We’ve been burning the candle at both ends lately in the lead up to Christmas.
We finally got our tree decorated last Friday:
…and put out a few more decorations, just in time for an evening get together with some dear old friends.
The next day my daughter had friends of her own over to decorate cookies. 
The final products were charming:
…in a rather surreal sort of way!
The boys had fun decorating cookies of their own with a “Ninjabread Cookie Kit”:
On Sunday we headed up to Arlington. That evening my friend Victoria and I went to a Mount Vernon by Candlelight tour:
We sang Christmas carols all the way back to her house, where we ended the evening by lighting her Advent wreath:
On Monday, the kids and I went over to my friend Janel’s house, where we decorated more cookies, sang more Christmas carols, and even caught a glimpse of Santa as he cruised through Rockville, MD on a fire truck!
I got to have lunch with this sweet friend today:
Afternoon tea at the St. Regis with my friendy Wendy:
And dinner with my family at an old favorite, Jang Won Korean Chinese Restaurant in Annandale:
Tomorrow we hit the road to head to Princeton, where we’ll be spending Christmas with the rest of my family.
A friend from my high school days came for a visit this weekend…
Back in the day, Victoria and I shared a locker, worked on plays together, and sang duets in the hallways after late night rehearsals when everyone else had gone home. It was a sad day for me when she left Yorktown High School to go back to her beloved Waldorf school. She knew back then that she wanted to be a Waldorf teacher, and that’s exactly what she is today.
She speaks so passionately and eloquently about the beautiful, organic way she teaches her students, it makes me sad to have never had that kind of educational experience myself. From our conversations I got the sense that the marking of time and the observance of cycles is an important part of a Waldorf education. I heard her casually mention terms I’d only ever read before, like Michaelmas and winter solstice. One of the first things she asked me when she walked into my house was, “Where’s all your advent stuff?!”
Ummm…in a box buried under other boxes deep in the bowels of my basement maybe?
OK, so we’re not entirely ready for Christmas, but we did go to my husband’s early music ensemble Christmas concert…
The photo reminds me of an article I forwarded to my very tall husband this weekend. It summarizes the finding of researchers at Konkuk University in Korea, who conclude that for a woman, the greater the height differential with her husband, the happier she is in her marriage. The effect, however, entirely dissipates after 18 years of marriage, which is exactly how long we’ve been married. But hey! This shortie is still happy after 18 years of marriage with her giant of a husband!
After the concert, my friend and I stayed up late into the night, chatting and folding and glueing stars together from special kite paper she brought, because that’s the kind of thing that happens when you hang with a Waldorf teacher!
My friend Katherine came over for lunch and we played with our food!
Peeling a massive Korean pear in one piece…
Did you know there’s a little bunny inside every peanut?
And a star in every apple?
Katherine left with a gift from Victoria:
Victoria and I made a quick trip to Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall…
SundayI found some pictures on my camera that I didn’t recognize. My early-rising son had captured this gorgeous sunrise.
The gift that keeps on giving:
My children and I sang in the choir for the candlelight Lessons and Carols service, which means that the Christmas season is now officially upon us.
For the first year ever, we, or rather I‘ve decided to have a real live tree that we can plant after Christmas. We got it at this magical place just down the road from where we live:
Behold our adorable chubby little Baby Blue Colorado Spruce:
Now if only we could get motivated to actually decorate it!
First posted on December 28, 2013.
When we were younger and would gather together with all of our extended family for the holidays, there were a few uncles we would avoid like the plague. One of them, in particular, would freak us out by placing his hands around our faces and lifting us up off the ground. Later, when my sisters complained of this mistreatment, he said, “Hey, I did you a big favor! Look how tall you are now. I didn’t do it to her (he glanced meaningfully in my general direction) and look…”
My sister reminded us of another practice that our own dad would engage in when we were little. He would gently stroke our forehead until we fell into a stupor and then would give it a sudden, smart smack.
We chortled as we fondly reminisced about these and other sadistic Korean practices.
“What was that last one called?” my brother asked as he wiped away tears of laughter.
“Love,” my sister responded without hesitation.
After Christmas breakfast, my siblings and I remained at the table chatting. My brother disappeared and returned again with a piece of paper. He began industriously drawing up a list.
And then it happened. My brother became that uncle:
Remember, kids…it’s called love!
It’s hard getting back into the routine after a wonderful break and time with our family. I’m glad to have the pictures to remind me of the fun we had. This is one of my favorite photos from Christmas. It’s of my son and nephew, the oldest and youngest boys in our extended family. And a special bonus – my dad in the backyard, caught with a rare grin on his face!
In days of old, it was foretold that, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
And it came to pass that people traveled great distances…
Every one came to adore the new baby…
The shepherds came with their sheepdogs…
There were three kings…
…and although it is not widely known, there were a couple of queens too…
There were gifts…
And a multitude of heavenly host sang, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men“:
MONDAY
Quiz Time!
In preparation for the upcoming holiday season and seeing our extended family, my sister and I decided to give the kids an after-breakfast quiz. “What is your Grandfather’s first name?” “What is the name of your cousins’ new dog?” etc. etc.
The kids decided we should be quizzed too. After lunch they gave us questions that included: “In which month are most babies born?” “How much does the earth weigh?” “Why can you not take a picture of a man with a wooden leg in British Columbia?” (Answers at end of post).
Having been roundly humiliated by this latest set of questions, we decided to up the ante with new questions of our own, relating to our work: “What are the ingredients of a roux?” “What is the purpose of a Form I-765?”
The kids were not amused. The next round, a math quiz, continued at the shabu shabu restaurant we went to for dinner…The kids posed questions along the lines of: “What is the cubed root of 512?”
Here was the final bonus round…
Adding only mathematical symbols (NOT numbers), make the three numbers to the left equal 6:
0 0 0 = 6
1 1 1 = 6
2 2 2 = 6
3 3 3 = 6
4 4 4 = 6
5 5 5 = 6
6 6 6 = 6
7 7 7 = 6
8 8 8 = 6
9 9 9 = 6
My sister and I, English and Russian majors respectively, looked at each other blankly.
“Here! I’ll even do one for you as an example,” my son generously offered.
2 + 2 + 2 = 6
My sister and I puzzled our way through almost all of them, but were stumped by the last few.
Again, my son tried to save us from utter humiliation with what he thought was a huge hint.
“Factorials.”
Alas, this did nothing to shed light upon our benighted ignorance.
“What’s a factorial?” I asked my sister. She shrugged.
Quiz Time is not over. Not by a long shot. We’ve already got the next round (“The Etiquette Round”) queued up and ready to go.
TUESDAY
The National Gallery
WEDNESDAY
Princeton
The rest of the tribe arrives tonight…
Answers to Round 2 Quiz questions: August, 1,000 trillion metric tons or 6 sextillion, You can’t take a picture with a leg.
Many years ago, in one of my darkest and loneliest of hours, I made a friend who became like a sister to me. I was living alone at the time. Every night I would cry myself to sleep in a grim, rat and cockroach-infested apartment in a welfare hotel that was gradually being converted into graduate student housing. I know this sounds maudlin and over the top…like something out of the 19th century Russian novels I was reading for my degree at the time, but it’s true.
When my friend and I decided to become roommates, we lucked into that rarest of commodities – a beautiful and affordable sublet in an elegant pre-war building in New York City. It was a sign. For one magical year, we lived in an apartment with a fireplace and a large turret window overlooking Riverside Park. That year it seemed like anything was possible and everything was going our way. We spent many a night talking and laughing into the wee hours of the morning. We threw lots of parties. We started a graduate student singing group. Two of the people we auditioned were already friends who knew each other from another choral group. They sang their way into the group and into our hearts. A few years later, we married them. Many more years and six kids later we live a few hours away from each other, but we try to get together as often as we can.
My friend still knows how to throw a great party. This weekend my husband had to stay behind to fulfill his professional singing obligations, but the kids and I drove up to Maryland to attend the party of the year. …a cozy affair with just my friends and all of our kids.
While the kids decorated cookies:
I wandered around feeling nostalgic as I looked at Christmas decorations I remembered from our old Riverside Drive apartment…
I admired some new ones too:
After dinner, we played a game that involved drawing winter scenes on paper plates…
while they were perched on top of our heads!
We opened Christmas crackers.
They contained whistles that played an entire musical scale…
So naturally we played a few songs…
under the direction of our very able conductor:
We played dreidel:
This boy may have lost the dreidel game, but he’s a triple crown winner nevertheless:
We opened gifts:
We were sorely missing one of our tenors, but my favorite part of the evening was singing Christmas carols:
How lucky I feel to still be making music and merry together all these years later with these dearest of friends.
From the 2012 archives…
Things have gotten rather crazy around here…We got our Christmas tree, but it’s been standing in our family room, undecorated and unwatered all week. The advent calendars, the lights, the snow globes, and the nutcrackers are all still tucked away in their boxes in the basement. The boys and I came up with a fun idea for this year’s holiday song video, but we haven’t had the time to record it yet.
We are in full-on-end-of-the-semester-survival-mode around here, and although we can see the light at the end of the tunnel faintly flickering in the distance, we are still just trying to slog through each day…Until we get our heads above water, I’ll be popping by now and then, mostly with old posts, starting with this one – our first holiday video from 2011. Gosh, those kids look so young!
o wonderful, wonderful 