Flowers and Candy and Cards - OH MY!

I loved Valentine's Day as a kid. What kid doesn't? You get to carve out an hour of school time to gather in envelopes full of free candy while you munch on heart-shaped sugar cookies and guzzle fruit punch.

As an adult, I find I really don't care. I don't like chocolate. I'm allergic to flowers. And I buy my own jewelry.

Don't get me wrong - I love to celebrate romance with my hubby. I just don't need a day set aside for it.

Because I'm of the slightly cynical opinion that Valentine's Day is a conspiracy put together by a high-level corporate conglomerate consisting (yay! alliteration!) of Hershey's, Hallmark, and 1-800-Flowers, I thought I'd go to Hallmark's website to find a list of days set aside for card-sending, chocolate-consuming, or flower-buying.

Here's what I found:

Valentine's Day 2/14: How can I possibly take seriously a holiday whose mascot is a chubby naked man-baby with wings and a glittering bow and arrow?


April Fools' Day 4/1: Do people really send cards or gifts for this? I used to hide rubber rats in my mom's bathroom cupboard and start screaming "Rodent!!" just to test their blood pressure.


Tax Day 4/15: If you send me a card for tax day, make sure it's stuffed full of cash. That's a concept I can get behind.


Earth Day 4/22: Oh surely you jest. A card? For Earth Day? Isn't that sort of against the whole point? Or maybe they just want to encourage mass recycling of gift cards that day.

Administrative Professionals Day 4/23: I really do think honoring secretaries and receptionists - oops! Administrative Professionals! - is an excellent idea. Having been one to put myself through college, I can tell you that the only drawback to this holiday is that it comes only once a year. We should have more days set aside where bosses have to stop behaving badly and instead have to spend their money to honor the person who makes them look good. =)

Cinco de Mayo 5/5: Oooh, thanks but I'd rather have a pinata. One in the shape of Hillary Clinton's head.


Mother's Day 5/11: No argument here. :D


Armed Forces Day 5/17: Also no argument, though I think we need to do better than to honor our armed forces only once a year. That's an individual thing, though. I don't think our poor calendars can take on any more "special days".


Memorial Day 5/26: Again, no argument that this is a worthy holiday but I'm confused as to whom I'm supposed to be sending a card...we don't really wish each other Happy Memorial Day, do we?


Father's Day 6/15: My hubby prefers homemade cards from the kiddos but to date, he's never turned down offerings of chocolate.


Canada Day 7/1: Well this is interesting. I was looking at a list of American holidays and this popped up. Do we really need a Canada Day? Isn't that sort of exclusionary toward our other allies? Where is our Great Britain Day? Our South Korea Day? Our Israel Day?


Fourth of July 7/4: Leave off the card and the chocolate and bring me fireworks instead, please. Big ones.


Friendship Day 8/3: Now, see? This is the kind of holiday that just makes me roll my eyes. This is a blatant attempt to garner more of my money by making me feel guilty if I don't honor my friends on August 3rd. Fortunately, I'm immune to such pressure.


Sisters' Day 8/5: Ditto what I said for Friendship Day. And did we have to stock so many useless holidays into one week? Furthermore, where is Brother's Day? Surely we could fit that into 8/7 just to round it all out?


Grandparents Day 9/7: Ditto Friendship Day again.


National Boss Day 10/16: Hmmm. Sounds like management wants to recoup their expenditures on Administrative Professionals Day. Really, I think this is close enough to Christmas that employees should get to choose one gift that covers both. Or just ignore it. Either way.


Sweetest Day 10/18: What does this even mean? Anyone?


Halloween 10/31: Again, no card for me. Just send candy.


Veterans Day 11/11: I think we could roll this day up with Armed Forces Day because really, we're honoring them all. But that's probably a really politically incorrect sentiment and since I strongly believe in honoring our troops all year through, I'll silence the part of me that longs for just one week that doesn't have a little Hallmark label at the bottom of one of the days.


Thanksgiving 11/27: I don't send cards for Thanksgiving. Does anyone? If you do, permit me to inform you that you are an over-achiever. A nice one, but an over-achiever all the same.


Hanukkah 12/21: 8 days of presents has to make Hallmark absolutely giddy.


Christmas 12/25: *sigh* Now THIS is a holiday where I do my part to support the conglomerate.


Kwanzaa 12/26: Not my thing but combine this with the two before it and the conglomerate is having a banner month.


New Year 1/1: You know, Korean families have a New Year's tradition where the entire clan gathers and the elders pass out wads of cash to the younger set. This is a tradition I think we should all embrace. At least until we find ourselves classified as an elder.


National Mentoring Month: What?? Get real.



Groundhog Day 2/2: The only good thing to come out of this holiday was that movie - and even it wasn't so great.

Gingerbread...WHAT??

I spent some time talking about the Christmas traditions that have been a part of my family since I was little and that I've carried on today (with some alterations...)

But one tradition is unique to my immediate family alone.

The tradition of making Gingerbread Poop.

I did not start out my stint in motherhood with the goal of instituting a tradition whereupon all the participants would use cookie dough to create replicas of excrement.

I planned on baking plates full of all sorts of homemade goodies, an apron wrapped around me, my cherubic children lined up to stir, roll, decorate, and lick the beaters.

Of course, I neglected to plan for boys.

Boys change the rules of the game by virtue of being boys. They don't stir cookie batter, they attack it with the sole intent of mastering the flour, sugar, and eggs and demonstrating who is boss.

Boys don't roll out dough, boys annihilate dough with a wooden rolling pin as their weapon of mass destruction.

Boys don't decorate cookies, boys fling heaping piles of sprinkles or frosting in the general direction of the cookie as they are racing through the room chasing, being chased, or on their way to rig the ceiling fan with legos for their unsuspecting mother again.

Boys do, however, lick beaters.

When we first moved to Tennessee, Scientist was 5, Daredevil was 4, and Starshine was 2. I decided we would start a new tradition of making gingerbread cookies for Santa. I mixed the dough, rolled it out, asked for volunteers to man the cookie cutters and baked pan after pan of perfect little gingerbread men.

When I got to the last pan, I had enough dough left over to give a chunk to each boy to design his own cookies, sans cookie cutter. The boys worked on their individual masterpieces and then I place them in a row beneath the perfectly proportioned gingerbread men, baked it for ten minutes, and pulled the pan out to see that dough crunched up, rolled up, and smashed by little boy hands had expanded beneath the gingerbread men's legs to look like nothing more than some pretty impressive specimens of poop.

Anyone with boys knows that poop is one of their favorite subjects.

They were beside themselves with glee. They'd made POOP! In an oven!! And now they got to eat poop and drink eggnog! (because Mom was a spoilsport and firmly declined the notion that Santa would love to eat some poop too.)

That Christmas passed and, being a girl, I forgot about the poop incident. My boys, however, did not. Somewhere in the back of their testosterone-soaked brains, hidden behind the alphabet, how to ride a bike, and plans for the eventual destruction of middle Tennesse, lurked a memory of the most enjoyable Christmas tradition they'd even encountered.

And so it happened that the following Christmas, when I hauled out the rolling pin and announced my need for helpers to create gingerbread men for Santa, I was met with an excited chorus of little boy voices all exclaiming one thing:

"Yay! We get to make gingerbread poop!!"

Thus it began. Every year since, I roll out dough, cut perfectly proportioned gingernbread men and then hand an ever increasing amount of dough to my boys to make their poop masterpieces. Honestly, it's the most interest in cooking any of them have ever shown.

I took pictures of this year's delicacies. The first shows the offerings from the Scientist (always precise, even when dealing with excrement) and Daredevil (whose work looks like a cross between poop and seriously over-worked roadkill). The second pic is Starshine's unique interpretation.





As proof that I have completely capitulated, this year I pulled the pan out of the oven and yelled up the stairs, "Come down for poop and eggnog!"

The Mechanical One

My parents are coming out to visit soon. Every time my dad comes to town, he likes me to have a list of projects for him to tackle. Anything from a squeaky door to installing a new fuse box makes him happy.

He's always been the mechanical one in our family.

My childhood is filled with memories of my dad fixing, building, and installing. My dad always seemed to do everything right.

Until one Christmas.

Christmas is a big deal in my family. We decorate the day after Thanksgiving and go all out. Ornaments, tinsel, and lights galore. Nativity scenes, candles shaped like trees, garland, and one very special brass-plated candle holder with cherubic angels flying over the top of the flames, ringing little bells as they go.

You know the piece. You light four skinny little candles and heat causes the angels to fly. The only drawback to it is that to store it, you have to break it down into small pieces.

Some assembly required.

No problem. We have my dad.

This particular Christmas, he sets to work assembling the flying-angels-who-ring-bells-over-candles doo-hickey. My sister and I watch. We've volunteered our services for this project and been turned down. Soundly.

My dad has designed and built houses, remodeled bathrooms, breathed life into dying appliances. He does not need help assembling a paltry Christmas decoration.

We begin offering our opinions. "That's not right, Dad. The angels aren't facing the right way."

He becomes irritable. We offer one opinion too many and he snaps out his famous last words:

"Don't tell me what to do. I'm the mechanical one in the family, remember?"

We remember. We are silenced. We watch as he installs the last brass cherub and lights the candles.

The angels hover in suspended silence for a moment as the flames grow. Then, it happens.

The flames create wind. The wind pushes the angels. The angels fly serenely in a cirle. The bells tinkle.

It is a rare and amazing thing to see four little angels all flying butt-first.

My dad has never lived it down.

Do You Smell That?

Yesterday, as my kids hunted for bright plastic eggs, I remembered a fiasco from Easters past.

My mom always hard-boiled a dozen eggs each for my sister and me to decorate. On Easter, we spent hours hiding and finding these eggs in our living room. We hid eggs inside my mom's collection of china teacups, balanced them in the folds of the heavy drapes, placed them inside my dad's record player, and rolled them under the couch. We were egg hiding pros.

One year, we finished our Easter afternoon with twenty-three eggs. This was a problem because a) we started with twenty-four and b) we were using REAL eggs.

We searched all over that room. My mom helped. My dad was called in for emergency back-up. We tipped our green upholstered rocking chair over. No egg. We shook out the heavy green drapes. No egg. We looked in every glass and china whatnot my mom owned. No egg. Finally, we gave up.

Not the best plan.

A few weeks later, we came home from school to THE SMELL.

Very few things in life can smell as pungent as an egg left out in a heated room for weeks. I haven't smelled anything quite like it again and I sincerely hope I never do.

Fortunately, with such a strong odor to guide us, we found the egg.

Told you we were egg hiding pros.