A CHRISTMAS CHALLENGE

I’ve wanted to do something about Christmas for years, and have simply never had the guts to do it…and this year is no exception. But I have a plan, and maybe….I’ll do it next year….maybe.

I’ve written earlier about my revulsion to the whole commercial scene around Christmas. I hate seeing tinsel and Santa Claus in October. I hate hearing canned Christmas schmaltz every time I have to make a transaction on the phone and I’m put on hold. I can’t imagine even venturing out of my house on Black Friday for all the “deals”.

My way of dealing with my dislike of all this in recent years has been to try to make as many gifts as I can. I knit (and this year, I’m way behind, some of the gifts will be for Epiphany, Groundhog Day and even Valentine’s Day). I make candy and pesto. This year Heidi and I are planning to make up a recipe for Shaker Convenience Mix, and put it in jars with recipes included for biscuits or pancakes or cookies. I learned to bead this year, and that is fun. We put up our tree around Dec 20th and leave it up until Twelfth Night…decorations for the gates and door are a little earlier. I haven’t been to a mall in years, my savior being the Internet. Things bought, wrapped, packaged and sent with a gift card. “Not very personal”, my inner I’ve Bought Into The System says, but really what’s so personal about driving to a crowded mall, not really knowing if the giver will love it or hate it, getting frustrated, tired and discouraged? One has to keep in mind that apparently the busiest days of the year after Christmas for stores are the hordes of people returning gifts they don’t want, or worse yet, forcing the giver to return them.

I love the season of Advent…the four Sundays before Christmas. I usually have an Advent wreath on the kitchen table. It has four candles on it….three purple and one rose, and a grand gold pillar in the middle. The third Sunday of Advent is the rose one…a little break in the mildly penitential season of Advent represented by purple. On Christmas Eve the big pillar is lighted and white candles substituted for the purple and rose ones. Advent is the season of waiting, of preparing. I have a friend who grew up with the tradition of thoroughly cleaning your house to prepare for the baby Jesus. What a lovely idea, instead of preparing it for a large flat-screen TV. I take my friend Ed out to Wilson Farms to get greens for the church and get supplies of a wreath and some candles for myself. I bake, and so do Rudy and Heidi….cookies, coffee bread, Weihnachtstollen. Back in the day when I was performing a lot, there were lots of concerts between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I loved singing in them.

On Christmas Eve, I go to church in the morning to help with the flowers and greenery, then in the early evening Heidi and I go to choir rehearsal bearing our contributions to the feast which follows the evening service. Rudy (and this year, our grandson Alex) arrive in time for the service. The music is special and wonderful, the service beautiful with candles and greenery and incense and hope, and the feast amazing. The next day in the late afternoon, we have a dinner party at home with relatives and friends. We open presents throughout the day, but frankly, this is the part I could do without. Not because I am cheap, either, but because every family has its most dysfunctional time around the issue of what was given and received at Christmas pasts, and the memories are usually not pleasant.

So here is my plan for next year, if I’m not too chicken to actually do it:

We will give presents on Epiphany. We will really celebrate the Twelve Days of Christmas.

I’ll do Advent in force. I’ll knit and bead and bake and light candles. I’ll make tree ornaments and wreaths, put out the little carolers on the table in the hall. I’ll bake for church and make special breakfast stuff for Christmas morning. I’ll help with flowers at church and sing and enjoy the feast. Then I will go home to bed, and on Christmas morning we’ll have a grand special breakfast. We will then head out to a tree lot and pick out the largest tree…for free… and put it up and decorate it. If we’re invited somewhere for dinner, good, if not, I’ll roast a chicken. On Boxing Day, or a day or so later we’ll head out to get some fancy ornaments for almost nothing, and to find presents and ribbon for a considerable saving. (I’ve started wrapping stuff in pretty fabric, saves trees and cuts way down on the amount of stuff I have to carry out to the barn in the cold for the rubbish people). On Epiphany, or the closest Sunday to it, I’ll invite everyone for a wonderful dinner party. It makes Christmas into a religious holiday, and the gift-giving comes with the Three Kings. Or if you’re not into religious traditions, I’d bet that it would be a LOT less expensive and a lot less pressurized.

Anyone want to take the pledge and join me?

Meanwhile, here are two recipes:


Shaker Convenience Mix (from Best of Shaker Cooking by Amy Bess Miller and Persis Fuller)


9C sifted flour
1 TBS salt
1/3C baking powder
1 1/2-2C shortening
Combine dry ingredients in a large bowl. Cut in the shortening as for pastry. When thoroughly blended store in a canister or glass jar in the refrigerator. It should keep for two months, but check to be on the safe side.

BISCUITS: 2c mix, 1 large egg, ½ C milk, cream or sour cream. Mix together, form into biscuits and bake @400⁰ for 12-15 minutes

MUFFINS: 3C mix, 1 large egg, ¼ C sugar, 1 C milk. Mix together and spoon into buttered muffin tins. Bake @425⁰ for 20 minutes. You can add berries, or fruit or extra sugar if you like. 1 ½ C cranberries are good too. Stir, not beat the batter. For Jam Muffins, after 10 minutes put 1 tsp jam on to center of each muffin and finish baking.

PANCAKES: 1 ½ C mix, 1 TBS sugar, ½ C milk, 2 large eggs. Apples or blueberries are nice too.

WEIHNACHTSTOLLEN

This is a Struss/Schild Christmas tradition. I got the recipe from an old out-of-print cookbook called Luchow’s, which was a German restaurant in NYC, and made the first batch in 1960, when Morgan was a very tiny baby. Ever since, I make it every year. I usually make it the night before Christmas Eve, since I sing on Christmas Eve. I let the loaves cool, frost them, then wrap them in plastic wrap with pretty ribbons.

11c sifted flour
2c milk
1 ¼ c melted butter (2 ½ sticks) I use unsalted butter.
6 eggs
1c sugar
2 oz yeast, proofed (put dry yeast in 1/2c warm water with a little sugar, let rise a little)
½ tsp salt, more if using unsalted butter (maybe 1 tsp)
½ tsp grated nutmeg
½ tsp mace
1 TBS cognac
1 TBS grated lemon peel
Get a huge bowl and put in flour. Make a hole in the middle and add the other ingredients. Mix as much as you can (start with a spoon, and then use your hands). Turn out on to a floured surface and knead. Then add one at a time, and kneading after each addition:
1 lb seedless raisins
1 lb currants
¼ blanched almonds, chopped
½ c citron
(I also add dried cranberries, or other dried fruit, and sometimes walnut pieces. If, like my daughter, Sylvia, you hate citron, you could leave it out and use other dried chopped fruits)

Clean and grease the bowl, put the dough back in it, cover with a towel and let rise in a warm place for some hours, until doubled in size. Punch down, form into loaves like this: Form 3 large balls, and roll or pat them until they are about 2 inches thick and flat. Then fold one side over the other and put on greased baking sheets. Let rise again, until doubled. Don’t let this go on for hours, or you will have huge, unwieldy, odd-tasting loaves.

Bake at 350 for one hour.

TOPPING
¼ c melted butter (1/2 stick)
2 TBS cognac
½ c confectioner’s sugar

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

I HATE….hate, hate, what “the market” has done to the holiday season in the US. Maybe it’s true in other countries too, but I live here, so don’t really know. It all starts at the end of October, and I have come to dread the onslaught. It begins even earlier, really. When is it, August? ….when the catalogues start arriving with the pumpkins and witches and pointy black things, followed briefly by turkeys and pies, then directly on to Christmas, sometimes simultaneously with the other two holidays. The past couple of years have added the guilty spectre of what will happen to the US, and then the world economy if one doesn’t buy enough stuff before, during, and after the Christmas season. Does the US economy really run on Christmas tree lights and plastic Christmas trees? My granddaughter, Heidi went to our local pharmacy cum everything else on Halloween to buy fake plastic spider webbing to decorate for a party (there’s one in every family!), only to find that they were already on the way to the dumpster to make way for Christmas things, and the jingle bells were hung and White Christmas was blasting through the store. (Do not, do NOT, get me started on that subject, I go completely nuts.)

I’ve already written about Halloween, but now let it be known that I actually love Thanksgiving. It’s all about feeding one’s family and friends, about getting together around the dinner table with good food, and good wine and good feelings.

Most years I order a good large chicken, or pork roast, or roast beef from Whole Foods, and I and the rest of whatever gang is going to be here get together to plan the rest of the feast. (Notice the absence of “turkey” in the last sentence, I’m not a turkey lover. I think that they don’t have much taste, which is why there are so many seasonings in the stuffing). We have lots of vegetable dishes both because there are so many lovely and varied recipes for things like squash and sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts, and beans and mashed potatoes….the list does go on. We also have lots of vegetable dishes because we have many vegetarian friends. We also have lovely appetizers. I read a book by Anne Tyler recently, where the family has only appetizers for Thanksgiving because they love appetizers, and they love making them. I understand this completely, I love appetizers as well. We have hot cider simmering on the stove with spices, making the house smell delicious. We have sherry and wine for those who consider sherry “zu süss”. We have amazing desserts…both I and my granddaughter love to bake, and Rudy makes a mean pie crust. We bring out all the china and tablecloths and napkins and flatware and glassware, we buy flowers for the table. We gather in our students who aren’t going home for the holidays because their families are in China or Bulgaria or Oregon. We have a ball, and I don’t care how many pounds I might have gained for that day. For me it’s all about giving thanks that we have such an abundance of everything, and I’m damned if I’m going to ruin everyone’s day by not eating their stuff because I think it has too many calories.

“But”, you might say, “it costs so much”. Not really. I usually buy the roast whatever because, lucky us, we’re not particularly hurting for money. The baking doesn’t cost that much, and it’s such a fun thing to do. Some people bring their specialities and others bring wine. We’ve already got the dishes and other stuff, accumulated little by little for years and years, from yard sales and auctions and EBay.

Years ago, when I started going to St. John’s, the director of the feeding program there, which we sponsored for many years, asked the congregation if we could supply pies for Thanksgiving. Rudy and I stayed up late on Thanksgiving evening and made four pies….two for us and two for them. We brought them to the church on Thanksgiving morning. So did everyone else in the congregation. They had so many pies that they ended up freezing many of them and using them for months afterwards. That’s what Thanksgiving is like for me….. and this peculiarly American holiday is the best of America, I think.

Here are two vegetable recipes from my friend Stirling. I hope that Tracy still makes them.

STIRLING’S BROCCOLI CASSEROLE ( It also works brilliantly with Brussels sprouts)
(This makes 4-6 servings, double it for a big dinner)
4 c broccoli 1 can cream of chicken soup (cream of mushroom will work just as well) 1 c mayonnaise (use real mayonnaise, please, this is a FEAST day) 1 tsp curry (use 1 ½ tsps if you’re doubling, not 2) 2 TBS butter 1 tsp lemon juice
Steam the broccoli and arrange in a casserole dish. Mix up the other ingredients and pour it over the broccoli.
Sprinkle over this:
1 c grated sharp cheese I c corn flake crumbs (put the corn flakes in a Ziploc bag and smash them with something)
Bake at 350® for 25-30 minutes

STIRLING’S YAM AND APPLESAUCE CASSEROLE
4-6 servings, double if necessary
Bake 4 yams, peel and slice
3 apples, sliced (core them, but leave the peels) golden raisins to cover
Arrange in buttered casserole dish
Mix together:
2c boiling water ¾ c brown sugar 4 TBS cornstarch 1 stick butter ½ can frozen orange juice concentrate
Pour over yams and apples and bake @ 350® for about an hour

So simple. So yummy.

MORE KNITTING

The finished mauve sweater described a few days ago. It’s hard to see in this picture the gorgeous silver buttons which I managed to find in my huge box of mostly utilitarian buttons. It took some sifting to find five exactly alike, but they were there. The sweater was intended originally for my Flagstaff daughter, but it’s actually too small. Shame on me for not knitting a swatch! The Rowan pattern called for Rowan Big Wool and size 19 needles. I’ve never even seen size 19 needles, and the woman at the yarn store where we bought the pattern and yarn for the original sweater said that size 13 needles were the way to go, and it all worked out beautifully. The yarn for this new sweater could be called Biggish Wool, I guess. It’s a soft, very soft, mohair, wool and acrylic blend…..2 stitches/1 inch with US 13 needles. Anyway, large turned out to be medium, so the sweater will go to my oldest niece, who will love it I think, and hope. It’s a funny thing about knitted gifts…the recipient either loves whatever it is and wears, or uses it constantly, or they would much rather have a gift certificate to The Gap. In which case, it often ends up in a thrift shop. I know this because last year I bought the most exquisite blue hand-knit sweater with the “knitted for you by____” sewn into it, at a local, pretty upscale thrift store for $15.00. Near my home in Cambridge is a wonderful Irish store which sells a lot of fabulous hand-knit stuff from Ireland as well as yarn from an Irish mill. My daughter and I always go there to buy yarn when she’s here on one of her fall trips from Arizona. I was wearing the blue sweater and the owner asked me if I had knitted it. I explained that I do knit, but that I had bought this one in a thrift shop for $15 bucks. The look on his face was priceless. “I could sell that for $350” he said…and this was last October when the Great Recession was at its gloomiest. I replied that I thought that maybe I was in the wrong profession and should knit things for a living. But when we figured out the cost of the yarn and the hours put into it, it comes out to about $4 an hour…definitely below the poverty line, and I make a lot more teaching voice.

Years ago, I went to the Orkney Isles to visit my friend, the composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, (name-dropping here)and while I was there, I bought a lovely sweater in one of the several stores which sell hand-knit stuff made by local people, women mostly. I had this idyllic vision of the long cold winters with women sitting beside the fire in one of the many charming cottages on the islands, happily knitting out the long cold days. The truth is a lot more prosaic. The days are long…it’s pretty far north, but not particularly cold by Boston standards. It’s very beautiful, but hard to reach, remote and rural, and I don’t think that life is easy. You’d have to knit a great number of sweaters to make a living, and I know what my shoulders and hands feel like when I overdo it. How, I wonder, does anyone make a living knitting?

SOMETHING DIFFERENT

Spacewalk by Ralph Hamilton Collection of Rudy Schild and Jane Struss

My husband, Rudy, is an astrophysicist, and also an open-minded scientist who has become something of a hero to many people because he is willing to listen to the stories of those who are “experiencers.” That is, they have had the experience of being abducted by extra-terrestrials, usually more than once. He got into doing this through his collaboration with the late, great John Mack. Back in the day, this was pretty shocking unbelievable stuff, made worse by the fact that the experiencers really couldn’t talk about it, or process it in any way. They were very mad at scientists who put them down without really looking at the evidence, or listening to them.

Granted, this is a pretty tough call. Hard science depends on verifiable and reproducible evidence, and if there are indeed UFO’s on the earth, they seem to do a very good job of controlling their garbage output. And the government evidence is presently classified, no matter what it is, so no one can get a look at it to check out what reality is and what isn’t in this area. And researchers disagree on what they do know. One claims that there really are no “UFO’s”, they should be more accurately called “IFO’s” (Identified Flying Objects), because what is seen is actually stuff being built by our own government. Others claim that there’s a government conspiracy to cover up the fact that the planet is teeming with ETs. All this leads to unending conspiracy theories on both sides, and a huge amount of misinformation all around.

I’m not an experiencer, neither is Rudy, but our friends who are, on the whole, are sane, articulate, and to a man or woman committed to making life better for others on this planet. To me, that speaks volumes. The abduction event, (or events) have transformed their lives….and drawn a real line in the sand for them. Everything is either “Before” or “Since”.

I was at an event this weekend which brought together 30 people, experiencers of various kinds, not just alien encounters but of other kinds of psychic and spiritual encounters which changed their lives (and by the way, the Native Americans don’t call them “aliens”, but “star relatives”). The agenda of the group evolved to be about listening, and trying to make connections between the “normal” experiences of people, and paranormal, or not-so-normal experiences of other people and how they might grow to understand each other, and learn from each other.

A few weeks ago, in response to the Vatican’s welcoming disaffected Anglicans into their ranks, James Carroll wrote in his column for the Boston Globe about the “large and urgent challenge facing every religion and every religious person, which is how to positively reconcile tradition with the massive changes in awareness, knowledge, and communication that come with the scientific and technological breakthroughs that daily alter the meaning of existence.” I couldn’t agree more with him, and it occurred to me that this group of such disparate people was embarking on a conversation about how to do this, and that it’s very urgent.

After the meeting, a number of us went to dinner at a restaurant in Harvard Square. A good friend asked me about my own church, which is St John the Evangelist, Bowdoin St in Boston. She wanted to know that if, since it was so High Church (“smells and bells” as we affectionately call it), had we gone over to the Anglican position. “Oh, no”, I replied, “we were the first church in the Diocese of Massachusetts to openly welcome gays and lesbians and to have a healing ministry during the time when HIV/AIDS was a big crisis, and when people who were gay, and especially those with AIDS were excluded from having a religious home. We did a good job, almost all Episcopal churches are open and welcoming in that way, and so we need to be involved in something new now, in welcoming other groups of people”. “Oh yeah?” said the experiencer across the table, “would I be welcome?”

And I didn’t know how to answer that.

PARTIES

Last Night we had a concert presented by two of my best voice students and my friend Bonnie, who is a wonderful accompanist. We set up our double parlor to accommodate thirty people. We had the piano tuned. My students worked very hard on a program of Mozart concert arias, Russian and French songs, and duets by Brahms. It was a beautiful night with no belting rain or high winds. And it all went fabulously….with an invited musical audience of friends and families of the performers, as well as some of mine and Rudy’s friends. Rudy connected with a guy he hadn’t seen for twenty-five years, I met the husband of another student (and neighbor) with whom I’ve spoken on the phone for years but never met before, my granddaughter Heidi met some young people her own age. In short, a good time was had by all.

When I do these concerts, I always include food afterwards. It’s a big house, with lots of room, and a kitchen which (as it turns out) accommodates thirty people. There’s some preparation involved, which got me to thinking about the nature of parties.

The truth is, I don’t usually much like parties with that many people, unless it’s in my own house, or all people that I know well. The first problem is the noise level. I don’t hear enough with a lot of noise going on around me when I’m trying to have a conversation with someone, or I hear too much. Music in the background only makes this much worse. And then there are the people. They are probably amazing fascinating people whom I really ought to meet, but I don’t know how to go about it. Or, really, I know how but I don’t want to. I have a friend who is an Episcopal priest, who always seems to know how to talk to people and get them to talk to her, who once told me that she’s really very shy and hates walking into a roomful of people, but knows that she must, so she goes ahead and does what she knows how to do. But she faces the same feeling every time. It’s like the fifteen minutes (or half, hour, or hour, or day) before a performance when one thinks “what am I doing?” (My nightmare is that I’m onstage in an opera and suddenly realize that I’m in an opera that I’ve never even heard and have to make everything up).

The concert/party events at our home really do get everyone talking to everyone else, and we’ve got the whole thing down to a science, and I will tell you how. There is a caveat however….you’ve got to have enough space so that people can either hang out together with drinks and talk, or sit down with their food somewhere besides where it’s being served, and there’s somewhere they could go to get away from the noise of a lot of people talking all at once. That would probably be a large living room, another room where people could go, and a small place for intimate conversation. A large kitchen is not required, though it makes things easier. If you do not have these conditions do not, I repeat, do not try this out at home. Instead, you could give a dinner party for six, with five familiar people and one fascinating stranger, which is God’s great gift to the world after creation…and I will tell you how to do that another day.

It’s a good idea to plan the party when you have some time free the day of, though with good planning you can do it without the extra time. It’s also a very good idea to be able to have the next day off.

What you do is this, and in the order given:

First you enlist a helper. Granddaughter (or son) is best, followed by: daughter, husband, roommate, friend, someone off the street…you must have a helper. If you think you can skip this part and do it all yourself, you are a true masochist and need to get some counseling.

Next ( a couple of days in advance, before you’re feeling desparate) you go to someplace like Trader Joe’s which will have everything you need. For thirty people you get:

3 boxes stoned wheat thins, or whatever crackers you like
6 packages of cheese, or 3 wheels of cheese
a lot of grapes
3 containers of paté (get some you like in case you have leftovers)
8 bottles of wine(red and white) six bottles sparking soda (I like grapefruit, blood orange, exotic stuff like that)
good bakery stuff, if you don’t bake yourself If you do bake, get whatever you need
A potted plant, nothing expensive, maybe a mum, or a poinsettia if it’s Christmas, or some daffodils if it’s February.

If you don’t have 30 wineglasses, plates and silverware, you’ll need to go to a party store, or someplace like IKEA and get plastic wineglasses, pretty paper napkins, plain paper plates, plastic forks and maybe some plastic knives (there are recyclable ones around, I hope you’ll get those). If you do have all this stuff in glass and china and silver, you probably have a dishwasher….even if you don’t, you’ve got your helper.

If you bake, make a sheet cake and some brownies, or cookies. You can do this a day or two ahead. If you’re really feeling ambitious, you can make some scones the afternoon of the party (I really love the King Arthur scone mixes), but you don’t really need to do this. Also, a day or two ahead, clean your house up reasonably. This could be anything from a cleaning service to just getting the books and magazines off the tables and chairs. (I bribe Dina to come the day the event of instead of her regular day, thank God for her)! If you have to do the cleaning yourself, I recommend having the party at night, with dim atmospheric lighting. But do be sure the bathroom or rooms are really clean with plenty of toilet paper and soap and towels. Also be sure that the table, or counters, or whatever you’re going to serve the food on are cleared off.

In the morning, put a pretty tablecloth, or piece of material on your table. Get out all of your candlesticks, or votives and arrange them so that you like the way it all looks. Put your napkins and serving pieces on the table as well as your plant. Arrange the utensils in cups or other containers. Put the wine bottles on a tray, or trays, with the glasses. Find the bottle opener. Put the white wine and the cold drinks in the fridge. Make ice if you’ll need it. If you can persuade your helper to come early, get him or her to help. If you baked the night before, they can wash the dishes. If you’re planning to make scones, do it in the afternoon, and get your helper to wash the dishes, or do a load in the dishwasher.

Take a nap. Get your nails done. Have a bubble bath. Do what you need to do to look as fabulous as possible. Look around and get the cat beds and water dishes out of the way. You and your helper can now put out the cheese and crackers and paté and grapes and whatever other goodies you’ve acquired. Light the candles and dim the lights. Let your friends in the door and have a ball! Do not start cleaning up until everyone is gone (except your helper, to whom you now owe some major favors). Put away all the lovely leftovers to eat whenever you like in the next few days. Try to wash up anything encrusted with anything before you go to bed so that you don’t have to use paint remover in the morning to get it off.

Having a crash day the next day is very helpful. I like to eat a breakfast with any leftover scones and do the crossword, and later knit and nap, or read a good book, or take a walk.

If you’re the type who keeps track of repaying your social obligations, you’ve probably done it, and don’t need to do anything similar for a good long time. If like me, you only really like your own parties (with some notable exceptions), maybe you’d like to do more just for the love of it.

KNITTING

I knit. Quite a lot. My mother taught me when I was a child. I remember sitting on a train during a Girl Scout trip to New York knitting argyle socks for someone….no idea who. I think I was too young for a boyfriend (things were much slower in those days).

During the next twenty years I knit a gorgeous chocolate brown cable sweater for a guy, with only one sleeve left to go when we broke up. I think that the moths took care of disposing of that over time. I began to take seriously the urban legend that if you knit a sweater for a man, the relationship is doomed. In 1974 however, throwing caution to the winds, I started a black cable knit sweater for Rudy. He’s one of the guys who throws everything in the washing machine, so it had to be acrylic. Acrylic in those days wasn’t the kind of soft cashmere-y stuff you can find now, but it was turning out to be a grand-looking sweater. I was knitting both sleeves at once expecting to finish on Christmas Eve, when the house burned down (that’s definitely a story for another time). Because it wasn’t finished, it wasn’t wrapped and was in the only place in the house where it wasn’t harmed, which was on a dining-room chair pushed under a round table with a non-flammable tablecloth. After years of airing it out, it stopped smelling like burning plastic and I put it away and didn’t come back to the black pile for twenty years. I found a pattern stitch book and recreated the complicated pattern on the sleeves. But I never really got into it…that acrylic yarn just felt like…well, 70’s acrylic. When I started knitting a lot again three years ago, I threw it out, finally. It hadn’t had the famous chilling effect on our relationship. Rudy and I have been married for twenty-seven years. Maybe it was because he was never able to wear it.

In the intervening 20+ years of not-knitting, I had bought some deep wine-colored yarn at Old Deerfield Village, and my youngest daughter (also a knitter) sent me some rose-colored wool from the Black Sheep Wool Co. It sat for years in a hatbox, miraculously untouched by moths. On a whim, three summers ago, I started a sweater for myself with the idea of using up the yarn. As I knit, I thought it lacked….something. So I took myself off to a yarn shop for the first time in maybe 30 years to buy some white yarn. There was this great Peruvian cream color, and a lovely purple, and….and….if you’re a knitter you know the drill. The result was a striped four-color pullover and the beginnings of my stash. Since then, lots of lovely yarn of all kinds, two complete sets of bamboo needles in all sizes, regular and double-pointed. Then circular needles, needles and yarn from consignment stores, stitch holders, pins, a blocking board, rulers, measuring tapes, needle holders, a needle case. Since that summer three years ago, I have made fourteen sweaters (fifteen, if you include the baby sweater I made for my new niece), and sundry other things….a baby quilt, knee warmers, two pairs of socks, a fish toy for the new niece (don’t ask), a lace scarf, and a bunch of hats.

Every October my twin grandchildren and my daughter come to visit from Arizona, where she is a lawyer for the Navajo Nation. Both my daughter Sylvia and granddaughter Elizabeth are also knitters, so there’s always a trip to a yarn store in the offing. Two Octobers ago, then 10 year old Elizabeth picked out a Rowan Big Wool pattern for a jacket, some size 13 needles and some very bulky bright orange yarn, along with wooden buttons which cost the earth (Nona pays). She started knitting the same day and finished half the back by the time they returned to Flagstaff. Apparently that was the end of it. This past February, my husband and my other granddaughter, Heidi, who is 23 and lives with us, travelled to Flagstaff for a few days, to help Sylvia finish her kitchen. While we were there, I found the project lying around and offered to knit it (a much easier task than painting ceilings!). I hadn’t quite finished it by the end of our stay, so I brought it back to Cambridge to finish it up. I sent it off to AZ, Elizabeth sewed on the buttons and wears it constantly.



Her mother asked for one for Christmas. And it’s such a quick pattern that I’m happy to comply. I ordered a ton of bulky yarn on-line. (I have to be careful or I would bankrupt us. I have never found a hank of yarn on sale that I didn’t have to have). It all arrived this summer while I was in the middle of two other sweaters….beautiful hanks of amethyst, burgundy, russet, black and white.
Several weeks ago, I realized that I needed to get started on Christmas knitting, so I abandoned for awhile: a cotton boat-necked pullover of a sort of elastic yarn (meant for socks) in the most heavenly blue color, and a heavy cotton jacket with intarsia squares, stripes and flowers. Both of them slow and labor intensive. The jacket is highly patterned (and I’m making it up as I go along, roll over Kaffe Fassett!), so I really have to pay attention. The blue one is TV knitting, simple, but many stitches to the inch. I started on the Rowan pattern with the new amethyst bulky yarn, and it was finished in no time. If one were really diligent, one could knit it in a weekend. Today I will sew in the raglan sleeves, and then I can knit the collar. I will mine my huge button box for beautiful buttons. I’ll sew the side and sleeve seams, and hide it when Sylvia and the grandkids come to stay. My present TV knitting is an alpaca multicolored scarf in a lace pattern. I really love knitting. I love giving knitted things for Christmas. I hope my relatives and friends like getting knitted things for Christmas, but even if they didn’t, I’d probably keep on knitting anyway.

ORGANIZING JUST ONE THING

I’m sitting at my kitchen table looking out at my garden. The mucronulatum azaelea is just starting to show red leaves, the little braided one from Katharine, the priest at my church (and my friend), which she brought to me in the hospital in January is blooming profusely…obviously still mixed up about its seasons. The day promises to be one of those wonderful warm autumn days called Indian Summer in New England (which are supposed to happen after a frost which we haven’t had yet, and haven’t had in October for years. Climate change seems to favor New England). My thoughts run (very slowly I admit) to fall cleanup chores. They consist of putting the porch furniture from all porches into the barn, rolling up the porch rugs and finding someplace in the basement for them (the basement... a story for another day). I should bring the citrus trees and as many of the geraniums as I can cram in to the small greenhouse…but not today, Scott is making repairs to it. So I will focus on a major clutter magnet inside the house.

There are several of these: the piano (but I filed all the music on it away earlier), the coatrack in the front hall (not bad right now), the back hall table (actually quick and easy), the dressing room (only a bag of summer clothes to take downstairs), the tables in our bedroom (book and magazine clutter, and of course, knitting projects), and finally the biggies: my desk and the kitchen table. It’ll be the kitchen table since I’m sitting right at it. It has on it, in addition to a pretty woven tablecloth with orange, red and yellow stripes, the following:
3 cloth napkins.
A white metal trivet.
My water glass.
A large footed fruit bowl.
A pile of magazines and catalogues.
A folded woven striped tablecloth which is too small for the table .
Eight candlesticks (two pewter with candles, two glass, one wooden gold-painted angel, three brass ).
The Whole Green Catalogue.
Eleven cookbooks (including The King Arthur Flour Baking Book, both volumes of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, The Joy of Cooking, Molly Katzen’s Vegetable Heaven and six others under them.
Three cloth shopping bags.
My music bag (OK, it’s on the chair, but that counts).
One potholder, one tea cozy.
A notebook and three pencils.
A small bowl of calcium chews.
A tea tin with Grace Tea’s Owner’s Blend tea.
Two placemats.
A doll’s dress for a teddy bear, which I intend to knit.
A beautiful pottery sugar bowl, made by my friend Daisy’s very talented potter daughter Adero Willard.
A ladder thingie with five votive candles on it.
Three other votives.
Four ceramic ducks.
A blue pitcher with what were once fresh autumn flowers, now become a dried bouquet.
A mailing envelope with a CD of a radio talk Rudy gave last week.
Bits of yarn and a yarn label.
A cardboard tray for catfood cans.

The reason this is not a truly daunting project is that I have a place somewhere else for all this stuff. I have to chose between all those candlesticks and votives, and the rest go in the bottom of the Welsh dresser. The fruit bowl, the napkins and the placemats actually belong on the table. The cookbooks have their bookcase, and so on.

I’ve come to the conclusion that if, like me, one’s kitchen tastes run to the 1989 country variety…oak and maple unfitted cupboards, wooden floors, butcher block and oriental rugs, with lots of things around, you’d better have a place, (or two or three) to stash the stuff in some orderly way, or it could get to be overwhelming. I think that if I lived in a smaller house, my tastes might get much simpler very fast. But I’m lucky, both of our houses are quite large and have outbuildings, even the one in Cambridge which has a carriage barn. People have offered to buy this barn for a lot of money to convert into a small house. We don’t really need the extra money, so it has what carriage barns were built to have in them…cars, garden equipment, bikes, and house leftovers or out-of-favors.

The Victorians understood a few things about living graciously, and we benefit from these today. I don’t have the house’s original complement of three live-in servants and several outside daily people. Instead we have wonderful Dina who comes for a few hours every other week to clean out the worst of our mess, and Scott who lives with us and does our carpentry and repairs. We have Jim and his guys who paint one side of the house every year and repair any roof things that aren’t slate. We have John who shovels at exactly the right moment after every snowfall. We have Carlos who delivers our milk and butter from a suburban farm. We have Boston Organics who bring (usually locally-sourced) organic fruits and vegetables and eggs every week.

One can easily find local farms and people who deliver milk, painters, carpenters, roofers, masons on the Internet. I find cards from cleaning people on my porch every week. Better yet, ask the neighbors. Mike sent John to us, a real estate agent sent us Scott. Other recommendations brought Jim to us (who practically lives on our street he has so much work). Our chimneys are currently being repaired by a mason who did work at our church. A new plumber is currently being auditioned. All these people need the work, and we need them. It’s called community building and it’s really important at this time in our history.

The table cleaning is finished and time for a sushi break!

HALLOWEEN

I am not a great lover of Halloween. I hate the color combinations of orange and black. I wonder how the idea got around that witches wear all black rags and ride around on brooms. Maybe they got that one mixed up with Cinderella, what with cleaning out the chimneys, having a daily workout with a broom, and no shoes. Pumpkins and squash are pretty decorations inside and outside the house, as long as you don’t actually have to eat the pumpkin when you, and it, are done. It takes a sharp axe, or sword, or machete to cut a pumpkin (and it’s pretty easy to do yourself in while you’re doing it), then you have to scrape out a huge amount of seeds and disgusting goo before you bake it for about 24 hours in a slow oven. After you’ve scraped it out of there, you get to eat, or use in baking something which tastes exactly like water and has the consistency….you get the idea. I really don’t like pumpkin. The seeds are nice, especially if you have small children. You can save them and plant them in the spring, and the kids can watch their own pumpkins grow. I am a dyed-in-the-wool locovore most of the time, but this really is a case where if you want to make pie, or whatever, it’s much better to get the kind in a can.

It used to be fun, dispensing candy to cute little kids in pirate and ghost costumes and ballerina outfits, but that seems to be a thing of the past, what with razor blades in the apples and anthrax in the chocolate bars being held out as a threat to parents who like their children to stay alive after the day. Most places have events instead, which is probably fun, though I’ve never been to one. The idea of getting into a costume and going to a party with other people in costumes doesn’t appeal either. I’ve been in enough operas for it to lose it’s appeal . Actually, I stopped doing it some years ago when I went to a party in a suburban town made up and dressed up as Georgia O’Keeffe, and no one knew who Georgia O’Keeffe was. Would they have known if I went as Sylvia Plath, or Virginia Woolf? I’ll never know. I look a bit like Virginia Woolf anyway (if she had lived to be my age), so maybe I could just go as myself and say that I was dressed up as her.

But what Halloween is really, is All Hallow’s Eve, the Eve of All Saints Day, when the veil between the living and the dead is most permeable. I like that idea. I like the quantum idea that past, present and future aren’t as well defined as we think they are. This year, there's a time change from Daylight Savings Time to EST. It'll be a looong night. I'm a member of the Church of St John the Evangelist on Beacon Hill, an Episcopal church with a wonderful High Church liturgy and a liberal attitude. On All Saints Sunday we bring in pictures of people we love who have died and put them on the side altars with lit votives and icons. It’s very beautiful, and every year I bring pictures of my mother and father, Larry, Andre, Ray, Ralph. If I didn’t think that everyone would think it was stupid of me, I’d bring pictures of my old dogs, Missie, Wingfoot and Patty, and my beloved cats Nimrod, Tux and Boo. I’d love to think that they’re all near to me on the eve of All Saints, and that maybe they have something important to say to me. That’s when I love Halloween.

LEAVES

There’s really something special about autumn in this area of New England. The days are warm with beautiful leaves, or frosty with beautiful leaves, or rainy, kind of like a French Impressionist painting of Paris at the turn of the century…this with all the beautiful leaves falling to the ground, but still vivid and lovely.

I have a good friend, a displaced New Yorker who is a wonderful poet. Every year he tries to determine exactly when the perfect pitch of the leaves will lure him to Vermont. Sometime in early October he gets into his car with a friend and heads for the mountains, invariably in a traffic jam of other leaf peepers, always wondering if this is the best spot for optimal leaf viewing. He’s written poems about this. One has been set as a song, so his experience is truly immortalized.

I just wait. In Cambridge, or Gloucester where we have a house near the ocean, the gold and red and brilliant yellows come later, but the days of all that glowing light do come eventually. When it’s time, for the week or so that it’s most lovely, I walk, and look, and kick up leaves.
This week I went to the Mount Auburn Cemetery, which is a couple of miles from our house. I had never been there in the autumn before, I tend to go in the spring when the azaleas or rhododendrons are blooming, and I hadn’t been there at all for a couple of years. The first day I went with a friend who didn’t walk far enough or fast enough for me, but the next day I went alone feeling really tired and out-of-sorts. I walked along with my camera, which got to be very leisurely because I kept stopping to take pictures. I only got a few really good shots, but the whole place was breathtaking. I came home refreshed and ready to take on anything. I went yesterday with my granddaughter and she took pictures with a camera which has film which needs to be developed. I hope she’ll get them back soon, she’s a great photographer.




One of the many reasons I love the autumn is the colors, the light. I use these elements a lot in my decorating. Our front hallway is a wonderful saturated autumn yellow color, with russet carpets and a dark mirrored armoire and paintings on the wall. The upper part of our bedroom and our library is a red color which we have named after our street….it has to be mixed up each time. It’s the color of old books, and autumn leaves. My kitchen is green and cream and wood, and in the autumn there are bouquets of mums and tablecloths with russet and green, with brass candlesticks which we light when we eat at night.

None of this is hard or expensive to do. Many years ago I lived in New York City, and I had a friend who was as impoverished a musician as I was. He had (and still has) an apartment on the corner of West 70something Street and Broadway. It’s one large room, with a kitchen and bath and fantastic large windows overlooking Broadway. In those days of rent-controlled apartments, it was possible to have such a place. It was also a high-crime area then, with a lot of break-ins. In my own apartment not far away, which I shared with another mezzo-soprano, we had figured out all the places where the burglars hadn’t looked and we hid things there when we were both away on tour. We had jokes about “New York Decorating: Macramé Your Police Lock, Arrange Ferns on Your Window Bars”, perhaps for New York Magazine. I threatened to put up signs on our fire escape in several languages asking whoever broke in to put the houseplants back inside in the winter and close the window. My friend, however had the ultimate burglar-proof apartment, and it was gorgeous. In his large room, was a huge, old oriental rug which he had found in the rubbish and had gotten cleaned. On it was his old and large Steinway piano (a necessity as he was a pianist) and chained to it was the TV, on the floor, and covered with some nice material when he wasn’t looking at it. He painted the walls an autumnal red. He recovered several large floor cushions in autumn colors and had lovely drapes, which he made. His bed was a platform in an alcove, with an Indian bedspread on it in bright colors with lots of cushions, a couple of lamps…and that was it. It was totally stunning. I haven’t seen him for years, and I wonder if now that the neighborhood is upscale, if anything has changed.

Someone showed me what to do with leaves if you want to preserve them for an arrangement. Go to the pharmacy and ask for glycerin….about a cup should do it. Put the colored branches (yellow beech works particularly well) on to a surface you can bang on, get a hammer and smash the stems. Arrange them in a container with the glycerin. That’s it. The stems and the leaves will become like suede and keep their color for several months.
Then go and heat up some cider with cloves and cinnamon in it drink it and look at your handiwork. This is particularly satisfying if you’ve been outside kicking up some leaves. Wherever you are, if you’re in a region with actual seasons, there are some, and you can find them easily, and it costs you nothing. My Hot Tips for living in a recession….or any other time.

KITCHENS

CONFESSIONS OF A MODERN VICTORIAN
KITCHENS
My kitchen in Cambridge is old, and has walls which, to put it gently, are definitely not plumb. In fact, the construction of the walls leads us to believe that this part of the house, which is a wing, was built by a drunken Victorian carpenter who had lost his level and possibly his mind. We repaired and replastered them when we renovated the 1950’s metal kitchen slum it had become into a functioning (and lovely) kitchen ten years ago. It is what is loosely called an “unfitted” kitchen with wooden oak floors, an island made of IKEA cabinets of huge drawers, a maple butcher block top and ball feet so that could move it if we wanted (we never have). Part of the kitchen has built in base cabinets (all drawers) where the sink and stove and dishwasher are, but we don’t have the usual run of overhead cabinets. Instead, hanging on the wall are a glass fronted oak cabinet, a large wooden dish drying and storage rack (very British, that),and an old mantel salvaged from the basement of the house, with great stuff on it. In other parts of the kitchen are a Welsh dresser, a large and ornate Chinese cupboard, and a New England oak cupboard, as well as the previously mentioned bookshelves crammed with cookbooks and bowls.
What was going through the mind of the drunken Victorian carpenter when he studded in the walls is lost to history, but the studs are spaced at random widths. Studs are usually 16” apart, these are sometimes 12”, sometimes 10”, sometimes who knows what. A stud finder is no help at all, because there seems to be a lot of metal stashed away in there and old leftover boards from some other project tacked up between the studs. The original Black Holes and they may be the origin of the universe. This means that you may or may not be able to fasten something securely when the light goes on in the studfinder and the little beeps sound. There are a lot of plastered-over holes from screws going through the plaster to nothing at all. There’s horizontal wainscoating painted dark green with a fashionable crackle finish. I hope it stays fashionable because that what paint does on these boards. This is the real Dark Matter of the universe. The countertops, unlike the ubiquitous granite or marble ones in Cambridge, are made of black laboratory-grade Formica (like the kind in your high school chemistry lab) edged with oak. They’re stunning, and wildly practical. The top part of the walls up to the fourteen foot ceiling are painted cream color. It’s a wonderful place…full of light from large windows, French doors with a transom opening onto a Japanese garden, and I’m constantly experimenting with it…moving things around, buying stuff for it as if it were a school child who needs new clothes in the fall.

It didn’t cost us a lot to renovate . We did most of the work ourselves with the help of a construction guy who loved to tear down walls, and who installed new windows. We have Scott, our housemate, who’s really a musician, but is also a wonderful finish carpenter, who finished and trimmed the windows with wide sills for plants, installed the French doors and built a porch. Probably none of the big stuff could have happened as beautifully without him. We had floor people install the oak floor. Everything else was mine and Rudy’s labor. He built new walls where they were needed with studs 16” apart, and did the drywall and plastering. We spackled and cleaned and painted, and assembled and installed all the IKEA base cabinets and the island. Home Depot fabricated the single countertop from my measurements…and I got it right! Rudy installed the sink, the plumbers plumbed and we were in business. That was 10 years ago, and we’ve accumulated the rest of the stuff over time, including the cookbooks.

That’s the back story.

So….this week the towel holder fell off the wall near the sink (only one of the screws was actually in a stud), making two more holes in the wall, as well as a couple of others for similar reasons. Last week I saw a picture in a magazine somewhere of a child’s room with a wall which was painted with blackboard paint. I thought what a fun idea it would be to have a blackboard as a backsplash behind the black counters. We’ve never been able to tile it because it’s so uneven. I thought we could write notes and recipes and put pictures on the wall.

I cleared everything off the counters (no mean feat) and admired the uncluttered look for awhile, then headed to the paint store. I needed to know if I could apply paint over high gloss paint (yes, with sanding, washing, primer) and if it could be painted over if I hated it (phone call from the store to the manufacturer, yes). So I brought my quart home with a small new can of spackle and a new putty knife, and a box of TSP. In the corner of the basement where we keep paint cans and supplies (otherwise known as The Alternate Universe) I scrounged a can of latex primer, along with three other gallons of primer which were way old, currently residing in the barn with their tops off , drying out,awaiting recycling. I washed, spackled, sanded and primed. Still ugly, all white, but smoother. I masked off the top part the next day, where I wanted the blackboard to stop and applied the first coat of black. Oh dear, awful, and was it going to have crackle finish too? I waited overnight, and obsessively at 6:00AM I laid on the second coat. Better, but awfully shiny. By the end of breakfast thought, it had dried and was stunning. It ties the whole thing together. I put the stuff back on the counters where the black backdrop makes the Kitchen-Aid mixmaster look like a twentieth century sculpture.



Yesterday I wrote the menu next to the stove (my twenty-something granddaughter is learning how to cook) and she drew a flower and a happy cat eating her cooking.







Now about organizing the cookbooks….no, Jane, lie down until that organizing urge passes!

SOMETHING ABOUT ME

CONFESSIONS OF A MODERN VICTORIAN
A woman quite at home (mostly) in the 21st Century, but with one foot firmly planted in the 19th

SOMETHING ABOUT ME
I’ve had a career. Often a very active and public one because I’m a “classical” singer. I’m nearing the end of that now (I’ll be 70 soon), but it was a great run. I performed with the best orchestras and conductors and colleagues, and musically it was wonderfully satisfying. I read “The Feminine Mystique” years before anyone else. It was the time of Love-Ins and Be-Ins and a lot of sexual and social-psychological experimentation, not to mention hallucigenic drugs and I delighted in it (and nothing really terrible ever happened to me, probably because my drug use was pretty moderate for those days). I’ve met, and taught, and been taught by a lot of amazing people in this life. I have grown children and remarried when I was in my forties to and accomplished scientist. (I like to say that he’s my second and last husband!) I have four grandchildren….my oldest granddaughter currently lives with us.
So what do I most love to do in this interesting and varied life, besides learning new stuff? Move furniture. Bake. Make renovations to my houses. ( I’m one of the very privileged people in the US…we have two). Knit. Cook. Decorate (that’s the best). I have a vast library of books on home décor…lovely picture books for grownups. I have hundreds of cookbooks and bookcases in two kitchens to hold them I am the Queen of Catalogues and a closet reader of shelter mags (though some of the best have gone out of business recently, alas). I have taken up knitting with a vengeance. I can tell you how to clean anything…in recent years with vinegar and baking soda. I make curtains. I uswed to hook rugs and crochet afghans and I may again. I know all the best consignment stores for antiques and clothes, every second-hand bookstore for miles (and every other bookstore for that matter). I can paint anything, including pictures. I garden. I love it…these “feminine” pursuits. They are what get my juices flowing, and are my comforts when things go wrong. I see something in my imagination, and I can create it, make it happen. Things of the mind made real.