—Coffee Break—
Ho ho ho ...
By Cynthia Sabelhaus
Happy Holidays! This is a year of many
holiday firsts for me. First year as a grandmother. First year to
celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas. And now, first year with no tree,
no outdoor lights, no cookies (well, few cookies, anyway)… I’m losing
the holiday battle and have just about decided to throw in the towel and
try again next year.
I suppose the problem began almost a year ago. I started a
campaign at work to raise the bar on our pattern of poor audit
performance. My small team of wonder women (with a couple supermen
thrown in) worked long days, even longer weekends, and in the end, we
were successful. Unfortunately, the end (the audit outbrief) came just
before the Thanksgiving holiday.
I’d been aware of the mounting stack of emails from my children.
Now I opened them. Christmas lists from one. Hanukkah lists from the
other. Okay. I had a month. NOT!
Turns out Hanukkah began December 4. I had to scramble to buy,
wrap, and ship gifts. I had a lot of trouble finding appropriate
wrapping materials for Hanukkah gifts. It turns out, Tucson is not a
great place to find Hanukkah-appropriate wrappings. I had to settle for
blue snowmen. My Hanukkah chocolate coins had Santas and reindeer on
them. There were three Hanukkah cards in all of Tucson. I ended up
sending my grandson a card that said, “Grandchild, you remind me of a
latke and I want to eat you up. Okay, so I had to look up latkes to even
know what they were. Somehow the words sounded more appropriate for the
Big Bad Wolf than for a grandmother. Oh well. I almost made it.
Everything arrived on the second day of the 8-day celebration.
Okay. One down, one to go. More shopping, more wrapping, and
shipping, and standing in post office lines. Various children’s retail
stores shipped the wrong things, or failed to place in the box at least
one of the items listed on its packing slip. So then there were phone
calls and some implications on the part of the minimum wage
telemarketers that I was trying to somehow scam the retailer out of an
additional whatchamacallit.
Throughout this process, I lost track of what I’d ordered. Some
items were shipped directly to the intended grandchild or his/her
parents. This
was fine in theory. In practice, it meant that I was filling up other
peoples’ homes with more stuff than they had room to store. Hey, they
made the lists, right? How was I to know they didn’t intend for me to
get everything on the lists???
Anyway, I shipped my last box on Saturday. I’m tired. I have
another 50 hours of house decorating and at least 10 to fling lights
around the yard and wrestle the reindeer from the shed where they are,
no doubt, sheltering a nest of scorpions and a rhumba of rattlesnakes
(no kidding, that’s what a group of rattlers is called…according to
Google). Then there’s the Christmas village…twenty-some tiny buildings
with trees and people and ice ponds and dog sleds…all to be artfully
assembled on some surface not already crammed with wrapping paper and
magazines I haven’t had time to read.
So, I was thinking. Maybe this year I treat myself to a relaxing
holiday celebration with maybe a single poinsettia on the table. It
could happen.
This year has been one of changes at
Calliope, too. We went to a quarterly format beginning with the
Winter 2007 issue that came out in January. This issue is special. It’s
a 5th issue for the year. You may have noticed there is no number on its
cover. That’s because it won’t count against your subscription…it’s
free. All of you have been so supportive as we made our changes, and we
wanted to say ‘thanks.’
The Calliope web site has also been receiving some
positive feedback. If you haven’t already visited, go to CalliopeWriters.org
and take a look.
Sandy has announced the annual fiction contest at the start of
this issue. We didn’t run a contest last year, and this one has a fairly
short fuse with submissions accepted Jan. 1 – April 15. I hope you’ll
enter.
So it’s the end of another year. A good one for you, I hope.
Thank you for being a member of the Calliope family. Never
forget that this magazine and the Mensa Writers’ Special Interest Group
are yours. They will be as good, or great, as your contributions make
them.
So no matter what holiday you may be celebrating, enjoy your
family and friends. Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year.