Tag: Life

That ‘X’ in Xmas isn’t what most folks think

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Considering that X is also the Roman numeral for ten, here goes this week’s Tendrils.

  1. X, or Chi, is the first letter in Greek for Christ. Thus, using it as shorthand for the Yule holiday has nothing to do with striking Christ out of holiday celebrations.
  2. Applied to the English word Christmas, the use dates from the 1500s. Elsewhere, the use of ‘X’ for Christ goes back to at least the fourth century.
  3. It did take me a while in doing genealogy research of the 1600s to realize that Xpher was the name Christopher.
  4. Only half of Americans attend religious services on Christmas Eve or Day.
  5. The holiday was widely ignored in Colonial America. For that matter, the first session of the U.S. Congress was held on December 25, 1789. It wasn’t until 1870 that Christmas was proclaimed a federal holiday.
  6. Turkey is edging out ham as the centerpiece of the Christmas dinner in America. It’s even a big day for cranberry, perhaps surpassing Thanksgiving. Swan and peacock were earlier favorites, though I’m not sure where.
  7. The Rockefeller Center tree started out small. The first one, in 1931, was undecorated. Two years later, one appeared with lights. Each year afterward saw a bigger tree, culminating in the familiar giant that boasts more than 50,000 LED lights.
  8. Christmas caroling was originally mostly drunken men going door to door and making a nuisance of themselves. And then the unemployed poor took over with their begging bowls.
  9. The oldest Santa parade in the U.S. is in Peoria, Illinois, dating from 1888. Apparently, it’s played well there.
  10. The original Christmas pudding was a soup made of raisins and wine.

Notes from a Yule tree search in the woods

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The tree the kid wants ain’t natchural! At least not the ones we’ve cut from the wild.

What we find in the woods are typically lopsided, with the growth mostly to one side. And they tend to be more open than full, which can have its own appeal when it comes to adding ornaments.

Not that she perceives that on her arrival from the metropolis.

She’s always been challenging and demanding.

 

Regarding our real estate market

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We were staggered and bewildered by the number of people – mainly from California, Texas, and New York – who were buying up properties out here, sight unseen during the height of the Covid epidemic. Well, that went for our Dover in New Hampshire, too. Their bids definitely inflated the selling prices.

It seemed pretty risky, from the locals’ point of view, and that included us. There are so many things, including warning signs, that you discover in a walkthrough of a property, fine distinctions that don’t appear in photos or descriptions. Just think of smells or the neighbors or even lighting as well.

There are also so many things you won’t catch if you see a property only in fine weather. Not just leaks or drafts, either. As a quip around here goes, will those buyers be selling once they’ve endured a winter living here?

We were lucky to purchase when we did. The prices not only went up dramatically soon after that, they’ve stayed up, We remain mystified about how young families are paying what they are for housing.

Could this be how it ends?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The time to go has come. It should have arrived several years earlier, rather than continuing in so much wheelchair loitering, trapped in a dream-state. Now the phone call, “I don’t expect him to live another week,” leads into packing and flight.

Unable to awaken, fully, from the bewildering disconnections. This is not the heart attack or car crash I had predicted. Nor the old age of graceful evaporation into a vanishing point of history. No one will say now, “He lost his mind,” but the new names change nothing. This terminal illness, in stages, until the patient no longer remembers how to eat or breathe. Perhaps, mercifully, an angel will break through the sterile chambers of medical enterprise, and another nature will take its course.

This flesh, shrinking to bone, rather than feather.

Fir tipping is a big job around here

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The signs “fir tippers wanted” this time of year can be puzzling, so here’s the scoop for those of you who don’t live in Maine.

  1. Christmas wreath makers need stands of evergreens to shape into their festive rings. In Maine, the traditional material is the tips of balsam fir branches. Don’t confuse the inch-long needles for spruce or hemlock.
  2. “Tippers” are the folks who have the skills to collect tips that usually range between 12 to 20 inches.
  3. Quality needles are found only in the mid-section of the tree. Tops and bottoms are deemed unsuitable.
  4. The season is short. The greens cannot be collected before the “tips” are set when a tree goes dormant for winter, usually around November 1, and that’s if the stand has had three nights of 20-degree or lower nights. (Beware of global warning.) Any earlier and the tips lose their needles prematurely. But the wreath-makers do need to get the product to market before Christmas Day, too. It gets busy.
  5. Millions of wreaths are crafted in the state each Christmas season. The trees are abundant and the fir branches are easily worked. Balsam is pleasant to smell, too.
  6. The work is a welcome boost in income for many rural families and comes after the crops are in.
  7. Tips can be harvested by a firm grasp between forefinger and thumb followed by a quick downward motion. Loppers or pruners do the trick for more out-of-the-way tips.
  8. Skilled tippers leave enough on a tree for it to recover in about three years.
  9. The tips are commonly gathered on a “stick” made of a small conifer stripped of most of its branches. When the stick has 40 to 75 pounds of tips, it’s carried off. Bundling the tips into smaller bunches is another method of transport.
  10. Tippers do need to get permission before harvesting from a site. Sometimes that means paying a fee for a permit.

– Source: University of Maine Cooperative Extension Service

In our longest nights

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

How long the day now? Our shortest is a mere 8¾ hours of visible sun if the clouds permit, barely a third of the 24-hour cycle.

Where I live, we’ve now reached the earliest sunsets. They’ll be inching later by the solstice.

Enjoy the long nights, then. Perhaps by a fire but especially in sleep. Or even out, bundled up, viewing Northern Lights and meteor showers.

One checkpoint where we lucked out

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A miraculous thing for us was that the roofing shingles, which had prompted our big renovation project, had held on for the four years between the insurance company’s alarm after our purchase and the actual replacement. Not so for many other shingles around us, even those that had been replaced during those years.

My initial impression, looking at the real estate market when we started considering this move, had been that we could fit into something cheap and make do. But things were shifting.

Most homes we saw for sale had problems, either for my coconspirators or me. Many of the remodelings were utterly puzzling. Others really needed to be redone.

I wasn’t the one who zeroed in on Eastport, but now I cannot imagine anywhere else I’d want to be at this stage in my life. Maybe it’s like Swami when she came to the Poconos and felt the vibes.

The ideal of moving to an island in Maine is almost a cliché. Even a Downeast shore, or a bit to our west, like the Wyeth clan. But we did need to downsize.

At one point, my dream had been to live on a mountain lake. The ocean never even entered into the picture.

Yet here we are, surrounded by interesting people, too.

Where is today’s local communication and shared identity?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Unlike many localities, Eastport has a fine newspaper, one that appears twice each month. It covers much of Washington County in Maine and Charlotte County in neighboring New Brunswick, Canada.

You get a good sense of the place from its pages. I can’t say that for many of the newspapers I’ve seen across the country, even when they were big moneymakers.

Living in out-of-the-spotlight localities, I’ve been sensitive to the nuances of each landscape and the people who inhabit there, not that I’ve often found them reflected in mass media outlets.

It’s not just newspapers or, for the most part, TV, though Northern Exposure did create the sense of one, especially with Chris Stevens as the disc jockey on KBHR radio.

I do sense that the lessening of local identity reflects the loss of local economic power centers, largely through corporate buyouts. The pharmacist no longer owns the drug store, nor does the local bank have its own president. The newspaper is part of a chain, as are most hospitals these days. The list goes on.

As I’ve explained, for many years, despite the arcane business structure in which advertising rather than sales of copies provided the bulk of the income, hometown newspapers were cash cows for their owners – who, in turn, paid their reporters and editors minimal wages.

The resulting management practices – reflecting those of surrounding corporate retailers and manufacturers – have put news coverage at risk, endangering both the communities and democracy itself. How will they, like the reporters and editors, survive?

Oh, yes, the big box stores – especially Walmart – rarely bought advertising space in the local paper, even while they squeezed the smaller retailers out of business. I remember one year when an economic downturn put five of our ten largest advertisers out of business.

~*~

Social media posts by amateurs may fill some of the gap, but there’s no substitute for fact-checking and other accuracy. Reporting and writing take time and devotion, not a given when you have a real job and family vying for attention.

And if you’re out there solo, who’s going to back you up when the topic at hand gets nasty? As it does, when corruption seeps in.

Anybody else feeling crushed?

So many threads have led to here

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

This pause in our renovations seems like an ideal time to reflect on the ways this project builds on much earlier dreams and becomes, perhaps by default, their culmination.

My junior high art teacher instilled in me a love of 20th century contemporary architecture as well as Japanese and Scandinavian art and culture. That dovetailed into Shaker traditions that had once existed just down the street from us and a county or two south as well. Plainness, exemplified by Quaker, Mennonite, and Brethren history is in my blood and bones, as I’ve learned digging into genealogy.

Add to that an appreciation for William Morris’ arts and crafts movement, which infused the bungalow I eventually owned in the Rust Belt, and my exposure to historic New England styles, including Queen Ann.

And then a sense of neighborhood, too.

Had you asked me at the outset where I wanted to live, I would have responded central city, perhaps in a high rise, or out in the wilderness, perhaps beside a mountain lake or stream. What was clear that suburban was nowhere in my preference.

So here I am in a historic sea captain’s home a block from the Atlantic yet at the edge of a funky downtown and arts scene and – utterly amazing, to me – within minutes of forest, lakes, and streams.

When I sit in our second-floor rooms, the heart of our renovation project, I have moments of feeling the best of both worlds. In following the new roofline for our ceilings, we’ve avoided creating boxes as the rooms. One criticism of so much architecture objects to “boxes with holes cut in them.” Rather than boxiness, sometimes I’m reminded of the contours within a ship’s hull or a sail overhead.

This time of year, I’m reminded, too, of the flurry of work just before the previous two Christmas celebrations. It got chaotic, up to six tradesmen at one time. We were tripping over ourselves as the rest of the family started showing up.

Throughout it all, we had the ongoing Viking Lumber deliveries, mostly with Tim driving. And our wonder at having the right contractor after all of the delays.

So here we are with the continuing surprise of the historical significance of the house, not just that it was 80 years older than it had been claimed, but that it had been so central to what has evolved here.

As our mason once asked, “How much is enough?”

For now, let’s leave it at that.