Wishing you and yours a very happy winter holiday, however you celebrate it, even if you don’t!
I’ll be back with more to say in the New Year.
Every year, Jim and I bake a lot of cookies. Some become gifts, some are served to guests. Some get eaten just by us. Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but we enjoy.
In addition to the sugar cookies pictured above, we do pecan-maple slices, meringues, butter balls, sesame balls (almost a savory), press gun butter cookies, Linzer tarts (this year with homemade cactus pear jelly), gingerbread (very spicy), hermits, and a simple fudge.
The sugar cookies are particular fun. I like making cut-out cookies. Jim likes decorating them.
We have a lot of cutters, so it never gets dull. The photo offers a small selection of this year’s sugar cookies for your enjoyment.
Enjoy!
This past weekend, Jim and I took a break from the on-going tumult that has been our lives and went to Aki Matsuri, the Fall Festival hosted by the New Mexico Japanese-American Citizens League.
In the course of our several hour visit we walked around a lot, and visited various displays. We talked with the bonsai growers, and chatted with a young man who does both digital art and traditional ink brush painting. We sampled matcha (a frothed green tea), served after eating a citrus candy (sort of like a fruit gummi) “because matcha is bitter.” We admired the ikebana, and got into a discussion of how combining roses and chrysanthemums gives a very New Mexico twist to an autumn arrangement.
In one of the display areas, a potter paused in spinning clay to encourage me to give yet one more try to folding an origami crane, assuring me that the person doing the demonstration was very good. I knelt down on the floor and did my best with a square of purple paper. It’s certainly not the best crane ever, but what will stay with me is the memory of the kindness of my sensei, as well as of how the potter, and the woman demonstrating tea ceremony, cheered us through fold after fold.
We also sat down and watched first a display of taiko drumming, then four Okinawan dances, then, finally, a cosplay exhibition. These three demonstrations, so different from each other, were not only fascinating in themselves, but a vivid reminder of how much there is not only to Japanese culture, but to any culture.
I also did something very important for me as a writer. By going to the festival and doing things I don’t usually do (including trying to fold that darn crane), I kept my creative brain from stiffening up. It felt good to mentally stretch. Almost without my willing it, I could feel new ways of looking at things taking shape.
Some of these will show up on the page almost immediately. Others may shift around and take months, even years, to find their way into print.
And, y’know, I even feel encouraged to try folding another crane.
My mom came for Christmas, our first overnight house guest since 2018. Mei-Ling came to live with us in August of 2019, as a very shy fourteen-week-old kitten. She had just begun to entertain the idea that people other than me and Jim in the house might be a good idea when the pandemic shutdown hit and she had the luxury of over a year to renew her opinion that visitors were not to be befriended, but to be waited out.
This was her tactic when Mom arrived on the 22nd. Mei-Ling dove into the closet in our bedroom and refused to emerge, even for dinner. When Mom settled down in the guest room, behind a closed door, Mei-Ling emerged, which is probably a good thing, since the litter box is not in our bedroom closet.
Roary, who also had never dealt with an overnight guest, was also uncertain. At first, he hid in the closet with Mei-Ling, but by later on the 23rd, Roary (probably taking his cue from Persephone, for whom Mom is a longtime friend), began to join the party from a discreet distance. By the morning of Christmas Eve, he even let Mom take his picture.
Maybe this is why, by mid-day on the 24th, Mei-Ling was at least up on our bed, and then, by evening, when we settled down to play mah-jong, actually came out to the front of the house. It’s not as much fun to lurk and hide all by oneself as with another cat, and she and Roary are great friends.
Christmas Day, Roary came to look at the boxes and wrapping paper, while Mei-Ling lurked at the edges. Coming out of the back of the house had advantages, especially since if she skittered fast enough, she could go out on the porch, which she loves, and watch what went on in the kitchen from behind the security of a closed sliding glass door.
By the 26th, both Mei-Ling and Roary were behaving relatively normally. When we settled in for our evening mah-jong game, Mei-Ling actually started meowing, trying to get either Jim or me to come into the living room and play with her. She’s really quite out-going when she forgets she’s shy.
And on the 27th, Mom departed for her home. Now we’re waiting to see how Mei-Ling will behave when we have guests next time. Will she have learned that “stranger” does not equal “danger” or will she try to wait them out?
We’re going to be playing mah-jong later this week with our friend Michael Wester. I wonder if the clatter of tiles will encourage Mei-Ling to come out and try to tempt us to play with her instead of with those noisy plastic tiles.