2014: A Memorable Christmas

Christmas 2014: Before the Feast

One of our Christmas Eve dinner guests--my favorite brother-in-law, it was--challenged us all to tell about the most memorable Christmas celebrations that we each had experienced over the years. This was a lovely exercise, as I learned something about each of the other guests, none of whom, except for my husband, I had spent many Christmases with in recent history. It also forced me to think quickly through the years to pick out a year that was particularly noteworthy.

For purposes of the discussion, I spoke about Christmas 1967, when I was studying in England and my then-fiancee flew from the US to London to meet me, and we flew on together to Copenhagen. There I met my to-be mother-in-law and father-in-law for the first time. It was one of only two times that I ever saw my father-in-law, or father-in-love, as he pronounced the term. I remember him with tenderness as a gentle and humorous and oh-so-accepting man. Around the dinner table this year we shared some small incidents about the days we spent in Copenhagen on that first trip. What I didn't talk about much was that in addition to providing an introduction to my in-laws and my adopted country, that Christmas was the first that I ever spent away from my birth family, and I was homesick. Unfortunately it became the norm for me to be separated from my sisters and my parents on holidays throughout decades of my married life, as was also the case for my husband and his first family.

If we perform the same exercise next year--and even if we don't, I probably will remember--my most memorable Christmas will be Christmas 2014. This year for the first time I was able to host my family for a Christmas Eve celebration. All my sisters were here for their first (and last) Christmas in this apartment, but hopefully not the last one in our home. I spent days planning the dinner and the decorations (modest), and I enjoyed it all. After a welcome drink of warm gløgg (mulled red wine) we started with smoked salmon with fresh pea purée and lemon sauce. The main course was pork and turkey tenderloin with little roasted potatoes and a fabulous whiskey sauce; and we had Graeter's (a Cincinnati tradition) peppermint stick and eggnog ice cream for dessert, with Danish klejner cookies that Johannes and I made together, a tradition that we follow almost every year. Later we shared nonpareils from a blue candy dish that brought memories to us all from our paternal grandparents, and cashews from an equally memorable gold dish handed down from our own parents. We four sisters and two brothers-in-love exchanged modest and thoughtful gifts among us all, but my main gift to them and to myself was this special time together.

Becoming Home

We arrived back in the U.S. just ten days ago, after two weeks in Spain packing up what I had thought would be relatively few belongings, getting that house ready to put on the market, doing lots of paperwork for our leave-taking from that country, and making a quick stopover in Denmark on the way back to celebrate Johannes' 75th birthday with good friends and family. Our final trip from Europe to the U.S. consisted of a flight from Copenhagen to Oslo, a long wait there, another flight from Oslo to JFK, an overnight and transfer there to LaGuardia, a flight to Atlanta and then on to Indianapolis, and then a rental car from Indianapolis for the two-hour drive to Cincinnati. Such are the connections that one lives with when reserving late and traveling in December.

We walked, on December 12, into a house nicely decorated for the fall, with autumn-weight clothing hanging in the closets, and a stack of mail higher than seemed possible--I thought everything went by email these days, but I am wrong. During the past week I have gotten through the mail, replenished the refrigerator and freezer, done three big loads of wash, put away the fall decorations and linens in the kitchen and dining room and replaced them with Christmas designs--most of which were  newly purchased, because the ones I had sorted and sent home from Spain were not expected to arrive very soon.

Then, on Tuesday, we heard that our boxes had arrived. Twenty-one of them (the remaining two arrived the following day). The plan was to let them stay in my sister's garage until we were ready to unpack them--which would not be in the final week before Christmas. We did that, retrieving only two boxes: the one that I had designated to open early because it contained winter clothing, and the one that looked like it but did not contain the winter clothing.

This pre-lit Christmas tree seems to be a little
defective, and Guapa says it is not her fault!

This morning I packed away my fall clothes and replaced them with the winter clothing from the box. I also found a couple small treasures that I had stuck in between layers of soft material, candle holders that will add to the few Christmas decorations we have assembled. Then we went out to buy a few gifts and enjoy the winter solstice sun. I already have picked up much of the food I need to prepare the Christmas Eve dinner I am making for my family on Wednesday, but when I check the recipes again--the ones I picked out from a Danish magazine while flying across the Atlantic--I will undoubtedly have to make a couple more trips to the store.

I look forward to being able to make Christmas dinner for my family in my home for the first time in decades; I can't remember exactly the last time that all my sisters were together for the holiday, but it was in Florida when my parents were still alive. So this will be a unique occasion. Even next year will be different, because then, in all likelihood, we will be celebrating not in our temporary apartment, but in the condo that we entered into a contract to purchase on Tuesday this week. I'm not saying much about that yet, for fear something may go wrong, but if all goes as planned, we will have a very busy couple of months in the new year.

The twenty-one boxes in my sister's garage will stay there until they are moved to the new condo. But this is becoming home and we are home for the holidays. I hope all my readers are home for the holidays as well, whether physically or in mind and spirit.

Living in Two Worlds / Viviendo en Dos Mundos

That is what I wrote about for my last OLLI Spanish class of the fall season:

Estoy viviendo en dos mundos. Una parte está en EE.UU. , donde assisto a las últimas clases de OLLI, buscamos una casa para comprar, trabajo con mi empresa en Connecticut, y visito a mi familia alrededor en Cincinnati. Otra parte planea nuestro viaje a España el domingo que viene, arreglando citas con amigos americanos allí para el Día de Dar Gracias, reuniones con el club de lectores, juegos de petanca con los daneses, visitas a mis amigos y a mi profesora de español, y las tareas de preparar a vender la casa. Es dificil vivir en dos lugares cuando ambos son tan atractivos.

I am living in two worlds. One part of me is in the United States, where I am attending the final OLLI classes, we are looking for a house to buy, I work with my job in Connecticut, and visit my family around Cincinnati. The other part is planning our trip to Spain this coming Sunday, arranging appointments with American friends there for Thanksgiving, meetings with my book group, petanca games with the Danes, visits to friends and my Spanish teacher, and the tasks involved in getting the house ready to sell. It is difficult to live in two places when both are so attractive.

Now as I write this on Saturday, "this coming Sunday" is tomorrow and the balance has shifted to the other side. We have done our final purchases of gifts and supplies to take with us, I have done the final laundry--not that we are taking many clothes--we have kitty-proofed the house and talked with my sister who will become Guapa's best friend for the next four weeks, I have done a good job of using up those items in the freezer and refrigerator that I do not want to face again when I come back, I have finished reading the book for book club next week and arranged for its return to the library, and we have picked up the rental car that we will use to drive to the airport and drop there tomorrow morning. All that remains is packing the suitcases and making sure I have everything I need for the trip. It should be simple, since we have a full house over there and are taking little, and I have been collecting things and making notes for a couple weeks. But it's the part of the job that I always hate. So I had better get to it.

If time and mind permit in the next few weeks, I will be posting my thoughts at my original blog, Sundays in Spain.

Playing Pètanque in Ohio

Pètanque Court in Zanesfield, Ohio

I've been dealing all week with a nasty cold I picked up by being outside for two hours in the brisk air last Sunday in Zanesfield, Ohio. It's worth it, though, because after a break of more than four months, I was playing pètanque again. Readers of Sundays in Spain, my earlier blog, know that I used to spend a lot of time playing petanca, as it is known in Spanish, when living in the Alicante region in southeast Spain. It doesn't take a lot of resources to play this game: the court can be just a field or sandy area, the game is centered around one ping-pong sized ball, and each player needs three metal balls. No special equipment, though a sun visor helps.

We had looked high and low for other players of pètanque in the Cincinnati area, checking out parks and sports stores, and searching for notices in the newspaper and on the Internet. Finally we came across the Zanesfield Pètanque Club. So last Sunday we made a two-hour trip north from Cincinnati to Zanesfield, a small town that I had not heard of, even though, I discovered during the course of the drive, it is located only a half hour's drive from the town in which I grew up! The Zanesfield club is very active and enthusiastic about the sport, and has corralled support from many organizations in the community to set up the best-equipped pètanque courts I have ever seen.  The members were welcoming and we had a great time, even though I lost two games. And caught a cold.

That Time Again

Readers of my previous blog Sundays in Spain know about my obsession with the biannual changing of the clocks. I am not so much opposed to the changing of time once in the spring and again in the fall as I am frustrated by the inability of Europe and the United States to do it at the same time each year. They both do it at 2:00 AM on a Sunday morning; it's just that the particular Sunday they choose to do it is not the same Sunday.

This year Europe changed from what I know of as "summer time" to "winter time" a week before the U.S. changed from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. I got my first inkling about ten days ago, when I registered in advance for a webinar that was being hosted in London this past week. The registration website had a button that I could click to find out the timing of the webinar in my local time zone. I know that there are normally five hours' difference between the U.K. and U.S. Eastern time but that the U.K. does not change to summer time (I guess Greenwich Mean Time is Greenwich Mean Time, is GMT, is GMT forever.) The website showed four hours' difference between webinar origin time and my point of reception. Oh dear! I should check that, I said to myself, but there is time to do it closer to the webinar date. I wrote it down on my calendar for the earliest possible start time.

Then later I got emails from friends in Spain and Denmark commenting on the impending dark evenings because the clocks were changing, and I knew I should be changing my mental calculation of the normal six hours' difference between Europe and here to the odd five hours' difference. I tried to explain this week to a group of people (those in my Spanish class, as it happens) that I get a little unsettled every year when this happens because it upsets the normal symmetry of my life: it is so much easier to calculate the time difference when one slides the hour hand on a primitive non-digital clock face straight across from 9:00 to 3:00, for example, or 12:00 to 6:00, or 1:00 to 7:00 than it is to move at the oblique angle that represents five hours' difference. Not to mention the change to my very deeply internalized body clock that I think adjusted to U.S. Eastern time when I was born in Ohio and, in spite of many layered adjustments through the years, still reacts to Eastern time as "real time." I don't think I was very successful at conveying this illogical but very deep-seated feeling to the other students, except for one fellow student who I believe is from Germany, who told me after the class that she understood perfectly, and shared my frustration that both continents do not change at the same time.

Happily for me, North American clocks changed from Daylight Savings to Standard time early this morning--one of us was awake to watch the time jump from 1:59 to 1:00 on the iPad. For the first time in ten years--maybe twelve--I experienced the change from EDT to EST in person. My internal clock is once again based in the right zone, and in symmetry.

Cool Cat!

Scooter, the neutered cat. "Hip spectacles. No testicles."
Created by Northlich.

Our public television station, WCET, has GiveThemTen.org as a sponsor of the PBS Newshour. Ten is a project that is fighting the problem of over-population of cats--it claims that a cat is put to death in a "kill shelter" every twenty minutes! We watch the Newshour most evenings and are therefore quite familiar with hearing that "Cool cats are spayed and neutered cats" after we hear other important views of the world. The tagline is part of a stellar eye- and ear-catching PR campaign that I believe has gone nationwide on much media--and worldwide through the Internet--but which I was proud to discover was created here in Cincinnati at Northlich marketing and advertising firm.

We had been reminding our little Guapa that "cool cats are spayed" every time we heard this or saw a picture of Scooter, the neutered cat, in his cool sunglasses and black turtleneck during the past couple of weeks. That's because she was approaching her six month birthday and had a date to keep to be spayed herself. Not surprisingly, she failed to appreciate the warning or the benefit.

 Cool Cat Guapa. ©Johannes Bjorner 2014

But spayed she was this past Wednesday morning. Both she and we survived. After we picked her up Wednesday afternoon and returned her to the house, she slept most of the remainder of the day, waking only to sip a little water drained from a can of tuna and lap up a few morsels of crushed chunk albacore. Then she slept again, and we watched her constantly to make sure she didn't lick her wound. She probably got more sleep than we did that night. Thursday she was ready to eat again, and had recovered enough so that we had to watch that she didn't jump too high and split open her internal sutures.

She is still much quieter than before the operation, but we are astonished at how quickly she seems to have returned to comfort, and without the pain medicine we had prepared. She still occupies much of our attention, and we are continually surprised--and only a little apprehensive--at seeing where she will appear next. She's one cool cat.

Open House

There was sun shining in through our balcony door and down through the living room skylights this morning. There has been precious little sunlight this past week, so we decided to do what we have been doing for the last several Sundays: drive out to a few open houses. Viewing real estate on the market without an appointment or a commitment seems to be an activity largely limited to Sundays in Cincinnati, and it is fast becoming as much a part of our Sunday traditions as watching CBS Sunday Morning from 9:00 to 10:30.

We scoured the Internet listings and came up with four new possibilities. One was in an attractive condo development where we had viewed before but which we had largely discarded because the two-bedroom condos were too small, and the four-bedroom one we had seen was a bit too large and even more too expensive. This was a three-bedroom, and it was much more to our liking. In fact, it was so much to our liking that one of us was ready to move in tomorrow. There had already been another condo that we had viewed two weeks ago which was very much to our liking: three bedrooms and in the same area where we are currently living, thereby close to stores and public transport. Alas, that one is now under contract to someone else, but I am keeping my eyes wide open for similar models in that development.

The fact is that we are reluctant to commit to a new property before we sell our house in Spain. And though we are returning to Spain next month to ready that house for the market, it would be very dumb to expect action too soon, and foolhardy to act on that expectation. On the other hand, we are living in a rental and will have to decide by next April whether we intend to renew our lease or not. So even though we are not ready to make a commitment in the next few months, we are spending our Sunday afternoons exploring different parts of the region and different styles of living.

We have driven to the east and to the west. We have driven north, though I am reluctant to go very much farther north than where we are already situated; we have not explored very much to the south, so that may come next. But the longer we stay in this area, the more we see its advantages: we had one agent last week rave about the wonderful community center in this town and the modest cost for seniors--and we have yet to darken its door. This week another agent explained that we have one of the most reasonable tax rates of any of the surrounding communities, because of some industrial properties (which we generally bypass) and lots of commercial properties (which we have taken great advantage of).

Time is on our side, so we will continue to explore and examine and think about what we need and what we don't at this particular point in our lives. Can we really find a smaller house with an open feeling that still allows enough space for each of us to have our private area?  A place with at least one bedroom and full bath accessible without steps, and a laundry room on the same level as the primary bedroom? With a low-maintenance but attractive yard? With walking and public transportation close by?

Time is on our side. While we watch and hope and let one or two get away, we are also peeking into a lot of closets and garages and observing the state of many properties on the market. All of which gives us a good idea of what and how much we need to do when we get back to our house in Spain in November.