be it ever so humble

There are some things that the absence of is needed in order to make you realize how much you loved it. My cold feet at night remind me of how warm my heated mattress pad made my flannel sheets. The orange-ish red concoction on the main line makes me realize how delicious Dad's turkey soup was. Waking up to the dark and a piercing alarm reminds me of the slow, sleepy awakenings to dishes clanging in the kitchen and light peeking through the slats in my blinds. Icy pellets from the sky onto sloppy muddy earth only slightly resemble the large flakes landing softly on an already existing blanket of whiteness.

Highlights of Christmas break '08:
+ Hiking through 2 feet of snow, burrowing under fallen logs, getting pushed in the snow by Dad who thought it'd be funny to spear me with his walking pole like Moby Dick.
+ the Christmas Eve service...twice.
+ Watching Band of Brothers in my bed.
+ Shoveling snow the first five times...after that it got tiring.
+ The first 300 pages of Anna Karenina...after that it got tiring.
+ Playing the Andy of Mayberry trivia game and speed scrabble with the fam. (Dad: "Do you spell 'slut' with one 't' or two?")
+ Watching Clint Eastwood movies, war documentaries, and Valkyrie with Dad.
+ Staying in my pajamas all day.
+ Baking peanut butter cookies every time the supply ran out.
+ Venturing by foot into unknown, snowy lands in search of the post office and stumbling into it like a dazed elf sutmbling into a ginger bread house on his way to the North Pole.

I miss Bing Crosby. And this:

we need a good assassination

When my alarm went off at 7:00 yesterday morning I thought back to Christmas morning when, after going to bed at midnight, I woke up at 6:15 and eagerly bounced out of bed. Now I was struggling to get out of bed after 8 hours of sleep, and I delayed until my roommate's alarm went off at 7:30 before finally venturing out of my 100% Egyptian cotton sheets. There's such a difference between getting up to eat Stollen and sit by a fire while my cat toys with the ribbons on our presents and sitting for an hour and a half in my economics class while it's raining outside.

It's also interesting how much I didn't want to get up at 1:30 in the morning to sit in the basement during a tornado, as opposed to how excited I'd be to get up at 1:30 in the morning to, say, rise with all the saints at Jesus' second coming. I can just imagine Sam coming into my room and saying calmly, "Heather, Emily, you need to wake up. Jesus is coming back." I'm sure silver trumpets would be a much better awakening than tornado sirens. Though I think there's a special bonding that occurs between girls who are scrunched in the hall of a basement, wearing pajamas and sharing blankets, girls without makeup or contacts, wearing glasses and retainers. It's funny to see what people thought to bring when in a hurry to flee from a tornado. I thought about what I would miss if our dorm was destroyed and all of the contents of my room strewn across campus. And the one thing I thought about wasn't the 60 DVDs or my pristine complete history of WWII book or even my guitar. I began wishing I had brought down my teddy bear. I'd be sorry to ever be without Gilbert.

Mom and Dad are getting 12 inches of snow today in Wisconsin, and Dad woke Mom up this morning to make him pancakes. I sat in semi-darkness this morning at 7:15 eating cereal I stole from the cafeteria, and though I enjoy raisins and granola and bran, I wish I could have traded in my groggy munching for Mom's homemade buttermilk pancakes and Perkins' apricot syrup. I'm not quite ready to forgo my sweaters and argyle socks, but if it's going to be 65 degrees and thunderstorm anyway, I'd rather it be summer so I could go home and eat pancakes. Weather, get your act together.

I miss doing this....

reflections of a college student on break

I feel like I'm on death row. I'm trying to get shove all this stuff in before my time is up. I've set a reading limit of 200 pages a day so I can finish The Woman in White before I go back to school. (It's a phenomenal book, by the way. I just can't sing its praises enough.) I'm eating all I can because I know once I get back to school it's Cheerios and stolen milk from the cafeteria. What's that? Someone just gave us home-shot deer sausage? I'm not hungry, it's ten o'clock at night, I've eaten an entire continent already today...but give it to me anyway. (It was phenomenal. Praises, praises, praises.) Maybe I should start setting my alarm at intervals during the night so I can wake up and eat. Deer.

What do you think zebra tastes like?

I think the best part about staying in your pajamas all day is that you don't have to change into them again at night. You're already in them. And if you fall asleep during the day and confuse the night with the day...it doesn't matter. You're in your pajamas.

I met a man at the bank today who made me pretty excited to be opening an account there, if you know what I'm sayin'.

The other day my dad began asking my advice on a dilemma he's facing at work as I sat on my makeshift window seat (my grandpa's WWII army chest that is now home to notebooks full of poetry and pretty stationary with bunnies having tea on it instead of the kraut lugers and bullet-dented helmets it once housed [actually not really, my grandpa was a dentist stationed in Pennsylvania during WWII, but unfortunately the bunnies having tea on my stationary really is a reality]), but I accidentally drifted off, looking at my books on my bookshelf. I heard the majority of what he said but I didn't have any response for him when he stopped talking.
He looked at me in mock belittling. "Are you 21 yet? Do you know anything?"
I simply shook my head. But boy, I can't wait for all that knowledge that comes with turning 21. (These days "knowledge" is code for alcohol, most likely.) 9 more months until I can down a pint of knowledge.

Today my mom came home from wherever it was she went (I'm dazed most of the day, except for when I'm eating) and asked if I'd heard the sirens.
"No..." I said, looking at her over my book. I had just woken up from a nap, and apparently slept through a house on fire down the street. I probably would have slept through our own house on fire, and only mildly complained out of my delirium for Mom to turn the heat down. Except she can't. Because I'm on fire. But at least I got a good nap in. And I'm already in my pajamas! So even death isn't really that bad.

One day between Christmas and New Year's we went to the Chinese restaurant and my fortune in my fortune cookie said, "You will step on the soils of many countries." I liked that fortune. THAT'S a fortune, not those stupid things that say like, "Beauty is red like a rose bleeding love." What the heck. (I just made that up. But I wonder if you can submit fortunes to be put into cookies, because that's a winner.) My brother and/or dad (they're interchangeable sometimes) said that I was stepping on foreign soil right now because the employees had mud from China on their shoes and had tracked it across the floor...anyway. The next week we went to the Chinese restaurant again (our arteries weren't crying loud enough for us to hear) and my fortune from my fortune cookie said, "You will step on the soils of many countries." What do you think that means? Can God speak through fortune cookies?

I also think it's fantastic when you're watching a foreign movie with English subtitles and you can't hear what they're saying so you turn up the volume. It doesn't matter, though. They're speaking Japanese. You can't understand them, anyway.

Taking pills labeled "colon flush" makes me nervous.

I'm tired, and luckily I'm already in my pajamas. I planned ahead this morning when I considered getting dressed. I thought, "No, because I'll be going to bed tonight." Always thinking ahead.

goodbyes

I feel like Frodo Baggins at the end of The Return of the King: "It's gone. It's done." (Except I'm not standing on a rock surrounded by lava on Mount Doom, in need of a shower and a new index finger.) I never liked New Year's. Sure, as far back as playing Jeopardy on Brandon's Playstation at Y2K I can remember spending New Year's with my family and friends, watching the ball drop, eating shrimp, going to bed to Frank Sinatra's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and wondering where the season went. This year I spent 4 hours with a group of people I didn't know, was too tired to eat shrimp when I came home, dismissed the ball-dropping because it had dropped an hour earlier, and went to bed a little after midnight without any Christmas lights on. I have yet to have that "one last time"-listen to "White Christmas."

The snow has been lovely, as has the time with my family. The traditions haven't stopped just because we're in a new house, but they feel different. Is that possible? Yes, I know it is. In a sense I feel very homeless, because school isn't home, and this isn't home. I love being with my family...but it's possible to feel out of place even when they're here.

Well my friends, it's time to say goodbye to Christmas and wish you all a happy beginning to 2008. I wonder what the year will bring? What things will be different this time next year?

We sing His praise this day of days and pray this time next year
we'll all be near to share the cheer of a Christmas auld lang syne

a wish your heart makes

I think I get more excited over the idea of things than the things themselves. I was just thinking about how much I want to own a bookstore, live in an apartment, own a cat with a literary name, read books while it's snowing outside, drive over to Mom's to bake cookies for whatever church function is happening that night....But what about the things I don't take into account? How much responsibility will it be to own my own bookstore? How much work will it take? Paying rent and bills and cleaning out the kitty litter - maybe I won't even have time to read while it snows (maybe it won't even snow!) and I'll be too tired to bake. My, imagining is fun. But that's exactly what imagining is: thinking about things that aren't real or true or haven't happened or won't happen. But I do like to think about it, even if it is unrealistic. If I didn't have these "unrealistic" dreams about my future, I would feel very much like I was wasting my time in Accounting and Small Business Management and How to Be a Grown-Up 101. (I wish that was a real class.)

Amidst the 72-degree weather here in Kentucky, it's snowing 5 inches in Wisconsin. I want very much to go home for Christmas now. I have a strong urge to read something Nathaniel Hawthorne, but maybe that's another one of those "ideas" that I won't really like once I get a hold of.

Happiness is celebrating the little things - my Dove chocolate holiday wrapper

Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day

Time is an odd thing. I don't know if you ever noticed, but it doesn't stop. Thanksgiving was already two whole weeks ago. We are in the thick of the Christmas season. Lights are strung across mall ceilings and every department store plays "Deck the Halls" behind the voices of bustling Christmas shoppers. Sales! Pushy peddlers! Did you know the Leo diamond is the most beautiful diamond in the world? Or so says the nice gentleman at LeRoy's Jewelers who was either bored or really thought I had $6700 in my red polka-dotted purse to shell out on a sparkly ring (with 6 more cuts than a regular diamond! See how it glitters in the light? Uh, not really. Do you want to try it on? No, thanks. It looks better on! The only way I am putting that ring on is if Mel Gibson is offering it to me on one knee).

Monday I walked around a housing development at 9 o'clock, the cold air filtering through the knit of my gloves. I stopped in front of a house completely covered in white icicle lights as Frank Sinatra began singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" on my iPod. As I watched the house, I imagined cars pulling into the driveway and parking on the street, walking up to the door in knee-length coats and red gloves, a woman opening the front door in an apron and revealing a warm world lit with candles and smelling of gingerbread. Instrumental Christmas music flowed out of the house and voices rose in greeting as desserts were presented to the hostess as a thank-you offering. And as I stood there on the sidewalk, Frank Sinatra singing, "Through the years we all will be together," I thought about the Christmases past, with youth group and church and family. How different it'll be going home to a house I've only known for 4 days and a church who forgets my name.

Time is an odd thing. I never thought Thanksgiving would come, but it has, and is passed. Christmas break seems so far away, but in two weeks I'll be home with the semester behind me. Time keeps going. Sometimes I feel like something will never come or never end, yet somehow I end up on the other side of it looking back at it, wondering how I got through it. I just can't wait to be on the other side of this semester. TWO MORE WEEKS!

Christmas time is here

It's Christmastime. What does that mean? It means jingle bell earrings that sing a silvery song with each step I take and bobble of my head. It means Wilmore Old Fashioned Christmas, walking around town bundled in knitted scarves and drinking hot chocolate provided by vendors selling homemade Christmas gifts. Covering our doors with snowman wrapping paper and cutting snowflakes out of construction paper to hang from the ceiling. Lit angels attached to streetlights and Christmas lights outlining homes like gingerbread houses. It means that soon I'll be going home to be with family again, baking peanut butter cookies and watching the lights on the Christmas tree blur when my eyes water. Dad says it's snowing in Wisconsin right now, and I know the fire will be lit in the living room as the flames reflect off the hardwood floors and the Christmas tree fills the room with pine. I can't wait to go home again, but for now I breathe in my pumpkin spice candle and string my Christmas lights around my room and listen to my 15-year-old Christmas carousel run out of batteries. It's Christmastime! No matter where I am, the mere thought that it's Christmastime makes me feel full, warm, and joyous. My heart sings this song...or maybe this song sings my heart....

Still, still, still,
One can hear the falling snow.
For all is hushed,
The world is sleeping,
Holy Star its vigil keeping.
Still, still, still,
One can hear the falling snow.

Sleep, sleep, sleep,
'Tis the eve of our Saviour's birth.
The night is peaceful all around you,
Close your eyes,
Let sleep surround you.
Sleep, sleep, sleep,
'Tis the eve of our Saviour's birth.

Dream, dream, dream,
Of the joyous day to come.
While guardian angels without number,
Watch you as you sweetly slumber.
Dream, dream, dream,
Of the joyous day to come.

"I've got plenty to be thankful for"

I'm thankful for, among so much else.... cranberry tea and football games and traditions and stone fireplaces and cream cheese frosting on pumpkin cookies and Christmas lights and Christmas music in the kitchen and cinnamon candles and endless turkey leftovers and snow on Thanksgiving Eve and nutmeg-sprinkled eggnog and all four Lethal Weapons for $10 and Christmas movies at night and "homemade" and

my neighbors being home when I locked myself out of the house on Wednesday. As cold as it was running down the street in my pajamas and socks, I enjoyed meeting Peggy and Phil.
("Which house do you live in?" Peggy asked me.
"That blue one down there," I answered.
"Do you live at home? I've never seen you before."
I should have introduced myself as Boo Radley and then stabbed her leg with a pair of scissors.)

and afternoon naps, which I think I'm going to take right now, as Alton Brown makes coconut cake on the Food Network.

Oh there's no place like home for the holidays // for no matter how far away you roam // If you want to be happy in a million ways // for the holidays you can't beat home sweet home