Melsville

Christmas Music

And so this is Christmas.  The Asian lady from the Davis Square T stop is in Harvard Square singing Christmas carols.   For months, this lady, with her wooden guitar had always been in the Davis Square T stop whenever I was there.  Always there, and always singing “Annie’s Song” without hint of irony or satire.  She seems happy, so I’ve always liked her.   Now, as I’m running from Davis to Porter, Porter to Harvard and home again, I hear her in another station singing other songs.

In Concord, when  the center of town was the site of two holiday traditions.  The first was the night when they kept the shops open into the night.  Not a very eventful event, but it was fun.  We  walked through the bright, dark, cold streets seeing friends, visiting stores, and shopping.   And then, there was Christmas Eve.

On Christmas Eve, people gathered to sing christmas carols in Concord center.   It was always cold, a thin, sharp cold, and the cold, and I was usually wearing  a dress and party shoes.  My family stopped in the center on our way to friends’ home for a traditional Feast of the Seven Fish.  We sang,  “Joy to The World,” or “We Three Kings” from out of booklets that we’d hung onto over the years.  Everyone sang loudly, not everyone sang well.  Remember all the Whoes in Whoville singing hand in hand? That’s what it was. 

Cars and Toys

Toy cars never interested me, and I never imagined they would.  Who  would know that a trip to a toy store would set me dreaming of driving through a glittering mod-tropilos?  And yet, there she was.  In the crowed parking lot, actually shining like an actual new penny was a copper-colored Austin Mini.   An original Mini, a car older than I am, the sister of the car my mother learned to drive.  This car had obviously lead an eventful life, but she was so beautiful.

You’ll never know how large a Mini Cooper is unless you’ve see an Austin Mini.  They are the perfect little toy car.  They look like something you could pick up and carry home, and that’s what I wanted to do.  It didn’t matter that I can’t drive; that car and I could share a funky, young,  girl-about-town life.  I hated turning my back on that lovely, but I had Christmas  shopping to do.

This is my third Christmas with a daughter, and it hasn’t gotten any easier.  It’s harder actually, since she’s exposed to more TV commercials than she did last year,  and she can see what they are selling; some are selling passes to girldom.  Mini-ovens, castles for twirling Barbie princesses,; Emma asks, “can we get that?”  When I ask her what she likes about it, all she sometimes says is,  “ It’s a girl-toy”. 

Now, I’m a girly-girl,  I and I was one when I was four.   When I was four, I loved dressing up, caring for my dolls and animals and having tea-parties.  I would never pull Emma away from enjoying these things.    It’s all about exploring girlhood , figuring out what she likes and what she can totally do without for now.

Our job that day was to follow Emma around  toy stores and see what she liked.  Baby dolls, when Emma saw that shelf filled with baby dolls,, she headed right for it.  She seemed to want to play with them all.  The next morning, she was pretty clear when she told me she really wanted a baby-doll; a baby-doll and a spinning top.   Add books, Legos and a few other bits of fun, and there’s Emma’s Christmas goodies

Standing in front of the Austin Mini, Jamie said, “look Emma! It’s your size!”  Oh, she thought it was cute alright, but it wasn’t love at first sight. 

Some Good Things and Why They Are Good

I just ate a plate of latkes at Rene’s Cafe.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I love potato pancakes.  That Rene’s keeps some kind of potato pancakes on the menu is one of the reasons I love it.

The best thing about Rene’s Cafe isn’t the potato pancakes of the eggs Benedict.  Liam and I go to Rene’s together on the Monday mornings when he’s home while Emma is at pre-school.  As soon as his side order of bacon hits the table, he attacks it; it might even be gone by the time his pancakes arrive.  I sit across from him, slowly eating veggie eggs benny. Liam can’t understand why I would replace the canadian bacon with spinach and tomato slices, and he can’t believe how slowly I eat.

Liam and I talk about stuff.  He tells me about his classmates.  I tell him about Mahatma Gandhi, and we agree that his birthday should be a holiday.  We discuss Harry Portter;  why everyone might rather that Percy Weasly  died in place of  Fred but that maybe it had to be Fred.   The best thing about Rene's is that, at Rene’s don’t rush their patrons.  The best thing about Rene’s is that Liam and I can stay and talk. as long as we want.

A writing challenge for the Winter is going to be to write a piece of Harry Potter fan-fiction.  When I’ve finished a story about George Weasly, I’ll give it to Liam, so we can talk about it over breakfast at Rene’s.

The Campbell /  O’Keefes have made pacts with the Campbells  and the Bendas; this Christmas, we are shopping only for the kids.  I love shopping for children, particularly at Christmas.  I like it because I do it in person.  I spend time in Porter Square Books  looking at the picture books  and seeing the illustrations for myself and reading the first pages of novels. I enjoy talking to the salespeople and finding out what books they recommend.   I walk up Mass Ave to a real  toy store; one where the toys are displayed in interesting ways.  These are toys that a buyer selected, toys that look like fun.  I might even get to see a toy out of the box, to see what it feels like, how a kid would play with it.  The salespeople can talk about the the toys because they know what they are selling. 

I like shopping in small stores because people working in these stores are sure of what they sell.  People who work in stores don’t get paid poorly to pack and ship boxes.  I like shopping in stores because I realize how much  I’m actually buying and how much it actually costs.  I like shopping in stores because going to the store is an event.

Yes, I do buy presents on-line.  When I’m buying CDs, computer gear or hard-to-find books, it makes sense.   For years, our route has been covered by the same UPS man, and I like him.  He carried boxes in for me when I was pregnant and shouldn’t have lifted things.  He came to our house twice in one day so he could bring me a late-arriving package two days before Christmas. He always calls me “Mrs. O’Keefe”, and I don’t let many people do that.

Last week, I took my First-Level Kung Fu test.  Instructor Karen reviewed my test.  When we scheduled the test, she tried to put me at ease saying, “I’ll be reviewing the test; it’s only me.  Only you Karen, the incredible woman who was still leading kids’ classes and two days before her son was born, only you Karen, who, cute as you are could probably snap somebody in half.


What makes Karen ( and Jonathan, and Marc, but I’m talking about Karen today), s o great is that she knows how to help me and when to leave me alone. When I was working my way through the Long Fist and Southern Fist forms,  I barely noticed her at all.  I felt like I was all alone working.  Full of purpose and all alone.

With Karen’s help, I proved a few things .  Because I wasn’t trying to keep up with a roomful of people while Jonathan counted out ten side-kicks on either side,  I could do them a little better (not much better, I will always hate side-kicks) if I did them slowly.  Because Karen insisted that I take more time with it, I realized that I actually do a passable snap kick with my left leg.  I can pull either leg up to my chest and stand there; I didn’t know that.

She’s the tough one, Karen is.  She doesn't modify moves for me as often as Marc ot Jonathan do.  Now, I adore Instructor Jonathan, don’t imagine that I don’t, but I think I still scare him.  Small women with Cerebral Palsy probably scare lots of able-bodied men.  I’m not sure that Jonathan has ever gotten over the fear that I was going to fall over and break something.

Last night, Jonathan lead the class.  I hadn’t seen him in maybe a month,  and his classes always are fun.  I walked home though the cold dark, with a few snowflakes swirling in the air.  I’m not crazy about the wind, but it’s almost Christmas, so it should be snowing.

I woke up this morning wishing for the tiny apple pies my mother always made; cups of pastry filled with homemade chunky applesauce and big dollops of whipped cream.   I missed those, and the sausage rolls and the many-layered wonder of Christmas trifle  Mama always made.  Her trifle recipe left the world when she did,  so here comes my yearly effort at making something like it.  One week before Christmas Eve, it’s good to miss these things.

What's Hanging on YOUR Tree

In the days when Christmas was enforced as the primary Winter holiday, Christmas ornaments were a yearly were classroom projects.   Skeins  of yarn, rolls of shiny paper, stacks of popsicle sticks, and blizzards of glitter, the y became stars,, circles and bells.  I also remember making an angle out of a gold paper cup, a paper doilies and a tiny Styrofoam sphere; for years, she topped our Christmas trees.   

My mother saved home-made decorations, although she always hoped that some would vanish somewhere between the basement boxes and the tree.  Some were so old that we  had forgotten who made it, or even what it used to be.

Such was the case wit the Xmas Lozange.   Made out of melted yellow plastic, a foreboder of the melty beads, it was long and shiny.  Because its texture was gravely, I thought that the plastic had never melted properly.  As the years past, we all agreed it was butt-ugly, and neither my brother Jonathan nor I took responsibility for it.  He blamed me, but I absolutely know that he created the Xmas Lozange.   The last time we our families gathered to the tree with my mother, all admitted we hated it, and the Xmas Lozange hit the trash.

My mother made ornaments as well.  She sewed them out of felt,  She made the classics, the tree, the Santa, the stockings the teddy-bears and the reindeer, and she made ones that made sense only to the four of us;  who would decorate her tree with a felt Sherlock Holmes except the youngest member of the Friends of Irene Adler?


Like most of his family, Liam makes things.  Three years ago, he built a home for my Yoda figure.  It sits on my desk an intentionally-lopsided hut, so perfect for the squat green Jedi.  Right now, he has a business building habitats for the beastie-shaped pencil-topping erasers that are popular with his classmates.  Demand is now so high that Liam and his fellow builders  have needed to fire their sales-people.  Liam may make himself obsolete because, since kids pay Liam and his friends in erasers, they may eventually be the only ones who have any.

This weekend, I am planning a trip to Pearl Art Supplies in Central Square.  Bypassing the alluring aisles of chalk pastels,  I’ll head strait for the craft supplies in the basement.  Felt, Popsicle sticks, melty beads and anything that sparkles, I’m planning to come home with some of everything.  The art-students buying brushes and fixative upstairs may wish they were going home  to make Christmas Jedi.