Category Archives: family

Clean Money

family, history, , , ,

My grandmother had grown up on a farm where she was probably comfortable with animals and “good clean dirt.” But when we knew her she had lived in the city for a long time (not The City of San Francisco, though) and was comfortable with us washing our hands quite frequently, especially if we had handled “dirty money,” i.e., all money. She wore gloves quite a bit, for different purposes. It’s very easy for me to pull up the image of her holding her soft leather driving gloves that she had just removed, which kept the fragrance of her warm and soft hands.

When my sisters and I visited her from our farm in the Central Valley she would take us across The Bay Bridge to The City. We dressed up in our finest and made a day of it, though I have no memory of just what we did there. Today I was made to wonder if she took us to the Saint Francis Hotel for lunch, because she would have liked the fact that they keep their money clean.

As a proper housewife I appreciate the use of soap and water and the impulse to keep things fresh and sanitary for the health of my family. Probably even the saint for whom the hotel is named wouldn’t have turned down a gift of soap. Or money, whether clean or dirty.

More than a week left…

family, friends, history, , ,
 

More than a week remains of the Twelve Days of Christmas, and am I glad!  The days leading up to and including Christmas Eve and Christmas Day flew by in such a flurry of church and family that I am fairly flattened. Today is the first of my restful days and I’m in happy R&R from wonderfully happy times.

Here is a hodgepodge of photos and memories from the last two weeks, probably not in precisely chronological order.

Of course, there were the doll clothes I sewed on for a couple of weeks, and did manage to mail to Littlest Granddaughter (working on a nickname for that one) on the 15th. An entire blog post will have to be dedicated to the small garments, later. I hear that the lucky dolly donned them immediately.

Then K. and I went to San Francisco again with little T. who is now 5. We did the usual cable car, Chinatown, and riding the elevator to the 31st floor of the Saint Francis Hotel to look over the city broadly and straight down at Union Square and the ice rink (photo).

We rode up and down several times and there was never a doorman to tell us, as he told poor Babar, “This is not a toy, Mr. Elephant.”


The gingerbread house in the lobby at the Fairmont Hotel was even more glorious this year, being two stories high. We were favored by meeting a baker who was doing maintenance on the candy that had already been nibbled by children.

Last year there were signs asking people not to eat the house, but not this year. So evidently some have felt more liberty to partake, at least of parts that were protruding a bit; I didn’t notice any chunks missing from the gingerbread bricks. The baker repairman gave T. a chocolate Santa.

Not to be outdone, the Saint Francis Hotel had a giant sugar castle in the lobby there.

After the San Francisco trip I mostly cleaned and cleared rooms to make places for six soon-arriving family members to sleep. We didn’t get our tree up until the day before Baby flew in, so she helped us decorate.

One of my favorite ornaments is this doll who came from the Czech Republic just as the gifter had: our friend Tylda had sneaked across the border to Austria about the time I was born, when Czech was still joined to Slovakia.

 

The little man is about 35 years old, the last remaining salt dough ornament of which B. and I painted and baked a whole set with which to decorate one of our first Christmas trees. He is looking a bit crumbly, as though his flesh is gradually vanishing into the atmosphere.

Pippin and her family left the snow to come and be with us. “My” deer looked like this when she snapped their photo before driving down.

Seventh Grandson Scout was way livelier than last year and entertained us all. We managed to keep him from falling down the stairs, and he was heard exhorting himself, “No, no…” not to bother the Christmas tree. His aunt gave him the perfect hat!


Newlyweds Soldier and Doll were with us, too, for several days. Oldest daughter Pearl sent them darling Mr. and Mrs. Snowman ornaments that she made.

And I got my own striking couple,
crazy-eyed marionettes brought from India last year by Kate.

The married couples returned to their homes already, and as I write, we are nearing the departure of the last child and the return of Quieter Nest. But I plan to enjoy all the remaining days of Christmas, with meditations on the Nativity, and wait a while before I get out the After-Christmas to-do list I made a while back.

Within Our Reach

Christmas, family, friends, poetry

At Christmastime my thoughts keep turning to all my friends and family whom I will not be with for the feast, and I want to pick up the phone to talk to each one, to tell all that I miss them, tell them that if I were with them I’d hug them tight. The Father’s gift of Love, of His only-begotten Son, is the quality of love that is expansive and overflowing in its essence. It — He –fills the universe, and will fill us to the degree that we are empty of self. I guess just thinking of it makes me feel more like sharing.

Sometimes I cry because I miss these people whom I can’t touch and look in the eye; mostly the tears are out of gratefulness for having so many people in my life to love. Following fast on the heels of that thought is the chance to soak up that Love myself in the moment of grace. I notice, though, that this kind of quietness is hard to hold on to as the busyness factor multiplies now, and there’s definitely no time to be chatting on the phone with all my beloveds.

This poem that Maria posted to set December’s mood on her excellent Poem a Day is what I would like to say to everyone, every creature made in God’s image. And also, “God is with us!”

LETTER TO A FRIEND

I salute you. There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much that, while I cannot give you, you can take.

No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today:
Take heaven.

No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in the present:
Take peace.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within our reach is joy:
Take joy.

And so at this Christmas time I greet you, with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

~ Fra Giovanni Giocondo (1435?-1515), Italian Franciscan friar and scholar

First Doll Rebecca

crafts, dolls, family,

I’ve begun sewing doll clothes for a Christmas present, and my sewing room is starting to get messy again, with all the scraps and pattern pieces swirling about like my creative juices. This doll and her clothes were waiting on the bed in that room, and as they have already been lost in the house several times in the last years, I thought I better take their pictures right away and add to my blog sewing archives the first successful doll clothes I ever made.

Oh, I sewed some other ones by hand when I was ten years-old or so, for my Barbie. But I didn’t have a pattern, just laid the doll on some scraps, cut out what looked to me like the shape the garment should take, and when I sewed the pieces together I was always surprised at how ill-fitting the clothes were. I can almost see the very shirts and dresses in my mind, though I threw them away pretty early.

Rebecca was the first doll given to my first daughter Pearl. She was hard and small and her limbs didn’t move, but I thought she was good enough to be The Doll, and I discouraged relatives from giving Pearl any more because “She has a doll already.” I was different then.

Sewing for a doll like that is challenging; knitted clothes are a bit easier to get on when the dolly insists on holding her arms stiffly by her side. I wasn’t an experienced knitter but I found some patterns for much larger doll clothes at the thrift store and managed to adjust them for this little mite. This gives me hope that in the future I might be able to at least knit a dishcloth that I like.

The pictures show most of the wardrobe I made for Rebecca 30-plus years ago. Nowadays I like to use velcro fasteners; I don’t know if we didn’t have it back then or if I just liked the old-fashioned and time-consuming snaps or button loops that the little girl almost certainly couldn’t do up for her own doll. As I recall, the young children are good at ripping off the dolls’ clothes and then they come to Mama to help them dress up the dolls again. If Mama is busy there can be a lot of naked dollies lying around.

Pearl did eventually get some other dolls, the My Friend Dolls made by Fisher-Price, and I sewed for them a little. I never thought to take photos of the clothes, but I plan to, next time I see Mandy, Becky and Jenny.

For the granddaughters’ dolls, so far I’ve only made the clothes for Maxi-Muffin shown here. Now I’m working on an American Girl type of doll clothes, for which many patterns are available. With luck I’ll have some photos of these creations within the month.

Because — Christmas is COMING!