Merry Christmas 2010

Merry Christmas! I'm afraid of saying "Happy Holidays!" since I read some recent irate letters to the editor of the Carroll County (Maryland) Times and also some comments on Facebook. I thought that there were at least three holidays in December this year: Hanukah, Kwanza, and Christmas.... Perhaps one can avoid ill will with all believers and non-believers at this time of year by saying: "Happy New Year!"

01. Tantrum. Yesterday, Elaine and I spent 5 (!) hours shopping for Christmas gifts. At one store, a 4 year old girl was laying on the floor, kicking her feet while her mother tried, in a nice tone of voice, to get her to relinquish the expensive and breakable Christmas ornament that she was clutching with a "death grip."

Elaine, seeing that the mother did not know how to handle the situation, addressed the child and said that she should remember that Santa Claus is always watching and remembering bad behavior. This caused the child to at least stop screaming and look intently at Elaine.

Since I was pushing Elaine in her wheelchair and Elaine knew I was behind her, she thought that the child would see me as Santa and repent. However, Elaine forgot that during the afternoon, I had had my beard trimmed. I lost most of my fluffy white beard and no longer looked like that jolly old codger. So, after pausing to look our way, and not seeing Santa, the coast was clear for the child to continue to scream and carry on.

Over the years, I discovered that if you let a screaming child continue to act that way and you completely ignore them, suddenly they will look around, and finding no audience, stop their tantrum. Apparently, the exasperated mother did not want to do that and finally grabbed the ornament roughly out of the kid's grip, picked her up by the nape of her coat collar and hustled her out of the store, still kicking and screaming. (I will have to make sure I have a hunk of coal to leave in this kid's stocking on Christmas eve.)

02. Shoplifting? On the way out of our last store yesterday, Elaine noticed an elderly woman stuffing boxes of $10. "electronic coin counters" into a massive shopping bag. She wondered if the woman was shoplifting and should be reported. We discussed it a bit.

a. Did she look like a thief? (No, she looked like a kindly old lady.)
b. Was there anybody to tell? (Nobody in sight, it was close to 11pm and only one or two cashiers were working.)
c. Were there cameras recording floor activity? (Yes, all over the place. Recently, a TV show disclosed how viewers in hidden store offices watch all of the activity in the store and report suspicious activity to hired detectives. .. so, remember that when you scratch your butt and think nobody can see you.)

We decided not to get involved. What do you think we should have done?

03. Recession? Once again this year, we had to ride around and around to get a place to park. People were parked on grass, across the street, in the driveways, .. all over the place. And the stores were so crowded we had a hard time getting around. Also, we had to wait in line to get waited on. Kohl's Department Store even had numbers to give out ... like they have at deli counters in super markets.

04. Happy Valentine's Day! Now that most of the Christmas gifts have been bought and store shelves are fairly empty, the Valentine's Day stuff is making an appearance!

05. Decorations. Most of the houses where we live have lots of wreaths and lights as Christmas decorations. I try not to be ostentatious, so I decorate "lightly".. by that I mean that I usually put up one light, in the form of a Mennonite star. Since my old stars had gone nova, I bought a new one for this year. Have you ever tried to put one of those things together? It is a job.

I put most of it together and got very frustrated. Elaine felt sorry for me and finished the job. Yesterday I hung it outside with a long green (I couldn't get a white one) outdoor electrical cord. It is a bit bright. So bright that the three wise men would probably not have a very hard time following it.

That star, as well as three beat up old wreathes, a small Christmas flag, and a big shiny new wreath for the front door, are our Christmas decorations this year.

06. Uncalled for decorations. A certain Mr. Vogel of Towson, Maryland, woke up to find his formerly undecorated house, decorated with ornaments, animals, and lights.. all illuminated by long extension cords. Mr. Vogel called the police, who are investigating. Is this somebody's attempt at a 2010 version of A Christmas Carol?

07. Merry Christmas, Hon! I'll bet that the Cafe Hon in Hamden, Baltimore City, Maryland, is decorated with Christmas Flamingos. They will probably be the usual pink, but with green and red ornaments. Hamden goes in big for Christmas.

Unbelievably to me, some grinches are protesting the fact that Ms Whiting arranged to get a copyright on the term "HON". They have actually picketed her establishment. Get a life, guys!

08. Flash! I just heard that an anteater baby has been born at a local zoo. I don't know if this is the Baltimore Zoo or the DC National Zoo. But how are they going to get any ants for food at this cold time of year?

09. Statistics. As a computer programmer for the Social Security Administration, I supplied our research and statistics analysts with record selections and counts from every computer run. Most of this information was provided to a nice lady who wore famously outlandish hats. Her office was across the street from the main Social Security building and I always wondered what she did in her office that produced such marvelous statistics, used by all kinds of Government Agencies.

One day I got her permission to come and see how this statistical research was done. I expected to see a battery of giant computers whirring and spitting out beautifully typed reports based on the information provide by us to her. Instead, I found a pleasant little office with a gigantic round table in the middle, around which ten grandmotherly looking ladies were rapidly walking, chattering away amicably, as they extracted and inserted pages of printed material out of and into large stacks of other pages of printed material.

I asked her why she didn't automate this activity and she replied that this way there was no duplication of information and therefore no distorted statistics. O.K., I guess I kind of understood that... thirty years ago. But I'll bet this process is done differently today.

10. Special statistics. (As reported in This Week magazine.)

a. One blinks about 20,000 times each day.
b. The U.S. Government has 854,000 people with a Top Secret clearance.
c. 49% of U.S. voters think that President Obama doesn't deserve a second term.
d. 51% of U.S. voters think that President Obama does deserve a second term.

11. Haiku!

a. Crossword Haiku:

Bob Klahn wrote a clue for a recent crossword puzzle that I think is a classic:

"A poem like this, of 17 syllables, split 5-7-5."

b. T-Shirt Haiku:

"Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator."

c. Cat Haiku:

"You never feed me
Pershaps I'll sleep on your face
That will sure show you."

12. Sex.

Actually, I have nothing to say about sex right now. I just put the label in to try to lure more people to this blog.

.............
Merry Christmas to most and Happy Holidays to a few. And: Happy New Year to all!

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Easter Thoughts

Its a beautiful sunny Easter day here in Maryland. Our cats are rolling around in the sun rays coming through the windows. The temperature is up to 50 degrees and the wind is in a good direction that will allow us (me and the cats) to sit outside for awhile and soak up vitamin D.

This is the first year that my family hasn't had an Easter egg hunt, and that is kind of sad. However, I'm sure that the young members will find some goodies in baskets that the "bunny" has left.

When Super 8 movies were in fashion, I recorded egg hunts that we always had when we lived in Randallstown, Maryland. The night before Easter, the "bunny" would hide about 100 eggs that she and her helper spent hours hard-boiling and painting. This usually lasted until about 3 am, and naturally the kids would be up around 7 am and bugging us to let them look for eggs.

I have three wonderful kids (now grown of course). Diane was an expert at finding eggs. She would methodically look and find eggs. She always found most of them. Elizabeth followed her around and got the few that Diane missed. Chris just lazily looked around and was satisfied if he found just a few. After the hunt, the girls would go into their Easter dance... they did dance steps that "Buck and Bubbles" would have liked to have learned. And I recorded it all on Super 8 movie film.

Sometimes the children's great Aunt Marjorie would come down from Massachusetts for Easter. She adored my children and would bring them all kinds of special Easter eggs. Some were even mechanical. I think that I wrote a blog about the hundreds of fuzzy bunnies that I bought at an auction in Gamber, Maryland. Marjorie took some home with her and decorated them with beads and bangles and would bring them back for Easter. Once, she even made one for me... fancy colored beads and ribbons.. this was the "mother bunny". I wanted to bring that to Social Security as part of my "bunny ploy", but the plan fell through when the bunnies began to disappear. (read my blog)

Aunt Marjorie was a favorite person to me and my family. She as well as my Grandparents brought me up and I'm sure she considered me as her child. I loved her as I did my mother and grandparents and I don't remember if I ever said "I love you" to her.. but perhaps my deeds conveyed it.

Once, when I was very young (7?) my Aunt Laurana gave me an old-style record that I could play on our wind-up Victrola. (This was long before 78's, 45's, discs, and CD's.) It was called "The Laughing Record".. and that is all that was on it... laughing.. laughing .. laughing.. over and over... I played it all the time. I loved that record. (I noticed that Aunt Marjorie seemed to get grumpy after I had played it for an hour or so.)

One day, I came home from school and looked for my record because I wanted to play it for a while before supper. I found it on the rocking chair, broken in half! Aunt Marjorie said that she hadn't seen it and had sat on it. I went ballistic! This was my favorite thing in the world. It took me a long time to forgive her.

Thirty years later, when my family had settled in Randallstown, a package arrived from Aunt Marjorie. It was a gift for me, a beautiful silver Christmas Tree ornament. Since we had already put up our Christmas Tree, we made room for the special ornament. That night, as we were sleeping at 2 am, we began to hear some laughter coming from the front room. Armed with a heavy book, I tiptoed out of the bedroom to protect my family. Nobody was there, but coming from the tree and Marjorie's ornament was laughter, over and over. It took a while to find the tiny shut-off button. (This had to be Marjorie's way of saying: "I'm sorry about the record, but listen to this ornament and understand my side of the story."

Easter moments with Aunt Marjorie were captured on film, as well as our Christmas adventures. I tried to splice all of this film together to make it easier to show. Over the years the family lost interest because of the effort that was needed to set up a screen, the projector and all those rolls of film. However, at one time a new employee of mine asked if I had film that he could put on a Beta tape. I brought him a bag of spliced, unspliced, unraveled, bent, inked, chewed by a cat, etc... super 8 film. He salvaged a bunch of it and dubbed appropriate music for each scene and gave me a "family treasure." We had hours of fun running the tape over and over on Sunday nights.

However, Beta went away. Somebody retaped it on VCR tape. It lost something in translation, but it is still viewed.. in fact, Elizabeth took it home to view last week.

In one of the many boxes of "stuff" that I didn't want to throw away in our last move, is a pile of that Super 8 film.. all mixed up and intertwined. I'm hoping that somebody in the family will volunteer to sort it all out and do a re-tape using modern methods. I don't want to lose the record of those wonderful holiday times.

PS. My Baltimore friend, Lee, says that when he was young all of the kids would play "crack eggs" on Easter. He says this is a German custom. I have never heard of it before and I can't figure out the rules or reason for it from what he says. I'll bet Kevin Dayhoff knows about it.