best gift exchange ever

I love making gifts, and I love finding meaningful gifts.  I have rarely had a lot of money to spend, and have often had little choice but to give “gifts of the heart” – homemade things, handcrafted things, and meaningful or needed things.  Even if I had a lot of money, I wouldn’t want to change this way of giving gifts.

For the past ten to fifteen years, at least, I’ve wandered through stores and been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of things to purchase. (I’ll write more about American excess soon, but this quiz is a good introduction to the topic.) During the same period, I moved many, many times, and also helped to clean out both my parents and grandparents long-time homes.  The moral of the story:  It is amazing what we acquire.   The result:  I am really turned off to malls, giant department stores, and buying new things in general, beyond what I need.  And when I can, I prefer to acquire used and re-purposed items (furniture, books, kitchenware, etc.). 

On this Christmas Day in a year fraught with disturbing news of the economy, I find myself thinking about my favorite gift exchange ever.  I worked for an arts council, where, of course, we were all underpaid.  The staff consisted of four women, and we discussed doing a $5 item gift exchange, but someone had the idea to exchange only handcrafted gifts.  Since not all of us were crafty, we began expanding the idea.  We ended up with no dollar limit, but instead had three criteria:  it had to be a found item, a handmade item, or a re-gift.

We had so much fun the first year that we did it the second year.  The range of items was bizarre and often hilarious.  One of my co-workers gave me a gift bag containing crafting projects she had purchased 10 years prior and never begun, along with stationery she’d never used and an ugly candle someone else had given  her – she dared me to pass it on.  Another co-worker gave me a pin that I had admired when she’d worn it; I treasure it to this day.  I also received books that people had read and were passing along, and homemade cookies.  It was so much fun to receive those things because they were all given with much thought and affection, and they were all gleaned from our own possessions. It was a wonderful and fun way to celebrate Christmas.

On this Christmas, I am hoping that everyone has plenty, and if you have abundance, the heart to pass it on.  Blessings to all!

 

Stocking up

The day before Thanksgiving, I stopped at Mike’s Truck Garden (a fruit and vegetable stand in Fulton, CA).  I’d seen low prices advertised on local apples the week before, and wasn’t surprised to see the place mobbed the day before the holiday.  I picked out some apples and a few winter squash, got up to the cashier and he said “the total is $4.44, which means it’s $2.22 for you today.”  And then I understood why the employees were saying “have a good holiday, see you in the spring” to everyone:  it was the last day of the season that they were open, and no matter what you purchased that day, the entire bill was half off.  Score.

I got in my car, drove around the back, and decided to park again.   This time, I brought in my shopping bags and got a cart.  I bought many packages of bulk food (nuts, seeds, trail mix, candy for Christmas stockings, etc), more apples and assorted squash, red peppers, green peppers, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, cilantro, parsley, radishes, cauliflower, kiwi, lemons, limes, oranges, onions, green onions, red cabbage, green cabbage, grapes, spinach, green beans, and swiss chard.  My total was $80.46, so I paid $40.23.

I would have bought more, but I was mindful of what I could use for Thanksgiving and in the immediate future, and what I could preserve.  My  instinct (that I had to suppress) was to “rescue” as much of the food as I could.  (I think I could be an obsessive harvester/gleaner if I ever have a garden.)

When I got home, I called my mother, and asked her the best freezing method for much of the excess.  In my childhood, we had large gardens and numerous fruit trees, and we rarely, if ever, used “store-bought” frozen vegetables or fruit.  Every year, we dried culinary herbs, canned tomato sauce, applesauce, and assorted jams/jellies, and stocked the freezer with large quantities of tomatoes, green beans, peas, peppers, corn, peaches, and blueberries.   My sister and I were always being sent to the basement to retrieve items from the two massive chest freezers.

So I spent all of the afternoon before Thanksgiving (and into Thanksgiving day, as well) washing, cutting, and storing vegetables and herbs.  In the week and a half since then, my roommate and I have used all the fresh things, and I take pleasure in being able to pull a ziploc full of clean, ready-to-use cilantro from the freezer when making guacamole.

It turns out that it was an exceptional way to honor Thanksgiving.  At the most basic level, I am grateful for access to plentiful food and to have the money to purchase it, and for the means to preserve and appreciate it.  It also connected me to my family who I was missing  over the holiday.  My mother sent me the following email late on Thanksgiving eve:

I hope you got all your food “put up”.  I was smiling most of the evening thinking about you doing that and enjoying it.  It always brings back a warm glow of home and gives such pleasure.  Enjoy, enjoy.

Related gleanings:  Last week, a story was circulated about 40,000 people showing up at a farm in Colorado to glean the fields after harvest.  Also, as most of us are aware, a lot of food banks are low this year.  If you have the means, consider donating food, time or money to one near you; a good organization is Feeding America (formerly known as Second Harvest).

 

uh, good idea? crafting and advice…

In preparation for a move, I’m again culling my book collection (my sister is still swearing about a move she helped with in 2002 due to the abundance of books).  In recent years, I’ve instituted rules for myself before I acquire a book and grant it space on the permanent bookshelves:  it must be more useful than a book I could borrow short-term from a library; it must be a great work of art that I NEED to possess should I require immediate access to it; or it must have fairly high sentimental or aesthetic value (as an object).  Without the rules, I’d likely end up buried alive.

So, on this round, quite a few cookbooks, out-of-date home decorating and crafts manuals, and modern and juvenile novels have not made the cut.  So far I have two boxfuls to go to my local library’s book sale (anyone want some books?).

However, I decided to keep one particular crafting book, just for its sheer kitschiness (and a little bit of childhood crafting nostalgia).  To the right is an illustration from B. Kay Fraser’s “Decorative Tole Painting,” 1972.  Oh, the irony.

The other gem that I will never part with is Arlene Dahl’s “Always Ask a Man” from 1965. It is full of advice to women on beauty, manners, homemaking, and the general art of femininity.  There are literally hundreds of useful tidbits – here is a sampling of my favorite passages and quotes.

NEVER upstage a man.  Don’t top his joke, even if you have to bite your tongue to keep from doing it.  Never launch loudly into your own opinions on a subject–whether it’s petunias or politics.  Instead, draw out his ideas to which you can gracefully add your footnotes from time to time.  You may be well equipped to steal the spotlight, but most females would rather sing a duet than a solo.

Most of us agree that lipstick is an absolute necessity.  I, for one, even wear a touch a lipstick to bed.  I switch to pale peach or pink to match my sheets, blot carefully, and powder over lightly so that just a tinge of becoming natural-looking color remains.

Any girl with a modicum of common sense and tact can control a man’s actions, unless she’s out with a sex maniac.  Don’t accept the frequently proposed male theory that if he spends money taking you to dinner or the theater, you must pay him back by inviting him in for a nightcap.  He doesn’t have to be the man who stays for breakfast.

Give a girl a pair of pants and she sprawls in a chair, crosses her legs like a man, and becomes more aggressive in her speech and manner.  A girl puts a man on guard psychologically when she takes to wearing pants around the house.

There should be nothing that takes precedence in your day’s schedule over making yourself attractive and appealing for the man in your life…nothing, nothing is more important than keeping your husband happy, interested and in love with you.

Male movie stars were also consulted on their ideas of femininity.  George Hamilton said “A woman is often like a strip of film–obliterated, insignificant–until a man puts the light behind her.”  Wow.  And as a brunette, I’m proud to join the company of those who “can look like an angel while operating like the black widow spider,” or is “the vamp on the bearskin rug,” or should wear furs “of black or white mink, fabulous monkey fur, or velvety black Alaskan seal.” Um, yeah, maybe not so much for the furs.

Here is a page on the art of fan seduction, which is still appealing to me on a certain level, I have to admit!  Note one of my other favorite quotes from the book, highlighted in yellow.

Finally, this isn’t from my book collection, but I’m reminded of my favorite kitschy stitching blog, called stitchymcyarnpants.com.  Here’s another good idea regurgitated from another decade….if you haven’t seen these already, check out the link to see more wonderful ski-mask stitching projects, among many others!

 

wait, i’ll just look that up…

My concerns: I thought perhaps I might have a brain tumor, or I’m experiencing the onset of adult ADD or early dementia. Or my life has so many varied, disparate elements that my brain is failing to keep up. Or just too much stress and not enough sleep is causing me to lose IQ points.

My symptoms: I can’t remember, with ease, the big words, the $2 words. And I have difficulty reading books or even longer articles these days because my mind wanders and I’m easily distracted, and I lose my train of thought in tangents.

The diagnosis: My brain is being altered by the Internet. I read an article a few weeks ago by James Fallows on theAtlantic.com, titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I was excited to read about academic and literary types reporting similar symptoms. Fallows wrote:

And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I have been re-reading some Jane Austen novels recently, and find it nearly impossible to stick to it for very long. It was frequently sheer will-power to get through a chapter at a time. My inner conversation, as I’m reading, goes something like this: “Hmm…Rosings Park. I wonder what the film location was for the 2005 version…I’ll look that up now…no, keep reading……I did like Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy in that PBS version though…what is the actor’s name from the Joe Wright version–Matthew something? I’ll just look it up quickly on imdb.com…no, stay…do NOT look anything up……keep reading.” And so on. I even have difficulty making it through movies these days, too, for the same reason.

I was lucky to grow up in a family where we always had dinner together and talked about our days. Inevitably, a volume or two of the Encylopaedia Brittanica would end up at the table. It was part of the table clearing ritual: clear the dishes, wipe the table, and re-shelve the encylopedias. I already had the propensity toward this kind of behavior, and growing up in a family like mine cemented it. So I was prone to being an information addict.

Access to information is a great thing. I confess my addiction. But how much is lost when there is no longer a need for retention of information? And if the way we think and learn is so deeply affected by how we access and process information, who will do the deep thinking?

Me? I’m just a gleaner.

 

abandoned, part II

Continued, from June 25 post….

Our next exploration at the decommissioned base was the abandoned commissary. I pictured some little building akin to a small-town store-front grocery, but this building was enormous. Like the size of a modern-day Safeway.

A co-worker brought his portable generator for this particular exploration, and set up a few lights just inside the door of the commissary. The lights created a pool of light on a pile of equipment that we were to inspect, but cavernous darkness lay beyond. We did our inventory (yes, 14 salvageable 5-drawer units to store historic blueprints and maps), and then my friend J. (a fellow historian/explorer) and I grabbed flashlights and scattered into the darkness, leaving our co-worker to guard the generator.

There is nothing like the crumbling remains of a formerly vital place. The aura of things that were once deemed necessary but are now purposeless feels so wasteful, empty and haunted. (I think that is why I have always been fascinated by post-apocalyptic and dystopian future stories and movies: I like to imagine what would remain useful or meaningful–material or immaterial–after any societal collapse.)

At the dark end of the building, after an immense span of open floor space, are a row of intact check-out registers and the store offices. It was evident that the office spaces had been used as living space or a drug squat. Hypodermic needles littered the floor, along with all kinds of debris including small broken appliances, food containers, and children’s toys, which look a little disturbing in that context.

After we explored the remainder of the building, I stood and looked at the piles of cast-off office equipment and furniture. The familiar panic started to rise: “How could I use these things so that they don’t go to waste?” But I had to suppress it, and let it go. There isn’t enough time or space to claim everything that could be gleaned and re-used.

 

abandoned, part I

I’ve recently had the opportunity to explore some abandoned buildings on a decommissioned military base. As an employee of the current owner of the buildings, my co-workers and I were checking to see if some equipment that we needed was stored in them, and to see if there was anything we could use in the future. The electricity is currently shut off, and most of the windows are boarded closed, so we took our flashlights.

One of the buildings we went into is part of the original base plan. The officer’s club was built in the 1930s, and although renovated to some degree throughout the years on the interior, it retains its original Spanish Eclectic details on the exterior and in the main rooms, which include a massive beamed common room with two fireplaces and ten foot-high arched windows, and a ballroom with a stage. The club is on a hill, and overlooks a bay – the location is magnificent – and I’ve heard lively stories from those who used to attend parties and dances there.

Wandering through its silent, dark, and cluttered spaces was viscerally sad. I have a tendency to wander off on my own, and found myself in the midst of a maze of cast-off office furniture in the huge common room, with only the faint beam of my wimpy flashlight to guide me. I called out my co-workers’ names, but they had disappeared. (Cue faint creepy music and the entrance of ghosts from a WWII officer’s ball…..yes, I have an over-active imagination.)

I found my co-workers a few minutes later, and no ghosts appeared, of course, but the sense of history there is truly tangible. I understand when buildings cannot be saved due to the expense of rehabilitation (esp. in CA for earthquake retrofitting), but to not re-use buildings with that kind of architectural and historical importance is the eradication of a piece of a community’s soul. I hope that someone can find a way to save that building.

To be continued…