Helpful Holiday Tips

Thanks a lot, Norman. No really, thanks.

It is upon us. That most magical time of year when we all take part in those time honored American traditions of overeating, overspending, and over-stressing. Where we all feel a little bit guilty because our family gets on our nerves, and a little bit sad because it didn't measure up to the idyllic expectations, and a little bit jealous because other people's probably did. Yes, it's that time of peace and joy where we wait in line to park so that we can wait in lines in stores. Where we watch with gleeful anticipation to see what toy will bring irate shoppers to blows this year. Oh yes. The holiday season is upon us.

Since I am "just a housewife", I have compiled the requisite list of helpful tips to get you through the holiday season without breaking a nail. I've even divided them out into helpful categories for you. Look out, Gwyneth!¹ You're about to get a run for your money.

Cleaning and Organizing:
You're about to get an onslaught of friends, relatives, new toys, reindeer and leftovers. What to do?

• Write important phone numbers, shoe sizes, and shopping lists on the backs of old receipts and shove them in the bottom of your purse. You will have them all there when you need them and for years to come. Only throw out receipts that might be useful for warranty information or returning unwanted items.
• Store clean clothes in the dryer. This serves the dual purpose of keeping things tidy as well as helping small children learn to confront their fears of dark, dank places by forcing them to retrieve their own socks from the laundry room.
• Place dirty dishes on the back porch overnight. The raccoons and possums will get a holiday meal, you'll have less scrubbing to do. It's win-win.
• Speaking of small children, enlist them in helping clean up. Turn cleaning into a game! Here are a few suggestions:
• Start the vacuum cleaner while they're watching cartoons. Holler: "What ever is not picked up by the time I count to 20 will be sucked up the vacuum cleaner!" Watch how fast they scramble to cram things places to get them off the floor.²
• Institute "Colonial Day" at your house.³ It's a fun game for the whole family. Explain that in colonial times there was no electricity (so no TV, computer or video games), children were expected to do chores to earn their keep (diagrams and pictures may be helpful for this part), and children were to be seen and not heard and their toys were sticks and bits of lint and stuff.⁴ Ready... go! 
• "Betty Draper Day". Send the kids off to watch TV and raise themselves, hire a maid for less than a living wage, spend the rest of your time lounging on a chaise in a beautiful dress, chain smoking, and feeling put upon.⁵

Decorating and Entertaining:
Now that your house is clean, here are some simple time and money saving tips for getting it gussied up for the holidays and the inevitable get-togethers.

• Do an "Advent Tree" this year. On December 1st, set up a naked Christmas tree. Let the kids decorate it a little every day by flinging their dirty socks and underwear at it. It makes a charmingly personalized tree and it saves you having to pick those items up every day for at least 25 days.
• Make a paper chain garland out of unpaid bills. Gets rid of unwanted clutter and makes a cheap decoration. Bonus tip: the longer you let the bills go, the more colorful the envelopes get.
• By leaving pans to "soak" for a few days, you not only save the time and energy you would have spent scrubbing them, it also gives your home that cozy holiday fragrance of bacon. 
• Light only with candles when company comes. Among the many advantages: poor lighting masks unwanted dust or toilet rings, scented candles mask unwanted smells, candlelight masks your lack of electricity from making paper chains with unwanted bills.
• Instead of baking Christmas cookies, artfully display leftover Halloween candy on a platter in a festive design.
• Why waste all day roasting a turkey when you can get turkey pre-sliced in the Deli? For an extra-festive touch, cut the lunch meat into seasonal shapes with cookie cutters. Add American cheese slices for a hint of color.
• Make a political statement with your holiday party. Tell guests that you've decided the holidays represent corporate greed and imperialism, have them meet you at a local protest. Pros: you don't have to cook or clean, it would certainly be memorable. Cons: you may get tear-gassed, beaten or arrested.
• Deal with that one annoying relative with a 1st Thanksgiving re-enactment. Have them dress up in a turkey suit and run around the yard while everyone else tries to hit them with tranquilizer darts. (This may be done with more than one 'turkey' if your family is especially dysfunctional.)⁶

Gift Ideas:

Money's tight all around, so here are some gift giving ideas for a girl on a budget:

• Stop speaking to a random selection of people around mid-October. By the time Christmas rolls around, they won't be expecting anything.
• Save on postage for your Christmas cards: Keep the envelopes that Christmas cards addressed to you come in. Simply insert your card into the envelope, reseal it and mark the envelope "Return to Sender, Addressee Unknown" and drop it in the mail. This also solves that pesky problem of the unrequited Christmas card - the only people who get cards from you are the ones who sent you one first.
• Tell your close friends that you are hand-making their Christmas gifts and so they might be a bit late. This will not only get you off the hook until about mid-March, you get extra thoughtful points for handmade gifts.⁷
• Tell everyone you're "going green" this Christmas. Wrap random crap you find around the house in colorful Black Friday ads and give as "upcycled" gifts.⁸
• Make custom gourmet condiments for the food lovers on your list: Simply combine the tail ends of the old sauces and condiments you found in the back of your fridge in a jar. Bonus tip: pick the crust off the lip and scratch the label off of one of the old sauces you found and you have a jar for gifting!⁹
• Tear pictures of things you wanted to give people out of catalogs and magazines and make a "collage of dreams" to give them instead.
• Feign a serious illness or wreck your car. Then no one will expect anything from you.¹⁰

Or... we could all collectively take a deep breath and realize that while holidays are fun, they are just days like any other. The season for peace, joy, goodwill toward others should be every season. The day for giving thanks and counting blessings should be every day. The time for spending with family and friends should be whenever possible.


1. Gwyneth is the new Martha, don't you know?
2. I have never done this.
3. This was my daughter's idea. I am not kidding.
4. If you have uppity children, you may want to leave out the parts about not being able to vote and unfair taxation. That only leads to revolution.
5. This game requires a certain degree of income and blatant racism.
6. This may be illegal in some states.
7. I have never done this, either.
8. Nor this.
9. I really haven't ever done this. Ack!
10. I have done this. Make sure you have good insurance if you go this route.

Exploding Unmentionables: An Intensely Personal Book Review (Sort of)

 If you've ever given birth, you'll understand what they mean when they say "the urge to push". Urge is putting it mildly. There is no wondering whether, perhaps, you may or may not be ready to push. There is no weighing the consequences. There is no sense in telling you not to push. There is no worrying about what people will think of your pushing. There is nothing in the world to do except push.

David Foster Wallace's description of a work in progress: “a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (dragging itself across the floors of restaurants where the writer’s trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebro-spinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it’ll get: the writer’s complete attention.”

There's no way to know what truckload of mental suitcases the reader brings to any bit of writing at any given time. As a compulsive writer and an avid reader, the most gratifying experience for me is when I read something that collides with me and has me screeching on the brakes and sending that mental baggage flying: exploding unmentionables in a colorful, embarrassing mess all over the place.

Mrs. Hagstrand was my 6th grade teacher. She was so beautiful to me with her flowing skirts, nubbly sweaters and thick ankles. She was Jewish, and therefore exotic in our small Vermont town. She wore chunky, ethnic jewelry and a sleek bob. I wanted so much to be her. I tried to dress like her, write like her, talk like her. I wanted so much for her to see the potential "her-ness" in me. I wrote a book of poems for a creative writing project. I barely remember the poems - a vague recollection of one about a unicorn - but I remember working and reworking them to make them sound just right. Earlier that year I had won a state-wide creative writing contest and had my story displayed outside the governor's office. Full of 11-year-old anxious excitement, I awaited my turn for a private conference for the teacher; for the praise of my latest literary endeavor. Shattered and sick to my stomach, I listened to her explain meter, rhyme scheme, feet, stanzas, all a blur of her red pen and the tears I tried to swallow. "Well Suzanne, I've seen you do a lot of things well, but this isn't one of them."

At some point, the diary I have kept since I was 6 years old became less a record of events and more a blank space for experimentation. Fragments of thoughts, poems, I'm sure a lot of angsty feelings, ideas about things outside my small existence, quotes from songs, books, conversations, magazine articles that resonated with me. I wrote frequently and abundantly, a place I could not only be wholly myself, but also to try out who I might want to be, how I might want to think. When I was 14, my whole family moved to China. Rather than fly out of New York or Montreal, we drove from Vermont to Los Angeles, stopping all across the country to say goodbye to family and friends along the way. A month in the minivan with my parents and siblings, drifting farther and farther away from my childhood home toward what might as well have been another planet. I kept myself busy with Aerosmith and my journal. My older brother kept himself busy reading my journal while I was asleep and repeating parts of it back in conversation while I was awake with a gentle, mocking smile.

The year I dropped out of college, my roommate and I spent all of our time in a coffee house. Writing and letting each other read it. We met some other aspiring writers (who wasn't an aspiring writer? Perhaps the aspiring rock stars?) and spent many a caffeine fueled night - bleary eyed, half-starved, electric - talking, writing, creating with the pretension that only 21-year-olds or established writers can pull off. That roommate remains one of my closest friends. In a recent email, she told me "Your words have kept me afloat this year."

I have the skeletons of short stories littered throughout my journals. Ideas I wanted to explore tangled and left to die in the brambles of poorly developed fictional characters, stilted dialogue, and broken plot lines. I stopped writing much because I didn't like to write fiction. I had stories to tell, but I wasn't famous enough for an autobiography, "important" enough for a memoir, but I got bored with fictionalizing it all. I started this blog as an outlet for that pent up writing. Every time I go to press "publish", my inner censor says: "Why are you publishing that? So much navel-gazing twaddle. Who would want to read that?"

In a prose creative writing class in college, my professor told me I could write tone very well. He told me I could make the reader really feel something, but that my plots went nowhere. I said wasn't it enough to make the reader feel? "Well no!" [pregnant pause in which his ruddy, jowled face seemed to reconsider] "No. No it's not." [quietly, as if to convince himself].

A few months ago, I said "screw it" and started this blog.

I read Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields when it first came out. I had never heard of him before but I read a review by accident as I was stuffing the newspaper into the wood stove and I was intrigued. In part, the book explores how the literary vehicle of the novel somewhat outmoded and tedious. Our current culture craves reality because it seems to be in such short supply. The literature we crave is the real or seemingly real. He speaks of elevating non-fiction from mere memoir or scholarly pursuit to the lyrical essay, the literary collage. I read it all in one night and couldn't sleep for the fire it started. A writer, a good writer, a published writer had defied genre and the literary world with this manifesto, this justification for my journals. It was as if, like my brother, he'd read my journals while I was sleeping and was repeating my thoughts back to me. Except instead of mocking, he returned my thoughts to me in this amazing, eloquent, intelligent, resonant collage. Serendipitously, he sent me a signed copy of the book which is now dog-eared, annotated, underlined and full of coffee stains. "For Suzanne - Good luck with your own writing - Glad to hear this book pushed you in interesting directions."

I went to hear him speak the other night at the library. I shook his hand afterward and told him thank you.
"Your book has liberated my writing. Thank you."
"You're welcome. You're the person I wrote that book for."