Christmas, 2012
Warning--There are a lot of pretty pictures. Maybe go through and look at those, first, so you're not distracted by them. Then, go back and read.
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| The weather on Christmas Day-- View out the back of Sal and Grant's living room and lawn for dinner |
When I first decided to go to New Zealand for Christmas I thought that I would miss Christmas entirely. I thought that, somehow, they either wouldn’t celebrate it, or I wouldn’t end up celebrating it, or it would be not as big of a deal in the southern hemisphere as it is in the U.S.
They may give fewer gifts than in America (although that doesn’t mean they don’t give any, nor does it mean the gifts are sparse, but it does mean that instead of a “mountain” the gifts are merely a “pile”), but they have no less Christmas spirit. Ron listens to exactly one radio station, Coast radio, which plays easy listening—all his oldies favorites; including but not limited to: The Beatles’ pop numbers (you will not find “Helter Skelter” or “Norwegian Woods” here), Elton John’s Piano Man, and that Limbo Stick song you play at roller skating birthday parties. Coast Radio has been interspersing Christmas Hits with the above numbers for the last two weeks, downplaying the former and upping the latter steadily, but they’ve been growing desperate for more and more Christmas songs, and they refuse to dip into newer stuff (Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” is too avant garde for these guys), so they end up using Christmas songs from fifty’s commercials, or fifties cartoons, which has the effect of a jumble of high pitched squeaky voices throwing out racially inappropriate terms and “ho ho ho’s!” and then bursting into songs that sort of get lost in a lot of electronic static and bubblegum jangle. I generally tune it out because I’m busy trying not to get knocked over by Doris number 487 while I get her and Cleo into the small pen.
Ron says Coast Radio is the most popular radio station in New Zealand. He says this to prove something to me about music, about how the sheer number of people who prefer music from the 60’s (see the list above, including that limbo stick song) prove that it’s actually better than the music from the 80’s, but I say, “Well that says something about New Zealand, doesn’t it?”
We’ve gotten to the joking to each other stage, so he takes that well.
But really. It DOES say something about New Zealand. I’m pretty sure it does.
So Coast Radio has been shoving bad Christmas music on me all week, but I look out and I go outside and it is like, a million degrees out.
That’s another thing. Technically, the temperature is only 75 degrees. The Kiwis (New Zealanders call themselves Kiwis—it’s a fun and short term and I will use it) are all opening windows and fanning themselves and saying “aye! It’s a hot one! Can’t stand too many more of these!” and I’m looking at them going, “It’s only 75 degrees out. Get a grip. In America we deal with 105 on a routine basis!” and they say, “Oh but we have humidity.” And I’m like, “Yeah. So do we.”
But by the end of the work day, when I’ve been planting trees out in the open and gasping for water, or in the shed with five hundred sheep all running in circles around me because I can’t find the leader, and knocking my shins on fences, or even just when I take off my blue overalls (you’ve noticed in every picture of me I’ve been wearing blue overalls to protect my other clothing—the overalls also afford some measure of protection from the sun and rain and thistles. Also, they tuck into the boots that we walk through all the mud and mire in) –even when I just take off my blue overalls I find myself fanning my shirt, opening windows going, “man! It’s a hot one! Can’t have too many more days like this!”
It’s hard to get into the Christmas spirit when it feels more like we should be prepping for Fourth of July (Side Cultural Note: The Kiwi’s have Waikiko day, which falls on the 9th of February, and is supposed to be a sort of national New Zealand day—people who work get the day off. Generally people use the day to protest whatever they want to protest. They don’t do fireworks or have parties or anything. It sounds like a lot less fun). And yet Gay is going around humming Christmas carols under her breath, and she’s making all kinds of puddings and cakes and things, and Simon’s been working on learning “Silent Night” on the piano.
So it sort of feels like I’m a bit of a grinch this year.
The first day or two I was in the house, Gay and I, her daughter Sal (short for Sally) and Sal’s son Alex (aged 1) went and cut down a pine tree to put up in the living room. We got a tree for Sal and a tree for us. Since Gay and Ron have such a large farm, and since a lot of it is wild mire with pine trees and bog, there were more than enough trees to choose from. I think they also plant pine trees by hand there to keep the forest going.
When we got home Gay and I decorated the tree in the living room with her ornaments. She stuck the tree in a bucket (no fancy christmas tree base) with rocks to wedge it up, dropped a couple aspirin tablets into the water, and then covered the bucket with wrapping paper to make it look festive.
I set up my laptop with my “Christmas Tree Decorating Playlist”—and yes, I have a whole playlist specifically dedicated to decorating Christmas trees. In past years we’ve had issues with the specific CDs we needed and in the specific order we needed, etc. The CDs must be in the right order. THEY MUST. We must put the ornaments on in the exact same order the exact same way every year; we get the same type of tree every year; we argue about the tree exactly the same way each year (mom wants a smaller tree, I want a larger tree); I do this, Rissa does that, etc. IT ALL MUST HAPPEN THE SAME. TRADITION. For instance: We always listen to the opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, which then transitions into The Clancy Brothers Christmas Irish music, which then transitions to Zydeco, which then transitions to more traditional stuff if there’s still more to go. Usually by that time we’ve finished with the tree. That is why I have a playlist constructed exactly that way on my laptop. TRADITION.
But Gay only had one string of lights and maybe forty ornaments, so I got through maybe three songs of Amahl and the tree was finished! The Wise Men had just knocked at the door. The peasants hadn’t even danced yet. The mother hadn’t stolen the gold—nothing! The tree was finished. And I was trying to explain the plot to Gay and she was sort of hmming and uh-huhing like it was a little bizarre that every year our family listens to an opera while decorating the Christmas tree.
I didn’t think it was so odd at all. Doesn’t every family listen to a full opera that is not so totally religious, thought it has religious elements, but is more about the relationships between people of different backgrounds and our own human natures and what we’re willing to do for each other in times of struggle (sometimes small struggle? interior struggle?familial struggle?)?
Apparently not.
The next Christmas involvement Gay thrust me into was making the Christmas cake. Christmas cake is actually fruit cake. Right now my father is reading this and making a really grossed out face. If you imagine me rolling my eyes and going, “Ugh, Fruit Cake, No thanks. No Thanks,” with a shake of my head and maybe a shudder thrown in for good measure, then you will have a female version of my father saying the exact same thing. My father has had, I think, negative experiences with fruit cake, although at the moment I forget why.
So when Gay said that for her Christmas wasn’t complete without it, and that one of her favorite traditions was Christmas Cake, I said, “Sure, I’ll try some!” because really, if it’s so awful in his experience, then there must be something absurdly crazy about it to elicit such a reaction. She gave me some from the store and it was a little wet and a little thick and a little fruity, but generally all right. (“Well, Corrie,” Dad says, “You can have it. You couldn’t pay me to touch it. Un-un. No way. Nada. Baby, You can have it.”)
A couple days later it was her birthday and so Sal, her daughter, took her out for dinner. She charged me that evening with making the Christmas Cake because it would take a couple hours to bake and I would have all night to sit with it. I’d baked in her kitchen before so I knew basically where everything was. She set the recipie on the counter and left me to it.
2 pounds of fruit. Well, the bag of fruit Gay gave me was 1 kg, so that corresponds. The fruit was soaked in ginger ale for several hours. Check.
¼ pounds of butter.
1 pound of sugar. These two grossed me out because that sounds like a lot until I did a google conversion search. 1 pound of sugar is roughly one cup. Or something more reasonable. ¼ pound of butter was a quarter of the block I had in front of me, so I have no idea how much I actually put in. It’s a mystery.
The rest of the measurements on the card were not in pounds, not in grams, but in cups, which just goes to show you that the Europeans and the New Zealanders switched over to metric not as long ago as you might think, because this recipe was handed down from Gay’s mother.
Anyway. So I put the cake into the oven. I put it on the temperature and time it says for. Gay came home before it’s done. She said, “Oh, you used that pan? I never use that pan.”
The pan I used was the only pan we’ve ever used for baking anything in this house, besides muffin tins. It’s a bizarrely extendable pan (it breaks in half and then slides together again, so you can have it as long or as short as you want, although I don’t know how the batter doesn’t just seep through the crack in the middle). But apparently there’s a deeper pan that’s squarer then the pan I used and didn't make square (even though I could have made it square, since it's extendable), a pan that takes a longer time to cook that blah blah blah blah. Anyway. How was I to know when she didn’t pull it out for me?
She pulled it out of the oven at the right time but the corners and edges were black because the extendable pan was shallower than the normal pan, so things got a little bit too cooked. The recipe said, “Do Not Cook Too Long”. But this extendable pan was too shallow and so yes, it cooked too long. Also, Gay told me later, sometimes she puts brown paper around the pan and that stops the edges from getting too brown.
HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW THESE THINGS ABOUT YOUR VERY FAVORITE CAKE. YOU SHOULD NOT DELEGATE IMPORTANT TRADITION ITEMS LIKE THAT TO SOMEONE WORKING WITHOUT SUPERVISION, IN A STRANGE KITCHEN WITH AN OVEN THAT DOESN’T ALWAYS WORK RIGHT.
I felt like a Christmas fruit cake failure.
She ended up cutting off the edges “to square it up a bit” and then wrapping wrapping paper around it. And then she forgot to take it to lunch with Ron’s sister’s house on Christmas day. (Mind you, by this time she had made probably TEN other types of dessert items to bring to various houses—fruit salad, jellos, trifles, etc.)
*hangs head* American fail.
Christmas Morning we had French toast, instead of wheaties and toast, like normal. I normally don’t mind wheaties and toast, but Christmas morning is a good time to mix it up a bit. So I made French toast. Simon left a couple days ago to spend Christmas with some friends of his in Queenstown (a large city a couple hours away), so it was just Ron, Gay and I.
We opened presents. For once, I was the youngest! I was the youngest person in the room! Isn’t that exciting! Normally I have a sister around who is always younger than I am, you see. So I was Santa and distributed the presents around to everyone, and decided who got what, when.
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| The tree I decorated! Presents under the tree! |
I had brought three presents for Ron and Gay—my father made bowls for them, I brought honey and a beeswax candle (customs took the honey but let me keep the candle) and then I also brought a small wooden, handcrafted bird house ornament that I got from a local artisan in Iowa. They liked all of them but I actually think they appreciated Dad’s bowls the most, and I’m not just saying that. I was able to explain the process of glass blowing a little bit, and talk about how much work goes into it, and how sometimes the glass just breaks you know, mid blow, because of the heat or coldness, so that was exciting. And I think they were really touched that he would send them something so personal that they could link to me, specifically. They’ve heard of his glass blowing before from me—I’ve mentioned my mother’s stained glass and my father’s glass blowing, so to get a set of bowls was really lovely.
They gave me a couple presents, too—a peacock pencil case full of tea bags (honey ginger, peppermint, and apple), a small tray with a colorful drawing of a local marsh bird, the pukeko, on it—a sort of giftey, touristy thing that I really liked because it’s the sort of thing that will be easy to carry home because it’s small and light, but will always remind me of NZ, and will always be useful, but which I wouldn’t necessarily buy for myself. They also gave me a calendar with lovely pictures of various sights in New Zealand! So all year round I’ll have beautiful photographs in case I don’t take any good ones myself.
Once that was over we headed to Ron’s sister’s house. We picked up Ron’s father on the way. Grandy (short for Grandfather) is in his 80’s. I’m not sure how senile he is. He seems to understand most things, but in the morning he rang to wish us a happy Easter. He has a fluff of white hair coming off the top of his head, straight up, and I think that’s the best part. He also has a tendency to lean over and toot, which I’ve only heard described in books as a thing grandfathers do to their mortified grandchildren, but never had the pleasure of experiencing, seeing as I’ve only had grandmothers, not grandfathers. This seems like a negative, but I would like to stress that when you have never had a grandfather around, and then one is around doing something so grandfatherly, tooting out the side of the chair (only the once) becomes something of a novelty, and I was quite pleased with the whole incident, actually. Grandy was very nice. He and I chatted when we could and slept the rest of the time. He and I slept in the car, slept in the living room when other people were cooking, slept when the baby was running around, nodded off while trying to read—it was great.
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| Ferg, Barb's husband, through a tunnel. |
Ron’s sister has a son with three children. I immediately became painfully shy, and when someone asked me even the simplest of questions I became stunningly unable to articulate myself—frenetic and fumbling and I spoke too fast and with my American accent it was a wonder they understood a single thing I said. So I glued myself to the wall of photos they had, where they had pictures of animals I’ve seen a million times—elk and grizzly bears and salmon and I was like, “well these are interesting animals but I am a little bored with this, actually, why doesn’t anyone have anything different.” And in the living room she has a wood and metal plaque of an elk with pine trees—you know, something touristy you see in Colorado or whatever all the time, and it took me forever to figure out, to remember, that New Zealand doesn’t have bears and elk, and that all these animals are new and exotic to Kiwis. Once I figured out that to Kiwis this living room looked like a fantasy island wonderland, I turned to Barb and said, “So where in the USA have you been?”
That was the question to ask, apparently.
Out came the photo albums, the stacks and stacks of them. Turns out that this year they went to Alaska, then down to San Francisco, Oregon, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, etc. In fact, several times they said, “Have you seen ____, at Willamette state park?” and I was like, “I’ve never heard of that small out of the way place in our large country, of which I have only seen a small part,” and Barb looked at me either like she was a little disappointed or bemused or maybe satisfied—like she, a Kiwi, knew more about my country than I did. Which was good—I’m glad to have been the American that made her proud of her traveling accomplishment because really, her travels in America and around the world have been extensive. And I haven’t seen enough of America. I do want to see more.
They did have a picture of a statue of Paul Bunyan and Babe, his blue ox, and I leapt on it, shouting, “It’s Paul Bunyan! Paul Bunyan! And Babe the Blue Ox! You know the stories of Paul Bunyan and Babe?”
They shook their heads, bemused. No idea.
So I opened my mouth, ready to give them the whole story of Paul Bunyan when I realized—I couldn’t remember any stories about them except the one that Megan White wrote about them during a creative writing class a couple years ago—so, a story not part of traditional canon—and much as I would have liked to start shouting across the table, “That’s Paul Bunyan and Babe! They were giant as babies and the whole town had to feed them giant pancakes! And then, when Paul Bunyan was a teenager, he lived in the subway system of D.C for a time, and people could see his breath coming up from under the city! He would burrow in the tunnels and go to all the art gallery openings and the people all loved him and they stood by him in times of trouble! He carved the tunnels and he sometimes lay in the Mall on sunny days and they made the Reflecting pool and Washington Monuments as toys for him to play with! But then he had to leave for some reason I can’t remember and then he straightened out the Mississippi with one tug! He and Babe straightened out the Mississippi! Did you hear? They just straightened it out--” I couldn’t do it—what if they repeated that story to an American and then got confused and cynical? So instead I just got flustered and panicked and someone had asked me about Redwoods just a moment before and I wasn’t sure if I’d given them the right information then, and here was Paul Bunyan, and I couldn’t quite remember which story was Megan’s and which was the real myth, and it was hot and children were shrieking (why are children always shrieking? Why is that their natural state?) and I just wanted to be not around any more people. So I stammered out something about the Mississippi, then someone took pity on me and changed the subject.
I just wanted to go home and dag some more sheep. Really, why couldn’t we just do that.
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| Pavlova--this one's textures were more defined between the layers |
Lunch consisted of cold seafood pasta, cold chicken legs, cold ham, cold rice salad, cold fizzy juice, and regular lettuce salad. Dessert consisted of a million things—cheesecake, Trifle (sponge cake with fruit and then custard on top) jelly, fruit salad, and then something called “Pavlova,” which is like a meringue. It’s basically whipped egg whites and sugar. It’s got various textures of these two ingredients, so the base is a soft cakey texture, the middle is a crunchy texture, the top is a light whipped texture, and the edge is a shell crunchy texture. All of it is sweet, and biting into it is delicious but basically an instant sugar coma that sweeps through you. There were TWO pavlovas at Barb’s lunch.
After lunch everyone exchanged presents, and in New Zealand, since it’s summer, it’s quite common to give fruit as a gift, especially since cherries are so expensive. So Grandy, for instance, gave cherries to all the nurses who take care of him. Unfortunately, all the nurses got cherries from all of their other charges, and apparently told him that they got too many cherries and didn’t need any more, so he was a bit peeved that his gift wasn’t received too well.
I escaped soon after lunch. I pretended to go to the bathroom, but then I high tailed it out the door with my camera, and I started taking pictures of Barb’s gardens, which are extensive. The flowers in this post mostly come from her garden.
After lunch we took a drive around the countryside to see Barb’s husband’s work sites, where he cuts down trees to make pastureland. I mostly slept in the car. I think it was an excuse to get the men out so that the women could do dishes.
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| The trifle Barb made for lunch. |
We eventually ended up at Sal’s place. Sal (Ron and Gay’s daughter) and Grant live on a Dairy farm, so when we got there Grant was still doing the afternoon milking, and about an hour or two in came in all dirty and tall from milking cows. I say tall because the man is about seven hundred feet tall. He has more leg then I will ever see in my life time on myself, even looking at my own legs over and over again.
Sal and Grant have a small child, Alex, age 1, who is all smiles and cheerful countenance, really a very good baby who almost never cries, and who everyone coos over. He is the first grandchild and Ron narrates all of Alex’s movements like Alex is a new machine that is particularly ingenious at performing simple tasks badly, but Ron is overly cheerful about it.
I like my small cousins just fine (in fact, of all small children, I think that my younger cousins, Ava, Maddie, Ellie, Annie and, although I haven’t really gotten a chance to meet him, Little Leo, are probably cuter and more intelligent than the average small child. I don’t know how it happened that way, but I suspect it’s true), and I really enjoyed sitting for Maddy and Pat when they were eight and older, but I suspect that my stiff back and meager smiles when it comes to Alex are probably fairly apparent. I feel bad about this, I really do. I wish that I felt all the maternal instincts in the world (I do not wish this; that is a lie); I wish that I had many urges to scoop him up and babysit him (oh god, I do not wish I had urges like that); I wish that I could coo over him like they are cooing over him, but I cannot make myself. Most of it is that I do not know how to coo. Mom tells me I do not have the right hormones. She tells me that when you have a child suddenly all children become likeable and miraculous and—anyway. That is a part of life that I am apparently not a part of yet. So, for all mothers out there, I am sorry that I have very little empathy. I apologize for my lack of baby-love. Sometimes I wish all babies were cats or sheep that I could herd into a pen and dag—I know this is blasphemous.
So they gave me a book to read.
The book is called The Bronze Horseman and is set in Leningrad, 1941 (which tells you something right away) and is an epic drama between two star crossed lovers who are inexplicably drawn to each other blah blah blah blah. I have skimmed the first two hundred pages and they still haven’t had sex. WHAT’S TAKING SO LONG.
It’s an eight hundred page book, that’s what it is.
I didn’t mean to start reading it, but it was either that or watch Alex roll Grandy’s walker over his foot over and over again.
I’m meant to be reading Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams, which is about him finding endangered species all over the world. I’ve started it. I have. It’s funny. It’s great. It really is. There’s this part about him going to see a venom specialist and the specialist really doesn’t want to talk about venom, instead wants to talk about hydroponics—it’s great. But.
CURSE YOU, BRONZE HORSEMAN.
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| Pavlova with fruit |
Dinner at Sal’s was nice because there were less people. Gay had asked me earlier about how to make a turkey because I’m an American and everyone knows about American Thanksgiving and the predominance of Turkey in thanksgiving. So I asked mom how to make one. Everything went fine. The only unusual thing was when people were being served no one had a preference for light or dark meat. I am used to everyone critically evaluating everybody else at the table thinking, “Ok, Jim’s going to take most of that thigh, but Linda’s clearly trying to lose a few pounds so she’ll take a slice of breast; Mom’ll take a slice of breast because she always does, and Uncle Roy’ll take the first leg, Julie and Evan will take both light and dark meat, but that’s almost the end of the dark meat—the only question is Chris, will he take the second leg? Dang it! He’s taken the leg. God damn it. That means I have to take a little of each otherwise Mom’ll say ‘leave some for the rest of us’ like she did last year and I hate white meat...”
But with this family I heard Gay say, “Do you want dark meat?” and Grant say, “I don’t really know the difference, honestly. Don’t really care.” And she gave him the whole leg and he tucked into it as if he couldn’t care one way or the other. It was incredible.
It was like a type of meat with a thick culture surrounding it was reduced to just the meat again.
There were more desserts after that (another Pavlova, more fruit salad, another cheesecake, another trifle, more jellies). Alex was put to bed, gifts were exchanged, Grandy was taken home, we went home and I fed the pigs.
I watched the pigs eat for a while because it was wonderfully soothing. Just the pigs and their snuffling, their snorting and nosing around in the grass. Nigella, apparently, is pregnant, although how they can tell I have no idea. The sky was getting darker and the goats were looking at me from beyond the pigs pen, and why can’t human interaction be as easy as feeding the pigs? I realize we call certain humans “pigs”—I don’t wish to draw those connotations. What I mean is that it was calm and lovely outside with the grass and the birds calling to one another and the goats trying to sneakily climb through the fence to get to the food they see the pigs eating, and the pigs lazily butting at each other to move each other out of the way. The air was cool but not too cool, and the ducks were swimming in the pond, through the rushes and the flax, and a gray one spread its wings and advanced on another one and honked, until the other one hopped back into the pond.
Why can’t Christmases be like that?
I collapsed into bed feeling like I had spent more energy merely existing then I had in a very long time.
Every single person was lovely and helpful and friendly. It must have been uncomfortable to have a stranger in their Christmas celebration—just as uncomfortable for me to be a part of their Christmas celebration. It’s hard to be in someone else’s family.
And seeing pictures of the Redwoods made me want to go back to the Redwoods. I think that my brain would get used to seeing such large trees. When we were there last summer—Megan White, Sarah & Pat Burke and I, I would look at a sixty foot circumference tree and think, “My god, that’s a huge tree!” and then I’d look away, and look back and think, of the same tree, “Oh, actually, it’s not so big. That other one over there is bigger.” Sixty feet around.
The silence and peace in those woods was wonderful. The scale of those woods was wonderful. The feeling of those woods, the feeling that you were so small, the prickle at your back that meant that the trees kept going up and up and up, way further than they should have—that was a wonderful and scary feeling.
I miss the Redwoods.
Sometimes I think about all the places I could go, that I want to go—like the Redwoods, or Alaska—and right now I’m thinking of all the places I could go while I’m actually in a place that I could go. I’m here, in a place, New Zealand, thinking of other places, Redwoods. Sometimes thinking about traveling is actually better than the traveling itself, and sometimes remembering traveling is better than traveling. I think it’s more rare than you think for the actual moment of traveling to be better than the anticipation or the memory of it.
But if you didn’t do the travel then you wouldn’t have the anticipation or the memory, and you wouldn’t be different afterwards, and you wouldn’t be able to move onto the next place.
I feel as though I would have loved for it to be possible to luxuriate in the feeling of the types of photos that you see here, but the imagined feelings and the actual feelings aren't really the same. And the intended feelings aren't the same either.But it was a good Christmas, all considering. It was a new type of Christmas. New Foods, new people, new types of presents. It's always good to shake things up.
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| These flowers were outside Grandy's nursing home. |
Cheers!
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| Christmas Day Evening, 2012, near Invercargill, NZ. |
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