For all my talk about my stack of Christmas books to re-read every year, I think in recent years I must have been reading only the Maeve Binchy: this year I’m getting to all of them, and most of them are not even familiar.

Right now I’m reading the two Miss Read books (Village Christmas and The Christmas Mouse), and I am reminded that this was the trajectory of my Miss Read reading: (1) the author was recommended to me; (2) I liked the books and read a whole bunch; (3) I requested the Christmas books for my Christmas book pile; (4) I found out my mother-in-law was a Miss Read fan; (5) I never read Miss Read again.

Reading them this year, I can see why my mother-in-law liked them so much: they’re just bursting with older ladies who know what’s best for everyone. A chunk of each book is devoted to the rich fulfillment found in hard work, pinched criticism of others’ behavior, and regular church attendance; a larger chunk is devoted to how young people have all these crazy parenting ideas that need to be firmly corrected by the grandmothers—and how very, very grateful the parents and children will be for these firm corrections in their lives.

In short, there are ways in which my late mother-in-law lives on.

The David Sedaris book is new to me this year (I got it for Christmas last year), and I found some of it perfect and some of it not at all right for me. His job as a mall elf, yes; spoof Christmas letters in which something terrible happens to a baby, no. Christmas whore, yes; Christmas morgue and Christmas TV executive, less so. But I am the same about my Augusten Burroughs book, so perhaps I will just get used to The Parts I Skim.

I would like recommendations, if you have them, for other books to read at Christmas. I think the Christmas Book Stack needs refreshing, and I’m going to the library this afternoon. So far on my list I have Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher, recommended by Nowheymama. What else?

On the post Christmas Propelling, I mentioned my Christmas books reading list, and then Becky and Betsy both asked about the other books on that list, so here they are:

The only one that is important to me that I read every year (i.e., I look forward to it as a significant part of Christmas, and will rearrange things to make sure there’s time to read it) is Maeve Binchy’s This Year It Will Be Different. I love it so much, and the stories are so familiar to me now that I start getting weepy and sentimental just OPENING THE BOOK, and I just really love it.

I don’t know whether to recommend it to others, though. You know how people are like, “Oh, I read Anna Karenina every year and I just LOVE it so MUCH!,” and then you read it and you think “OMG this is so incredibly awful and depressing and there are so many Russian names to keep track of I can’t STAND it, I want to DIE”? You know how that is? Well, I love Maeve Binchy, but when I have recommended her in the past, it has sometimes happened that the recipient of the recommendation has referred to her books as “so depressing.” Whereas I find them uplifting and satisfying and if anything a little overly undepressing (“Hey, everything works out right! Again!”)—but that is how some people feel about dark Russian novels that have words such as “doomed” and “tragedy” in the descriptions, so clearly there is a certain element of crapshootage to the book-recommendations thing. And it would be hard for me to say that stories involving hideous and unspeakably-rude stepdaughters, sad affairs with married men, and canceled weddings were not A BIT on the doomed/tragedy side, if someone were to read This Year It Will Be Different and then call me out on that. And I don’t know if I loved it quite so much the first time I read it. And so forth.

ANYWAY. It’s my favorite Christmas book. And in fact I will buy a copy for someone. Leave a comment that specifically mentions it if you want to be included in the drawing; I think you ought to be able to comment on a post without being entered into a contest. My goal will be to get you a hardcover edition, because I think it’s much nicer, but this means a gamble with a used copy from an Amazon Marketplace seller—speaking of crapshoots. They’re always like, “NEW condition! BRAND-NEW!!” and then it arrives all dinged and scuffed. Which I wouldn’t have MINDED if it had been LISTED that way.

So, as I was saying, This Year It Will Be Different is the one that’s every year. Then I have Augusten Burroughs’s You Better Not Cry (Amazon search results lead me to a $21.99 hardcover, but I see there is also an $8.80 bargain-priced hardcover so I linked to that), which I discussed in the Christmas Propelling post linked to above. This year I also have a new one in the pile: David Sedaris’s Holidays on Ice. It has other holidays in it besides just the winter ones.

Two others on the pile are Miss Read books. They’re a little hard to find, but I see there’s a single volume that has both that can be bought used starting at about $4.00 (they say starting at a penny or two, but that doesn’t take into account the four dollars shipping). There are in the “pleasant little tales of a quiet village” category, very nice for reading in a room with Christmas lights and maybe a fireplace.

And the last is Christmas Stories. This one includes stories by famous English-class authors: Dickens and Chekov and Updike. I shouldn’t really have it in the pile, because it is the one I leaf through a little bit if I’ve read all the others. But it has such a pretty binding and I love seeing it with the other books.

All right, so that is the Christmas Book pile. And remember to mention in a comment if you want to try the Maeve Binchy book. I’ll pick a name soon, in the hopes of getting the book there before Christmas (although there’s no hope of it if it’s a book-rate option, which can take weeks). How about…Monday. I’ll pick someone sometime on Monday. (U.S. mailing addresses only, as usual—I have Amazon ship it directly.)

(Also see: Christmas Books Follow-Up.)

Edited to add: The winner is Sarah Filchak. I’ll email you, Sarah!

The tree is decorated! The tree is decorated!

Does it look a BIT as if someone stood back six to ten feet and FLUNG ornaments at the tree? This is because I crossed “Christmas will not be good unless the ornaments are pleasingly arranged” off this year’s list right after I crossed off “Christmas will not be good unless all seven names are signed on the Christmas cards.”

After writing yesterday about how I was overwhelmed and trying to fix it by reducing unnecessary perfectionism, I employed my “Well, what CAN you do?” tactic to get myself to do the next thing I really did want to get done: decorating the tree. I couldn’t seem to make myself decorate the tree, but I COULD bring up the box of ornaments from the basement and put it in the living room.

From there, nature took its course: children came home from school and descended upon the box. The ornaments were applied two, three, even five to the tip of a single drooping branch. But the ornaments were ON THE TREE.

And, bonus: the children felt as if they had participated in a happy holiday activity. I can picture them later in life reflecting on my awesome laid-back mothering: “She let US do it, however we wanted! She didn’t get all uptight about things that didn’t matter!” Yeah. That’s how it happened.

I am speaking soothingly these days into my own ears: “No, no, shhhhhhh, it’s fine, you ALWAYS think there’s too much to do before Christmas, and it ALWAYS works out JUST FINE.”

A soothing mantra, I’ve found, is “No one really cares.” I used this most recently to help me dial back the perfectionism with the Christmas cards this year: I genuinely enjoy sending them so I don’t WANT to skip them (I know I COULD skip, but I don’t WANT to), but it absolutely works to write “Love, Swistle” and call it a day. No one really cares; no one will say, “Awww, but she usually writes ‘Happy holidays and a very happy New Year!’ first, and then writes the names of all seven family members! How are we going to have a happy holiday/year without Swistle WRITING that we should have one?”
 
And just because I OWN tons of cute gift wrap and ribbons and gift tags doesn’t mean I have to USE them. Some years it’s fun to do that, making a pretty assortment of wrappings under the tree and figuring out interesting combinations of coordinating/contrasting ribbon/tags. Other years I want to use a roll of gift wrap until it’s gone, and then start on the next one and use IT until IT is gone, and I want to use a sharpie to write to/from on everything. No one really cares which way I do it. No one will say, “Awww, last year my three presents were in three different papers! This year they’re all in the SAME paper! Christmas is RUINED!”

And it would be NICE if I had each of the three younger children make cards for their teachers. It would be NICE if I made the little plates of treats for the mail carrier and our neighbors. It would be NICE if I got some extra snapshots printed to send with the card to my great-aunt. It would be NICE if I arranged a gingerbread-house-making activity. But I’m not going to this year, and no one will deep-down care.

(This would be the opposite of soothing on the years that I am getting everything done.)

ANOTHER thing I’ve had to learn again and again (I’m picking up this post as if it’s been in the forefront of all our minds since then) is that if I am thinking things such as “It’s really just a matter of making Good Choices—not giving up ALL treats, of course not, but having them MODERATION,” it means I have an infection, and the infection is near my brain. Last time I think it was ear; this time it’s sinus.

I hope you won’t think less of me when I say that once I’d looked it up online and learned that most routine/moderate sinus infections clear up without antibiotics (and that in fact many of them don’t respond to antibiotics), I decided to cruise along with the infection for awhile. It is hard to give up this little temporary time of “I just have to watch PORTION SIZES, that’s all!” and even “Oops, it’s 3:00 and I just realized I forgot to have lunch!”—and meanwhile the pounds leaving one by one.

This video propelled me RIGHT INTO Christmas spirit: it’s Jimmy Fallon, Mariah Carey, The Roots, and some little kids, wearing Christmas sweaters and using classroom musical instruments to do “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”

And I NEEDED a little propelling. The tree is not up. Nothing is wrapped. I still have many things to buy and mail. The Christmas cards are not done. (Although that is PARTLY not my fault: the photos I ordered were done wrong so I had to re-order them.)

I HAVE done my annual re-read of the first Christmas book on the pile (You Better Not Cry, which I read first because the stories are not, er, traditionally Christmas-enspiriting) (stomach pumped, boyfriend dying of AIDS, house flooding, waking up in a hotel room with a stranger, etc.). I usually like to bask in the lights of the tree as long as humanly possible, so it is a little stressful to be wasting day after day: here I am, reading about the Christmas when Augusten Burroughs found himself on the street after a 2-day alcoholic blackout, and there are NO CHRISTMAS LIGHTS. And the children are agitating because we have a “Candy canes may only be eaten when they can be harvested from a tree” rule, and the TREE IS NOT UP. There the candy canes sit, tantalizing in their boxes, and the parents do not seem to REALIZE the enormity of this issue: they’re all “Eh, maybe tomorrow? Maybe this weekend?” when asked when the tree WILL be up! As if days without candy canes is NO BIG DEAL!

So! This morning I brought the Christmas tree box up from the basement! It is a small step, but it is a step!

Oh, coffee with egg nog and whipped cream. Why have we stayed apart so long??

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I learned two things about Twitter recently.

The first thing I learned accidentally, while looking for something else in my account settings (in Twitter, click the little gear symbol at upper right, then choose Settings in that pull-down menu): I learned that there was a box checked (which I hadn’t checked) saying that Twitter would “Tailor Twitter based on my recent website visits.” That is, Twitter would track my internet usage, in order to “customize” Twitter to that usage. They’d “protect my privacy,” of course, while following me around the internet and recording that information in order to use it. Oh! I see! No, thank you! UNCHECK BOX!

The second thing is what I was actually looking for when I stumbled upon the first thing. It had gradually started occurring to me that I was not seeing tweets from protected accounts I didn’t follow, EVEN WHEN THAT PERSON HAD @-REPLIED ME. That is, I knew I wouldn’t see protected tweets if I wasn’t following that person, but I HAD thought that if a person with a protected account deliberately contacted me by using my Twitter name, I WOULD see THAT tweet.

BUT NO. I wonder how many people know this, because I didn’t. I wonder how many people have talked to someone on Twitter and then felt ignored when they didn’t get an answer, not realizing that the other person couldn’t see their tweets? Because it’s REASONABLE to think they WOULD see the tweet! And Twitter doesn’t, like, reject the tweet, or warn the user at the tweeting moment that the person they’ve @-replied doesn’t follow them so won’t see the tweet!

Here’s a screenshot from Twitter:

It’s that last bullet point. If you have a protected account, and if you directly talk to someone on Twitter, and that person doesn’t follow you, THEY CAN’T SEE YOUR TWEET.

This explains why I have felt so confused, looking at Twitter conversations that seem to actively include me and yet I can’t see half of the tweets. Sometimes I’ll see someone else answering someone who seems to have asked me a question—but I can’t see the protected account, so I don’t know what the question was.

DID YOU KNOW ABOUT ALL THIS?? Because I did not.

Leaving myself notes is turning out to be VERY HELPFUL. Last year I felt like I’d remember most of the Thanksgiving stuff, but I put all my plans and recipe print-outs into a folder anyway. This year when I got them out, I didn’t really remember any of it. And I kept thinking things like, “Uh oh. I must have thought I’d remember that recipe for roasted vegetables, but I don’t! …Oh, here it is in the folder! Whew.” The best were my menu-list notes such as “5 pounds PLENTY” after potatoes, and “next time, 3 dozen” after rolls.

This morning I got out my Christmas notes, which were much less organized because CHRISTMAS is much less organized. Here are some of them:

1. “Watch Christmas shows and read Christmas books EARLIER.” I keep thinking I should wait until it’s really close to Christmas, to maximize the Christmassiness of those activities. But instead I ended up feeling stressed and thinking “I STILL HAVE TO WATCH/READ THOSE”—when I’d spent several weeks of December WANTING to watch/read them but making myself wait. Silly! Plus, reading them earlier gets the holiday spirit going earlier.

2. “Eat all the candy canes BEFORE Christmas.” Nobody likes them after Christmas, so the deliciousness must be almost entirely Christmas-anticipation based.

3. “Buy one gift card per Target trip for a few months.” (I wrote about this idea here.) I need to write this on the calender in September instead: by the time I get out the Christmas Notes, it’s too late to remind myself of this.

4. “Remind kids about politeness/gratitude.” I keep thinking incorrectly that their training on that is complete. They still really need a refresher before opening any presents.

5. “Divide stocking stuff beforehand.” Every single year I think it’ll be fun! and festive! to divide the stocking stuff right before it’s time to fill the stockings. Every single year I end up sweaty and frazzled and rushed, ripping open bags of candy and dividing them all into five piles and trying to remember where I put the Silly Putty. This year I’m dividing it ahead of time into bags I can then just pour into each stocking.

6. “BRING FLASK.”

I had to learn AGAIN yesterday the lesson I have already had to learn a thousand times: That if I am being reduced to slumped-shoulder teary-eyed despair by all hundreds of things that need doing everywhere around me, it will actually HELP to actually DO some of those things. I don’t know why it feels as if it’s pointless, when I’ve learned so many times that it WILL HELP.

Yesterday after I refilled the soap dispenser, and picked the disposable flosser up off the floor and threw it away, and refilled the cat food container, and washed the pan soaking in the sink, and got out the Christmas address labels, I felt much MUCH better—even though I hadn’t scooped the litter box, done any laundry, done any Christmas cards, or done any of the other hundreds of things that had been bringing me down.

I’d only made a FEW, SMALL improvements, each of which took only a few seconds or at most a couple of minutes, but those helped cut down on the number of things I was seeing every time I went into those rooms. The pan in the sink was only one thing, but it was catching my eye EVERY TIME I WENT INTO THE KITCHEN, and so it had felt like a dozen things, and so washing it was like getting a dozen things done. And every single time I went into the bathroom, I was seeing the stupid flosser on the floor, and then a couple minutes later thinking “Oh, the stupid SOAP dispenser!,” so those two things felt like a dozen things, and taking care of those two things felt like getting two dozen things done.

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Another recent set of lessons includes “Things That Will Burst Into Flame, FOOMPH!”

William has been engrossed in a series of wax/candle projects/experiments. Recently he’s been melting down free candles (he got a bunch from a place we have in town that’s like a Freecycle Hut: leave anything you don’t want, take for free anything you do want) and pouring the wax into a large fish bowl with wicks dangling down into it. It’s looking pretty neat, all stripey.

Anyway, you know what bursts into flame? Wax that got accidentally dripped on a stove burner and down into the little drip-pan underneath. First it just smoked a bit, and I thought, “Well, sure, this is what happens to anything that spills on the burner. It smokes a bit and then it’s gone.” But then: FOOMPH!! and there were flames, and I stood there staring at them and then slowwwwwwly got a cup of water and slowwwwwly poured it onto the flames, wondering why I was moving so very slowwwwly.

The other thing that bursts into flames: parchment paper in an oven set to broil. I was making a toasted cheese sandwich, and I took the pan out of the oven to flip the sandwich over and I noticed the paper was getting kind of brown, and then I put the pan back into the oven and FOOMPH!! The box of parchment paper has anticipated this, and has a temperature-limit listed—but I had been thinking “parchment paper = aluminum foil” for so long, I wasn’t thinking about it anymore.

Oh, one more thing that bursts into flames: crunchy taco shell in a toaster oven. I only needed one or two and it seemed silly to heat up the whole oven for that, so I put them in the toaster oven. And they were doing very nicely, and then FOOMPH!!! I read the box, incredulous, and sure enough: “Do not use toaster oven due to possible risk of fire.”

Every year I seem to get something where first I’m sick for awhile and then I just cough and cough and cough and cough and cough. It’s a dry cough that kicks itself off, like a bouncing ball: the first cough irritates my throat so I cough again, which irritates my throat so I cough again, and so on. And it’s way worse when I lie down. I’ve tried every cough medicine on the shelf, and the only thing that works is knocking myself out with a sleeping pill.

I went to the doctor and she said it’s “probably viral.” Well. Thank you. That’s useful information. She also gave me a prescription for codeine cough syrup, which I thought was going to be AWESOME because it’s a CLASS-C NARCOTIC and that sounds SEEKABLE, but it didn’t seem to do anything for the cough OR make me feel even lightly kite-like. (But DID make me feel like I was going to throw up. Free bonus.)

Alexa told me a mixture of equal parts whiskey and honey would make a nice cough syrup, so I stopped on the way home for a bottle of whiskey. This is when I learned there are KINDS of whiskey—that “bourbon” and “scotch” are not separate liquors like vodka and gin but are in fact WHISKEYS. This has been an educational day. But isn’t there a song that goes “One bourbon, one scotch, and one beer?” and not “Two whiskeys, and one beer”? So the liquor store clerk should not have looked at me SO weird. NOT EVERYONE SPECIALIZES IN LIQUOR, LIQUOR CLERK.

Anyway, I think Alexa was thinking a tablespoon or whatever, but I think I’ll start with a cup each and sip at that until I can’t remember why I was sipping it.

Also, my lower eye lid has been twitching for weeks. WEEKS. Is that something I can die from? Because I’ve gotten kind of distracted by the cough and haven’t fretted about the twitch for awhile.

There! Isn’t it EXACTLY like having lunch with an old lady, except no lunch? Now YOU talk about all YOUR physical woes, and then we’ll split an entrée!