorrow (apparently Beyond Tomorrow was the original title).

It was filmed in black and white, but I watched the colorized version, and while I’m not always a fan of colorization I have to say last night I was happy for it. For reasons I’m uncertain of, black and white seemed last night like more work than color. Even with the color, though, I can’t say I came away a big fan of Beyond Christmas/Tomorrow. It’s pretty sappy and overtly religious, neither of which win points from me. I still enjoyed it, though, possibly because of the combined accents of Charles Winninger playing Michael O’Brien and Maria Ouspenskaya as Madame Tanya, or possibly because the winter holidays are the right time for schmaltz.

Not just movies at home; also movies filmed at home

#frontstooppoetry (c) 2020 Kim Kishbaugh

Before putting on the movie, my husband and I were glued to the television screen for a very different kind of showing. Once again for reasons I don’t know, the husband pulled the old (as in oldest—we have more than one) video camera from its bag and found in it a tape labeled Christmas 2000. Once we started looking at it, we couldn’t stop. We relived the opening of Christmas gifts with our young son on Christmas morning, his first test run on his new scooter, frolic in the park, the pre-school Christmas pageant and more. My husband was transported back to the childhood home that has since been demolished to make way for a McMansion. And by the way, who were those two young parents cavorting with my son? Just wow.

The holiday season seems a great time to relive home movies, so full of memories and nostalgia. Or maybe it’s the pandemic that makes this seem right. Whatever the reason, I thoroughly recommend it. If you have old home movies anywhere, pull one out and revisit it. Maybe get on Zoom/FaceTime/Skype with far-flung family and let them see it, too. And while you’re at it, have a latke or Christmas cookie.

Just like that, it’s December

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I’m not sure how December happened. My last post here seems to have happened at the end of May. Where have I been?

I guess I’ve been exactly where everyone else in the United States was—or should have been: at home. Or, if you prefer, nowhere. Those days have dragged and dragged, and yet here it is December. And what have I to show for it all? So much and so little.

I have a giant raised garden that yielded towering tomato plants, though not quite enough fruits on them, plus lettuce, carrots, chard, kale and kale sprouts, and so much basil that everyone I know will be receiving pesto for the holidays. Just this weekend, I was surprised to find a late crop of lettuce volunteers and delicious carrots, weeks after the first frost. My gardening books tell me that December is a month to slow down, and the garden definitely has done that, but it hasn’t yet gone into hibernation. Some of the carrots became part of a chicken cottage pie on Saturday night, and there are more waiting to be harvested.

I’ve also started teaching myself to bake bread. I started with a fairly simple oat-corn bread, made a sweet Swedish cardamom bread as gifts for local family at Thanksgiving, and just this past weekend baked my first loaves of Swedish Limpa bread. Limpa is part of my customary Christmas, but my Swedish bakery has gone out of business. I’m delighted that I can now begin making my own. I haven’t yet found quite the right spice combination, but I’ll keep experimenting.

I’ve spent a good portion of the last six months ill-focused (anxious) and unable to read books. Poetry has pulled me through for the most part, although for a few days around November 3 even poetry seemed daunting, and I started reading cookbooks instead. If you like to cook and are having trouble focusing on reading, try it sometime. It was a brilliant solution—and started me down the path of bread making.

I’ve also been sending a lot of postcards, and have started making my own cards as a kind of art therapy. Paper crafts seem to relax me (along with cookbook reading). The banner photo up top is from one of my postcards. Here are a few others:

I’m looking forward to making more, possibly some holiday-themed ones during December. I like the creation, and connecting with friends, and supporting the U.S. Post is a bonus.

Between the primary and general elections, I wrote about 1,000 postcards to help get out the vote in Wisconsin and Michigan. That’s an accomplishment that gives me pride. I’ve also been posting a poem a day on a chalkboard on my front porch (and on social media for friends) every day since June, inspired by a friend who was doing the same. I’ve found myself largely unable to write anything long during the pandemic—witness my absence from this blog. Sometimes just a three-line poem has daunted me. But I’ve kept at it, and sometimes I think it’s what’s keeping me sane.



I have managed to have a few poems published since the start of the pandemic, though. Two actually were products of the pandemic, both of which found homes on Headline Poetry & Press. I wrote Pi Day at the very start of the pandemic, when we had just gone into lockdown and the world seemed scary but I still had lots of hope. What I Fear Most came later and has lots more angst. More recently, Back Patio Press featured two very different poems by me: RIP Munchkin, and I Like My Life, but It’s Unexpected.

Writing all this down, I feel more like I’ve accomplished something during this pandemic. Hooray!