Sitting here in my home office, waiting for Fuzzy to finish getting ready for work (we carpool), I can still hear the music from last night ringing in my head. We have an alto-heavy choir, and our choirmaster, at the last rehearsal, split us into two rows, to balance the number of people in each row, and to balance the sound. I'm the shortest person in either choir, and I was put in the back. When I teased him about that decision, about how I don't know the harmony on some of the older carols, and was relying on the piano, he said, “But I put you in the back because you can hit the pitches,” meaning the three of us in the back row are supposed to sing into the front row, and guide them. That made me feel better, but what really helped is my row-mates agreeing that the alto part on one of the pieces is just really tough – I think we ALL just opted to sing melody, since the congregation was singing along. In any case, C. was able to listen to the master cd of the performance on the way home, and we should have copies of the edited version by the first of the year. Having a brass quartet joining us for the carols was AMAZING, inspiring, and just plain fun, and I had to laugh at our Bishop, who was seated behind us, humming along with all the introductions.

Today, the morning sky is thick with soft grey mist, the kind that makes lights twinkle more brightly, and makes a cozy fireside THE place to want to be. And yet, I'm still so buzzed from singing that I don't even mind getting in the car and heading off to work. (Maybe I'll have a password?) Somehow, it'll just make coming home to my decorated house that much sweeter.

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If you live in the DFW area and are looking for something Christmassy – and FREE – to do tomorrow (Sunday the 18th) evening, consider yourself invited to the Lessons & Carols service at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Grand Prairie. It begins at 7:00 PM, and there's a reception afterwards.

According to the website for the King's College (Cambridge) Chapel :

The original service was, in fact, adapted from an Order drawn up by E.W. Benson, later Archbishop of Canterbury, for use in the wooden shed, which then served as his cathedral in Truro, at 10 p.m. on Christmas Eve 1880. A.C. Benson recalled: â˜My father arranged from ancient sources a little service for Christmas Eve â“ nine carols and nine tiny lessons, which were read by various officers of the Church, beginning with a chorister, and ending, through the different grades, with the Bishop.â™ The suggestion had come from G.H.S. Walpole, later Bishop of Edinburgh.

Almost immediately other churches adapted the service for their own use. A wider frame began to grow when the service was first broadcast in 1928 and, with the exception of 1930, it has been broadcast annually, even during the Second World War, when the ancient glass (and also all heat) had been removed from the Chapel and the name of Kingâ™s could not be broadcast for security reasons. Sometime in the early 1930s the BBC began broadcasting the service on overseas programmes. It is estimated that there are millions of listeners worldwide, including those to Radio Four in the United Kingdom. In recent years it has become the practice to broadcast a digital recording on Christmas Day on Radio Three, and since 1963 a shorter service has been filmed periodically for television. Recordings of carols by Decca and EMI have also served to spread its fame.

As tradition requires, our service opens with “Once in royal David's city,” and includes formal anthems, readings, and familiar carols, and through most of it, the congregation is encouraged to sing along. We've been rehearsing Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings since Thanksgiving, both to blend our choir with that of St. Joseph's Episcopal Church (also in Grand Prairie), and to learn the music, and we were told last week that the presiding Bishop of our diocese will be attending. Children from St. Andrew's school choir will also be participating, and there will be a brass quintet as well. It's not a Mass (there is no Eucharist), just a festive service.

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I came home from a long and terribly dull day at work, followed by a lovely dinner with Fuzzy at a local steakhouse, to find this information on my computer.

John Spencer has died.

I'm going to miss his gritty voice, and the subtle detail of his acting.

RIP.

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Like fruitcake, the self-published newsletter is an ubiquitous part of the holiday season. At once a cheerful greeting and an experiment in determining exactly how much cute clip-art one can fit between the printer margins of an 8.5 x 11″ piece of paper, these mass-mailed missives fill our mailboxes during much of winter.

As early as Thanksgiving (American, not Canadian – one hopes), folded and stapled copy paper arrives via post, sometimes sporting stickers or custom-designed stamps, other times merely printed on paper in colors found only in the “festive” section – bright orange, planetary purple, obnoxious pink, and, of course, the traditional red and green, as well as utilitarian white (most often used with colored fonts).

December is when the serious newsletters begin to arrive. These are designed by hard-core mailers, and often come on thick or glossy stock, or written entirely in verse (though the latter is often comprised of questionable rhymes and uneven meter). While most such posts arrive by the 25th, there are often several sprinkled throughout early and mid January. Often, these sport snowflake designs, and titles like “Winter Wonders” or “News of the Great White North.”

It doesn't really matter when they come, though, for holiday newsletters are, in some ways, relics of the days when sending Christmas cards was a normal activity, and not something only engaged in by neo-Martha Stewart clones, or over-achieveing students of Alexandra Stoddard, holdovers from times when written correspondence was looked upon with great anticipation, and not the dread of wondering who is begging for money this time.

As I have an unabashed love of stationery and the written word, of pen and ink and postage stamps, it should come as no surprise that I've succumbed to the pull of the desktop publishing software, and am printing copies of MY holiday newsletter as I write this entry. While it DOES have some clip-art (just a border, I swear) it also features a picture of my tree from last year, in front of a window, with a snowstorm beyond, the whole thing photoshopped by a dear friend into something soft and worth sharing. It does NOT contain a minute-by-minute breakdown of the last year, however, just a few teasers, and an invitation for folks to read my blog. Yeah, I'm shameless.

Whether you send newsletters, or only receive them, and whether or not you actually read those that arrive in your mailbox, consider this when you next come across one: even a kitschy newsletter is still a “real letter,” and real letters are special. After all, a gift from the hand is a gift of the heart, even if a keyboard was involved in the translation.

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Last night after rehearsal, we walked outside to find a soaking rainfall and warm (for December) weather, and the combination of the moist air and the music buzz blended with the soft twinkle of the lights on all the houses, and made me smile. Almost, I wish we had glittery lights all year, but only almost. Some things are more special for being rare. Today, I sat at a window-facing table while I ate my lunch, and watched the rain outside, and read a bit, enjoying the quiet. I love rain.

This morning, I was welcomed onto my new team at work with a Secret Santa gift, and many many smiles. How many people walk onto their first day of a job and find a present waiting? (Actually, they'd also made sure my desk was stocked with a calendar, pens, and post-it notes, which nearly made up for the extremely boring day I spent watching people fill out forms, since IT hadn't yet granted me network access.)

At the end of the day, I also learned that all of the people in my new hire class HAD been added to the list for the company Christmas party, with each of us allowed a guest. I'm not sure how I'll get in, if I don't have an access badge (we're supposed to show them) by then, but it means a lot that they included us. I'm hoping this is a trend and not a fluke. (Last night's email held a party invitation for an event hosted by friends, and while I'm always horribly shy at parties, I'm really looking forward to this one.)

Parties, presents, and precipitation – I wish all Wednesdays were this wonderful.

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Two days into the new job, and so far all I've done is attend orientation classes. I now have more passwords and numbers than any human needs, and have learned much about the company's history and culture, and confirmed that yes, I will get paid on Thursday (not bad, really, to have your first day on Monday, and know on Tuesday by looking it up on the corporate website, what your check amount will be.)

I'm so beyond tired that I have no energy to write, no energy to think, and barely enough energy to shower, but I came home to find that Fuzzy had gifted me with a second tivo unit, which resides in our bedroom. So, yes, we are now a two-tivo household, but I'm too tired to watch anything, and I'm trying desperately not to let this sinus infection/cold/allergy/thing get a real hold on me, because Sunday is Lessons & Carols, and I don't want to miss singing. (Upside: When I'm congested, I can sing higher.)

I've been distracted for days – weeks – which is why I'm not haunting other blogs so much right now. I need to get a replacement check out to a certain Jam Maker (the original one came back to me today, by the way – I'd put MY zip code from when I lived in CA on the envelope (don't know why), and forgotten to put a stamp on it – I am NEVER that out of it, and can only blame the fact that I was about to go on a trip, at the time.

Tomorrow, I report to my actual manager, who has asked me to shadow one of the people who is already doing my job, which I'm not looking forward to, because I'd rather jump in and DO stuff. But, the desks are spacious, and I've met the members of my team, and they seem nice enough.

I had a thought, when I sat down tonight, but do I remember it? No. Argh!

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As I write this, I'm curled up in bed, a dog at my feet, and another with his tiny head resting against my hip. I'm wearing a purple tank top and the bottoms from a set of flannel pajamas that Fuzzy gifted me with several years ago. They are decorated with a lavender grid pattern, darker purple bones and WOOF WOOFs and turquoise terriers. They are too long, unironed, and completely undignified, but they are also soft, warm, and comfortable, and I love them.

I really don't do much flannel. Oh, yes, we have a lovely set of flannel sheets, but we lived in California, and now live in Texas, and the temperatures in either place are rarely low enough to require flannel on the bed. (I use them once a year anyway, around Christmas time, as they are also soft, warm, and comfortable.)

As a child, of course, I looked forward to new flannel nightwear every Christmas eve. One year, it was red flannel feet-in pajamas (I only wore the pants to those as well, and eventually cut the feet off, too.), another year it was a voluminous nightgown with ruffles and little red and orange flowers, most years, though, it was some version of nightgown in solid red, and my mother has oodles of pictures of me, with a cocoa mustache and a present-bow in my hair, from various years – pictures I'm inclined to burn, actually, so it's good that they're with her in Mexico.

Ugly pictures aside, there's something comforting about flannel. It's not bulky, like fleece, and doesn't make corduroy-esque swishing sounds like nylon windsuits, it's just soft, and warm, and somehow satisfies the need to nest, even if you're sitting crosslegged on an wood floor, while wearing it, and not curled up in a warm bed.

Flannel. One of my favorite parts of winter.

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It's been a weekend of extremes –

Yesterday morning was extremely musical, with a rehearsal that lasted almost half an hour longer than was scheduled. There was much laughter, clandestine coffee drinking, and some actual rehearsing, as well, and I'm beginning to really enjoy a lot of the music we're doing.

Yesterday afternoon was extremely hectic, as we visited Target (for snack trays and a crock pot), Starbucks (for a new coffee maker, as I only had my little French press) and Albertsons, for last minute forgotten items, before having friends over for dinner. It was a delightful evening, and the house felt festive and alive.

Today, partly from too much sugar yesterday, and partly from nerves about tomorrow's return to Corporate America, I was practically comatose all morning, waking after Fuzzy came home from church to ask him to start laundry, sleeping for another couple of hours beyond that, and then finishing the remaining laundry. Since then, I've read a bit, and watched some cheesy Christmas movies, showered, and almost finished compiling the addresses I need for Christmas cards, which will go out in trickles this week. Not very exciting, but a much needed day of rest.

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This was posted today in my fiction blog at Moonchilde, but as it makes a nice post for a Holidailies submission, as well as being my December contribution to The Alchera Project, I'm posting it here too. It's not fiction, so it's allowed to be in the blog. Really.

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite things about Christmas was the tinsel. Those bits of silvery metallic ribbon that we draped over the plastic branches of our four-foot-tall tree seemed like strands of dream stuff, making the tree come alive, just the way that real icicles turn the winter world into fairy land by making everything all a-shimmer.

I remember sitting near the tree, with the lights off in the living room, long after my parents had retired to their room. Of course, I was supposed to be in bed, but perhaps the dog had to go out, or maybe there was just some part of my brain that couldn’t rest. I found peace in the glow of multicolored lights and the refraction caused by tinsel. I found magic in the way it held a static charge – run your fingers along a strand of the stuff, and a spark will form at the end. I found a few minutes of idle pleasure of the kind not dissimilar from the feeling brought on by turning a paperclip into desktop sculpture, by stretching a flat length of tinsel until it was as thin as it could possibly get, and watching the way the surface changed from reflective to flat and opaque, to a dead, lifeless thread of grayish stuff.

The year I was seventeen, my senior year in high school, my love of tinsel died. My mother’s only brother died of lung cancer that year, right around Thanksgiving, the first of many subsequent November deaths in our family. He was older than she was, but not so much so that they hadn’t had good memories of childhood adventures. He was an amazing artist, both with pen and ink, and with a camera. He was a competent craftsman – I still have the walnut toy chest he made for me when I was a toddler, though the scroll piece is missing. I use it at the foot of our bed, as a step for the dogs, as a place to sit to put on shoes (our bed is too tall), and to store odds and ends. (It retains a sweet smell that I cannot place. It’s not cedar-sweet, but neither is it anything like the camphor found in moth balls. I think of it as smelling like my uncle, really.) He taught me how to bait a hook, one year, when he and my grandfather took my cousin and me fishing off the fisherman’s pier. He had a voice thick with fallen dreams and made for telling stories, and I’m sad that I never knew him as an adult, that he was, at the time he died, little more than a name to me. But I was named for him (he called from where he was AWOL in Canada to instruct my mother not to give me HIS name, as he felt it was cursed, so she used the first letter instead), and I suppose I’ve always felt it was a sort of bond between us. And he loved tinsel. He loved tinsel so much that when my mother and her siblings were growing up, putting the tinsel on the tree was his special job, just as in my house, it was mine.

The first Christmas after he died, my mother bought tinsel, intending to wait til Christmas Eve to put it on the tree, leaving the tree glitter-free until then, in remembrance. Somehow, we never managed to take the step and actually open the package, and it was stored away with the Christmas things for the next year. We didn’t open it then, either, or any year thereafter, and somehow, over the years, the memorial act of not putting tinsel on the tree became habit, and then tradition.

This year, staring at my tree, I can’t help but think of my uncle, of my mother, celebrating Christmas in her newly built house, each of us separated from family during this holiday, and a part of me wants to buy a box of tinsel and strew it over the branches. I won’t, of course, because I have small dogs who like to investigate everything, and a strand of tinsel swallowed or otherwise ingested can kill an animal. And yet, even though I’ve not purchased tinsel in the eleven Christmases I’ve spent with Fuzzy, even though it’s been almost twenty years since any ornament of mine has been near the silvery stuff, a few stray strands make it onto my tree.

I’ve come to think of them as a message from my restless, artistic uncle, who died without finding his real niche – part warning, part understanding – since I’m much the same. To me, the metallic icicles are a voice from beyond.

To others, I guess they’re just tinsel.

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There's nothing worse than job hunting over the holidays, except perhaps starting a new job. In all my running around to HR meetings this week, I've seen people dressed for company parties, or decorating trees, or, at one branch of the company, a table with an electric menorah and a dreidle, and pamphlets explaining the history of Hannukah, and it makes me feel isolated, because as a new hire, I won't get to go to any of these events.

Sitting in the HR lobby this afternoon, I had the opportunity to watch many people. While I was there simply to have my fingerprints logged as part of the new hire process, some employees visited the same department to have their access badges re-activated, or, in the case of one man who gripped his cell phone with worried knuckles and left soft-pitched messages assuring his wife everything would be okay, to be fired. (I know this because he was ordered to stay in view while someone was sent to fetch his personal items.)

There were also about ten prospective employees, all interviewing for customer service positions, all nervous and freshly-washed, like children anticipating the first day of school, all about twenty-five, and most already at the peaks of their careers, even though it was only customer service.

And then there was Gregory. Oh, that's not his name (which I overheard, but will not repeat), but it's a name that suits him, and so I use it here.

Gregory sat separate from the others, his long wool coat draped over his knees, his posture perfect, even in the mushy chairs, which were too low even for me. His suit was dark, impeccably chosen, obviously expensive. His voice, when he spoke, was made of two parts experience and one part refinement. His hair was greying, his eyes were deep blue, as was his tie. His nose was red, when he walked in, but I attributed that to the weather, and the chilly walk across the parking lot.

He walked in with an air of quiet confidence that the other interviewees didn't posses, apologized in soft but firm tones for being late due to road conditions, and then reminded the receptionist (a dead ringer for Christopher Lowel, minus about fifty pounds), that he'd called to let them know he'd be late, as the roads were closed where he lived, and that while the drive had been long, he understood if it was necessary to reschedule. (When I overheard that, and the tinge of weariness in his voice, I wanted it not to be necessary. I wanted them to walk out and smile, and tell him everything would be all right, and mean it.)

From behind the relative safety of the internal corporate newspaper, which was the only available reading material other than the phone book, I watched him, noting the age lines in his face, but that he held himself with pride, the perfect manicure, the pressed suit. I wondered why such a person would be interviewing with the branch of the company where we were sitting, for jobs that were clearly entry level. I made up stories of tragic loss – his wife had died, he was a recovering alcoholic, he was a jazz musician who needed a stable income – any number of possibilities. I wanted to ask him, but knew it would be rude, so when I finished my paper and he finished his, I asked, “Want to trade?” and we did (they were different editions, each about eight pages long.)

I left the room before he did, and when I returned he was already gone, hopefully for a nice, long, successful interview. Later, when I spoke with my mother, I asked her why he might have been there, and she reminded me, “Honey, the fact that he was, as you guessed, at least fifty, is enough.”

It is terrifying to hunt for a job at the age of thirty-five. How much more so to be fifteen years beyond that, and forced to start your life over? I don't think I'd have been as calm. I wish him well, the man I will make myself think of as Gregory, and hope for the best.

Laughing on the bus
Playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said â™be careful his bowtie is really a cameraâ™

â™toss me a cigarette, I think thereâ™s one in my raincoatâ™
â™we smoked the last one an hour agoâ™
So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field.
–Simon & Garfunkel, America

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