“I still believe in Santa Claus. he may not be the one that puts presents under the tree, but his spirit works through us each time we give freely without expectation and each time we spread joy, love, and light.”—Meadow LinnI’m once again in that weird state of feeling as if the holiday is over, but Christmas is still days away. That’s because my writers’ group and associated friends have been doing a holiday party together on the third Saturday of December for well more than 20 years. I’ve been writing an original Christmas Ghost Story to read at said party for at least 22 of those years. We get together, laugh and talk and catch up. Several of us have stories to read or songs to perform or the like. We exchange presents. We laugh and talk some more. There is always a bit too much food. But it is all fun and wonderful.
In short, it feels like my real Christmas.
When we were still all publishing a sci fi zine together, we would publicize the date and location of the party to the subscribers and contributors. And that meant we often got a lot of people who weren’t part of the regular monthly writers’ meeting crowd showing up. Which was great, but I also used to go to pains to de-emphasize the gift exchange part of the evening. I didn’t want people not to show up because they thought they were obligated to bring presents for strangers. That also means that I got in the habit of picking up and wrapping a bunch of extra presents–just in case. Because I didn’t want anyone who showed up not to get a brightly colored package to open.
I got the last of the present wrapped only a couple of hours before we were expecting people to arrive.To pull that off, one of the things I’ve been doing for years is keeping an eye out for things to give people for Christmas all year long. So at any time after say mid-January, there is a box hiding back in the bedroom with various things in it as I slowly accumulate presents. So, for instance, if I read a book that I really, really loved earlier in the year, I’ll buy a second copy (or several) to put in the box to give to people at Christmas. I don’t always have a specific person in mind when I do, but I know that enough of my friends enjoy some of the same kinds of books as I do that there will probably be someone I can give it to.
Because of moving the year, and what a big hole it blew in our schedule for months (not to mention eating my brain), I didn’t have as many things as usual already sitting in the box by the time November rolled around. So I spent a bit more time scrambling for presents this year than I have usually done. Still, I had something for everyone, and a collection of extras. And we all had a lot of fun unwrapping things and discussing what we got or where we found that thing, et cetera.
This I got something that made me tear up a bit. It takes a bit if explaining. My friend, Keith, comes from a whole family of artists. His parents ran a commercial art company for many years, and one of their product lines were the Alaska Snowbabies Christmas ornaments, designed by his mother. I own a bunch of their ornaments, mostly from the Snowbabies line, though there are a few others. Keith, as you might expect, has a much larger collection of such ornaments, since he worked for years in the company as both a business manager and a mold designer (among other things). Keith’s parents retired and closed down the business a number of years ago, and Keith’s father has since passed away, so there haven’t been any new products for some years.
Anyway, Keith and his wife do two trees in their house most years, and he posted pictures of this year’s trees earlier in the month, and I noticed that several of the Snowbabies visible in his pictures had red Santa hats, rather than the usual white parkas, and I commented on how cute they were and that I was a little jealous.
So shortly after arriving, Keith handed me a small package and said, “And that’s from my mom.” It was very pretty paper, and it said “To Gene and Michael from Suzanne” and I thought it was odd for her to send us a present, but I wasn’t quite smart enough to put together the dots until later, when we were opening gifts and I got to hers, felt the package, and suddenly realized what it was. She’d seen my comment on line and decided I needed to have one of the later ornaments.
Isn’t it adorable?So it’s now hanging on my tree. As she said afterward, it’s where he belongs.
Not often you get a gift straight from the artist, right?
“Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays”In 1942 Irving Berlin composed several songs for the movie, Holiday Inn. The most famous song from that movie is “White Christmas,” and it is the only song in the movie that is specifically about Christmas. However the first song in the movie is “Happy Holiday” which in the context of the movie is about New Year’s Day, as well as an introduction to the conceit of the film—that someone could run an inn that is only open for business 6 days a year, each of them a holiday. Still, this song that doesn’t mention anything Christmas-y at all has been considered a staple of Christmas music since the mid 1940s:
Happy holiday, happy holiday
While the merry bells keep ringing
May your ev’ry wish come true
Happy holiday, happy holiday
May the calendar keep bringing
Happy holidays to you
An advertisement from the Duluth News-Tribune of January 6, 1890 is just one example of the use of the phrase for more than 125 years!But one can’t credit Irving Berlin with the invention of the phrase, “Happy Holidays!” It’s been in use for more than 125 years, and was clearly not part of any attempt to secularize the holiday.
Most people point to Bill O’Reilly’s segment on December 7, 2004 about the so-called assault on Christmas as the origin of the myth. But you have to go much further than that, back to the 1920s, when in recurrent segment of industrialist Henry Ford’s newsweekly entitled “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” which opined: “Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone’s Birth. People sometimes ask why 3,000,000 Jews can control the affairs of 100,000,000 Americans. In the same way that ten Jewish students can abolish the mention of Christmas and Easter out of schools containing 3,000 Christian pupils.” Notice that even 97 years ago the American rightwing was antisemitic.
I was not alive back when Ford and others were trying to use Christmas to inflame anti-Jewish sentiment, but by the time of my childhood in the 1960s, that notion (along with the John Birch Society’s theory that the United Nations and Communists were trying take the Christ out of Christmas) had soaked deep into the psyche of evangelical fundamentalists. Though it took slightly different forms. I’ve written before about how the various Baptist churches my family attended considered Santa Claus an anti-Christian emblem. Some churches banned Christmas trees from the sanctuary, because of their pagan origins. Poinsettias were allowed because popular myth was the the red leaves represented Christ’s blood. But many of the common symbols of the holiday were believed inappropriate for the church.
Which isn’t to say that they forbade you from decorating your home and a tree or Santa — there was just a clear distinction between the sacred meaning of the holy day and the more general public celebration of the holidays. Which is why some leaders of the Christian Right in the 60s and 70s started advocating that Christians should encourage businesses to use phrases such as Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays precisely because all that commericialism shouldn’t be associated with Christ.
That’s right, there was a time when the very same sorts of people that today are foaming at the mouth about Starbucks’ holiday coffee cups not being sufficiently Christmas-y were asking businesses not to profane Christ’s name by labeling their products with the word Christmas.
“Christians be like ‘God bless this pork you told us not to eat on this most holy pagan holiday that you told us not to celebrate.’”The pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. It’s been popular across the political spectrum to lament the commercialization of Christmas for many years, for instance. But the funning thing is that this commercialization: the emphasis on exchanging gifts (specifically gifts for Children) are part of a puritanical push during the 19th Century to make the holiday family friendly. For most of its history, the Christmas season was associated with drinking and feasting and various kinds of wild partying. So the Victorians decided to wage a war on the previous forms of the holiday. Unlike the Puritans, who banned Christmas entirely when they set up their colonies in the U.S., the Victorian prudes at least understood that you couldn’t ban the celebration outright, but you could encourage people to observe it in a different way.
So the next time someone gripes about commercialization of Christmas, point out that little historical tidbit and watch their head explode.
I could ramble some more, but why not watch this video instead?
Adam Rules Everything- The Drunken, Pagan History of Christmas:
Sometimes being on a crowded bus feels like being one of these fish.I have been using the King County Metro bus system as my primary way of getting to work for about 29 years, so I have lots of bus stories. Most are not as exciting as the one I repeated when discussion a Nazi-punching incident in downtown recently, which is probably a good thing. Most bus rides are uneventful, or the events are minor things like the bus being more crowded than usual, or overhearing weird conversations, or observing interesting fashion choices.
The frequency of certain incidents have changed significantly since we moved to Shoreline and I’m taking a different route and riding longer. For instance, Fare Enforcement encounters. For a little context, some Metro routes are Rapid Ride lines. My old commute was on Rapid Ride D, while my new one is Rapid Ride E. What makes a route of Rapid Ride is that first the buses are designed more like commuter train cars: multiple doors and low floors so you don’t have to climb up stairs to get into the bus (this also makes boarding people in wheelchairs a lot faster since there isn’t a lift). Many bus stops have a pay station at the curb, so you can tap your card there before the bus arrives, and board using any door–instead of everyone having to enter through one door and either pay as they enter or show the driving a transfer.
This means the Rapid Ride buses operate on something of an honor system. But it isn’t entirely an honor system. Teams of Fare Enforcement officers randomly board buses, announce themselves, and then while the bus proceeds to the next stop, they walk up and down checking everyone’s proof of payment. Those of us with a pass, for instance, hold up our card and they touch a reader to it, which pulls information from the RF chip in the card. If someone doesn’t have a pass or transfer, they will be asked for their ID, information is recorded. They may receive a warning, or a ticket. Usually the officers only pull people off the bus if the person argues or otherwise doesn’t cooperate, or if they need to write up the multiple tickets. Whether they find anyone in violation or not, the get off at the next stop after they’re checked everyone, and wait for another bus on the line to board.
During the years I rode the D-line, I tended to see Fare Enforcement only once a month or so. And only about a third of the time did they have to write anyone up or take them off the bus. My second day riding the E-line, Fare Enforcement boarded the bus and wound up taking three people off. I thought that was unsual. I soon learned it was not. I see Fare Enforcement at least once a week. And I have never seen them not find at least one person who hasn’t paid or doesn’t have proof of payment.
By chance, most of the neighborhoods the D-Line goes through are median-rent or higher-than-average rent districts. While much of it’s route is on a major arterial, a big part of that arterial is through residential areas. The E-Line runs down State Highway 99, also known as Aurora Avenue. It’s a major thoroughfare that usually has commercial and retail. The neighborhoods range from well-to-do, to average, to what some people like to call affordable housing. This also means the crowd on the E-Line is both more colorful and diverse than the D-Line was.
Last week, between taking Friday off and working from home another day, I rode the bus only six times. I saw Fare Enforcement on four of those trips. On three of the trips they pulled two or more people off the bus besides issuing warnings to a couple.
The fourth time was the trip home Thursday. They were already on the bus when I got on. Typically the bus is pretty full by then, but that one was very empty. And all three officers were gathered around one guy, writing him up. He was complaining about how many of these tickets he’s gotten, and one of the officers was trying to get him to confirm that the address on his ID was where he received mail, because more legal papers would be coming. That means that he’s gotten so many tickets for not paying his fare, that they’re going to send a summons to appear in court.
The enforcement guys got off the bus at the next stop. And as soon as they left, the guy pulled a bottle of vodka out of the giant backpack he had in the seat next to him and started swigging. At that some stop, about three dozen people got on our bus, so it was suddenly as crowded as usual. At the next stop the guy with the vodka bottle was still grumbling, and waited until the bus driver had closed the doors and started to pull out to start shouting, “Wait! Wait! This is my stop!” So the driver stopped, and a bunch of people packed into the aisle had to squeeze and move in order to let the angry drinking man and his giant pack off the bus.
There are a lot of reasons someone can’t afford $2.50 bus fare—especially twice a day, five or more days a week, and so on. There are reduced fare passes available, but applying for them takes time, effort, the wherewithal to get documents together to prove you qualify, and so on. And I know lots of people who on paper make too much money to qualify for such programs, but they and their family are living hand-to-mouth. My point is that there are lots of circumstances where skipping paying the fare seems like a reasonable risk. But I still find my mind boggled a little bit.
On the other hand, many times I’ve seen people who keep an eye out the window, and when they see Fare Enforcement standing at the stop we’re pulling up to, they jump out of their seats to exit as the officers get on. I’ve never seen an officer pay any attention to people leaving. I’ve even seen guys not notice until the officers actually step on, and they jump up and say rather loudly, “Oh! It’s my stop!” and rush off. So clearly some habitual non-payers have figured out this is a way to avoid getting a ticket.
When my husband was explaining this a couple months ago online, someone expressed shock that the officers didn’t stop people that were exiting. That misses the entire point of the Rapid Ride. If they prevented people from leaving until they checked them for payment, that would hold the bus up. The way the officers do it, the bus’s route isn’t interrupted.
I’ve rambled on this a bit longer than I meant to, but to circle back to my point about reasons people have not to pay: I have assumed all along that the reason the E-Line is a more fertile ground for catching violators are economic ones. But I have also noticed that people who are dressed in a manner that would lead you to conclude they are well-off are just as likely to turn out to be the person who hasn’t paid. So, it’s another example that you can’t judge a book by its cover.
I’d really wanted to spend more of this month blogging about either fun holiday things or writing. Serious topics keep dominating, and while some of them have at least been holiday-related, it hasn’t exactly been Ho! Ho! Ho! time on this blog. That isn’t because I’m only thinking dark thinky thoughts, or even that I’ve been in a bad mood. Honestly, it’s mostly because I’m trying to get this year’s Christmas Ghost Story finished, as well as get everything else ready for the party, and finish Christmas shopping all while dealing with more than a few long days at work.
Which, admittedly, isn’t very different from any of the last 20-some Decembers.
This year’s Christmas Ghost Story had what I thought was a very straightforward plot. And it hasn’t been the plot that has been giving me trouble. But I keep writing dialog and then futzing with it because it’s wrong…
Why December is always bad in this way is because none of my usual methods of powering through a clogged story work. All of them are based on the philosophy that no matter how bad the first draft is, you can fix it in re-write. The Christmas Ghost Story is something that I will read to the attendees of our annual holiday party this Saturday. So I have to revise and fix as I go. At least, that’s how it feels.
Intellectually, I know that if I had just powered through and forced myself to write to the end two weekends ago, I would have had all this time to go through it and fix things. But that seldom works. I’m going to keep futzing until sometime Friday when the overwhelming knowled that I have to finish this now pushes me through to the end.
One thing that’s different this year than from previous: I didn’t make a new Ghost Story Playlist as the end of November. I know, I know, as if I need another playlist. I have so many (literally thousands).
I also haven’t been listening to as much of my usual Christmas music. Please note that I didn’t say as much Christmas music as usual, but rather as much OF my usual. Among my playlists are a bunch of holiday music lists that are usually my go-tos if I don’t have a craving to listen to a specific album. Playlists with names such as, A Caroling Caroling, A Class-ic Xmas, A Dame & Diva Christmas, Xmas Oddments, A Gay Yuletide, A Jazzy Christmas, A Quirk-y Christmas, A Silly Christmas, Last Bells for the Christmas Parade…
The problem when one has a Christmas collection as big as mine, is that it is easy to just listen to a few hundred favorites each year and ignore the 4500+ (I am not exaggerating) others. So, several years ago I made a Smart Playlist: all the songs tagged either Christmas or Holiday, and they have not been played in at least two years. I would listen to that list on shuffle for a while–usually only three or four days– and then start listening to other lists or specific albums most of the time. I would go back to the Smart List every now and then, usually when I couldn’t decide what I wanted to listen to.
The beauty of this list is that it shrinks as you listen to it. Once a song has played, it drops out of the list, because its Last Played Date is now, right? When I fired up the list a few days before the end of November, I was happy to see that it only had about 1600 songs–about a third of the collection. So I did a better job listening to a wider variety of my library that last couple of season, because usually it’s closer to half the collection. I started listening to the list, as usual, but instead of only listening to it for a few days, it was the primary source of my listening for nearly two weeks. Yeah, from time to time I’ve decided to listen to a specific album, but it wasn’t until this week that I started choosing some of my usual go-to lists. The upshot of all this is that the smart list only has a bit over 600 songs left in it. And that’s kind of amazing.
I’ve also been plugging away at wrapping presents. I got most of the presents for the relatives I was hand-delivering to finished before I drove down to Mom’s last Friday, and now I have about two-thirds of the presents for other people we’re giving stuff to, finished.
Just before Thanksgiving my husband found a 4-roll pack at Costco in which (as he described it when he texted me at the time) “all purple or penguins.” And since on the roll of cartoon penguins, some of the penguins have purple scarves, all of the wrap is purple. And it’s really good paper. Now I understand why I have heard people talk about the Costco paper (we didn’t get any of the reversible rolls). The paper is heavy enough to be sturdy, and it has the grid printed on the back so even I can cut nearly straight lines.
Now this is the first year in a long time that we needed to buy new paper. Not that not needing paper stopped us before! But we both had this bad habit of buying cute wrapping paper when we saw it in stores, and winding up with more gift wrap than we wound up using. So our stash of wrapping paper kept growing and growing. During the move, I looked at the stash (only half of it would fit in the special plastic wrap-storage thingie that my late husband bought 22-23 years ago) and realized that there were still some rolls in my collection that were also 22-23 years old. One of them was a particular design that Ray had gushed about when he bought, and for all the years since he died, I only used any paper off of it a few times–specifically when wrapping a present for his mother. Other years I will pull it out, think about how much Ray liked it and then decide not to use it because then I wouldn’t have it any more.
This is, by the way, extreme packrat pathology. I recognize it.
But it gets worse!
The other roll that had been hung onto that long was a design that I thought was really ugly–but Ray had bought it and thought it was beautiful and therefore while I never wanted to use it, I also wouldn’t get rid of it.
Which is packrat sociopathy or something!
I decided the storage container was aiding and abetting our worst packrat tendencies. It’s also kind of difficult to store, because all of this parts are rounded, and it has handles that stick out awkwardly, and the lid for the section where you’re supposed to store tape would pop open if you sneezed near it. So the storage thing and every roll of wrapping paper (and bags of bows and so forth) were all taken to Value Village.
The hope is that maybe we’ll be less likely to hang onto excess wrapping paper now that we’ve learned our lesson. Wish us luck!
“Don’t get your tinsel in a tangle.”For many years, each holiday season, we would run down to spend time with a bunch of my in-state relatives for either Thanksgiving or Christmas. When my mom was still working, we would pick which one to come down based on when she had to work. Being a lifelong retail employee, she was used to the stores being open on those holidays, and generally if she had to work one, she got the other one off. This followed about seven years of me not visiting at all because most of the family reacted very badly1 when I came out of the closet, leading me inform them that until they accepted my then-husband as my husband, I wouldn’t visit6.
Now while these relatives all seem to genuinely love my husband7, that doesn’t mean that holidays with them are all happy and gay. There’s a pretty big double-standard we have been expected to swallow most years: they can babble about god, evil liberals, et cetera and ad nauseam but if we bring up any counterpoints, we’re the ones who are shoving our politics down their throats. I did manage to get a few to admit this was a double-standard and maybe we should all refrain, but, well, the Bible-thumping will happen, regardless.
Things got worse and worse during the Obama administration. All of them believe that Obama/Hilary are the anti-Christs and only
Trump can save the world for Christians. Or something.
So last year we did Thanksgiving, but we did the minimum: we drove down that day, and left the same day. No staying overnight at the hotel we usually rent a room at8. And then just before Christmas I drove down on one of my days off to drop off presents and quickly visit several of them.
Interestingly enough, when I drive down for the explicit purpose of just visiting and dropping off presents, no one seems to feel compelled to talk about their latest worry about the destruction of the world by those godless liberals. Clearly there’s something about it also being a holiday that fuels some of that.
So, we didn’t go down for Thanksgiving at all this year. And we aren’t going down for Christmas. I dropped presents off on Friday to mom, my sister’s family, my grown niece’s family, and one aunt. I fixed Mom’s computer and helped her with a couple of things one her iPhone. I helped my aunt with some problems on her computer. I took Mom to dinner.
And yes, it was pretty late when I got home, but it was infinitely less stressful than last Thanksgiving had been. Yeah, there was a little random god talk, but nothing like the pro-Trump cheering of last year.
This weekend is real Christmas for us. We’re hosting the holiday party & writers’ night this year. I’ll get to see many friends, share this year’s ghost story, hear the things other folks have brought to read or perform, eat a lot of good food, chat, laugh, and otherwise have a great time. Then on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day, we plan to just have a quiet Christmas at home, the two of us.
That will go a long way to getting rid of the stress.
It’s been a few years since I quoted Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, “I don’t need anything from anyone but love and respect. If you can’t give me that, you have no place in my life.”
This year, I’m saying it to myself. Giving myself permission to avoid the people who can’t give both.
Footnotes:
1. One aunt sent me a 28-page handwritten letter listing all of the words and topics that I would not be able to mention in conversation if I visited her house. It also explained that if I brought my friend (the word was underlined every time she used it) we would not me allowed to call each other “honey” or “dear” or any other pet names or display any affection toward each other at all.2
2. In a follow-up conversation she angrily insisted she just wanted to treat us the same we she did her unmarried children when they brought people over. She didn’t appreciate it when I laughed loudly into the phone and reminded her of the time her middle son brought a young woman with him to Thanksgiving at her house and they kept making out3 at the table! She asked him to cool it, at that point4, but didn’t say a word about the frequent more restrained kissings on the cheeks and lips and forehead that kept spontaneously happening for the rest of the dinner5.
3. Full tongue and nibbling on ears and such. It was like accidentally stumbling into a porn shoot.
4. I and his older sister were trying to decide if they were high or just drunk.
5. I’m also pretty sure that one of the times they vanished that afternoon that they had sex in the downstairs guest bathroom.
6. Some of the family did come around before Ray died, but barely two months before he did. Fortunately because Ray and I had gotten through that seven year struggle, things have been much better with Michael.
7. I am quite certain that several of them like him more than they like me, but I’m okay with that. It’s a lot better than what we had before.
8. The last few years as the rhetoric in general has heated up, it has been more and more galling on a personal level to pay for the privilege of biting our tongues all day long even during the occasional anti-gay rant of one relative…
Sealed with a kiss.Merely five years ago today we were legally pronounced husband and husband, and I got to kiss Michael in front of friends and loved ones and all those people got to see me crying my eyes out.
We’d only been together for 14 years and 10 months. We weren’t one of the couples of silver-haired people who finally got to legally tie the knot after 50 or more years together. But it still deserved a non-ironic finally. And even though we had been together those years, and I had never doubted his love for me, and couldn’t fathom my life without him, there was something magical and wonderful and powerful about being able to finally call him husband legally.
I had been introducing him as my husband for years. It was a linguistic and political decision I had made before meeting him. Years before Ray died, we had had a commitment ceremony, signed some legal papers (medical power of attorney, wills, that sort of thing). And after that, I called him “my husband.” And now more than 20 years after his death, I still call him “my late husband.”
He is my knight in shining armor… even when the armor includes a t-shirt that says “Social Justice Fighter.”I had tried some of the other words, such as boyfriend or partner. But boyfriend sounded far less serious and fleeting than what our relationship had become. And partner—well, let’s just say that one of the times I used it, an acquaintance literally asked about the business that they thought we were joint owners. So, I started saying husband. And while that sometimes evoked nervous stuttering replies, double-takes, and even the occasional angry comment, it was the word that most accurately described our relationship. And, as I had decided a couple years earlier with the word “queer,” there is power it seizing a word and wielding it like a weapon back in the face of both the actively homophobic and the more thoughtless forms of heterosexism.
I wasn’t surprised that I cried at the wedding (and cried while we were on our way downtown three days earlier, and when strangers handed us rosebuds as we exited the license office, and when a random stranger ran up to us as we were walking away from the courthouse still carrying our roses and gushed “Congratulations!” with tears in her eyes, and when two friends surprised us with a string duet at the ceremony, and… and… and…). There’s an old idiom “he cries at card tricks” to describe those of us who are easily overcome with emotion which most definitely applies to me. But what did surprise me was how, after the ceremony, I would have a little hitch in my voice and feel the surge of my eyes getting watery—not quite tears, but definitely tearing up—whenever I said “husband” for the next several months.
I’d been calling him that (and thinking of him as that) for years, but now it was different. Because for most of my life I had thought I would never be able to legally marry the man I loved. The thought was completely unimaginable! I still have vivid memories of a film they showed us in health class, back in the mid-seventies, during the week we studied “sexual deviancy,” and the film included a scene of two men in pastel tuxedoes walking hand-in-hand down an aisle in what seemed to be a church with the narrator talking about how sexual deviation was so normalized in places like California that people pretended to get married. And it was edited to make it look like they were skipping (you could see the jumps in the flow of the image) with some ridiculous music playing. Meanwhile an entire classroom of my peers were laughing and making gagging sounds all around me.
I had lived through a small number of the most liberal cities in the country setting up domestic partnership registries that carried no actual legal rights, but gave some way to register the relationship so that an employer that decided they wanted to be magnanimous and hand out some benefits to their gay employees, there was a legal-looking paper to point to. And I’d lived through the grudging middle stages, fighting every step as the way, as we got some civil partnership or other half-assed quarter-measure acknowledgement in some states and so forth. I’d watched the bigots spend millions of dollars campaigning against civil unions, angrily insisting that it would destroy the fabric of society and so forth. I had watched, as we slowly won the hearts and minds of a growing percentage of the population, those same bigots suddenly switch to insisted the domestic/civil unions/partnerships were more than adequate and why can’t we live with that so that marriage can be reserved for something special?
One of my husband’s current art projects is setting up some of our many hats in displays around the new house. These are the hats we wore the day we were married. And yeah, I get that lump in my throat and tear up every time I look up at them. Tears of joy.So intellectually I understand why those same two syllables felt so very different after marriage equality became the law of our home state. As I said after the election, a solid majority of my fellow citizens — a whole bunch of straight people — voted to include us. They staffed phone lines to urge people to vote in favor of equality. They donated money. They showed up and voted. And then hundreds (or more) of those straight people turned up at the courthouses and county offices and so forth on those first days we could get licenses to cheer for people they didn’t know. On the first day the ceremonies could happen, a huge crowd gathered outside city hall to cheer and clap and being the receiving line for a bunch of queer couples — strangers! — who had just been joined legally in matrimony. Knowing that made me cry then. And it makes me tear up long long after any time I’m reminded of it.
Which happens to be every time I refer to my husband…
So! Today is the five-year anniversary of the day we stood in front of many of our loved ones and exchanged vows. We were pronounced husband and husband and I cried. He’s the most wonderful man I know. I really, seriously can’t quite understand why he puts up with me, let alone loves me. But I’m eternally grateful that he does.
Happy Anniversary, Michael! He’s the best!
A note about the title of this post: I’ve been reading the Savage Love advice column for decades, through the years before Dan Savage met his husband, Terry, when they started dating, when they adopting a kid together, when they finally legally married (in Canada), and so forth. After the Canadian wedding, Dan started referring to Terry as his husband in a very exaggerated pronunciation: “mah huzzzzben!” And I always took it as his way of being proud and a bit shocked that marriage equality had arrived in at least some places within his life time. I always thought it was cute. In a recent blog post he answered a question from a reader who felt that the weird pronunciation was an insult to Terry, or something, and Dan explained:
I started calling Terry mah huzzzzben when we got married—more than a dozen years ago—because in all honesty it felt so weird to call him that. To be able to call him that. I never expected that marriage, legal marriage, would happen in our lifetimes. And while I didn’t have a problem calling him my boyfriend, calling him my husband took some getting used to. So I played up my… well, not quite my discomfort with the word. I played up my unfamiliarity with it. It felt strange to say it—the word “husband,” unlike my husband, felt awkward in my mouth—so I said the word in an awkward way. I did what I advise my readers/listeners to do: you gotta embrace awkwardness to get past it. And I am past it now. It no longer feels strange to call Terry my husband, and I’m capable of saying the word these days without hesitation. But you know what? I like calling him mah huzzzzben. It’s less “this is weird and new and feels awkward to say!” and more “this is my own affectionate pet name for him!” And I’m gonna keep saying it.
Five years ago today, we went down to city hall to pick up a license. It was the first day that the marriage equality law which had been approved by a comfortable margin by Washington voters was in effect. We were just one of many, many couples who got a marriage license that day, kicking off the mandatory three-day waiting period before we could officially tie the knot.
There was a tumblr post going around where someone collected pictures of cats sleeping on Buddhas…
One of the things I’m still getting used to about the new place is how to manage light inside during the daytime. At the old place1 we had one large, unobstructed north-facing window in the living room, while all of the other windows were small and at least partially shaded be either trees, hedges, neighboring buildings, large overhanging eaves, or all of the above. We were also on the first floor. The big bedroom window was in a location where people were walking by inches from the window, so those curtains were always closed just so we wouldn’t flash the neighbors. The new place is a second floor apartment and all of the windows are either east-facing or west-facing. We have a large window and a sliding-glass door in the living room2. Two of the windows are shaded by trees, but all of the rest are unobstructed. And even the ones that are shading get a lot of direct light during the part of the morning when the sun is only a bit above the horizon.
Also, we have blinds, which even when closed allow more light than the thick, insulated curtains at the old place.
I’m not a morning person, and when I first wake up I like it dim. I’m just not ready to deal with harsh light for a bit. For as long as I can remember, I prefer even when I wake up in the middle of the night and have to run to the bathroom to leave the lights off.
During the summer, I didn’t have much control over how bright the living room/kitchen area was during the time I’d be getting ready for work. The blinds would have patches of very bright light with the shadows of the tree branches painted dramatically. It was still a mostly diffuse light, but it wasn’t very dim.
As the fall arrived, the intensity of that morning light lessened a bit. Also, it would arrive a little later each morning.
Work from home days were difficult. Once I was awake enough that I’d logged into work, I wanted at least a little more light in the room, but turning on any of the lamps in the room was more3 than I’d wanted. For a while I got part of the effect I wanted by draping a translucent scarf4 over one lamp that wasn’t too close to where I set up my computer. But it wasn’t quite right.
As the morning got darker, I finally gave in…
Back when we first moved to the new place and were setting up the furniture, Michael had suggested that I get a small clamp-on light for the little table that sits beside my end of the dual recliner. It thought that the lamps on the bookcases behind this area gave adequate light and had decided against it. But not before browsing some on-line sites until I found one small, purple goose-neck lamp that would fit on the table.
So when I realized that I wasn’t getting the light I wanted to work by on work-from-home mornings, I ordered the light.
And of course, now that it’s there, I find myself in many other situations where that is the only artificial light I have on in the living room. It makes the area right around where I’m usually sitting nicely illuminated, without being super bright, and without lighting up the rest of the room.
I’m not sure why at some times for some activities I want the entire room lit up with everything clearly visible, and other times I want most of the room to be a bit obscure and shadowed and out of mind.
But it did occur to me one night last week while I was sitting in the mostly dark room, typing furiously away on a story, with the little lamp illuminating my coffee mug, that I was almost like a cat that had found the perfect patch of sunlight to curl up in…
Footnotes:
1. Where I lived for over 21 years.
2. And because of the big open floor plan of this place, light from the dining room window and even a bit from the kitchen window make it into the living room.
3. Or maybe just harsher, since a lot of the lamps and the overhead fixtures all have LED lights that tend toward the blue end of the spectrum.
4. A really cool, very long purple scarf that was my main winter scarf for several years, though it was beginning to wear thin, and I’d almost tossed it out since I was tended to wear some newer scarves friends gifted me more recently.
First, twenty-two years ago at a holiday potluck at work, the subject had somehow turned to shopping for parents, and I mentioned that I didn’t always know what big present to get my Mom, but there was a particular kind of candy that she loved and I had been buying her a box of it every year since I was a teen-ager, so there was always a point during the opening of the presents when my Mom would pick up the box and realize what it was and grin. A new co-worker expressed shock and disbelief, insisting that any mother she knew would be irritated to get the same thing every year. She further insisted that my Mom must be faking the enthusiasm for the candy.
Second, twenty years ago, I visited Mom for Christmas and drove her to Grandma’s for the big Christmas Eve shindig Grandma used to throw. At said shindig, Mom received a present from one of the other relatives that was an enormous (and ugly) knick-knack. It was taller than any table lamp that Mom owned. And Mom had just recently moved into a smaller place specifically because she was trying to get rid of stuff. Mom had said thank-you to the present, but the look in her eyes had clearly communicated to me, “What am I going to do with this?”
During the almost hour long drive back to her house, there was a point when Mom went really quiet for a moment, then asked, “Where am I going to put that thing? I mean, it’s so big!”
I made sympathetic noises, but otherwise didn’t have an answer.
She suddenly grabbed my arm and said, “Promise me you won’t get me things like that! Give me candy, or cookies, or candles—things I will use up! If you don’t know I need it or will use it, please don’t spend the money!”
Third, seventeen or eighteen years ago, Mom had mentioned needing a specific thing for the kitchen, and I had found it, but it was in a weird, truncated pyramid-ish shaped box. And while I was trying to decide how to wrap it, I noticed that the broad base of the box was almost exactly the size of the box of those candies I have been buying her for Christmas since I was a kid. So with some wadded up newspaper and a lot of tape, I turned the two things into a large, retangular package, then wrapped them together.
Christmas Eve was at my Aunt’s that year, and Michael and I drove Mom to it. During the gift opening, one of the kids of one of my cousins had distributed everyone’s presents as piles beside each of us, and it had turned into a bit of a torn paper frenzy. I had watched Mom getting quieter and more sad looking as the evening progressed. She hadn’t been feeling well that morning and had almost decided to stay home for Christmas Eve, so I thought that she was feeling worse. I quietly asked a few times if she needed something.
There was only one present left beside her chair—my two-in-one box. Everyone else was finished, and one of the kids asked Mom if she was going to open her last one. She sighed and said something that sounded quite a bit less than enthusiastic. She picked it up into her lap. She turned it around looking for an edge to the wrapping. And when she did, the candy jiggled inside its box—making a distinctive sound she recognized.
Mom’s eyes lit up like search lights. She turned the box again and looked at the tag to see it was from me. She grinned at me. “I know what this is! I know what this is!” And then she tore the paper off like a tornado of ninjas attacking a castle. She liberated the box of candy from the rest of the present and exclaimed, “You didn’t forget my candy! My son didn’t forget my candy!”
Michael had to point out that there was another part of the gift she might want to look at. She was glad that I’d gotten her the kitchen thing, but she was clearly more happy about the candy. And she was enthusiastic the rest of the night.
So, my Mom really does like it when I give her that candy every year1.
Fourth, as long as I can remember, Mom has loved hot tea. She loves nothing more than to curl up with a new book and a cup of hot tea and spend the day reading. For various health reasons, she can’t do caffeine any more. So the tea needs to be herbal. Unfortunately, when most of the rest of the people in Mom’s life think “herbal tea” the go for camomile3. Mom doesn’t dislike camomile, but she gets tired of it after awhile.
So every years I look for interesting herbal teas for Mom other than camomile. Last week I found two boxes that looked interesting while I was out shopping. I went to a rather large number of stores that day. When I got home, there was a lot of stuff to put away. And when I was finished, I couldn’t find the two boxes of tea.
I searched all the shopping bags. I looked around the house. I looked in the pantry with my teas. I looked everywhere. I confirmed on the printed receipt that I had paid for the tea. I decided that when I and the person at the store were bagging my groceries, one of us had accidentally pushed the boxes aside.
The next day I headed out shopping again with a list of people I needed to get gifts for. At the first store I went to the back of the car to get a shopping bag. And there was a shopping bag from the day before with four things in it. Two of which were Mom’s tea. Fortunately, nothing in the bag was perishable, so I didn’t waste anything by forgetting some groceries in the car overnight.
So there will be several presents under Mom’s tree from me this year. And now you know what three of them are. And I’m pretty sure as soon as Mom picks them up, she’ll know what they are, two. Ever since that one Christmas, I have made sure that the box of candy was wrapped by itself, so it would be no surprise to Mom what was inside.
But surprise isn’t the point of that particular present.
Footnotes:
1. One time when I told this story, a friend who is also a mother and grandmother told me that there was a type of salt-water taffy she liked, and anyone who bought her some of that for Christmas was a winner in her book.2
2. Another person (who also happens to be a mom and grandmother) pointed out that while it is undoubtedly true that Mom likes this favorite candy of hers, by the time I was an adult and I still gave her a box of the candy every Christmas, the candy had become a symbol. “I have absolutely no doubt that every Christmas when she opens that box, she looks up at you and she doesn’t see you as the grown man you are. She sees her little boy—how you looked as a small child. That isn’t a box of candy, to her, it’s a box of memories of her baby.” I suspect she’s right.
3. One time my Aunt found a big boxed set of “herbal teas” in the gift box aisle at Walmart. Except they weren’t herbal. When you read the small print on the box, the teas were all regular black tea4 with artificial flavoring. So the “camomile” was regular black tea with some kind of camomile flavoring. And the “hibiscus” was black tea with hibiscus flavoring. And the “elderberry” was black tea with flavoring and so on.5
4. Loaded with caffeine.
5. The set included I think it was 8 little tins, each of which had the name of the herb in question, and then behind each tin in the box was a little foil packet with three of the skankiest looking oily tea bags. And they all smelled absolutely awful.6
6. Mom begged me to take it home. Michael and I had a lot of fun throwing it away.
Today is World AIDS Day. Each year, I spend part of the day remembering people I have known who left this world too soon because of that disease.
So: Frank, Mike, Tim, David, Todd, Chet, Jim, Steve, Brian, Rick, Stacy, Phil, Mark, Michael, Jerry, Walt, Charles, Thomas, Mike, Richard, Bob, Mikey, James, Lisa, Todd, Kerry, Glen, and Jack. Some of you I didn’t know for very long. One of you was a relative. One of you was one of my best friends in high school.
I miss you all. It was a privilege to know you.
This year’s theme for World AIDS Day is “Let’s End It.” For the first time ever, a reduction in the number of new infections as been measured in several cities, finally bringing a new kind of hope.
Meanwhile, the joke of a president the U.S. is enduring managed to leave out mention of every marginalized community disproportionately impacted by the illness:
Remember how Trump’s first Holocaust Remembrance Day proclamation made no mention of the Jews? Well, Trump’s first World AIDS Day proclamation is out and you’ll never guess who he left out this time: gay men, people of color, and trans men and women—the communities most at risk, the communities that suffered the most during the plague years. It’s like they get up every day determined to prove to the world that they are the assholes we already damn well know them to be.
Font Folly 