Catchy Name Needed

I have sort of a fraught relationship with the holidays, nowadays. I guess a lot of people do. I used to love Christmas. I was brought up in what would now be called an evangelical family - Baptists, and in Texas (Southern Baptist, which didn't especially mean anything to me back then). So I was taught that the story of Jesus' birth was absolutely factual, but I don't know that I really internalized it that way. (I remember that when I was little, I thought that when we sang "Jesus Loves Me" and it said "the Bible tells me so" that the Bible was, like, a fairy or something. I just think little kids don't really take in all that stuff, do they? I thought that maybe Jesus was real and maybe fairies might be, too!)

Anyway, the thing was, nobody made any effort to separate out the religious and the non-religious aspects of Christmas. But we always went to my grandparents' house for Christmas, and we didn't go to church on Christmas Eve, that I recall, or do anything specifically religious other than somebody saying a prayer before dinner. (Which was something we always did for formal meals, so that wasn't anything out of the ordinary, either.)

Even after I decided as a teenager that I didn't actually believe all that stuff (meaning religion in general, not just Santa Claus and fairies!), it really didn't change the way I thought about Christmas a whole lot. I no longer thought that the stories were literally true, if I ever did, but I still enjoyed Christmas. Actually I think I'm kind of a natural skeptic - I started poking holes in the Santa Claus story earlier than a lot of kids do, and I suspect I felt the same way about religion generally, even if it took me a kind of a long time to admit it to myself.

I guess it also made a difference to me, in a way, that I was in choir (school choir and church choir both, for a long time) and honestly, when it comes to Christmas music, religious Christmas music tends to be superior to the secular stuff. They may not play much of it on iHeart radio, but when you're singing in four-part harmony, Christmas carols are the best.

I used to think that I wished I could be a believer, because it would make life easier. I don't really think that any more, but I do wish we could do Christmas the way we used to, just celebrate it in our own irreligious way without worrying about it. I don't much think that's possible any more, though. The blasted War on Christmas business has made that impossible, at least for me.

There was an article once, about a political campaign event. This was in 1984. I think the article was in The Austin Chronicle, but I'm not sure about that, it was too long ago. (I might even have a copy of it somewhere, but I haven't looked for it.) The tone of the article was slightly mocking. It wasn't a very exciting event, that's for sure. Among other things it says that there was music. "Five people dance, " it said. You may have guessed by now that I was there. I was one of the five people who danced. I remember reading the article and saying, "Look, y'all, that's us!" and everybody else looked and laughed and agreed that, yeah, it definitely was. We were the only ones who danced.

In 1984 I was out of school and working at the libraries at UT. I would have been 23-going-on-24. Most of my friends were a little younger than me, some in grad school and some undergrads who were just dawdling - it wasn't at all uncommon to take 5 or even 6 years to finish your undergrad degree, if you had parents who would cooperate with that. If you've been reading here in past Decembers, you've seen me talk about going to concerts a lot - this was the period of my life when that most of that happened. I had a little group of friends I hung around with and we did a lot of going to concerts and going to clubs and eating out, the usual stuff for single people in their twenties. (And, if you're wondering about the five people dancing thing, we tended to dance as a group. We were mixed sexes and nobody was a couple. There wasn't always five of us, but when we went where there was dancing, we just all got up and danced without worrying about pairing off.) (I don't think that's unusual nowadays but thirty-odd years ago it still was.)

And we worked on Gary Hart's campaign in 1984. We didn't work on it very hard, mind you - we had jobs and school and all that. We weren't real campaign workers who were there all the time. Some of my friends may have been more involved, but I only remember doing two things - one of which was going to this event, which was at one of the big hotels down on Riverside Drive, and was on a weekend (at least I think it was a weekend) when Gary Hart was actually in Austin. He didn't come to the reception that I talked about above. I don't think we saw him talk or anything, either, because I think I would remember that, if it happened. But we did see him - we were on one walkway in the hotel and he was down below us. We waved and he waved back. That was it.

The other thing was that we gave out flyers or something on the day of the primary. I didn't enjoy that - I'm not good at talking to strangers, generally, much less accosting them with political stuff. Between that, and the way that Hart imploded later on (that happened in 1988, but I had to look it up because I had forgotten), I've never worked on a campaign again. I'm kind of a political junkie - I follow politics closely, and I donate money to various campaigns, but I've never quite been able to bring myself to volunteer again. These days I'm embarrassed to admit that, but it's true. Part of it is a deep-seated conviction that you can't trust individual politicians that came largely from having hitched my wagon to the Gary Hart train long ago.

(I don't know if I'll go see The Front Runner, the movie about Gary Hart. The reviews aren't that great, and I doubt that Rob would be thrilled to go. But it was because of the existence of the movie that it occurred to me to talk about this.)

 Forty-five years ago this week (it was Flag Day, that's the only reason I remember the exact date still) I had heart surgery to fix a heart murmur I was born with. I was 12. I saw that it was Flag Day this week and I did the math and came up with that rather staggering number - 45 - and so I also noticed it tonight on MSNBC when they said that the Watergate break-in was 45 years ago this week. I didn't remember that, but then it wasn't big news at the time, either. It only became big news later on. But that means that happened while I was in the hospital recovering - I was really bored sitting in the hospital for a whole week, at least after a couple of days when I started feeling better. I remember that well. I don't specifically remember watching the news, but everybody watched the evening news back then (usually referred to as "watching Walter Cronkite" the way I remember it) and it's possible I did. I do think I knew about that break-in pretty early on.

But that might just be in my head. I do know I remember being mad about the Watergate hearings being all that was on on the TV - this was during the summer, I'm assuming that was in 1974. And I remember Nixon resigning and I know I knew the basics about it at the time, at least, but it's hard to be sure how much of all the stuff that happened in that two-year time period I really remember from the time it was happening and how much I learned later, from All the President's Men (both the movie and the book) and so forth. I do think now that all of that may be a lot of the reason I'm so interested in politics today, though.

1970 was when the Jackson 5 were a new thing:

This is not the same video (although it's the same song) that I posted for Music Advent - I got my versions mixed up and the one I posted is a truncated version of their 1970 Ed Sullivan performance. I believe the longer Ed Sullivan one is out there, but I've lost the link.

One year (it might have been 1970 or it might have been later) I got a little portable cassette player for Christmas - not a Walkman, mind you, those didn't exist yet - and some cassettes to go with it, and one of them was the Jackson 5. Actually my memory is that I also got "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" which didn't come out until later, so I'm not sure. I may just be conflating two different years, though. Anyway, I liked the Jackson 5, but I wasn't obsessive about them or anything. I was obsessive about The Partridge Family a bit, and only the fact that I have other songs I want to talk about today and tomorrow may be saving you from getting a Partridge Family song. (I'm not sure about 1972 yet, we'll see.)

The teen idols when I was the age for that kind of thing were David Cassidy (of the Partridge Family, not to be confused with his brother who came later on), Bobby Sherman (who sang but was also on the series Here Come the Brides which was very popular at the time), Donny Osmond... and I'm sure there were some others that I'm forgetting. Davy Jones of the Monkees has to be thrown in there, too - that Brady Bunch episode where Marcia has a crush on him didn't come out of nowhere. Michael Jackson was also in that group to some extent but I read somewhere that the fan publications would not put a black performer on the cover at the time the Jacksons first became popular, so the Tiger Beat magazines in my head don't feature him. (Like many instances of racism at the time, I was completely unaware of that.) I loved David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman and I do remember loving Davy Jones when I was younger but not so much the others. I thought Donny Osmond was cute but I never liked The Osmonds' music that much. I think it was more age than race with Michael Jackson, for me - he was only about a year older than me and I just didn't see him as a sex symbol, then or later. Donny Osmond is about two years older than me; David Cassidy was about 20 when he suddenly became a teen idol and Bobby Sherman was closer to 30. Apparently I liked my men older! (Oh god, here is the motherlode of teen magazines. Jack Wild! - I know I had a huge crush on him at some point. And clearly Bobby was the big thing that year.)

In other happenings that year - I went and found this entry from several years ago where I talked about joining the choir in school, which happened in 1970. (I talk there about the difference between church choir and school choir, and the fact that you didn't have to audition for church choir, but I don't really have much memory of auditioning for school choir either. I think there was an audition but it was really just to see if you could carry a tune, and that was about it.) Actually I don't really remember choir all that well in elementary school, but then we only went once a week. I have a lot more memories of school and who was in my class and such, starting in 5th grade, but I think it's partly because many of them were the people who went on to be in choir with me for a number of years, and some of them were my best friends for several years.

I didn't talk about teachers. One thing that happened in fourth grade was that my teacher's husband died very suddenly over Christmas break - I think he had a heart attack. (Remember that my mother was a fourth grade teacher, too, at the time, so she was friends with all these people. But that would have been a big deal in any case.) My fifth-grade teachers were Mrs. Andrews and Mrs. Armstrong, who were both somewhat older ladies, as I remember it. (My mother would have been 30-ish at the time. I imagine that these two teachers were more like the age I am now, fifty-something.) Fifth grade was the first year we had more than one teacher; in sixth grade I think we had three, not counting the things you only went to periodically like music and art. We thought that made us very grown-up. In fifth grade one teacher taught language arts and the other taught science and math and social studies, but I am not completely sure which was which.

It's funny, I have a very clear picture of one classroom - I'm pretty sure it was Mrs. Andrews' and I think she was probably the one that taught English - but I can't visualize the other one. I can remember my 3th and 4th grade classrooms pretty clearly, and even the ones before that in a vaguer way. It's probably just because once we started having many classrooms I can't remember them all. I remember two of the 6th-grade rooms but not the third one. And after that I know I don't remember all of my junior high rooms too well.

I'm "of a certain age," as they say - which is to say, middle-aged. I'm a little over 50, and what that means for this purpose is that I remember the Bond movies of the 60s, but not clearly. By the time I was old enough to have more than a vague idea of what the Bond movies were all about, Bond was into the Roger Moore era, and he just never really appealed to me. Plus I thought those over-the-top plots of that era were stupid. So to sum up, I've just never been a huge Bond fan, and Rob - who is a little younger than me, just under 50 - doesn't like the Bond movies at all, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me. (I don't know if the age thing makes any difference whatsoever - but it might, a bit. The two-and-a-half year age difference between us is nothing when you're 50, but back when we were kids, it was a lot. I don't remember the Sean Connery movies well, from back then, but I imagine I remember them better than he does! Although actually I doubt that either one of us were allowed to see them in the theater, if it came right down to it.) But anyway, I was intrigued enough by the reactions I was seeing on Twitter that I basically dragged him in with me to see Skyfall, and the fact is, we both enjoyed it. It's well-made, and it's really not a "traditional" Bond movie at all in a lot of ways, which for us is more of an advantage than not.

I didn't really read the reviews before we went, because I figure it's better in most cases if you can manage not to be spoiled. I read reviews of movies I'm not sure if I want to see, not the ones that I do. Skyfall would normally have been one of "unsure" ones, except for the aforementioned Twitter mini-reviews, which mostly were entirely non-spoilery things like "AWESOME!!" It was the sheer volume of those that caught my eye - nearly everybody on my Twitter list had things like that to say about it. So I decided I wanted to go, and I told Rob that if he would go with me to Skyfall on Thanksgiving Day that I would go with him to Lincoln on Sunday. (Which was not exactly a compromise, quite honestly, since I wanted to see that too. But it was enough to get him to cooperate, anyway!) I didn't read reviews of Lincoln, either, and I didn't actually realize what it's about - I think I expected more of a general Lincoln biopic than it actually was. But I like politics, and that's really what it was about, so I enjoyed it.

Now I am a little bit of a Civil War buff. Back in the early 90s when the Ken Burns thing came out, and then the Gettysburg movie, I got interested enough to wade through all three of the Shelby Foote books - which I highly recommend, if you're interested, but you need to be really interested. (A far lesser bar, if you're interested but not interested enough to put yourself in for a couple of thousand pages, is Foote's Shiloh novel. Or even better, the Michael Shaara novel that Gettysburg was based on, The Killer Angels. They are both extremely readable, without requiring any particular knowledge of the subject.) Then after Foote, I read an awful lot of other Civil War books as well - I actually considered going back to school to study this stuff, at one point. The only real tangible evidence of all my acquired knowledge is this little mini-summary of the first part of the war, which I still think is pretty good for something I wrote off the top of my head one night. (The reason there's no part 2 was largely because the war in 1863 gets a lot more complicated and got beyond the scope of what I could write without doing research.) So all this is by way of saying that I know a lot about Lincoln, in general. But I honestly didn't know much about the fight to pass the 13th amendment, and I enjoyed it. (I know, I keep saying that. But I did.) I don't know how much you'll enjoy this movie if this is not a subject that interests you, but it's another well-made movie, and the packed house we saw it with seemed to really enjoy it, too. And they surely can't all be Civil War buffs.

There was a Holidailies prompt from a couple of weeks ago to talk about the holidays 5 years ago. It took me all this time to write it up, but here it is:

2004 was a memorable Christmas (and year) to me. I don't really have to think about it much to recall it, because it was completely unlike any other year. First of all, it was the year it snowed in Galveston on Christmas Eve, and we completely missed it. One of my friends said that they had gone to church and they came out and it was snowing, and it was like being in "White Christmas" or something. And of course the chance of a measurable snowfall in Galveston on any day at all, much less Christmas Eve, is miniscule. So it figures that we weren't there.

We were in Austin, visiting my sister. Rob and my mother and I drove up there, and I remember that I had made some Christmas mix CDs just for the occasion, which were basically crafted just for my mom - I put a lot of old stuff on there, Louis Armstrong and Judy Garland and such, and I remember her saying that she really liked the music and there was even some she didn't remember having heard before. (It might have been the Louis Armstrong version of "Winter Wonderland" that I'm thinking of.) I'd almost forgotten that my mom wasn't supposed to drive at the time, which was one reason she was riding with us - although we probably would have done that anyway. She had had seizures a couple of months before that, and had had a biopsy, and by Christmas we already knew that she had a brain tumor and that the prognosis was not all that good. (I think the oncologist told me, when I pressed him, that patients with a tumor like hers typically lived 3-5 years. She lived a little more than two.)

It wasn't a bad Christmas, but it was a deeply weird one, as you can imagine. In fact there was even more to it than that. Both my mom and my sister were supposed to have surgery right after Christmas - brain surgery for my mom, and a hysterectomy for my sister. My sister and her husband had just moved to Austin with their teenage son, and were still adjusting to that. Or not adjusting so much, because I don't think we knew at the time that my sister was intending to leave her husband, and was only waiting until the surgery was over to do it. We knew that they were having trouble, but not that things were so immediate, I think.

The house that they were living in in Austin was an interesting one - it was sort of a patio home, but a big one, and it was right up against a creek (Shoal Creek? I'm not sure). I remember that they had a big, pretty cut Christmas tree, but it didn't have any decorations on it. I think my sister had been too busy getting the house straightened out to worry about decorating specifically for the holidays. (Remember that this is the same sister who has pretty much refused to have anything to do with Christmas in the five years since her divorce. But I never have been sure exactly why.)

Let's see, my nephew is 18 now, so he was 13 (going on 14) then. He is a nice kid. I don't really remember that much that he did or said that Christmas, really - I was all centered on my mother, mostly. I do remember all going down in the gully and scrambling around for a while. It was really, really cold and I remember seeing icicles on the rocks over the roads around Austin, but it didn't snow.

We came on Christmas Eve, and went home on the 26th. On Christmas afternoon, my nephew and his dad left and went to visit the other side of the family outside Houston. I remember being terribly relieved - I think we thought that my brother-in-law was acting awfully weird, and so we were happy that he was gone. We were always on civil terms with him and in fact we still are, but we've never had anything much in common. He thought I was flaky and I thought he was pretentious, so we did really good to be civil to each other all these years, I guess!

I even remember where we went out to eat: we went to Cheesecake Factory on Christmas Eve - it was the first time I had been to one - and on the day after Christmas before we left, we went to the original Chuy's, down by Zilker Park. Both of them were mobbed. I don't remember much about Christmas dinner itself, though. My brother-in-law usually cooked the turkey, so he must've done that, but I don't much remember that part.


Oh! I remembered one more thing - my car got broken into the night before we left, in Galveston. Maybe I didn't lock it, because the window wasn't broken, but somebody got into the trunk and stole some food and CDs and stuff. The food was stuff I was taking for Christmas, but we scrambled around and replaced most of it, and the CDs were actually mostly homemade CDs from TUS people, so they didn't have any particular commercial value, but that also made them a bit irreplaceable. (Although people did make me copies of some of them later.) I told myself that whoever would steal food out of my trunk on December 23rd was probably hungry themselves, but I'm not sure I believe it. I think some people just think that Christmas is a fine occasion for theft. Anyway, there were no presents in the trunk, so it sure could've been a lot worse.

erythroblastosis fetalis
A grave hemolytic anemia that, in most instances, results from development in the mother of anti-Rh antibody in response to the Rh factor in the (Rh-positive) fetal blood; characterized by many erythroblasts (red-blood precursor cells) in the circulation, and often generalized edema and enlargement of the liver and spleen; sometimes caused by antibodies for antigens other than Rh. Synonyms: congenital anemia, hemolytic disease of the newborn, Rh antigen incompatibility.


I was reading about this the other night after we were discussing Your Medieval Death, and it occurred to me that this might have been my sister's medieval death - not mine - since I am the older child of an Rh-negative mother. In case you've never heard of this, what happens is that an Rh-negative mother develops antibodies to the Rh factor with the first (Rh-positive) child, but the antibodies don't attack that first child, only subsequent ones. Actually, until I read about this in the other class, I had forgotten all about my mother being Rh-negative, but once I remembered that, I also remembered some discussions about this - apparently the drug that you take to prevent it (which I believe is called Rho-GAM or something to that effect) already existed in 1961, so my sister was born without incident. -- Well, without incident regarding Rh-factors anyway. There was the hurricane, but I've talked about that story before.

I haven't been specifically doing the "happy things" list the last few days, but I was aware of it, and all my entries have contained something that made me happy. The pictures I've been scanning make me happy. The idea of going to Las Vegas next month (and mostly for free!) makes me happy. That picture of me wearing a crown made me particularly happy - it's funny, I remembered that picture but I had completely forgotten about the crown. (I suspect that it was a Sunday School thing - it might have been regular school, too, but Sunday School was particularly prone to resort to the silly arts and crafts projects.) The thing we did this afternoon made me happy, too - fighting the crowds to go shopping, even though we didn't have anything we particularly had to buy. I don't know why, but it's not Christmas if I don't get shoved around in Macy's (or some department store, it doesn't have to be Macy's) for a bit.

It also feels pretty Christmassy. A white Christmas isn't what I expect, after all - the only one I've ever seen is once when we spent a Christmas in Telluride. And it didn't actually snow that day, even; there was just snow already on the ground. But it's plenty cold here, for my taste. Yesterday it was 80 but today we were wearing our heavy coats. We are suppposed to have a near-freeze tonight.


We were discussing the concept of a "Jewish Christmas" in my comments a couple of days ago, and actually that Christmas in Telluride was the closest I've ever come to one - we had to eat Chinese that day because it was the only restaurant that was open. I don't think we got the movie, though! We were staying in a condo but I guess my mother didn't want to cook. Maybe they didn't realize everything would be closed. (I don't remember what I ate, exactly, but I think it might have been the first time I ever had Chinese food, even though I was already in college at the time. I grew up in Alvin, Texas, remember. We hardly had any restaurants at all, and certainly not Chinese.)

I also remember that my mother had dragged toothbrushes - among other things - all the way from Texas to put in our stockings, and my sister and I were really indignant about it. She had a different idea than we did of what constituted a reasonable stocking-stuffer - I think she was a child of the Depression when it came to things like that. (Although she was too young to remember the Depression; she was born in 1938.) We weren't all that well-off when I was growing up, but we weren't nearly poor enough to think that a new toothbrush was a special treat.

In fact, the kind of affluence that let us spend the holidays skiing in Colorado was a pretty new thing to us, at that time. Both of my parents always worked and that in itself made us better off financially than a lot of people, back in those days when it was still pretty unusual - but it wasn't until my dad quit teaching school and became a commercial fisherman that there was really money for luxuries like ski trips. (I'm not recommending commercial fishing as a secret path to financial freedom, though. I hear it ain't what it used to be. Just ask my dad.)