Holidays » Sherry Roberts Notebook

How to Make Your Own Holiday: A Stop on the Meet the Family Blog Hop

Christmas, Family, Holidays 6 Responses »

Dec 132012

To all the children born in December: sorry. I don’t know what we were thinking in March (well, actually I do). As a parent of a December child, I know that you are the greatest Christmas gift your parents will ever get. I also know that you get the shaft in presents and celebration every year.

It is not that we don’t adore you with every atom of our being. It is just that time shrinks to the size of a pea in December. There is never enough of it as we rush from parties to stores, from baking cookies to decorating trees.

My December child has solved this problem by declaring the entire month as cause for celebration of her birth. She calls it Suzmakah. The rules of Suzmakah are simple:

Work “Happy Suzmakah” into as many sentences as you can during the season.
Give out many, many hugs during Suzmakah. You get extra points.
Be generous. Additional presents will not be turned down. Never think one gift will do double duty as both Christmas present and birthday gift. That just isn’t fair.
Join all calls for Suzmakah celebration at the local pub (and there tend to be quite a few). Drinks are on you.
Finally, if you hire a plane to write your birthday wishes in the sky, please spell Suzmakah right.

To my own December child: I will never forget taking you home from the hospital in a giant red Christmas stocking. You couldn’t wipe the smile off my face with a snow shovel. And here’s another silver lining—you have the biggest stocking hung by the chimney with care.

Happy Suzmakah, baby.

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If you have a December baby or just want to start your own holiday, give me a shout. Leave a comment please.

For a short story in the tradition of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, check out “Christmas Unplugged.” And have a happy and well-lit holiday.

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This post is part of the Meet the Family Blog Hop. We all have festive traditions, memories, stories, recipes, hopes, and wishes that we share within our families. This hop is all about celebrating family and festivities, both in real life and in fiction! The host of this blog hop is Terri Giuliano Long.

Several writers are blogging about their holiday memories and experiences. Get in the holiday spirit! We will be blogging from December 10-13. Stop by our sites. You’ll find the entire list here. Please take a moment to read a few posts and comment. We love hearing from you. Have a fabulous holiday.

Let There Be Light: A Stop on the Meet the Family Blog Hop

Christmas, Family, Holidays 6 Responses »

Dec 122012

All I want for Christmas is: illumination.

Light is a gift. Fire was a game changer for the cave family. Chevy Chase became the ultimate bad light bulb hunter and a maestro of light in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation all because he wanted to give his family the brightest house on the block. And don’t forget, a child bringing light to the world is the whole reason for Christmas.

Gifts of light can stake a place in our hearts and in our memories stronger than any physical gift under the tree. I will never forget the year we purchased a Black Hills spruce for our backyard. I know how much Rubbertoes (my guy) hates stringing lights so I didn’t dare suggest dressing it up for the holidays. Yet, that Christmas I looked out the window and found someone (my own sweet Rubbertoes) had festooned the little fellow in blankets of white Christmas lights. Splendiforous coniferous.

In our old neighborhood in North Carolina, we used to set out luminaries every Christmas Eve. Volunteers from the neighborhood garden club would drop off white paper bags and tealight candles and dump a pile of sand at the local park. On Christmas Even afternoon, we would take the kids with their sand shovels down the street to the park to get buckets of sand. We then shoveled the sand into the bags placed along the curb of our yard and centered a candle in the sand. (The sand kept the lit candle in place and kept the bags from blowing away on windy nights.) Then when it got dark, we lit the luminaries and strolled through our neighborhood following luminary trails until we were tired.

Since moving to Minnesota, we have a new Christmas Eve tradition: the Christmas light display drive-by. With the Christmas tunes vibrating through the car, we travel the dark streets looking for the best, blow-our-minds light shows. And we vote: on the elegant presentation of all-white lights and strategically placed pine boughs and red bows, on the tacky-from-one-end-of-the-yard-to-the-other balloon Santas, on the amazing effort that combines light and altruism by putting together one heck of a show synchronized with holiday music on a specified channel of the radio and encouraging all visitors to leave a can of food for the food shelf.

Many towns give light through holiday parades, but few can compare to Holidazzle, which is a festival of lights in the Twin Cities. Volunteers transformed into Christmas trees, snowflakes, elfs, and all things Christmas related skip down Minneapolis’ Nicollet Mall alongside light-laden floats. And they do this nearly every night during the month of December, in rain and in snow, in freezing temperatures that turn your nose Rudolph red and your feet into blocks of ice as chilly as the winter lakes in Minnesota. Bundle up the kids (think lots of layers), grab a Thermos of hot chocolate, and go.

Sometimes the gift of light comes at you from nowhere. Have you ever been driving ten hours to get home for Christmas and cast a weary glance into the night and seen on a far hill a single tree lit up like Rockefeller Center? Gives you that warm feeling, doesn’t it? Think about it. Someone decorated that tree, stretched miles of extension cords, just for you.

So may your holiday be filled with light—whether you are walking the sparkly streets of New York or skiing through the quiet woods.

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What gift of light do you remember? Ruminate on your illuminations. Leave a comment and share it with us.

For a short story in the tradition of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, check out “Christmas Unplugged.” And have a happy and well-lit holiday.

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Christmas Shopping by Twilight: A Stop on the Meet the Family Blog Hop

Christmas, Family, Holidays, Parenting, Relationships 6 Responses »

Dec 112012

After several excruciating hours navigating the mass mileage of the Mall of America, I lug my Christmas bags home, plop down in a chair, and realize with sadness: I don’t know how to do it right anymore. Christmas shopping, that is. I have an indescribable urge to wail for my mother.

Not that the shopping was that good in the small Missouri town where I grew up. In fact, if an alien spaceship took me up into the skies, transporting my molecules (in a friendly manner) from here in Minnesota to there, I probably would find myself on foreign ground. I understand most of the people in my hometown don’t shop there anymore; they do not search the quiet stores downtown in the twilight. They drive to Walmart out by the interstate or trek thirty miles down the road to one of the bigger burgs on the Mississippi River, a place powdered with shopping malls and discount houses. From the portals of a spaceship, I bet it looks just like every other town in America.

When I was young and without wheels, a driver’s license, or a credit card, I knew how to shop. I would choose a December afternoon, inform my mother I was walking downtown after school, and stuff in my pocket $1.69 for each member of my family. The amount never left my head as I circled the courthouse square, studying the windows of the hardware store, the jeweler, the dime store, the drug store, and the department store. Would my mother like that beautiful little bejeweled box? Does my father need a new screwdriver? And of lesser concern: what would bring my little sisters happiness?

Those afternoons of Yuletide bliss were moments of glorious freedom and joy, the kind that wells up in your heart and sends it tripping with happiness. Although I am sure the town square was busier than usual due to the season, I do not recall crowds, being shoved or pushed. I do not remember lines at the cash register or drivers snarling over parking spaces.

I had time to mull, to ponder, to weigh each of my purchases. I wasn’t obsessed with “the getting,” more than “the thing that was got.” Every gift was given quite serious, but not necessarily lengthy, thought. And I knew it was right when it bypassed my head and rammed straight into my heart. I knew, then, it would be just the right gift to be found under the tree on Christmas morning. For perfect presents have that quality of rightness, that specialness; they seem to conjure up Christmas morning feelings long after the day is done and the tree has been taken down.

Perhaps that is why it has been so long since I have enjoyed Christmas shopping. I have missed that feeling of rightness. My shopping list seems filled with brand names learned on Saturday morning television or Pinterest boards. I no longer shop on pure impulse, fueled by happiness and expectation. I have lost that lightness of step; now I am weighed down with the wants and desires of others (not that I have such a needy bunch but I do want to give them something they will like). Christmas shopping has become not something I want to do, but something I must get done.

When I was young and without worries, schedules, and parking problems, I knew how to shop. I would wander in and out of the stores while the day darkened and the evening began to glisten with Christmas decorations and automobile lights. Some Christmases I would step out of a store just as it began to snow on shoppers and people going home. I would meet my mother at the corner of the dime store; she would pull up in the car and I would bundle in with bags and packages. And I always was amazed that she was never curious about the packages, never wanted to know which one of them was for her.

I used to think, riding home, that she didn’t want to spoil the surprise, and that may have been some of it. But, I think now, it was more likely that she had her mind on other things—shopping lists and parking spaces and schedules.

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How is your shopping experience going this year? Leave a comment and share it with us.

For a short story in the tradition of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, check out “Christmas Unplugged.” And have a happy and well-lit holiday.

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7 Tips for Making Your Christmas Cookie Party Merry: A Stop on the Meet the Family Blog Hop

Christmas, Cooking, Holidays 10 Responses »

Dec 102012

The reason I host Christmas cookie decorating parties is that baking is an imprecise science (at least in my kitchen), and, occasionally, you need someone to take the fall. I also am not a fan of the cookie exchange parties, where everyone brings a container of cookies, tosses them on the table, and mixes and matches. There is always some anti-Julia Child who believes ripping open a bag of Oreos passes as holiday baking. At my parties, you earn the cookies you take home at the end of the night clasped in your sticky fingers.

Of course, any sugar-laden event can go awry. That’s why I offer these helpful tips to keep your holidays merry:

1. Provide regular food to offset the sugar high. Since my Christmas cookie decorators work hard and justifiably deserve nourishment, I tend to look the other way as they snarf down the product. To help them adjust their sugar levels, I always have real food to munch on throughout the evening. My two standards are cheese fondue, which makes me feel tres continental, and barbeque sandwiches from Scott Ja-Mama’s, a famed hole-in-the-wall joint for pulled pork in South Minneapolis.

2. Invite everyone to participate, but don’t expect everyone to do so. I have discovered that guys often have trouble getting in touch with their inner cookie-decorating child. You may have to lasso your husbands and boyfriends with your Wonder Woman lariat and drag them to the decorating table. Their style can best be described as minimalist. One gentleman, who is greatly interested in politics, decorated his snowflake simply with “Obama 2008.” I saved that cookie, wrapped it up, and sent it to him on President Obama’s inauguration day.

3. Make extra red frosting. This goes back to the likelihood of mishaps in the kitchen. You may be shocked to know that not all of your cookies will come out of the oven in pristine condition. Reindeer legs can be snapped off; snowflakes can lose arms; whole cookie families can suffer decapitation. It can be a precarious journey from baking sheet to kitchen counter. Yet, you never want to waste a cookie. So what do you do? You swipe red frosting on the injured area and tell the sad story of how Rudolph met up with a chainsaw or wood chipper (for Fargo fans), or how the cookie family was in a terrible auto accident.

4. Buy oodles of decorating embellishments. Silver balls, miniature snowflakes, cinnamon buttons, sprinkles, you will need them all as a well-supplied patron of the arts.

5. Decorate with themes. How about: best Gingerbread Elvis, best bikini-clad reindeer (we do live in Minnesota with dreams of a February Caribbean vacation), or best Jackson Pollock star?

6. Stay cool. Inevitably, someone will decorate an anatomically correct cookie person. You can react, or you can ignore it and hit the punch bowl. If there are young children decorating with you, make the offender eat the cookie immediately after getting his or her jollies.

7. Lay on the llamas. It is my position that cookie decorating should be more about fun with frosting and friends than the pursuit of the perfectly frosted cookie. That’s why I do not just bake Christmas-themed cookies. I collect other cookie cutters, and one of my most popular is the llama. Everyone loves decorating the llamas.

So, for a great Christmas cookie party, don’t forget the llamas, keep the sugar flowing, and have plenty of milk (and wine) on hand.

Happy holidays and may all your cookies avoid the wood chipper.

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What do you like to bake for the holidays and why? Leave a comment and share it with us.

For a short story in the tradition of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, check out “Christmas Unplugged.” And have a happy and well-lit holiday.

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I Heart You Not

Holidays, Love, Relationships No Responses »

Feb 122012

I despise holidays based on either extortion or expectations of the heart.

Everyone knows my feelings about Halloween. (See “Why I Spend Halloween in the Basement.”) Valentine’s Day ranks right up there with it; I was tempted to name this post “Why I Spend Valentine’s Day Under the Bed.”

I didn’t always think Valentine’s was a total waste of pink, doilies, and red construction paper. I’m not a complete ogre. I still have those homemade love notes from my kids, and they still make me cry. And then I remember those same kids, years later, sobbing in my arms because some elementary school doofus gave everyone a Valentine but her or because she did’t receive a rose that day from a single high school moron.

This holiday is rife with expectation, hope, and sentimentality. It makes me gag. It makes my heart hurt for all those sitting at home waiting and for those coerced into going out on a miserable date not because you want to but because that’s what you’re supposed to do on February 14.

Romantic love is not dashing into Cub Foods at 5 p.m. and snagging the last bouquet or giving, heaven forbid, a love coupon worth one heck of a time at a future date. It is not having a jet waiting to fly you to Paris (althought that could earn massive points).

Romantic love is giving and receiving a smile EVERY day. It is keeping your mouth shut when you are jumping-around-inside-of-you dying to say something.

You want true love? I’ll give it to you.

One day my husband (whom I shall call Rubbertoes) and I were arguing in the backyard. I forget what it was about, but it started to get heated. Finally, my normally peaceful Rubbertoes flung his gardening trowel into a bed of impatiens and shouted: “And that’s your heart!” For a moment, the world stopped; the birds ceased singing; the children gasped.

And then I burst out laughing. I laughed so hard I nearly fell out of my lawn chair.

No one sends a spade spinning into the aorta of a garden unless they truly care. When we drive each other to the edge and still hang on, that is love. It does’t have anything to do with chocolates or jewelry or tattoos.

My curmudgeonly advice: Don’t do anything special this holiday. Instead, make all the other days of the year special. That’s my plan—do nothing. At least until the grandkids come along.

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Do you celebrate Valentine’s Day? How? Are you a curmudgeon or a mushy, chocolate-loving, diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend sort?

12 Shameless Reasons to Shop the Indie Book Blowout

Book of Mercy, Books, Christmas, Holidays, Kindle, On Writing 22 Responses »

Dec 122011

This time of year you are inundated with promotions—every single one of them shameless. I’d like to keep Christmas pristine just as much as the next guy, but what’s an indie author to do? I’ve got birds to feed, kids who need more electronics, and an 81-year-old father expecting something for Christmas.

We’re all—both indie and traditional publishers—fighting for your attention. Hey, you out there in cyberland, yes you, look at me, look at my book (major waving and jumping around). Put down that L.L. Bean catalog and come to the Twelve Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout.

The Blowout is like that annual book sale you wouldn’t miss for the world, the one held at your church or your local library. Every year you go, slowly making your way down aisles between tables crammed with books. Your neck gets a crick in it from turning at just the right angle to read book titles on old moldy spines. The room smells of books—and excitement. What treasure will you find this year?

The Twelve Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout is full of treasures. Here are twelve shameless reasons why you should explore it:

The most shameless of the shameless: my new novel, Book of Mercy, is there. Where else will you get a serious topic—censorship—all wrapped up in a funny novel? (There’s pie throwing, a wife who binge drives, a navigationally challenged husband, a villain who wears Prada, hubcap art, and a bad guy who likes Richard Nixon masks.) FOR JUST 99 CENTS. The first three chapters alone are worth that. And once it’s on your Kindle, it’s easy to get to, unlike some partridges in pear trees.
Turtles (not to be confused with turtle doves) are fearful things. They duck back into their shells at the slightest provocation. At the Blowout, you can work on facing your own fears. You WILL find the perfect book for Uncle Harvey or Aunt Rose. There are more than 200 from which to choose—and every book is only 99 cents.
Looking for something foreign? I don’t think there are any books in French or about hens. But you should examine every one, just to make sure.
If you hadn’t read this far, you wouldn’t know that the famous holiday tune actually sings of “colly birds” on the fourth day, not “calling birds.” What’s a colly? It’s a blackbird. In England, a coal mine is called a colliery, and colly refers to something being black like coal. Isn’t it great to learn new stuff? No doubt you will access all kinds of new information in your Blowout books.
I cannot promise you that you will receive five gold rings this Christmas. However, if you shop at the Blowout, you could win a new Kindle. Buy a book and get entered into the giveaway. What will you do with another Kindle? Keep it for yourself and give your old one to your kid.
Don’t lay a goose egg this Christmas. You can give Blowout eBooks to friends and family who don’t even own Kindles. They can download a free Kindle app and read into the wee hours of the morning on their computer, iPad, or smartphone.
Duckling or swan? Shopping at the Blowout will bring out your inner beauty. Because that’s what reading and books do. They grow our spirit, make us laugh, and feed our dreams.
If you’re a maid who has a lot more milking to do before the sun sets and can’t face the mall, simply turn on your computer and head to the Blowout. You can satisfy any reading appetite without leaving your desk: scary horror stuff, fun romances, intriguing mysteries, smart contemporary fiction, mind-blowing paranormal tales, and in-your-face nonfiction (it’s all true, baby). Every book is 99 cents, which fits perfectly into a milkmaid’s budget.
Remember the Black Friday riots: people grabbing toys out of other people’s carts; shoppers shoving, pushing, and pepper spraying? At the Blowout, we are all about decorum. You can act like a lady or a gentleman—and still stuff your stocking to overflowing with Kindle books. Go ahead, do your happy dance now.
Every day of this special sales event, the Blowout will be giving away Amazon gift cards to winners randomly selected from the Indie Book Blowout subscriber database. That ought to set your lords to leaping. Enter the giveaway with each purchase. That’s extra smackeroos to supplement your Christmas budget (or to pack your Kindle with more Blowout deals).
Sorry, there is no music being sold in this holiday promotion. You will have to get your pipers piping elsewhere.
Drum roll, please. This wouldn’t be a shameless list if I didn’t mention my book again. Book of Mercy: a funny novel about a serious issue—censorship. Don’t fall for a book of similar title by some guy named Cohen; that’s poetry. I don’t write poetry, and I don’t sing. But I have always wanted someone to dance me to the end of love.

So let’s get in the shopping, er, holiday spirit. Go to the Twelve Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout NOW and begin wandering our virtual aisles. The Blowout only lasts from December 12-24, 2011. It is sponsored by the Indie Book Collective, a group of authors who believe readers rock.

Happy holidays and enjoy your books.

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MORE! Check out these blogs by other Indie Book Blowout authors:

Rachel Thompson: Indie Book Blowout Begins!

J. Sterling: Being an Indie Author

Shannon Muir: The 12 Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout

Abbey MacInnis: Twelve Days of Christmas Event

Ron Vitale: The 12 Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout

JC Andrijeski: 12 Days of Christmas Indie Book Blowout (with free Kindle and Kindle Fire!)

C.K. Bryant: 12 Days of Christams: Indie Book Blowout!

Christmas Unplugged: A Short Story

Christmas, Holidays, Married Life, Short Story 2 Responses »

Dec 042011

Jenna already has her lights up, of course. I would have mine up, too, except ever since Sam fell into the Grand Canyon, I have been a little behind on things. I told my husband, leaning over the edge like that, that there wasn’t anything down at the bottom of the Grand Canyon but river. Well, he proved me wrong. Men dance on the edge of the abyss, not even thinking about the mess they’ll leave behind.

From the moment Sam hit that rocky bottom, my world changed. It didn’t help that the stock market went splat, just like Sam, shortly thereafter. I have held on to my 1940s St. Paul bungalow by judicious spending, prodigious coupon clipping, and lowering the thermostat. It’s not so bad. Zoey the cat and I burrow under the down blankets and listen to the snowplows at night.

My one worry is the Christmas lights. Electricity is expensive, and I simply MUST have at least 5,459 lights. That is the number smothering Jenna’s house, trees, and that tacky plastic North Pole diorama. She’s been bragging all over the neighborhood about this year’s display. If I can’t produce one light more, she will win.

“You and Jenna have been competing with each other since the cradle,” Sam always said.

It was true. When we were four and I took the crown at the Beautiful Babes Contest, Jenna threw a tantrum, ripping out all her pink hair bows. But she came back swinging at the State Fair when we were sixteen, becoming one of the beloved dairy princesses. As I fumed, my mother said, “Now be Minnesota nice, Abigail. Besides it’s cold sitting in that freezer getting your likeness carved in real butter.” I wanted to knock that tiara off Jenna’s butter head with a hot dish.

And that’s the way we’ve gone on for fifty years: frenemies. Neither will be the first to let our hair turn gray or admit our true age. She even moved in right across the street from me. Her house is bigger than mine, and newer, but mine is an original Craftsman, not one of those knockoffs.

I tear my gaze away from Jenna’s house and stroke the cat sleeping on a nest of bills. I pluck the electric bill from the pile. “Zoey, where can we get a hundred dollars for my lights?”

“You could skip the lights this year,” Sam would say.

“Not on your life,” I tell Zoey.

Outside Jimmy, the boy from down the street, is doing Sam’s old job. He is my new light man. He lifts and untangles and hammers and strings. It will take him two days, and I just hope he knows his way around a roof.

While Jimmy works on the lights, I walk to the hair salon. This time of year, I always take a route that passes the Black Rooster because it offers one heck of a Christmas display. As I’m taking in the decorations, I peek through the diner windows and see Bennie Nordgaard, Jenna’s husband, in a booth, giggling and patting the hand of a woman who is at least twenty years younger. He glances in my direction and jerks back his hand. I raise an eyebrow. He looks away.

That night I can’t sleep. Zoey is hogging all the covers. She is fifteen pounds of Maine Coon dead weight. I look like crap the next morning when Jimmy knocks on the door. He spends another day untangling and hammering, finishing about four o’clock. He has tested his work and swears that every one of my 5,460 bulbs is working. Five thousand four hundred and sixty—I make Jimmy count them twice.

That evening I bundle up and go outside to stand in the street and bask in the glow of my Yuletide extravaganza. Before long, Jenna joins me. As she stands beside me, the smell of her Chanel reaches across to me in the cold. We both stare at my house. I cross my arms. She crosses hers.

“How many?” she asks.

This is when I do the victory dance in the packed snow. I have the numbers and the money to keep them lit. But for some reason, I don’t jump to respond. I find myself thinking of the blonde in the booth at the Black Rooster.

Before I know it, I lie: “5,458.”

Jenna stands a little taller, a satisfied smile on her face. “Too bad. 5,459.”

“Well, there’s always next year,” I say.

“Yup, next year.”

As Jenna minces her way across the icy walk back to her house, I return to mine. Zoey greets me at the door. I bend to stroke her then whip off my hat and shake out my hair. I examine my gray roots in the mirror. Sam had been pushing me to go au naturale for years.

A dye job at Missy’s Mane Event costs about a hundred bucks.

“Merry Christmas, Sam,” I whisper.

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If this story brought some holiday cheer to your busy day, please take a moment more and check out some of Sherry’s other fiction: Book of Mercy, a funny novel about a serious issue—censorship, and Maud’s House, about what happens when creativity goes missing in a small Vermont town.

Why I Spend Halloween in the Basement

Holidays, Married Life, Relationships 12 Responses »

Oct 282011

Our marriage is a Halloween-free zone.We also avoid restaurants with themes, ever since the waiter at Renaissance Buffet plopped down on one knee, thumped his chest, and said, “My liege, might I suggest a hearty meat pie or a joint of our finest mutton roast?”

That put my husband off his feed. “I don’t like people in costumes touching my food,” he said. “They unnerve me.”

“Hmm?” I said, studying the menu. “What’s in the Borgia Burger?”

You might wonder how we raised two daughters with these types of phobias. We did okay until they hit preschool and learned from some loudmouth that other kids actually procured bags of goodies on Halloween. That happened to be the Halloween they both had chicken pox, so after much begging, I relented to conjuring up two princess costumes. I smeared white makeup on their faces to hide the red spots and pronounced them ghost princesses. I agreed to let them extort candy from one house.

When we returned, my oldest said with dreamy eyes, “That was so much fun. Next year, can we do two houses?”

And that was the end of my Halloween bliss until they got old enough to make their own costumes and preferred parties to walking the streets.

Really, I don’t think we need to teach our kids about extortion. There is enough of that in the world already between South American kidnappers and Somali pirates. Maybe, instead, we should turn the day upside down and have our kids give out treats instead of asking for them.

Being a chocolate lover, I could get into that. But wait, I’m not allowed to answer the door on Halloween. Ever since our daughters went to college, our tradition has been a simple one: we hide.

We order Chinese takeout, pull the shades, turn out the lights, and go to the basement with our moo goo gai pan. There we watch a romantic comedy, where no one is terrorized by little beings in costumes or overzealous waiters.