Saturday, November 24, 2007

jingles for Christmas

Here's a funny thing for a dyed-in-the-wool atheist: I love Christmas music. I love a lot of things about Christmas, actually, but the music in particular, as long as it's not "Away In A Manger"-style schmaltz or "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer". I even like God-heavy numbers like "Joy To The World" and "Hark The Herald Angels Sing". I know three verses of "Silent Night" in English and one in German.

Every year I start fidgeting near the end of October, waiting to be able to listen to Christmas music. I'm not quite sure where this comes from. Maybe the years of singing in choirs: after all, what's more joyous and majestic than Christmas music, aside from opera? The loud songs are like bells; the quiet songs are lovely in a melancholy way. Being inside all that beautiful noise is a transport of some sort. I get all the peace and goodwill I need even without the religious significance. And it's something better enjoyed as a family, unlike arthouse movies or Christmas shopping trips. After all, my great-aunt on Dad's side is still the only woman to have played the pipe organ for her talent at the Miss American competition - who could pass up a chance to sing to that accompaniment? And Mom's family are all musical. The post-dinner cleanup is usually in three or four part harmony.

Bosslady is not big on Christmas music; I don't foresee "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" playing in the bookstore anytime soon, and thank goodness. Give me old-fashioned soaring harmonies any day, churchy or not. No doubt Biceps is going to get on my case about this. "How can you sing these songs when you don't even believe in God?" But Christmas isn't just for Christians anymore. I think that's clear, when it's celebrated all over the world with plenty of American trimmings and poppy, non-denominational tunes. I myself once taught some Indian children how to cut paper snowflakes, right before I took them to my very first midnight Mass at the cathedral in Calcutta. Christmas celebrations in America are practically enforced, so steeped are we in caroling and Christmas bargains and tinsel and Santa Clauses on every corner.

So let the raucous sleigh bells jingle, in the words of Tom Lehrer. I'll just be in my concrete office consoling myself with twelve different versions of "Baby, It's Cold Outside". Now if only Pandora would learn to recognize it.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

home for the holidays (oy)

So! Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which of course means that the library and the bookstore where I work are deserted. Outside, despite the fact that it's an astounding 67 degrees, it looks as if it's about to snow. Miserable weather, no classes - yes, it's going to be a slow day. On the plus side, that gives me a lot of time to think about recipes for tomorrow. It's tough sometimes being the only vegetarian, especially during these holidays so dedicated to meat. Last time I was home for Thanksgiving, my relatives forgot not to include bacon in the green beans and chicken brother in the mashed potatoes, so I was stuck with a small portion of salad and a hastily microwaved potato. Wasn't feeling a lot of peace and love, I can tell you. It's hard to feel included when you're an afterthought.

Thanksgiving in India and France was a lot more difficult. In Madurai, for instance, it was easy to get potatoes, butter, and pumpkin, but the only turkey available in all of South India had to be ordered from and cooked by the city's biggest hotel restaurant - there simply wasn't another kitchen equipped for it. We cobbled together a pie, but we had to get the servants to show us how to work the SITA Center's oven. It's not as if improvising reduced the quality of the meal: subbing in an Israeli-style salad for green bean casserole and all the fixings was probably healthier.

In France, the only problem was that turkey's expensive. I think Anna spent 35E on a 12 pound bird; Mom sounded so shocked when I told her. We had mashed potatoes and green beans and stuffing (always the surfeit of stale bread! I made stuffing a couple of times a week for about a month at one point, it felt like) and pumpkin pie (which perplexed the little old lady at the vegetable stand) and Matthias the Austrian carved and we all said things we were thankful for. I was thankful that it was a lot easier for the other non-American assistants to understand the point of Thanksgiving than it was for my blank-faced students. Apparently, Pilgrims don't make a lot of sense to other people.

This year, Mom and I are taking special care to have plenty of food that I can eat (I don't enjoy being irritable at family holidays, but when the point of the day is a meal I can't eat, gratitude runs short). It's so easy to have Thanksgiving here, but sometimes it's less easy to remember what I'm thankful for. Daily contact with the ones I love tends to inure me to their charms and instead highlight their irritating habits, but I'll take a day or two to remember why I'm glad to be home.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Shoe money tonight!

I'm excited: tonight is poker night for my department, a whim of Biceps' which Bosslady decided merited a little more followthrough than some of our other ideas (say, the construction of the Redhead's box fort). You would think that, given that I spend a significant portion of my week with these people, I wouldn't be thrilled at the prospect of devoting my Saturday night to them as well, but on the other hand, work at the bookstore doesn't usually involve classy beer and minor gambling.

I think fictional President Josiah Bartlet summed it up best in one of my favorite episodes of The West Wing: "I don't know why, but nothing makes me feel quite so good as the sight of colleagues, enjoying each other outside work." (The episode in question is "The Crackpots and These Women".) While my colleagues don't have quite the frenetic charm of a Josh Lyman, the gawky grace of a C.J. Cregg, or the sardonic, "the world is going to hell" humor of a Toby Zeigler, I'm fond of them, and it'll be entertaining to spend time with them in a less professional environment (though I'm sure Bosslady would make some comment about how we could hardly get less professional, some days).

Hard to say why the appeal of social events with people I work with is so compelling, or why I find it so enjoyable when fictional characters do the same thing. Maybe it's because, for the first time, I'm in a job where my colleagues aren't my fellow students or my housemates. If I want to see them outside of work, it has to be a conscious choice. I hardly ever have a chance to bicker with my colleagues over who's better at chopping onions or compare references for that hefty paper. We don't go on school trips to foreign countries together. If I want to spend a Saturday evening mingling with the people I'm usually rearranging books with, it must be planned. It's a good sign that we get along well enough to agree to this. After all, we could just meet up again on Monday. The office part is a curious phenomenon; at least I am assured that ours will not be quite so awkward as those on The Office (though less carefully planned).

I imagine our work-friendship will stand the test of one evening playing poker. After all, the buy-in is low and so is the potential for tipsy shenanigans. And it won't be as idyllic or moving as Sorkin's various descriptions of colleagues playing poker (Sports Night's "Shoe Money Tonight", The West Wing episodes "Mr. Willis of Ohio" and "Evidence of Things Not Seen", among others), but I imagine there will be plenty of laughs. And hey, I finally have something to do on a Saturday night.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

A rare schill: Raw Minerals

In a surprise move, a shallow post: today I'm writing about makeup.

It's very clear, once one detaches from the keyboard, that I am not one of those posh and polished girls. I hardly ever wore makeup in college. I'm not wearing makeup now, given that I was running late this morning. But I had to rave a little about the stuff I've been wearing for the past couple of weeks, because for the inexperienced and the indifferent, it's fantastic.

I found out about Raw Minerals through their many internet ads and a little word of mouth. "Free 30 Day Trial!" the ads proclaimed, and I thought to myself, "Self, you can't beat that very easily. Especially being the broke and miserly girl that you are." So I coughed up the five bucks for ground shipping and waited for the box to arrive (it came slowly). Eagerly I unboxed all the little jars and pulled the (quite nice and yours-to-keep-free) brushes out of their plastic wrappers. I followed the directions, first moisturizing, then dusting the stuff over my face. Result: a dewy smooth glow unlike anything my limited skills achieve with regular makeup.

Ever since I got back from India, my face has been prone to breaking out in a way it never did when I was a teenager. Normal makeup seems to aggravate this, but the Raw Minerals stuff doesn't. It hardly feels like makeup at all, and even at the most obvious, it doesn't look cakey like my usual foundation does, so I'll never be mistaken for an out-of-her-depth sorority pledge. Best of all, it seems to be repairing my skin. Outlandish! Delightful! What kind of makeup is actually good for your face?

The two tones of powder blend right into my fair/light skin, evening it out without the need for concealer, and the blusher/bronzer that seemed outlandishly dark is actually quite flattering. I like the idea of a powder with an SPF of 20 that goes over my SPF 15 moisturizer and evens out the glow if I apply too much bronzer. The brushes are great, with the added benefit that I feel like an old-timey dame as I dust the "Active Veil" powder over my nose and create the illusion of cheekbones with the "Mineral Glow" blush.

I'll probably be sending back the little pots of skin-colored powder once my trial is over. While I can afford $5 for 30 days of glamour, I probably can't swing $40 per month (or $60, which my email promises is a special members-only deal). However, if I do get a little extra cash in my pocket one of these days soon, I'll probably swing for another batch. RawMinerals stuff isn't sticky or runny; it's not heavily and bizarrely perfumed; and it actually kind of makes me look forward to putting on makeup despite the little voice in the back of my head that tells me I'm betraying my liberal arts education.

So how about that?

Verdict: Hokey names, great products.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Leaf raking and pie making

The other day I helped Mom rake leaves in the yard. We have two large maples out in the front, which means we get glorious color (most years) for a couple of weeks, but we also get enormous piles of leaves all over the yard. I'll be the first to admit we haven't got the nicest lawn in the neighborhood (partly due to the delightful deep shade provided by the maples and partly due to the rambunctiousness of the dog), but apparently a deep carpet of crunchy leaves isn't an acceptable alternative. Hence: raking.

It was an enjoyable twenty minutes or so, but also strange. It seemed like such an outlandish thing to do. Raking leaves? Sure, and afterwards, maybe I can whitewash a fence. Then I remembered that I haven't been home in the fall for five years. I skipped off to college in the fall of 2002 and I haven't raked a leaf since. The extremely competent and cordial facman staff did that at Grinnell, with all their noisy leaf blowers, and there weren't any leaves to rake in India. As for the one tree in the courtyard of our maison blanche, it didn't drop that many leaves, and if it did, there were janitors at the lycée to take care of that sort of thing.

Leaf raking is only one of the fall traditions I've skipped over the last while. It's kind of strange to think that I haven't spent a Thanksgiving or a Christmas at home in the last two years. Sure, we cobbled together a pumpkin pie in Madurai (and had to call the servants because we couldn't figure out how to turn on the rickety oven), and I made a prodigious pile of mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce in Cambrai, but now I'll be in a country where it's actually possible to purchase and roast a turkey yourself for a reasonable price and investiture of effort. Strange. And Christmas decorations aren't going up yet like they did in Northern France, but I know that the day after Thanksgiving, I won't be able to turn a corner without running into tinsel and carols. Or will I? Stores are definitely barreling toward the season; it was hard to find flannel sheets without Christmas ornaments on them. Soon, the notion of a Christmas that comes but once a year will be slightly laughable, since it'll be a three month process. The "So's Christmas" comeback to a slowpoke insisting on their imminent arrival is already rather dated.

I feel a little out of touch with American customs, even though I've put the effort into recreating my interpretation of them the last two years. Thanksgiving especially is a concept that doesn't really translate well. "It's like Christmas, without all the religious parts, just the togetherness," I tried to tell my French students, who stared at me blankly. But then again, they live in a country which is extremely Catholic: even if the French people are mostly non-practicing or non-Christian, all of the holidays are modeled around the Catholic calendar, and the shops close on Sundays. By contrast, America is a country where the people are devout, but the holidays try to be secular (except Christmas. And Easter. But you can't tell me Lincoln's birthday and Labor Day and Halloween are because of God).

Now that I'm back in the States for the holiday season, maybe I'll try to bring a little foreign flavor back with me. Curry the green beans at Thanksgiving, perhaps, or learn to make the gaufres so popular in the Christmas markets in northern France (Liègeoises, of course: I love the way the sugar crunches, and the Franglais in this recipe is charmingly incomprehensible). I've spent the past couple of years adapting to new rituals; it's odd to be in a place where everything is so familiar. I keep expecting saris or firecrackers or a Ferris wheel in the middle of town next to a mulled wine stand. Fortunately, America's pretty easy going about enveloping new rituals from other places into its existing celebrations. Maybe it's our history of colonizing and having been colonized. Maybe it's our immigrant populations and our cultural gluttony. I have to admit, it works for me.

And oh, Father Christmas, if you love me at all, send me a package of those chocolate-topped gaufres so easy to find in Cambrai or Lille (or in the giant vending machine in Paris Nord), but impossible to get in small-city Upper South U.S.