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.