It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas

In fact is not only looks like it is beginning to be Christmas time, it is Christmas time. Beginning the day after Thanksgiving when my decorations go up until sometime in late January it is Christmas around my house.

Yesterday I baked a gross (a dozen dozen = 144) of Gregory's Great Grandma Barbara's German Christmas Cookies, a 200+ year old recipe that uses lard, sourghum, and candied citron.

Each year the ingredients are harder to find but thanks to the internet I still am able to find them. Traditionally they are baked the day after Thanksgiving. Because they are made from a "boiled candy" type of recipe, after the cookies are baked and cool they become so hard that they cannot be eaten or even dunked in tea and eaten.

They have to be "cured" with sliced apples in a sealed container until the 25th when they will be soft enough to eat. Taste wise approximately described, the cookies are gingery, molassesy, spicy with a touch of lemony.

Yesterday, after Barbara's cookies, I baked a gross of my mother's walnut cookies. She used to make them into crescents but I use a very small mellon scoop and make what I call Adeline's Walnut Balls. Heavy on the walnuts and butter, sprinkled with powdered sugar, these delightful treats melt in your mouth.

I've started a new tradition this year, something Gregory and I had talked about before. I got a packet of 100 brand new single dollar bills from the bank. I carry them around in my pocket and give one to every beggar, derelict, homeless person who crosses my path (or do I cross their path?)

Even though the words I used are somewhat pejorative (beggar, derelict, homeless) when I give them the dollar bill I remind myself that they are like me: a person with feelings, needs, hopes, desires.

I remind myself that they are no different than I and I am no different then they in our wants and needs. We are of different circumstances, yes, but all living and breathing gifts of the universe.

I may not be able to solve their problems with one dollar, or cure all the ills of the world, but I can take a moment to smile and wish someone Merry Christmas and regard my fellow human beings.

Family of a Different Sort

Last night Gregory and I shared the Sabbath with Jan and Jake and Isaac, Sheldon and Laurie (Jan's brother and sister-in-law,) their friends Janet and Dave and Laurie and Mike (now our friends too.)

Defined, the Sabbath is a day of religious observance and abstinence from work, kept by Jews from Friday evening to Saturday evening, and by most Christians on Sunday and while Muslims do not celebrate the Sabbath like Jews or Christians, they do have a day of prayer on Friday.

For Jews it is most significantly celebrated in the home at sundown on Friday with the blessings over the candles, the wine, and the bread, followed by a home cooked meal.

You have heard me say often that Gregory and I are NOT religious. He is NOT Catholic-ish and I am NOT Jewish-ish. At least in the religious sense. In the spiritual sense, YES. In the celebrations of tradition, YES. In relation to a well cooked brisket of beef or a Christmas Tree, YES. 

But the Sabbath is much more to us than religious, as we once again experienced last evening. It is the coming together of people we care for, it is taking a moment in time to remember what we have to be grateful for: food, light, shelter, health, family, friends.

It was a chance to chat and share with Sheldon and his wife Laurie, whom we haven't seen in many years. It was the always interesting time we spend with Janet and Dave, Laurie and Michael. It was the love and closeness and support and those things in common which we always feel when with Jan and Jake.

It was spending time with our God-Son Isaac, recently home from Japan where he taught for a year, and appreciating him and his ideas and his humor and his outlook on life and his reminder that we too were once young (should I say "and foolish and wise?") 

It is a reminder that we are loved and that we love in return. "Good Shabbas," as is said.

Singing From Behind

This is a repeat of a Christmas story I wrote in 2009.


The Holiday Season never begins until the first Saturday in December at Roger’s annual Christmas Party. One is always able to count on a delicious home made dinner, home baked cookies, fond friends (some seen only once a year at this event,) and a festive atmosphere filled with love. On the “perfect each year” fresh Christmas Tree decorated with old fashioned lights, there are ornaments from his family that go back generations and from his many friends that go back a lifetime. 

His home has added touches of Christmas everywhere. There is a bit on tinsel on top of a picture frame and small red and green foil boxes held in the arms of a Plaster Putti in the bathroom. There is a snow globe on the dining room table that plays music and a forest of various types of miniature trees on the shelf above his kitchen counter. On a folding table in a corner of the living room there is his boy hood antique nativity scene. In the bedroom a second, foil Christmas Tree very much in the style of Charlie Brown.

Everywhere you look, there is love and Christmas and thirty or so people enjoying their time with Roger in the big sense of home which he has created in his small apartment.

Another tradition at the party celebrates his Jewish friends. In the beginning of this party, that goes back at least thirty or so years, since they never got to do it in their own home the Jews got to put the lights on the Christmas Tree, but based on a lack of experience with things Christmas, they usually did a very poor job of it. After many years of having to rearrange the lights after the party, Roger decided that this part of the tradition had to go!

The tradition of Hanukkah dreidels, “gelt” in the form of gold foil wrapped chocolate coins, and the lighting of the Menorah have continued. By now the non-Jews have learned the blessing over the lighting of the candles and joyously join in the singing.

As I squeezed in to join the singing, Lisa tried to make room for me but there were so many people grouped around the Menorah that I told her, “I’ll just sing from behind.” Giggling, she said that my comment sounded like the title of a short story: “Singing From Behind.” This then is that story. Michael Horvich December 2009

George Hnilicka RIP

George, father and father-in-law of our dear friends John and Chuck, passed away after a long illness at the age of 84. His wife Reene died five years earlier. Gregory and I attended his funeral mass in Racine, Wisconsin. The Hnilicka family has been part of our family for three plus decades so it was important and meaningful for us to be at the mass.

Many of the family members participated in the mass and they had selected the various readings and musical pieces that were used during the mass. It lasted approximately 90 minutes.

I found myself analyzing the mass, funeral, and celebration of George's life. I found myself doing this in relation to what I had missed, not having attended the funeral of my own mother and father. While Gregory and I did our own form of celebration of their life, it felt very lonely. On the kitchen counter, where we also eat our meals, we set up an alter for each parent in their turn (March 5 2005 for dad and March 27 2010 for mom) which included burning a 24 hour candle next to their picture and a vase of beautiful flowers. Gregory and I lit the candle holding hands, said a few words of love, shed a few tears of sadness, and ended with, "Well good for her (him,) she (he) found their way out." We spend our breakfasts, lunches, and dinners for the next few days with our memories as reflected by the alter.

Our experience at George's mass was quite different. Being in church, there was a prescribed order, based on the tenants of the Catholic Church. The order was predictable, familiar, and comforting to the family. Each prayer found its proper place after the casket was rolled to the front of the church, escorted by George's extended family, for one last time. To the family, the songs were familiar, the prayers were familiar, the mass was familiar. The beliefs were united. Faith pervaded.

The priest would say, "May God be with you." and the congregation would reply, "And with you." People knew when to cross themselves, when to rise, when to be seated. There were comforting thoughts, music, candle light, responsive reading. At one point everyone wished those around them peace with hugs or hand shakes exchanged, sometimes with total strangers.

In this house of worship, most of the people in the congregation knew each other, had helped celebrate the life and death of the other congregants, had attended Sunday, holiday, special masses, had attended religious classes, had grown up together and were born or passed away each in their time.

For the most part the thoughts and prayers were appropriate and not too erroneous. Stories of an afterlife and future for the departed, the deceased's now peaceful repose, the walking hand in hand with Jesus were retold again and were familiar. They comforted if only because of their multiple repetitions over the years.

Whether one believes in any of what a religion has to say, loosing oneself in the dogma and stories of the church for at least a brief period of time has its place in the face of the mysterious, painful, sad, incomprehensible question and mourning of the death of a loved one.

When one does not have that support only the mystery, inability to really understand what death is all about, possible fear, and lonliness exists. The ceremonies are for the living. The dead are already well on their way. The older I get, the more I realize the value of tradition and ceremony, friends and family.