Goosey the Red-Nosed Reindeer would like to welcome you to our late December post.
We watched the 12.12.12 concert online. The boys got a little choked up when they saw all those pictures of our beloved shore again.
It was time for the annual Christmas picture with Santa. Absurdly expensive malls always have the best Santas, so we took off to the ridiculous Americana at Brand.
We zipped through the Santa line and got a few moments with the big man. Oscar asked for a DS3, Arlo asked for a cotton candy machine, and The Goose asked for a remote control Barbie car. (Only two of them will be getting their wishes. Can you guess which two?)
Robot fights! Of course there is a robot store, full of robot and electronic kits we've gotten from savvy grandparents. At the robot store at the Brand, they are twice the price. But we love our local robot stop, and on very rare occasions I'm happy to part with $9 (three bucks a kid) for a fifteen minute robot fight, especially when it's refereed by kind engineering students who are sweet to my terribly-behaved kids.
I used up our movie rewards and took the kids to see Rise of the Guardians at the fancy movie theater. Production design? Glorious. Story? Meh.
But it sparked a great conversation with the kids about myths and legends, and how people want to tell the same stories differently. We previously had this talk about the different Spiderman movies and different Batman movies/TV shows. As folks that work in the "biz" we want to impart to the kids that there are the basic stories -- boy meets girl, guy gets bit by a spider and gets powers, beloved child gets sent from doomed planet and lands next to sweet salt of the earth parents who raise him, big sweet guy ends up at the North Pole and ends up being the patron saint of well-behaved children.
They are all structures for talented people to build stories on, and although Evan and I are not writers, we explain Santa to our kids as a story, a myth that contains the Christmas Season. That Santa we see on the street? A sorry interpretation of the story. The different variations of Santa that we meet in old stop-motion TV specials and new glitzy movies? Just different ways that people tell the same story. The real-bearded, engaged Santa at the expensive mall? A version of the the story that we love. And the best facet of the story is OUR Santa, the guy that eats the cookies and drinks the beer and feeds his reindeer the carrots we leave out every year, who reads your letters and spirits them away for his database, the guy who leaves a present that you will love but might not be the present you begged that other Santa for -- THAT Santa is real.
Evan and I are decidedly non-religious. But we are entirely pro-story.
How ridiculous is this mall? Well, here's the kids running away from the trolley.
And here's the meticulously-choreographed dancing fountain.
Giant clock tower.
The 100-foot Christmas tree.
And, the absolute best part, which we discovered coming out of the movie: SNOW!
Yes, here in sunny LA, the fancy malls have snow machines on the roofs to blow snow into the central square at certain appointed hours, while Ella Fitzgerald sings "Let it Snow" and the fountain dances along. It was totally silly and seriously wonderful.
We managed to pull ourselves together and go to the preschool Christmas celebration, which was exactly what we needed.
The Goose decorated ice cream cones as Christmas trees. Part of me, as a politically-correct Northeasterner, wants to call them holiday trees. But we are here in our church based preschool and we will call them Christmas Trees.
The church occupies most of a block. They have chapels and sanctuaries, gyms and kitchens, offices and endless warrens. They also have a central courtyard, which the preschool uses for its Christmas party. There are four numbered doors. You knock and are welcomed by costumed members of the church. The first are the shepards, with their cardboard sheep. They talk about their visit from the angel and how they are going to visit the baby Jesus tomorrow.
The next door is the inn and the innkeeper. He shows all the baby dolls in the nap cots borrowed from the preschool, and tells the kid that he is full, and that a couple showed up and needed shelter but he had none to give him. So he told them to bed down in his stable, and he sent us over to the next door.
Can I just say: all of the volunteers gave 100%. They talked directly to to the kids, only interacted with the parents when the parents spoke, and really were committed to sharing the story of Jesus' birth. (We are an agnostic family, but we believe that Jesus' teachings that we should strive to love others as we want to be loved are spot on. So, in our agnostic family, we look forward to putting out the Nativity Scene from Jerusalem that my parents gave us our first married Christmas. We look forward to sneaking out Baby Jesus into the manger on Christmas Eve. We keep the Christ in Christmas, we just keep out the religion. Christmas is about Santa and family and giving, but my kids also know that it's really Jesus' birthday. What can I say? It works for our family. As Anne Lamott says, I just love the guy. I love Jesus. )
The next door was Mary and Joseph, baby Jesus and a cardboard donkey. They told the story straight to the Goose's face and engaged her. I managed to take a picture.
The final door, in a nod to our Hispanic culture out here, were the Three Kings. They knelt down in their robes made of sheets, and their Kmart sandles, and explained their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myhurr to my Goose.
It was magical.
Off to the chapel!
This is the Thursday-Friday class, only a dozen or so kids. The Goose goes five days a week, so she also attended the Mon-Tues-Weds Christmas Celebration with her Daddy.
The Goose with her friends Peyton and Will. Will was a total hambone -- dancing and REALLY FEELING those lyrics of Rudolph and Frosty. I was an emotional wreck and I needed to see kids being happy and singing like nobody was listening, and I know Will's mom and dad felt the same. I treasure that kid, who greets me every day with "LUUCY! and LUUUCY's MOM!!!!!"
A lovely thing that our preschool does: the kids make two salt-dough ortaments. One is for their family and one is for a preschool friend. They decorate them and at the party, with their parents, wrap the other for a friend whose name they picked out out of a bag. They sit in a circle and give their friends their gift. We have three treasured ornaments on our tree from The Goose's friends at Grandview.
On the way home, The Goose devoured her frosting off her tree and got angry that I wanted to tke pictures.
Saturday, we stopped at our beloved Porto's for some meat pies and cheese breads and went to meet our friends Michael and Sandy about a half-hour away.
Michael was at Kitchen Sink with Evan and I and was at DC for a long stretch with both of us. Sandy worked at the American Museum of Natural History and got us in for a few visits when I had tiny kids, still obsessed by dinosaurs. Michael got a job offer out here in LA and jumped on it.
Since our wild single days in NY, they've had two adorable curly-headed children. Their kids are slightly younger than our youngest
Declan and The Goose hit it off. Om of South Orange and Nigeria might have some competition.
Movie night! Arlo got it into his head that he needed to draw pictures for everyone before the movie started. And when Arlo gets an idea into his head, we all need to stop and let him run with it.
A $100 bill for Oscar.
A rainbow for The Goose.
A meticulous rendition of the Enterprise for Daddy, using the Christmas ornament as a model.
We eventually had movie night. We watched Elf for the first time with the kids, and as always, I spent the last 20 minutes loudly bawling and red-faced. And then my beloved Robyn Brody Kaplyn called to chat and I spent the entire phone call trying to explain why I was crying.
Ah, the holidays. Aren't they grand?
A couple days later, I went to my friend Susan's cookie exchange.
Look at that spread.
I made small talk with a bunch of women I would want to be friends with, I made myself comfortable in Susan's gracious and lovely home. I fan-girled out (only in my head!) to a couple talented character actresses that were in attendance, and brought yummy cookies.
Such a spread, and such a lovely time.
Comics folks are the best folks.
Time to start wrapping.
And decking the halls.
Oscar wrote a great book for school about our four-generations-and-counting Christmas stockings. I'll post pictures when he gets it back from his teacher.
Hanging up by the chimney with care.
Arlo got a visit in school from a special guest (one of those Santas we're always talking about) and gave my friend Kristen a gorgeous smile.
I had a couple afternoons designing and addressing and stamping holiday cards. I am always horrified at the amount of money we spend to send out roughly 130 cards, but I honestly don't regret a penny. I adore Facebook and texting for everyday back-and-forth with my faraway friends, but there's something about getting a lovingly designed card with cunning epitaphs and charming photos in the mail, with stamps and creamy envelopes and all.
And, no matter what I did, the Jewish friends always ended up with the Santa stamp.
Off to the post office, with our stack of love letters to our friends and family.
PEACE
LOVE
FUN
in 2013!
Great post! Love the mall and the cookie exchange. We also loved your card this year..it was just beautiful!
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