Do you or your family make any special dishes for the holidays?
Um
Yes, only it’s complicated…
I’m not sure why, but I’ve always had a thing for tradition. Not just mine, I love to hear about everyones! Don’t spare me the details, I want to hear about all of it! One year my high school put on the play Fiddler on the Roof. I painted sets for weeks, maybe months. That was my introduction to theater. I fell in love. With the play and with theater in general.
Little did I know then that one day I would be able to relate to the story.
When I had my first baby I got a lot of advice. A LOT. So much that it was actually uncomfortable which is why outside of this blog, I try never to give advice (unless asked specifically). And Especially not to new parents… (they have the internet, and besides, no one wants my out dated ideas)
When I was still quite young, Someone advised me to make traditions for my family, they said it would be like glue and keep teenagers close. I loved my sweet babies so much that of course I wanted THAT! Uh…good and bad news here. It worked but…
I want to say we got a little too attached to our traditions. This could be a little hilarious or it could be a bit of problem. I seriously just made them all up. Some are from my childhood and I made them fun. Some I borrowed and made our own, but mostly just conjured silliness based on things I read about…
So yes, we have traditional foods that we only make around the holiday season, specific to each holiday. We have activities, we have music, we have books and movies. We decorate. I being an artist freaking love to decorate. I stay up too late making stuff, designing around a theme, it’s kind of ridiculous, but it’s what I love. The excuse of a holiday? The carrot of keeping my people close? What in the world?!
Kids grow up, they get married, they move away, they have their own families. They have their own traditions to make. Even though everyone will probably agree that my holiday traditions are the pinochle of the best of the best, kids grow up, they get married and they do it their way. Tradition as Tevye and his wife learned, is as precarious as a fiddler on a very slanted pitched roof. Life is really all about change. Change is more where my life is at, especially now, so I’m all ears. What fun foods are you making for the holiday season?!
I read a book about the magic of gratitude. What a perfect month to have this gifted to me. I read it on the train from SD to SLO and I’ll probably read it again while I’m here . I want to remember the many good suggestions. Maybe it’s a study guide for life.
I’ve never used the term ‘magic’ in conjunction with gratitude before, I’m glad to be introduced to an old subject with a new twist.
Gratitude can change your life? Daily exercises in saying thank you, feeling thankful, being grateful, will change the way our brains work. I believe this.
If we get into the practice of looking for positive things and feeling grateful for them our brains will gradually shift to sorting and sifting and seeking positives. Similar to when you want or buy a certain brand of car, you start to see them everywhere. We recently got a white jeep, even before it was ours, it seemed like everyone owned a jeep, mostly white ones. This happens because of a part in our brains called the reticular activator. Its role is to pay attention to some things while ignoring others. It’s a primitive region in our brainstem that regulates sleep, awareness, even fight or flight. It decides what we can sleep to (the sound of traffic if we are used to it) and what will wake us up ( a crying baby). It is constantly looking for what seems important and ignoring what doesn’t.
The fun side of knowing this for me, is that I can program my RAS on purpose. Most brain things happen automatically so to have some real time control is interesting. I know I have done this while shopping, while designing, while staging.
So now it’s been suggested to actively look for things in a day to be thankful for. Minimum ten, choose a daily favorite, look back in time for some, then imagine things working out perfectly and feeling grateful in the future. Intentions wrapped in gratitude? I love that.
It’s not that I’m not already thankful, the idea is to amplify my attention to it. (I’m sure there were just as many white jeeps on the road before one came into my life). This has already been a magical month full of things that I’m beyond grateful for. How can it get better than this?!
Well, I guess I’ll program my recticular activating system to search for more magical moments of gratitude and see what happens…
Stone, Bear, Pepper, Midnight, Willow, Hazel and Peter. All pets that are not really mine, but kind of are because they belong to my people. The people I love most in the world, their pets are my favorite animals (because I KNOW them).
Stone was my first grand. I met him when my son picked G and I up from the airport one time many years ago. He was a rolly poly puppy who stole our hearts as we meandered through traffic. Was getting a puppy a good idea? Uh? Now? By the time we were dropped off and for every day after we were in love. Both G and I will agree, probably the whole family will agree, Stone was the best. Best. Dog. Ever.
Then one by one along came the others. Each with its own personality and drama and love to add to our lives.
I have so many stories. Stone and the skunk, Stone and the coyote pups, Pepper needing emergency surgery the morning the kids were set to leave on a trip. They dropped their kiddos off at school, her off at the vet and I later collected the three from after school activities and drove to the vet for one sweet post-op cat. Even the vet commented on her personality. Pepper purred and purred as she was being pushed into her carrying crate. Best surgery patient I’ve ever met, (humans included) A story for another time…
Here’s one about Bear and I.
Bear is the yellow lab who had to follow Stone. (the black lab puppy turned wonder dog). Stone was smart and beautiful and calm. He could win anyone over with his polite attitude, good looks and playful charm. Stone was a very hard act to follow.
Bear was cute. At first anyway, but he quickly grew out of cute and into ‘the chewer’. He chewed up EVERYTHING! Shoes, toys, delivery packages, sunglasses, plants, clothes, pens, walls, furniture… you name it, no matter how many dog toys or chew items we bought for him, nailed down or not, he ate it. The yard went from plush to baren And fast. They had to get him a special bowl so he wouldn’t eat his food in three seconds. He was dopey and pushy and jumpy. He had trouble receiving attention. Even the calmest pat would excite him so entirely that he became a biting jumping crazed monster. (I say this with love)
I’m the baby/pet sitter who never says no. (Did I mention these are my baby’s babies and that I love them?)
So here I was watching Pepper and Midnight, the nocturnal cats and three year old Bear who has calmed, but is still himself, for two very long weeks.At the end, my marriage was still intact, maybe loosely but we’re all fine now…
I had hurt my foot and was coming down with a cold and it was raining. Bear pulled hard on the leash when I walked him so I tried walking him up hill as much as possible. He struggled to settle at night and woke up long before dawn at my house, so I ended up at his house and alone due to all the non sleeping, rain and coughing.
On a particularly rainy stretch of days, I binge watched a dog training show that helped dogs and owners nix bad post lock down behaviors. The guy kept reminding the owners to portray ‘calm confidence’ which is my favorite term for being regulated. I started watching as a tired, sick and injured spectator. Then one morning, I looked at Bear and thought, we should try to ‘master the walk’ (apparently the hardest thing) Which we magically DID! I confess that I was part of the pulling, over excitable problem. Did you know dogs can feel how you are feeling through the leash?? And guess what? I learned to feel how he was feeling through the leash right back!
I learned that I can change my energy on purpose with intention, even in less than ideal conditions and in seconds!. I have that much power. We all do! I saw one person after another learn to communicate calm confidence to their dog. I learned how to teach Bear to respect my space. How to calm, how to not pull at all! Bear didn’t chew up a single thing and to this day he sits very still to have his leash attached and waits to be invited forward. I, who am more of a dog un trainer, then trainer, taught him. (animals in general tend to act like they know me, even when they don’t, it’s weird, sometimes they don’t act their best, it’s a thing from my childhood, Dogs and cats followed me home ALL the time. I can’t explain it) I bring out the worst in other people’s pets, so you can imagine how the grand pets act when they see me or my car or someone who looks like me.
Without treats, without commands Bear transformed. He became calmly confident.
Stone embodied calm confidence. I used to think confidence was something you were born with or were taught in childhood. Bear and I learned how to teach it to ourselves and encourage it from each other, even from the other dogs and people we passed.
I will never forget seeing calm confidence in action. Watching the transformations on the show and then in real life seemed pretty magical. Learning how to conjure up this state even when I wasn’t feeling it, still feels magical. Leading Bear into that state, looked impossible, but was easy and even fun! I went from dreading every walk, to adding extra walks and enjoying them!
Crazy, full on Christmas miracle?! Maybe..
I do love my favorite animals, they always have much to teach and give and add to my life.
My family loves to eat. There are a lot of us so narrowing down three favorites is harder than it sounds. Add that we are fickle and change things up a lot, I can hardly speak for the whole group, but here goes my best jab at it.
1.Pasta with red sauce, meatballs, sausage, peppers and onions, ragu.., however you do it you can’t go wrong with a good red sauce
2.steak and potatoes, maybe a green salad, maybe potato salad, a simple vegetable
I like the concept of dedicating a day to give and be thankful.To be thankful and give. A whole day to pause and count up all the wonderful blessings life has tossed my way and to look for ways to give to others…
I also like that as humans our one constant is change. Every year we are different. Every year we bring a new version of ourselves to the literal table.
This year I’ve been plunked down in my California beach hometown to see my kids, grandkids and good good friends. A welcome interruption from my stint in the North East. This unexpected twist has me feeling, you guessed it, intense gratitude!
There’s a grandparent thing that is unexpectedly amazing. It has something to do with the fact that you get to just be yourself and these adorable people LOVE you. From baby to teen, for some odd reason, you show up, and yeah. There are no words for how utterly awesome this phenomenon in itself is.
Our just turned two baby lives near her other set of grandparents, so she sees them often. At one point she realized that there were two of us. Two grandmas! Two! She told everyone. She told both of us. She told it like someone who just realized they won the lottery, twice!
How do babies know that they are this loved and this adored ? How does this same feeling span seamlessly across every age? And here’s another part of the miracle. It’s not dna. G is not my kids dad, but he is absolutely their kid’s grandpa. I know many examples of Grand-parenting where little to no dna is involved. What there is is love. Kids understand that part very well.
Here are a few things I’m feeling tearfully grateful for this year: (besides the miracle of my being here),
A one-on-one game of football using a cornhole bean bag for the ball with the sweetest 9 year old, only boy in the group (who will still slip his hand into mine while we walk and relentlessly try to get a word in edgewise around his hilariously chatty sisters ). It was a serious play-running game that turned into everyone who ‘didn’t want to play’ plus one birthday two year old running and laughing and PLAYING together.
An impromptu tea party with a real China tea set, a not yet two toddler and her dad. Buttered toast cut into lady fingers (four strips) and real tea (herbal of course) many pours and misses into tiny cups. Sweet bliss.
A failing attempt at making gingerbread cookies. Betty Crocker did not have the recipe I used to use .The one we found online was terrible! Such a weird consistency that we decided to make houses. (weird meaning the cookies were reminiscent of building material), so houses of course. Except that constructing three little houses from cookie dough despite looking easy on tictok, we can now tell you it’s not.
Hours later, after falling apart and sagging in and getting covered in frosting (us, the houses the table, the floor…) three little houses made it through the night intact, finally ready to be decorated. Many reasons to laugh here.
A visit with dear friends, a walk on our familiar stretch of beach and yoga classs with all my friends. I brought my seven year old granddaughter along because she was beyond excited to try yoga and certain she would love it. Which she did!
And finally, a full day of hanging out with part of my own little tribe, cooking and eating, playing games and listening to music that we all love. A few silly dance moves and a lot of laughing. Hydration pong (beer pong with water) was quite the hit…
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone, I hope you have moments to be thankful for today as well…
If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?
Marc Chagall maybe… Janis Joplin? Jimmy Hendrix? I’ve heard a different version of this question before. If you could have dinner with three historical figures, who would you choose? I’d probably pick at least one comedian (do I know a clever funny historical comedian? Groucho Marx? then, maybe Einstein, maybe Frida Kahlo. Since it’s a whole dinner, I’d want good conversation and some laughs. But to just meet? There are a lot of interesting characters in history. Van Gogh, Churchill, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tolstoy, The Brontë sisters. Louisa May Alcott, Paul Cezanne, Franz Marc, Abraham Lincoln, Lewis and Clark, Henri Matisse….go ahead and pick just one
If instincts and intuition are the same thing, then yes. If they are not, still yes and here’s why. I have spent a lifetime learning to listen to myself. I may have learned this lesson by not listening or not believing, but there were always those moments when I did. Every moment that I did what my heart or gut or instinct or intuition suggested, I learned something about who I was.
Was I always right? Yes and no. Ultimately I’m going to say yes.
Animals are equipped with instinct with no logic to talk them out of listening to it. They still get eaten. They can’t help migrating when the time is right, but lose herd members along the way. Fish do that circling thing, but their big swirling numbers attract big hungry predators.
My instincts and intuition have given me me. I have navigated twists and turns in ways that work the best for me. Has it always been comfortable? No. I used to spend time trying to figure out where I went wrong. This was an activity that did not serve me. The where-did -I -go-wrong game led me into avenues of thought that weren’t optimal. Having some good gut feelings kept me alive and moving and gave me an ally.
I like to think that that is why I have them. Everyone gets their own private navigational systems and uses their systems very independently and personally. As we pick our way along the paths of our life, we have these internal hunches and prompts. We get to decide when or if to follow, at least I think we do. It’s all us for us.
My instinct and intuition help me decide. If I only had logic and reason to help me, I would never have gone to Africa. I wouldn’t have had children and I absolutely would not have become an artist. My heart, my me ness gets to interject, when I follow, I get a life more of and for me.
I have learned to trust myself along the way. I have also learned to trust myself in hindsight. Is self trust instinct? Is it intuition? Or are these the tools for knowing or remembering ourself?
What’s the first impression you want to give people?
Interesting prompt question. What do I want people to remember about me when they walk away from a first meeting? Hmmm. Let’s see.
I like when I walk away from an encounter with another and think :that was fun! So maybe I would like to leave an impression of lightness. I want to leave the other feeling a comfortable and happy energy.
I just spent an afternoon and evening with four of my grandkids. All of them have their own way of leaving me feeling like that. Later I had some moments with my daughter in laws and son. (we were helping decorate some birthday cookies and cup cakes). In separate conversations we ended up laughing so hard we could hardly get words out.( it may have had to do with too much sugar and the late hour) but laughter and lightness leaves me walking away thinking :well that was fun!
It’s not always laughter. Two days ago my son was talking to me about AI. He had a little experiment in which he interviewed me using questions compiled by AI around the topic of my book and why I wrote it. When he mentioned that it would be recorded, I was less interested, but it turned into an interesting conversation and we were both like hey, that was fun!
My oldest grand daughter loves trivia. She likes being tested on it. She stops me every so often and says I could do this for hours so if you get bored we can stop. I laugh and say I love asking her questions that I can’t even answer! In between chatting with the group we keep up the questions. Down the elevator to the car, back to the game room, we keep the questions going (I’m reading them off an app.)
That was fun!
So that’s my answer. Im not a comedian, but I love laughter, I love light, I love some fun thinking conversation. I genuinely want others to walk away feeling a tiny bit (or much) happier. Seen, heard, and part of the fun!
Peace Kit 