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By rebecca, December 13, 2011 1:32 am

Here’s a fun holiday craft you can try.

First you shape willow branches into the form of a ball. Paint and apply glitter.

Kidding! I got these at Dollarama. I thought it would be fun to hang them on the tree in the front yard since our house is older than dirt and doesn’t have any electricity running to the outside. Not an exterior outlet for Christmas lights. Not even a porch light.

Mary was napping and Ed was washing dishes so Colum, Irene and myself went out to tidy up the front yard and string up the ornaments. It went a little like this:

Me: Okay, Colum, you help rake up these leaves and, Irene, you put them in this yard waste bag. I’ll gather up all the sticks and twigs.

Them: By rake the leaves, you mean open up the lids of those old paint cans you never disposed of properly and roll down the hill into traffic, right?

Me: Wait. What month is it? You can’t rake leaves into yard bags in December! There’s no yard waste pick up in December! This is what I get for never using the front door. Crap, crap, crap. Okay, new plan. Just rake all the leaves into a pile and throw all the sticks and twigs over near the fence while I clear all the leaves from the front steps and sidewalk.

Them: Can we instead fight about whose stick that was and then move all the sticks away from the fence and strew them back all over the front lawn? You know, for kicks. And please let us roll out into traffic again. Please.

Me: No. Stop that. What? No. Fine, whatever.

Somehow, at some point, Colum thought he got the go-ahead to forget about this stupid clean up the front yard business and get on with the decorating the tree business. He brought the ball of twine and the ornaments from the front steps to the base of the tree, but the scissors and pack of ornament hooks were nowhere to be seen — at first. I did, in fact, see them eventually when I put my face right down above the gap in the wooden step. They’re still there if you want to take a look because there’s no way to retrieve them short of dismantling the porch.

I may have lost my cool right then. A wee bit. And Colum may have gone into the house never to return. I felt bad and apologized promptly, but he wanted to warm up anyway. So that left me and Irene. Irene and I. Did you know that threading some twine through a glittery willow ball ornament is a lot more difficult than it seems? We got three or four ornaments hung before she was also too cold to carry on.

New plan! I would fully prep all the ornaments inside and then we would return to the front yard to finish hanging them later. My god those Chinese glitter ball factories don’t mess around. I got glitter all over myself, the table and chair, the children and the floor, naturally. But there was even glitter in Mary’s diaper that night! And then, two days later, there was glitter on a cauliflower I was cutting up for dinner. Kid you not.

Eventually we made our way back outside. Of course, I hadn’t realized that our tree is ten gazillion feet high and I couldn’t actually reach any of the branches. Good thing we never cut down that mini, parasite-like tree growing out from its base. We’d just decorate the spindly branches of the parasitic tree-bush instead and make it all festive-like. Sure.

So that’s what we did.

Well, that looks kind of crappy.

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By rebecca, November 25, 2009 1:21 am

The holidays are here again, so brace yourself for the inevitable tug of war between charity and commercialism. The Christmas season should be about giving to others, we all know that, but we also want to give to our own family. This Christmas Colum is old enough to really look forward to the loot, to write a letter to Santa and to be wowed by the presents on Christmas morning. And I really want to wow him. So I think, sure I’ll give to others after I have taken care of my own family. I think, I support giving and charity, I do, and it’s really great that other people are so into that kind of thing. They must have more money and time and fewer responsibilities than I do.

But then I think of my mother and my mother-in-law. These are two women who have raised four children each and worked full-time jobs and balanced budgets and somehow managed to put food on the table and shoes on our feet no matter how scarce money was. They also managed to be everywhere at once: the skating rink and ballet classes and school plays and baseball games. From the PTA and Boy Scouts (Donna) to nursing relatives on their death beds and sitting on the floor of a Greyhound bus while eight months pregnant (Mom), there is nothing these women wouldn’t do. Their entire lives have been guided by a sense of giving and self-sacrifice. They volunteer their time and energy and money as a matter of course, never stopping to wonder if they have enough to spare. Whenever and wherever a need arises, these women automatically ask themselves, “How can I help?” (Not “Should I help?” or “I wish I could help.”) And then, swiftly and quietly, they do.

So when I started seeing initiatives that encourage bloggers to use their corporate and social networking connections to pay their good fortune forward I thought, good. I mean, after the recent scourge of name calling and finger pointing that has been dominating mommy-blogging circles in the lead up to and the wake of the new FTC regulations (the assumption that we are all corporate whores, essentially, willing to give it up for free crap), this is a breath of fresh air. Initiatives like Her Bad Mother’s Give Good Blog or Mamanista’s Bloganthropy encourage bloggers to champion a cause and to exploit any corporate contacts in doing so.

Yeah, bloggers should totally do that, I thought. I would too if only I were more widely read and had more companies knocking at my door. But wait. I did use my blog to host an online raffle for breast cancer research at the Princess Margaret Hospital. And I did reach out to family-oriented businesses, many run by moms who are friendly with the blogging community for awesome donations. And they did come through. I actually used my blog to raise over $2000 in personal donations to the Weekend To End Breast Cancer. When my good friend Gillian lost her baby, I blogged about that and made up a button that links to the Sick Kids Foundation’s donation page and stuck it at the bottom of that post and in my sidebar. Huh.

Maybe I can do something after all. So then I emailed Kathryn Easter from Mom Central Canada and said, Hey. You know that giveaway we’re doing for Disney on Ice? What are the chances we can get another set of tickets to give to a family that is spending the holidays at Interval House, a safe haven for abused women and children? And Kathryn said, Let’s do it up. (I’m totally paraphrasing, you know.) And so we are.

I tell you all this not to toot my own horn. (Although I guess that is the biggest effect, isn’t it?) Mostly I tell you all this because if I can actually do some good with this blog and its regular readership of my family and friends and the hundreds of porn-bot followers I have on Twitter, then imagine what you can do. You don’t need a hugely successful blog to make a difference. You don’t even need a blog at all.

My mother and mother-in-law didn’t have blogs, after all. Hell, they didn’t even have Facebook. (I know!) And they still managed to find a way to do good things for people in need. So if we all just try to be a little more like them, then we don’t even need a formal declaration. We just need to act.

On that note, let the holiday season begin.

(Image courtesy of saxon on Flickr.)

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By rebecca, April 9, 2009 9:36 am

Easter means,

Winter’s last snow, more times than not, and coughs and colds and sniffles.

New running shoes and spring jackets and rolling up my sleeves for a good spring clean.
Fish and chips on Good Friday.
Lots and lots of chocolate.

Bunnies. Spring chicks and ducklings, too, but mostly bunnies. Continue reading 'Easter Means …'»