Christmas :: Susan Rooke

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Humbugged

December 12, 2019

Posted by Susan Rooke

This is just a quick post today, Dear Readers. For one thing, many of us are busy shopping, cooking and making travels plans for the holidays. My own plans for the next few weeks include making peace with the idea that we’re starting yet another new decade in this 3rd millennium of the Common Era (which at the moment seems even more common than usual). Also on my to-do list is once again to be able to sit in a chair without lots of pain meds and a heating pad. Like right now, for example.

Yes, your semi-faithful correspondent is about to ditch the next couple of posts, but it’s for a good reason: I’ve been sidelined with sacroiliac joint problems. Despite X-rays showing hip bones in perfect health, the right hip has been berating me for days now with unreasonable demands. (Don’t sit! Don’t stand! Don’t bend over! Don’t lie down! What are you, crazy?) It’s quite tiresome and to be honest, it kind of smarts. Since my normal M.O. is to avoid pain whenever possible, I’m going to take some time off from working at my desk in order to heal. Also, I’m on narcotics, which tend to make me stupiid. Whoopsie.

BUT . . . Before I go, I want to share with you my short story that was published by Tell-Tale Press on December 1st (and thank you, Editor Andrea Dawn, for the acceptance!). It’s called “The Break Room,” and you can read it here.

While you’re there, I recommend perusing the other stories on the site, too. Tell-Tale Press publishes four genres of fiction in four virtual libraries: Fantasy, Horror, Mystery & Crime and Sci-Fi. Mine’s in the Fantasy Library, naturally, though it does have just a hint of horror. So please enjoy, and if you’re so inclined, leave a comment!

May your coming weeks be filled with joy and blessings, and may your new year get off to a fabulous start. Happy Holidays! I’ll see you some time in January!

Blog, Christmas, Featured Post, Holidays, Publishing, Stories, Writing

Home for Christmas

December 20, 2018

Posted by Susan Rooke

10 Comments

Just a short one today . . .

I want to wish you all the most joyous of holiday seasons, and the hope that your year concludes with many blessings and hearts full of love. I’m going to be kicking back and having fun for the rest of the year, because . . . The Daughter’s home! And The Son-in-Law will be joining us soon!

It’s been seven years since Glen and I have had the chance to spend Christmas with Katie and Wesley. The last time they weren’t married yet. Or even engaged. So we’re taking full advantage of this opportunity. There will be days of delicious food, fabulous cocktails, abounding snarkiness, clever puns and uproarious laughter over raucous games of Cards Against Humanity (“A party game for horrible people”).

The one thing I’ll do during this time that counts as work will be reading The Realm Below. In paperback, because the proof copies arrived Monday!

This is the fifth or sixth time I’ve read it, but it has to be done. And no skimming allowed. I’m on page 150 (out of 453) and I’ve already found two errors that slipped past me before. (This is in addition to two others that one of my wonderful advance readers, author Diana Conces, found.) So, all cocktails aside, I have to be paying attention when I’m reading.

Later this month, most of you will probably receive a brief newsletter from me announcing that print copies of The Realm Below are available for pre-order from Amazon. (Not sure of the date yet for that. If you don’t receive the newsletter, you can subscribe by going to the right sidebar here where it says “Subscribe and Download Chapter One.”)

You can already pre-order the e-books, though, and some of you have done so. Thank you! The release date is only a month away: January 22, 2019.

And to everyone who has taken the time to read The Space Between and tell me how much they enjoyed it (a new person just reached out to me on Facebook as I was writing this!), I’m always, always thrilled and grateful to hear from you. And thank you for your reviews!

Happy Holidays, Dear Readers! See you in 2019!

Blog, Christmas, family, Featured Post, Holidays, Publishing, Reading, The Realm Below, The Space Between

This is All Josh Groban’s Fault

December 7, 2017

Posted by Susan Rooke

14 Comments

I love Halloween and I love Thanksgiving. Those are great holidays, celebrating, in my view, mostly the simple joy of the experience. They don’t come nearly so burdened with unrealistic expectations of the perfect family moment, the ideal gift. Just good company, yummy nibblies and mutant gourds.

Most years, I enjoy Christmas too. Just last year I wrote that observing Christmas in an empty nest, deprived of The Daughter’s snarky, hilarious company (which these days she often shares with her in-laws) doesn’t make me as whiny as I’d thought it would. But this Christmas season has been different. I’ve been whining. A lot. (Just ask Glen.)

And it’s all because of Josh Groban.

I’ve written before that I’m always saddened when something triggers a memory of happy times Katie and I used to have together before she moved out on her own. The movie Legally Blonde, for instance, often makes me cry, because it reminds me of the fun mother/daughter excursions—the shopping, lunches, haircuts and pedicures—it inspired. (Just to be clear, we didn’t get matching haircuts.)

But I haven’t seen Legally Blonde recently, so I can’t blame that for my whininess this Christmas. What I blame instead is the concert Glen and I saw on TV a couple of nights ago. It featured a grand finale from Josh Groban, which triggered a memory. And of course I cried.

About twelve years ago when Katie was a senior in high school, a classmate and her mother offered us two tickets to a Josh Groban concert in San Antonio. Their plans had changed, and they knew that Glen, Katie and I were big Josh Groban fans. Would we be interested? Sparing only a moment’s thought for poor Glen’s feelings, or for the drive to San Antonio and back, I told Katie, “Sure, I’ll take you!”

And they were great tickets. Floor level, aisle seats, close to the stage, a large but comfortable venue. As we sat chatting with another mother/daughter pair next to us (who were just as excited as we were), I lamented aloud that I wished I’d brought a sign to hold up when Josh took the stage: I’D MAKE A GREAT MOTHER-IN-LAW! Then the opening act came on: Chris Botti. Well. The icing was on the cake. That night was cemented in our memories forever.

A couple of years later, The Daughter moved out of the nest. And ever since, though I always enjoy listening to Chris Botti’s jazz trumpet, hearing Josh Groban’s magnificent voice makes me forlorn. It brings on a sad nostalgia for the fun we had at that concert twelve years ago.

As I learned the other night, hearing him sing during the holiday season is much, much worse. After the TV concert was over, Glen cued up more of Josh on the stereo as I sank deeper and deeper into melancholy. I cast a gloomy look around the house and saw that we had no Christmas tree, no lights, no ribbons or ornaments, nothing that sparkled or glittered or flashed. In fact, I realized—getting whinier by the moment—we’d had no Christmas decorations for five years. We stopped decking the halls when we put our old house on the market. All to avoid distracting potential buyers, or making the house seem cramped. I used to have so much fun with it, especially on the dining table. At Halloween:

At Thanksgiving:

At Christmas:

But now? “I haven’t even done a tablescape!” I exclaimed to Glen in despair. “Because everything I used to decorate with is still in boxes in the garage!” (That’s right. We moved into our “forever home” 9 ½ months ago, and the garage is still full of boxes to unpack. Mea maxima culpa. I can’t blame Josh Groban for that one.)

Glen, meanwhile, was fiddling with his phone, paying no attention to my wretchedness. Not much, anyway, because he was busy finding us a Christmas tree on Amazon. It didn’t take him more than thirty minutes, and it’ll be delivered by the time you read this.

After I finished being weepy over how sweet and thoughtful he is, I realized I was a touch disgruntled. It was disconcerting to have my whining doused so efficiently by Glen’s practical, man-of-action response. But December is young. I’ll bet I can find something else to whine about if I put my mind to it. For one thing, I haven’t found the box with the tree skirt or the ornaments yet. Or any of my tablescape materials. That’s good for an evening’s worth of whining, at least.

A footnote about that long-ago concert in San Antonio: We all know, of course, that Katie did not end up marrying Josh Groban. Possibly because I neglected to hold up a posterboard advertising my mad mother-in-law skills. That’s all for the best, though, because she married Wesley instead. Who happens to be the best son-in-law ever. And—the icing on the cake—he sings very well, too.

Blog, family, Featured Post, Forever Home, Halloween, Holidays, memoir, Thanksgiving

Resolved

December 29, 2016

Posted by Susan Rooke

10 Comments

There’s something about the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day that can make me a bit melancholy. Some of it is probably due to the ghostly memories of the too many used-up years behind me. Their sheer weight hangs from the eaves like melting ice, and I can hear the drip, drip, drip until the new year is safely underway.

It’s a tad depressing, but fairly easy to talk myself out of. The primary source of the melancholy, however, is beyond my control. It’s the seasonal gloom that blots the face of half the earth this time of year.

Lots of people I know welcome what they seem to feel is the warm-hearth-and-fuzzy-slippers coziness of early nightfall. Not me. I dread the end of Daylight Savings Time. Each year I’ll change the clocks in the house to Standard Time, but I’ll leave my wristwatch set to DST. When it gets dark at 5:30 p.m., I’ll tell myself it’s really 6:30. This fools no one.

And each December I celebrate the day when sunset times resume their forward motion. In this area it happens mid-month—sooner than many people realize—days before the solstice. Here, the great machinery ground into forward gear again on Thursday, December 15th (believe me; I keep track) and as of today, we’ve already gained 10 minutes of evening daylight (yay!). At this point it’s still a few days before the rise of the sun reverses to an earlier time, but it’s not sunrise I care about. I operate on the assumption that it’s likely to rise pretty soon after I do. It’s the light at the end of the day that matters to me. And at this time of year, there’s much too little of it.

Christmas is a welcome distraction from all that, but after it’s over, I’m still left with weeks of endless night on my hands. After darkness descends, all I can see is gloom, gloom and more gloom. (Literally. I don’t see well at night. Or any other time, for that matter.) But, since I’m powerless to change the rotation of the earth, I have to accept things the way they are. In the spirit of acceptance, therefore, I’ve been thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Because it’s not like making a resolution is going to change anything, right?

Well, not typical resolutions, maybe. At least not any of the ones I’ve ever made. “I will write a poem every day for a year.” I made that resolution four years in a row. Never got through even the first six months. “This year, I will make every recipe in Baking with Julia.” That’s Dorie Greenspan’s wonderful book of Julia Child’s PBS series, and a ridiculous notion of mine. I baked perhaps three or four recipes out of the book. Not entirely my fault, though. The croissants were so good (just ask Katie and Glen) that I never got past them.

But on the other hand, it’s quite possible to make resolutions that do stand a reasonable chance of success. Not the good-for-you kind. The fun-for-you kind. Since I don’t want to overload myself with too much fun (it can be just as burdensome as too much self-improvement), for 2017 I’m going to make just three:

1. I will drink more champagne.
2. I will sing “The Doom Song.”
3. I will contemplate my favorite tree.

And I might just do all three at once.

My reason for the first: A well-mixed cocktail in the evening is lovely, but champagne . . . well, it’s champagne! It’s delicious, it’s effervescent, it’s a golden, sparkly celebration in a glass, even on the dullest of evenings. It’s “Life Made Festive, One Flute at a Time.” © Susan Rooke 2016. You read it here first. I think.

My reason for the second: Doom is an awful word, a horrific concept. It’s a thought that keeps me company all too often on these endless winter nights. But then I click here. I get approximately 30 seconds of a cartoon figure repeatedly singing the word “doom” in a shrill voice, to no apparent tune. It makes me laugh every time, and takes—for those 30 seconds, at least—the gloom out of “doom.” Thank you, Katie, for introducing me to “The Doom Song.”

My reason for the third: This enormous tree quiets my mind. Here it moves from fall into winter, ever graceful.

The world can be a brutish, frightening place. Eyes watch us from the dark woods; the beast’s belly is a vault that holds a universe of souls. We all know by now that I’m a pantywaist, which makes it even more important that I hold this determination: As often as I can, for as long as I can, I will have fun, be festive, and celebrate silliness for its own sake. Because I believe it’s necessary.

Thank you for your company; I appreciate you all. Now. Who wants to have a glass of champagne and sing “The Doom Song” with me?

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Christmas in an Empty Nest

December 22, 2016

Posted by Susan Rooke

10 Comments

The title of this post may sound like I’m going to whine, but I surprised myself. Turns out the experience isn’t bad at all.

From the time I was 11 years old until Katie was born two decades later, I viewed the Norman Rockwell-ized ideal of Christmas with cynical amusement. I can pinpoint it with such exactitude because that was the year my mother and I celebrated Christmas in a beachfront hotel in Pattaya, Thailand. I remember the locale as tropical and lush, with our very nice room overlooking the body of water still known in those days as the Gulf of Siam. I see that now in Pattaya they cater to tourists by putting up Christmas decorations, but when we stayed there, there was nothing like that. Why should there be? Thailand was, and is, a largely Buddhist nation.

My mother, however, took genuine pleasure in Christmas, and was dismayed that we had no decorated tree for the holiday. Her solution was creative. We scrounged in the hotel courtyard and found a leafy green stalk of vegetation 20 or so inches tall, took it to our room and propped it up in the ice bucket. Then we combed the beach for a pretty seashell to top it with, but were even more thrilled when we turned up a dead starfish. How perfect was that? It was very limp, though, and surprisingly heavy. When we draped it atop the Christmas “tree,” it made our construction sag to one side. Undeterred, we admired it for a couple of days anyway, until it began to smell so awful we had to pitch the whole mess in the trash. I’d never before associated the festive season with rotting echinoderms. We were able to put Christmas behind us so much more easily that year.

Soon after that I embarked on my phase of brittle cynicism. I still enjoyed Christmas—it’s a pretty holiday, and we had some terrific cutthroat rounds of charades when the family got together each year—but I felt no compulsion to maintain an idealized view of it. Until Katie was born, and at that point I morphed into a steaming bowl of indulgent mush.

But eventually Katie went off to college. And once she did, for several years the advent of another Christmas would make Glen and me a bit melancholy. While she was growing up, we had formed and embraced our own family traditions, all because of her. We would have a traditional Christmas breakfast. Traditional mimosas accompanied the breakfast once we judged her to be old enough. There would be a scavenger hunt for presents, with clues left on the tree. Yes, she came home from college for the holidays, but we always knew the holidays would be over soon. Then she’d go back for the spring semester and there we’d be, up a creek without her oddball, snarky, hilarious companionship to steer us.

College was good practice, though. It got us over the hump, so that by the time she married Wesley (who is equally oddball, snarky and hilarious, so he fits right in), Glen and I were used to being by ourselves again. I can’t deny that a little empty-nester gloom still creeps in from time to time, but for the most part, we’ve discovered we have a lot of fun. Kind of like the first four years of our marriage, but with loose skin and arthritis. (Hey. At least I didn’t say “loose teeth.”)

A few years ago we even began our own tradition: a low-key celebration, just the two of us, except for the occasional uninvited guest.

Now we spend our Christmases in a 270 sq. ft. cabin in the middle of West Texas nowhere, on a ranch belonging to good friends Richard and Michelle. The cabin is short on a few modern conveniences. There’s no TV, and only spotty telephone and internet service. (Glen has plenty of music on his iPhone, though.) When it’s bitterly cold outside, we bundle up and go hiking and birdwatching anyway. In the evenings, after a plain but satisfying dinner, I beat him at poker. Unless he beats me. (That sounds wrong, but you know what I mean.)

We enjoy wintry scenery

and sunsets like this.

In other words, it’s perfect.

This Christmas, though, for the first time in several years, we didn’t get to go. But that’s okay; it’s because we’re building our forever home. And it’s almost done.

As for next year, we’ll just have to see what it brings.

I hope everyone reading this has a wonderful holiday, whatever your traditions are. As the song says, “May your days be merry and bright.” Bright’s good. Merry’s good too. But for me, being silly may get me through the holidays best of all.

Yes, I did buy the smiling poop pillow. ^_~

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