Welcome to the December Question of the Day. Please post your answer in your own journal or blog, and comment here.

Question #8:
(Paraphrased because the book is upstairs, and bed is warm.) If there is one person whom you haven’t been in contact with in a while, and chose to get in touch with over the holidays, who would it be, and how would you start the conversation?

I spent yesterday writing Christmas cards to friends and family, and didn’t finish til well after midnight, so was too tired to write. Sometimes even I get behind on my own meme-things. This should make the rest of you feel better :)

Today, I want to talk to you about Ben, the first boy I ever loved.

I don’t remember how I met him – if it was at Palo Alto preschool (in Arvada, Colorado), or if it was through our neighbors and mutual friends, Heather and Kerry who lived in the big yellow house up the block, that reminded me of the Murray home from A Wrinkle in Time. I loved that house. I still lust after that house.

In any case, we did meet, when we were both at the advanced age of five and ripe for true love. He was sweet, not like the other boys, and he and his mother lived with our preschool teacher, Ray, over on the next block. I never knew the story there, but it didn’t matter. Ben and I bonded instantly, and our mothers became good friends.

We had many adventures together, like tobagganing down upper 16th street in Golden, Colorado, and not getting killed by the traffic on the main road at the bottom. Or climbing to the top of the small hill outside Georgetown, CO, which I suspect was a popular make-out spot for older kids. We learned to ice-skate together, but I graduated to single blades before he did. He let me sing at him a lot, and said he liked it. We shared peanut-butter-and-honey-on-pita sandwiches, and shared his trundlebed, or my bunkbeds, during sleepovers.

One night, in the totally innocent way that little kids do, he offered to show me his penis. “Sure,” I said, curious. Later, I think I said it was stupid or gross or some other five-year-old girl word that means, “Um, okay, and what am I supposed to do with *that*?” On an afternoon in the back of my mother’s blue VW bug – the classic kind, which was the only kind in 1976, we shared our first kiss. Chaste. Quick. But neither of us said “Iewww.”

He always smelled like cinnamon and soap and vanilla and grass (the lawn kind, not the kind you smoke.)
He always held my hand like it was – like I was – a treasure.
I lost track of him when we were both eight.

If my life were a romance novel, I’d have found him right before I met Fuzzy, and we’d have fallen in love and lived happily ever after, but my life isn’t a romance novel. Or, well, it IS, but it’s not that predictable. Fuzzy isn’t Ben, Fuzzy’s himself, and he understands me, and puts up with me, and grounds me when I’m in need of that, and spoils me as much as he can, and our hearts beat together.

But you can’t help but wonder. I can’t help but wonder.
And if I ran across Ben, on the net, in person, I know just what I’d say: “So, I never returned your etch-a-sketch.”

Question #7:
What is one thing you’ve always wanted to do during the holiday season, but haven’t done thus far?

Every year as winter approaches, I receive the Stars on Ice pre-sale email from Ticketmaster, and I am drawn back to my childhood.

I learned to skate on those double-bladed kids skates that Donny Osmond wore on the Donnie and Marie show, on a pond, in winter. Skating then meant layers of mittens and coats and socks inside too-large skates. I vaguely recall a pond under the Navesank Bridge, but that can’t be right, and is probably a mix of memories.

As I got a little older, and we lived in Georgetown, my skating venues expanded. There was the reservoir, where it was so cold the ripples would freeze into the ice, and, in February, when it had frozen a foot thick, there would be Porsche rallies, but there was also the baseball diamond. They would put a liner on it, and a foot-high fence, and make a skating rink, and we kids would walk there after school and skate til our fingers turned blue and our chins were numb, and the sky was beyond twilight and into full dark. We would sit under the streetlamp that shone on the bleachers and un-tie laces that were crusted with snow and ice, and then we would walk home to waiting mothers and steaming mugs of hot chocolate. Life was innocent in that time and place. We second graders could walk from the baseball diamond at the park, through town, to our homes, and never worry about being stolen or molested.

It wasn’t all great, of course, because most of us had to wear these scratchy silvery socks that were just itchier than anything had ever been or could ever be itchy. Imagine the itchy sort of wool woven with tinsel, and that’s what they felt like. Oh, sure, our feet were warm, but we scratched them raw when we got home.

Well, once we could feel our fingers.

I haven’t skated outdoors (the faux arena in downtown San Jose notwithstanding) since I was seven. By the time I was ten, we’d already moved to a real city, and while I still went ice skating with my friends after school, it was at the rink attached to the Y. Better ice, hot chocolate right there, but not as much fun at all. The magic was missing. I haven’t skated AT ALL since before I was married, when my mother and I took lessons in San Jose. It was fun, but again, inside. No magic.

(Somewhat ironically, I never went skating at all in South Dakota either, as it was usually TOO cold, and no one else knew how.)

The thing is, winter isn’t winter without ice skating. And as much as I hate the cold most of the time, there are moments when I want the scratchy silver thermal socks, when I crave the cold air freezing my nose as I race around the rink, when nothing could possibly be better than coming home to a warm fire and hot cocoa, after a day on the ice.

Question #6:
In your opinion, what is the most timeless toy?

There’s something special about the smell of wooden blocks. It’s different from the scent of freshly cut lumber, different from the smell of any other wood blocks. It’s sweeter, earthier, darker and lighter at once, as if somehow, wooden blocks, and especially wooden blocks that have been handled (sometimes rather roughly) by the tiny hands of more than one generation, hold within them the essence of youth, the spirit of play, the kernel of imagination, and the garden of dreams, all compressed, folded in on themselves time after time, until what remains is a fairly innocuous object.

But what possiblities are in that object!

We talk about metaphorical building blocks all the time, protein, fundamental education, basic cooking skills, these are the building blocks of bodies, intellect, life skills.

Just as important are the building blocks we once used to actually, you know, build.

I remember sitting on the rug in the den near the ghastly yellow recliner my grandfather so loved, arranging blocks into different configurations. The same collection of rectangular and square bits of wood would form in rapid succession: the cages in a zoo, a sky scraper, a tree house, a log cabin, a ship, a town square, a mansion, a thought, a hope, a dream…

I remember the alphabet blocks, with their paint faded, chipped and worn, so the letters on them were as much as mystery as whose hands held them first. (Perhaps my mother, or her older brother, or one of my cousins?)

I remember a faded green rectangular block so old it’s edges had softened, rounded, blurred. It was the size of a bar of soap, a matchbox car, a wish.

I remember my grandfather insisting I sort the blocks by color, shape, and size before I could build (he was just as anal with the tinker toys, with the train sets, with everything). “Lay out your lumberyard,” he would coach, and I would tuck my braids behind my ears and willingly comply.

I remember feeling wistful, when I was too old for blocks, and passed them down to a younger cousin, a child who couldn’t possibly have appreciated them the way I did. The way I do.

I remember my grandfather’s hands, calloused, gnarled, thickened with age, when he would help me build, and I remember his regretful expression the year he could no longer hunker down on the floor and play with me, the year he was relegated to the sidelines of building block play.

We switched to breadmaking after that. I always thought it was because he just liked to bake. Now I wonder if maybe something in those golden loaves, rectangular, firm, loaves, reminded him of blocks.

DecQOTD #5: What is your favorite Christmas (Winter/Holiday) scent?

Even though I’ve lived in homes with fireplaces more often than not, the scent of burning pine has never been a particularly strong holiday memory, largely because my mother is extremely allergic to it. We’ve had plastic trees for as long as I can remember, and even though I’ve had my own tree for more than ten years now, that trend continues, partly out of respect for her, and partly because I’m afraid of what the dogs would do to an actual tree in the living room.

No, the scent of Christmas, for me, is not pine.

But what is it?

Well, sometimes it’s rain, as December tends to be rainy in both California and Texas. There’s something cozy about the faintly metallic ozone taste after a particularly close lightning strike, something tangy about the air just before a storm, and, by contrast, something so fresh and pure about it just after.

It’s also the scent of paperwhites. I love forcing them during the holidays, as they tend to perform reliably, and their essence wafting across the room never fails to improve my disposition.

THe cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger combination that is ubiquitous at this time of year is also a favorite. It doesn’t matter if it’s ginger snaps, pfefferneusse cookies, pumpkin pie, or just fresh nutmeg sprinkled over cocoa, eggnog, coffee or chai, that trio of spices is instant comfort. They’re all “sweetening” spices, by the way – flavors that bring out the natural sweetness of whatever they’re mixed with – and I rather think they sweeten the season itself as well.