The Futility of the Christmas War

Every year. I don't get it, but every single year we see the stores gear up for sales that people stand in line for, we see Christmas Trees for sale in mid-November. We see the holiday of Thanksgiving (certainly one of the more poignant holidays, in terms of meaning, that we have) totally skipped in our market places, minus the non-superstore groceries that still count on holidays like Thanksgiving for a little monetary boost during the year...

And somehow, some way, some of us are convinced there is a "war" on Christmas.

As a child, I remember receiving cards in the mail that said "Happy Holidays". No one was complaining then, and the fact that they are now tells me this one thing: We are easily led by the powers that be. We are easily divided, for the powers that be. And... this is not a good thing.

About four and a half years ago I joined a website called Cafemom, and inside that website, I joined a religious debate forum. I don't think I've ever had a better learning experience. From the get-go, I was seeing the world through the eyes of others, and understanding began to bloom. World religions was always a favorite subject of mine in school, so it was a natural draw, this forum, and I ended up making friends there that I may not have given a second thought to in real life. Actually, I may have avoided them in real life.

Avoiding people who are different because they're different isn't something that I would call a "Jesus" thing. Probably the opposite, actually.

And this brings me to what I've noticed more often than not- for non-Christians, the message they're receiving from the majority of Christians is this: You don't matter unless you conform. You aren't an American until you conform to our primary customs. You are, in fact, anti-American until you stop being a jew/muslim/hindu/buddhist/pagan/atheist and start telling us "Merry Christmas" when we want you to. Get over it or get out.

Further, the picture people are getting from the actual celebration of Christmas goes something like this:



Rather than this:



That isn't the fault of anyone but those who participate in it. This isn't the fault of Muslims who celebrate Ramadan- occasionally- around Christmas time. It isn't the fault of Jews who celebrate Chanukah. It isn't the fault of Pagans, who celebrate on or around the 21st of December every year. It isn't the fault of the atheists, who often celebrate Christmas along with *most* everyone else.

It's the fault of laziness in communication during the holiday season. Once upon a time, people chose to say "Happy Holidays" to each other rather than, "Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Happy Boxing Day, Good New Year" which is a mouthful. It is also the result of thoughtful communication in areas of this nation where there are larger pockets of Jewish people who don't always appreciate being told Merry Christmas for reasons that should, at this point in history, be obvious.

While we're on the subject of history, how about a little introspection on the history of modern Christmas celebration? What is the first sign that it's coming on Christmas? That's right- we're cutting down trees. Why trees? Because once upon a time- before Christianity enveloped Europe- people worshiped the sun, and on the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, they would decorate their homes with plants that stayed green during the winter as a reminder that spring would come again when the sun god grew strong again. Similar meanings are behind wreaths, candles, mistletoe, holly, and the colors red, gold, green and silver- all things that our culture has adopted and renamed to suit our preference- and we demand that no one else does the same.

Another thing that comes to my mind is the fact that so many Adventist friends and relatives have taken on this task, full bore- and with SDA eschatology? I find it ironic for SDAs in particular to suggest that people conform or get out. Think about this for a minute if you are an SDA. What happens when we force conformity in religious matters? What happens when we are forced to conform??

Basically, what it comes down to is this. Be nice. Take folks like Bill O'Reilly for what they are; angry, frightened people interested in dividing a nation that needs, more than ever, to stick together. We are a colorful, diverse nation, and thank goodness for that - you learn nothing when nothing is different and challenges never arise. And Jesus said there would be challenges- and he said to love your neighbor, and to hand your cares and burdens to him.

He didn't say to yell at people for saying the wrong greeting on his birthday (or the day that we chose to celebrate on in hopes that the pagans of a certain region would have an easier time conforming to the new religion). See? There's that conformity thing raising its ugly head again.

Stop demanding it. More flies with honey.

A Nest For Celeste (a little review)

For the last couple weeks we've been having tea at night with our four children while we read books and just sit together at the end of a day. The first book we've completed during this new tradition is A Nest For Celeste: A Story About Art, Inspiration, and the Meaning of Home by author and illustrator Henry Cole.

The story opens inside a Plantation House in Louisiana, and inside the wall- just under the sideboard in the dining room- lives Celeste, a mouse who enjoys making baskets, and is busy making her newest creation when the two rats that live alongside her come along to bully her into finding them dinner for the evening. From here, the plot moves along rapidly, and characters are quickly introduced- one being John James Audubon, who is staying at the plantation with his young assistant Joseph Mason. Much of the human story is true- the plantation and the family who lived there, the presence of Audubon and Joseph; an accident involving Joseph- but all of it is told through the eyes of Celeste, who is simply trying to find home.

The book is illustrated with fine pencil drawings by the author, and is organized into 37 chapters.

Basically, you should give it a look if you've got kids in the 4- 12 age range at home- or, if you just like good books.

Oh, and aside from Celeste, our favorite character of the book is an Osprey who Celeste befriends. Reminding us faintly of Foghorn Leghorn, he provided comic relief in touchier moments of the book.

The Wild One

*Sigh*

For the last two years I've been helping out a particular feral cat that showed up at our trash can, regularly. I figured it was easier to feed him than to watch him tear up the trash every morning- and with that- my conscience. He is a beautiful, tawny colored tabby with intense green eyes and a nick in his ear from a long-ago cat fight, I assume.

For the first year, he was untouchable. I would see him out on the front porch, grab some food and take it out for him, while he beat a hasty retreat to the security of the middle-yard until I went back into the house. For awhile, I was able to get him close to the porch while I stood there waiting. Then I upped the ante. I broke out the canned cat food, and after that, he couldn't just wait. He had to have that food- and our trust grew.

But then he disappeared.

We had gone on vacation in the summer, and I arranged with a neighbor to leave him his daily ration of food until we returned. But he didn't eat anything. I thought the worst- he'd been hit by a car, or eaten by a coyote- whatever, he was gone.

And then, a few months later, in November, he reappeared. I was opening the door to take the trash out, and there he was. Once again, beating a hasty retreat- but when I called to him, he stopped, turned around, and waited.

Three weeks later, I was able to pet him for the first time, and as he came to trust us more, I was able to put him in the old dog kennel I had in the garage during the nights when it was so cold. Last winter, he didn't suffer frost-bite on his feet, and he actually put on weight. He came into the house for long periods during the quiet of the day- and he would nap on my desk, the first time I had ever seen actually relax. We decided to call him "Boo" after Boo Radley from To Kill A Mockingbird because it just seemed to fit.

Summer came, and I had moved Boo into the outdoor, covered kennel we have on the side of our house. There he had shelter, a place to potty, clean water and his daily ration of food. When we returned from this summer's vacation though, he was changed. He seemed angry, and I didn't know what to do. He is a feral cat, and I wondered if being kept inside something was bothering him. I let him out, and he stayed out for days at a time. He looked a shambles, he dropped weight, and once again, he wouldn't allow me to pet him- and when I tried, he would lash out. I felt guilty, and I also began wondering if male cats have some kind of weird hormonal shift in the summer that makes them anti-social and mean. Chop those suckers off- is the obvious answer- but be careful trying to get him to the vet is the caveat. I'd like to keep my arms, thank you.

Its getting cool again. And for the last couple weeks, Boo has gentled down again. He has begun sleeping once more on the porch furniture, and purring for his daily can- and accepting pets. He was beginning to look better than he had all summer, and then he came home this evening looking like he had fought five rounds too many in a boxing match. In short, he got his butt kicked, and so, that was it. Back into the kennel he went- slight protestations aside.

I don't know. It's hard to know what to do for these guys. Apparently my house has an aura recognizable to cats in need of assistance- two of my neighbors have confirmed that our house was the stray-cat house long before we ever moved here.

Anyway, Boo is safe for now.

Double Chocolate Banana Bread....or possibly Cake

I've never had much luck with banana bread. No matter the recipe I'd try, it had this bizarre tendency to burn on the bottom before the middle was anywhere near cooked through.

It isn't that I'm a bad baker. I have my moments, but generally speaking, I'm fairly decent. This banana bread issue was beginning to make me wonder if I ought to just hang up the apron. I mean... banana bread? Who has problems baking banana bread? Souffle? Of course that's difficult. Very understandable to have problems with souffle. A trained chef will occasionally have issues with a souffle. Creme Brulee? Yeah, you need a fire tool for that. Completely frightening. But banana bread?? Something referred to as a 'quick' bread?

Please.

Anyway, in a tinkering mood one day, I decided to try my luck again. Well- and I had a whole bunch of just south of the sell-by bananas drawing fruit flies. So, that was another reason. And- I think this is the one, folks. Although this recipe is huge, and makes a very large sheet-cake size thing, you can halve it to make one large loaf, or several cupcakes.

Here's the goods~

pre-heat oven to 350º and grease your baking pan with oil or butter. Butter is better.

8 bananas, mashed
2 Cups granulated sugar
3/4 C melted butter
1 Cup cocoa powder
4 eggs
2 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 tsp baking soda
4 Cups All Purpose Flour
1 Cup chopped walnuts- or more if you like. Or less. We all know someone who hates nuts.
2 Cups semi-sweet chocolate chips

Whip together all those wet ingredients at the top, and in a separate bowl, wisk together the salt, soda and flour. Add slowly to wet ingredients, and then add your walnuts and chocolate chips. Scoop into your baking dish and shove that sucker in the oven for a good 30 minutes. After that time turn the temp down to 325º and keep a close eye on it. Check again in 10 minutes and stab it with a toothpick or thin knife to gauge your progress. Keep in mind that if you've halved this recipe, baking time will change and probably lessen.

Although.. I have this one bread pan that makes everything take forEVER to bake. So, you've got to know your equipment and be willing to keep an eye on it if necessary.

This would be marvelous with a dallop of whipped cream on top. The real stuff. Not that synthetic 'cool whip' stuff that comes ready made in a plastic pail. Unless you're just that lazy. Which I can completely understand.

Happy Baking!

The Garden in the Front

When most of us think about crime, we think about an action that hurts another person- theft, murder, rape.

What we probably do not see are front gardens with vegetables growing in them, and the vegetable gardeners themselves.

When Julie Bass decided to replant her front yard with vegetables - in neat, raised beds- after replacing a sewer line, she didn’t know that she was breaking the city of Oak Park’s code for front yard planting. What she did think was that she was doing something to mitigate her grocery bill, to teach her children about food, and to ensure her family had ready access to organically grown produce. A very American notion, yes?

Not according to Oak Park city planner Kevin Rulkowski, who has insisted that the word ‘suitable’ in the code means ‘common’, according to Webster’s dictionary. (Feel free to look up the definition here, and make sure to read the comments on the bottom of the page.) In one interview, Mr. Rulkowski insists that most people do not want to “see that” in their neighbor’s front yards, leading one to believe that Mr. Rulkowski is offended in some way by vegetables.

So, Julie Bass was charged with a misdemeanor, and faced three months in jail as a result. Rather than complying with the city in order to have charges dropped, she decided to fight, and an aggressive public campaign has ensued, putting Oak Park on the map, and driving the town council underground. To add insult to injury, two misdemeanors were added for failure to license the families dogs. In compliance with this, Julie and her husband tried to license the animals (again, the law was vague, and Julie did not know she was outside this ordinance), only to find that the offices were closed on Friday, due to budget cuts. She licensed the dogs the following Monday, and was told to “bring the documents to court, and they will probably be dismissed”, according to Bass.

When she brought the documents to court, the prosecutor verbally dismissed them before going forward on the garden charges. Later on, a judge from another district dismissed without prejudice the garden charges, and the prosecutor’s office reinstated the charges for the dogs, and Bass will have to appear in court on the 26th of this month. To dismiss without prejudice on the garden charge means that those charges can still be reinstated at a later date. The case has effectively not been dropped.

Bass also attempted to obtain a copy of the town ordinances, but was told that hard copies were not available to the public. She could look up the ordinances at the library- but it is closed for renovation at this time.

In trying to reach a city council member, I have only had contact with Gerald Naftaly, the city mayor, who sent me this message; “There’s nothing obvious to you. you’re not hearing the facts, just one side. ‘you’re entitled to your own opinion, You’re not entitled to your own facts’. -- moynihan I have no obligation to anyone but our oak park residents. Thanks.”[sic] In other interviews, Mayor Naftaly said that Bass would not be put behind bars, and that the ordinance would be reconsidered if residents and local organizations object to the ordinance as is.

Now, there are people out there that believe that front yard gardens are an eyesore, but has this always been a prevalent attitude in our history? No, it has not. In fact, Americans have often gardened during times of economic stress, war, and for basic survival. Not until the peaceful post-war era of the 1950s, when people flocked to suburbia and the “American Dream” did vegetable gardening fall out of vogue- and out of necessity for many Americans. This was also a time of high taxation, and healthy employment. There is a pattern, here, folks.

But there is also a pattern of creeping control. Compliance, or “forcing compliance” have become frequently heard words that find most of us automatically nodding our heads in agreement, without any practical or critical thought on the individual issue. Today, with our food system in decline, our private property rights under scrutiny, and our jobs disappearing into other lands, it becomes apparent that critical thought is a must if we want to ensure any sort of valuable legacy to our children and their children. Compliance is hardly ever a “must”- it is more often the way in which the Bill of Rights is ignored in favor of a patriarchal government, whether at the village level, or at the federal level. It is more often something to be fought, and it is rarely “for our own good”.

At best, the folks running Oak Park at present are, perhaps, stuck in a bygone era. A time of cookie-cutter front yards and houses and families. It is an impractical mindset, and one that needs reevaluation, perhaps from the confines of forced retirement by the voters of Oak Park. At worst, they came into government with a plan to ensure their own happiness above the rights of the residents of Oak Park.

As it happens, election time is almost here, and there is a challenger to Mayor Naftaly, who has released this statement: “Oak Park is going through a very difficult time with record numbers of foreclosures, property values sinking, and crime an all too often occurrence and threat. Devoting scarce public safety resources to prosecuting a vegetable gardener does not reflect our needs. Sadly, when oak Park residents hear crime, they think of theft, arson, hate crimes and burglary- not vegetable gardens. We need city leadership to focus on jobs, fighting crime, and building safe neighborhoods.” - Marian Meisner McClellan.

Food and the Future

I've always been interested in food and the politics surrounding it, but its one of those subjects that can make one want to disconnect for awhile and forget. Problem is, that's the main problem. Right there- the forgetting, the head-in-sand moments or years that go by when we stop thinking about what is behind most of what we eat.

When I was a little girl, the grocery stores carried only very specific types of each vegetable. Want an onion? Here's a white one. Want a potato? Russet. Want some lettuce? Iceburg. Tomato? Beefsteak. Apple? Red Delicious- which I always felt was a bit of a bet, sometimes tasting like apple-y styrofoam than a crisp, fresh apple. We ate a lot of canned vegetables back then, and a good amount of frozen. I don't remember one time actually seeing broccoli not from a plastic bag. My mother grew a large-ish vegetable garden most summers, and that's where I realized that fresh is ever so much better than not fresh. I would stand in the garden in sundress and sandals, picking pea pods and opening them, and staring at the perfect line of waxy, green peas before placing each one in my mouth and delighting in that sweet taste with a texture oh-so-different than what came out of those hideous cans.

Europe is in an e-coli crisis at the moment, with 18 dead as of today, and many more sickened and threatened lives. Food is not simple. Food is not easy. It was never easy, and it never will be. The growing of it has become- for the large part- 'easier'. But that has brought with it risk and a certain level of violence that is at present uncheckable once unleashed. Do we believe that we can sterilize fields, feed livestock diets that cause them illness and just get away with it? Do we feel entitled to easy food? I think we often do.

Below are several links to further information and reading if you're interested. Change is under way, but it is also under attack. The only prevention of fruitful change is active pressure-

http://www.slowfoodusa.org/

http://www.edibleschoolyard.org/


http://michaelpollan.com/

Food, Inc.

The Garden

Fair Food Project

The Food Revolution

The Future of Food

Fast Food Nation

Food Politics

Community Supported Agriculture

The Summer I Take Back the Yard

So, a little over a year ago, I decided to go back to school, and while this has been a somewhat resounding success- if I do say so myself- I have noticed some slippage in other areas. For example, I seem to have gained the freshmen, well, ten in my case. I've tried to convince myself that this has nothing to do with seducing myself into a non-stressed haze by scrolling for hours through facebook and cafemom. No. That couldn't be it.

Then, because I went straight through last summer- full time with four children at home-more scrolling-as-stress reliever in my front room office, and there were moments- many moments- where I would look through the windows that line this room and shudder at what had become of my yard. Little creepy tendrils of stress would creep up the back of my neck, forcing my gaze back onto the comparative neatness of the computer screen. Ignore it. It isn't happening. There isn't a rainforest where a neat garden used to be, and wild marijuana is not growing profusely in the back alley. Not happening.

Another issue with last summer was the lawn mower. Yeah. I have issues with lawnmowers. They either don't start for a mechanical problem- or I just can't start them. One or the other, and both rendering the thing useless to its owner. Being in school full time did not seem conducive to using the little rotary mower (that I love, by the way), so I hired out the job, and spent 20 minutes every Thursday just waiting for the lawnmower man to run over some pile of concrete block, hidden under the savannah grass in the back yard and ruin his mower, believing fully that mowers aren't destined to live long in this little corner of the universe. Then there was the fact that the summer before had been the summer of "the storm", which will remain "the storm" until one can come along to top it. It was one of those storms that didn't do enough damage to get any insurance money out of it that we could use on the yard. All up to us. We little people vs. entire trees. Thankfully there are enough people with tractors here, that if we could just get it to the street, they'd chain it and drag it to "the pile".

So, we were recovering from "the storm", I was in school full time, the lawnmower didn't work, and yeah. Bad, bad things happened to our yard. If you decided to walk to the garage via the neat little sidewalk that runs between it and the house, you needed something to cut things down with. Shameful.

And so, this summer, I decided to take off school, opting instead for the restoration of sanity.

This morning, I drug my four children out the door- okay, they actually wanted to go out.. at first. I hung out some laundry on the line, and asked the older two boys to cut strips of landscaping fabric for the garden. This could have gone better. Instead of folding the fabric to make neat, straight lines, they allowed it to billow around, while yelling at each other for help. Guess who cut the fabric? Next, we decided to take down the poppies, which are done blooming for the year, and the little boys were actually quite helpful, taking wheelbarrow loads to the compost pile. We got about 2/3 of this done, when I decided to finish cutting the grass in the area I had suggested be mowed today. I had to do this, because the older boys had decided it was just "too hard". Hear that in as whiny a voice as possible, because that's the way it sounded. I pulled the wash off the line, as it was finally dry and asked the older boys to finish cutting down the poppies while I took the little boys inside for showers and to make lunch. Hearing fighting outside- I stuck my head out the window and said, "Do you want me to fire you two and give your allowances to your little brothers?"

Anyway, it finally got done. Mainly. I'm sure there is detritus to be cleaned up tomorrow. At any rate, the sun is out, the air more dry than before the thunderstorm that came through last night. All in all, a decent day outside.