25: Feliz

Having seen the light, and a growing pile of actionable responsibilities, I hereby revert to sporadic posting. If you have been following this nonsense throughout December, then have a stretch, some cookies, and a stiff drink. I thank you, from the bottem of my Grinchy heart, for reading. In recognition of your extreme bravery in the virtual line of duty, you will receive a free Molvanian celebration cake and therapy session with a seal of  your choice.

Still proceeding, sort of.

Happy Christmas, bless us everyone. Phew.

24: Luz

It's Christmas Eve, the big Advent enchilada, and all I got left is sand, votive candles, and a bunch of brown paper sacks. Pretty humble ingredients, but believe me they collaborate to create the warmest glow in the known galaxy.

Home, where no storm clouds rise.

Luminarias, or farolitos if you prefer, get plonked out every Christmas Eve on the house, the yard, the fence, the chicken coop, the llama barn, or whatever. As any rural New Mexican (which is to say most New Mexicans) will tell you, it can be quite a job if you live on a big plot and have a bunch of sand you need to get rid of.

Budget beacons.

Luminarias, the story goes, are points of light after dark to guide the holy family home. So a landing strip on a shoestring, circa 1AD. 

Most every Christmas, I find myself standing at the end of a luminaria-lit path in the dark just before midnight. At this moment, no matter where I am (there have been a few places now), I always feel like I have found my way home at the end of a long year out in the big world.   

23: Waiting for the miracle

Day 23 is born.

With child.

At my first maternity appointment, the GP actually said 'women have been doing this for thousands of years'. Boy do I hate the assertion that bearing children is trivial because it is common. True: every child born is first carried, and true: this usually involves a bulbous belly, a tired back, the better part of a year, and a rather rude exit. Thousands of years of hard labour, agony, loss, and joy.

Palm of wonder. 

Frequency simply cannot remove the peril or the wonder of the experience. So I don't think it's sappy to say that when a child takes her first breath outside the womb it is miraculous. Even if her plastic manger lies in a noisy ward smelling of disinfectant, staffed by toast and tea-wielding midwives instead of angels, beatifically illuminated by fluorescent strip-lights shining through some horrible hour of night.

Wondrous, even if women have always done just this.

22: Turtle doves

Advent day 22 has landed, after circling around The Gallery (thank you Tara at Sticky Fingers).

Joined at the lip. 

Birds, like fish, tend to be aggressive jerks when it comes to dating. You couldn't, for instance, bring a mallard drake home to meet your mum. But a handful—doves, robins swans, eagles—form couples.

I identify with swans. Mostly because they are grumpy. They are also territorial, belligerent, structurally incapable of being useful before noon, and mostly useless after that. They are defensive, nest-proud, and they shout at anyone who looks sideways at their kids. They eat all manner of murky pond gunk, and appear to communicate through a series of honking and farting noises. 

Muddling through the pond-scum of life together. 

But swans are also graceful, deliberate, unflappable. They are loyal unto exhaustion and they love unfailingly for life, only opening their wings wider to allow for ugly ducklings. Which is to say, swans also remind me so very much of my other half, Papa. 

A strand of three (or four) is not easily broken.

21: Santa imposters

Day 21 in Advent is staring down at Who-ville with a sour Grinchy frown.

...and laying a finger aside of his nose-ring...

There is a local tradition in these parts whereby kids are taken to a creepy, skinny, unbearded, fake Santa Claus in the days preceding Christmas. They queue like trembling lemmings, then sit one by one in Creepy Claus's lap and recant their sins. There is much grovelling, gnashing of teeth and plaintive crying to show contrition.

Parents photograph the whole scene to use as evidence, should the kids later recant their confessions and commence misbehaviour. A key part of this cultural practice is that surrounding grown-ups must say things like 'ah how cute' and categorically refuse to acknowledge that Creepy Claus is clearly a big phony.

If the Grinch could do it, then so could Creepy Dog. 

I hear that our Santa imposters are pretty tame compared to the uber-scary Swiss ones, who travel with evil whip-wielding sidekicks, and pack kidnap bags for the naughty kids (thanks for the info, Sheena). And anyway, according to the eleventy-hundred good parenting manuals I should have read, threats covered in treats-clothing are crucial to the cultivation of good behaviour. You see, after a date with fake Santa, kids will be super-thankful for their Christmas presents and act like angels for months, or until all memory of him has passed (so possibly only a few minutes).

I do my best to respect local custom, so last week my girls went for their annual review with fake Santa. And there we met the jolliest, fattest, beardiest Santa imposter imaginable. I can only assume the agency hired him over the phone, or made an administrative mistake. I waited for him to speak in a scary voice, or pull out some other Scroogey trick, but he remained a kind, grandfatherly type throughout the interrogation.

Wise one that she is, Ali howled like a banshee anyway to indicate that she knew her place in the ritual, and felt genuine remorse for her sins. Ana looked bored, irreverent, borderline half-asleep. But in fairness, not even the Grinch would make Ana nervous. In fact she rather identifies with that guy.

Santa imposter ritual complete, I'm off to stock up on Who-hash and roast beast for the big day.

20: Off the air

Day 20, or C minus five.

Dash away, dash away, dash it all. 

Depending on the whims of ye merry Gatwick gentlemen, Santa may have to travel overland instead of by air. If you listen very carefully like David Attenborough, you may hear a grumbled 'typical, innit' carried on the winds from Lapland.

Britain's children may not receive their presents until March, as Santa will be stuck in the M25 roadworks until at least Valentine's Day. Chin up, the Royal Mail has prepared us for this day.

Current conditions at Heathrow. 

19: Winter roses

Day 19 in Advent photos.

18: Away to the manger

Day 18 is hard at work on the farm.

Got wool. 

Kid in sheep's clothing. 

17: Cookies revisited

Day seventeen and by now you may have noticed that I come from a long, proud line of cookie enthusiasts: buttered sugar runs deep in our veins.

We cooked the cookies in the cookie jar.

If cookie baking was an Olympic event (and it should be), Grandma would be a serial gold medallist. As a girl, I remember how exhausted she was by the sixty-fifth batch, running on endorphins and will-power alone, flanked either side by an international clutch of talented and fiercely competitive cookie-mums. My siblings and I could merely watch in awe, throw energy drinks and towels from the sidelines, and cheer wildly (though this will give you one heckava sore throat because most cookies require at least ten minutes at 175c). Inevitably, Grandma always produced a beautiful deep freezer full of cookies in record time, and we kids applied them to our hoarse throats all winter.

Peppernuts, or pfeffernusse, are compulsory in my family. Happily, they are also delicious. Both Grandma and Great-grandma K excel at peppernutting. Credit for the following wisdom belongs entirely to them, and of course to the long, proud line of peppernutters before them.

Peppernuts are pretty easy. In a mixer, cream 1 cup of softened butter with 1.5 cups of sugar, then beat in three eggs. Then add the zest of one lemon, half a teaspoon white pepper, 1 teaspoon cream of tartar, and 1 teaspoon cardamom (optionally you can also add dashes of the following if you like: lemon juice, cloves, or ginger). Add about 4.5 cups of flour, a bit at a time, just enough until you get a stiff dough. Roll into balls: big and chewy or small and crunchy according to your preference. Bake on greased cookie sheets at about 350f or 180c for about 8 minutes, or until lightly brown. Consume immoderately.

Half baked. 

Sadly I don't think I'm ready for Olympic peppernutting yet: a wise neighbour tells me that my batch tastes like Farley's Rusks.

16: Schwesterhood of the travelling nappies

Day 16 in Advent and I am pleased to report that Santa Claus, glass in hand, has just granted me my one Christmas wish: my sister. Apparently the cookie-based siren call was too strong to resist, so Tanta has booked a last-minute trip here for the holidays.

Two in a pair.

Tanta and I live an ocean away from the rest of our relatives. We have a history of spending Christmas together on our side of the world. Children have made this annual winter gathering logistically difficult in recent years. But Tanta, Onkle, Neffe (and Santa), brave people that they are, have pulled it off for another year running.

So a toast to sisters is in order, via Christina Rossetti:

For there is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather; to cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands.  

'Mwaaaaaaw!'