New Year’s Eve

Posted on December 31, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker was always resolutely cheerful on New Year’s Eve.

She was by no means one of those folks who is always urging everyone to look on the bright side of life. Momma called her “my unhappy little pine tree” for her entire life. She disliked cheerleading of any sort, and usually expressed the opinion – when she expressed any at all, which was rare – that something dark was sure to happen. She seemed to feel that public optimism was jejeune, naif; even rather vulgar.

Kage could be outright dour.

And yet, at heart, she was a practical and even cheerful person. “Well, no help for it,” she’d comment, after having gotten the cursing and wailing at some disaster out of her system. “What we need is a plan!” And she’d make one. At least one. And she’d stick to them, too, until the problem was solved. Once she had that plan in hand, she was resolute, brave and happy.

New Year’s Eve was a holiday so full of promise, redemption and symbolic hope – Kage couldn’t resist. There was all day, every day, each and every year for snivelling and regrets: the New Year was the perfect place to practice optimism for at least one day, and try to make it count. And that was Kage’s intent.

So we always celebrated. Usually at home, and fairly quietly – she was practical, after all, and it’s just not very safe out there on New Year’s Eve. Even living in a tiny town on the mainly uninhabited coast of California was not secure – we were also a tourist town, and the week between Christmas and New Year’s was one of the big times. We got 50,000 people crammed into our 7 square miles of town then; you couldn’t walk to the ice cream parlour without seeing a drunk fall in the gutter, or glance out the kitchen window without seeing someone’s turkey launched skyward from a back yard deep fryer. Good times, Dear Readers.

We went out to dinner sometimes – unfashionably early. We were often the first patrons in a restaurant; sometimes the only ones for the duration of our ladylike celebrations. One year, while on our way home – still wearing the modestly filigreed paper tiaras we had donned for the occasion – we were delayed while we helped a lady out of the street. Where she happened to by lying at the time … She was wearing real diamonds, a leopard-skin coat, stiletto heels in damascened silk: and she was paralytic drunk, at a mere 7 PM in the evening. We hauled her up, handed her off to the likewise reeling gent in the tailored suit who was waiting for her, and gave them a push toward the restaurant we had just left.

“Did you tip well?” asked Kage as they went off at a barely coordinated 4-legged stagger.

“Yep,” said I.

“Good. ‘Cause we’re not doing the staff any favours with that pair.”

We went home singing temperance hymns.

Then we’d watch the end of the day-long Twilight Zone marathon (where the best classics get aired), and ultimately Rockin’ New Year’s Eve In Times Square with Casey Kasem – not quite his head in a jar, poor man, but increasingly shakey as the years wore on. Kage would have been sad to lose him at last, as we did this year – but I’m glad she missed the Grand Grimoire tragi-comedy of his death and much-delayed burial. We watched the old familiar spectacle even in her last year (I stayed at the hospital with her – no one was chasing me out any more by that time), though we missed ritual the trip down to the sea.

It was always Kage’s custom, in Pismo – which is where her entire public career took place – to go to the shore on New Year’s Eve, and re-dedicate herself to her Muse and the gods of writing. She’d fling off her coat, kick off her shoes – this woman who never even went barefoot in the house! – and wade into the winter waves to mark her oath. I held things, especially my pocket flask, so I could revive her with blood-warm single malt* when she walked back out of the midnight Pacific …

And Kage, who complained of hypothermia when the temperature dipped below 70, would emerge blue and laughing and shooting off sparks from her hair, except at the end where her braid hung below her waist and was usually white with foam. That yearly bargain with the Unseen Powers (except she saw them) always left her exultant.

We always had a Happy New Year. We always made the same resolution, which was To Survive! That last time, we even had champagne I’d smuggled in to the hospital.

That’s probably your job, now, she commented on the last day of 2009.

I don’t know how, I muttered.

Don’t worry, I’ll leave instructions, Kage said cheerfully.

Oh, screw you! was my witty and classic response, and we both laughed like maniacs. But as I left to head home, she said, sleepily and contentedly, Shall I believe ? … and I turned and assured her that I would follow all her instruction, I really would: though they’d be unnecessary.

I was almost home – I stopped to walk down the cold sands and throw her promise to the waves – before my lagging brain filled in what Kage had really meant:

Shall I believe that unsubstantial Death is amourous?

Well. She always did like lean men, did Kage.  And I’ve come to rather depend on that bony gentleman’s legendary courtesy, and hope she was taken into Eternity with a bow and a courtly flourish. It was just the sort of good ending she would have expected.

So – a Happy New Year’s Eve, Dear Readers. And a happy year to come, and may there always be something to light your view of the future with joy – no matter how dim it looks. May all be glad for you.

 

*Where did you think she got that phrase, Dear Readers, of the whiskey the arms merchant shares with Alec? Experience!

 

 

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2014 In Review II – By Me

Posted on December 29, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker loved year-end lists. She liked making them; she liked reading them. She liked exploring the categories other people thought were important – what does it say about a society that wants a list of badly-dressed celebrities? Kittens in hats? Ways to cook with nopalita cactus? (Hormel makes a nopalita cactus salad. In a can – did you know that, Dear Readers?)

She liked lists in general, being of the opinion that history, library sciences and the general use of “immortal memories” all began with some beleaguered gatherer lady counting up her baskets of acorns with a sharp rock on a spare bison rib. Certainly, the earliest examples we can find (and decipher) are lists: of cattle, baskets of grain, barrels of beer. The next oldest are lists of kings and gods. Kage said we should really take all those old king-and-god lists with a generous grain of salt – because they were apparently compiled after those ancient tally clerks got through the beer …

Maybe that’s why so many of the very oldest are actually queens and goddesses. In wine there is truth … probably even more in beer. Which was evidently invented by women.

Anyway: Kage had an especial fondness for lists. There are many Books of Lists out there: the best, in Kage’s opinion, were the ones by David Wallichinsky and Amy Wallace; we used to take those camping with us, and take turns reading the lists out loud by the fire. They were hilarious, and we were hysterical. Nowadays, of course, there are lists sites all over the Internet. Probably 3rd or 4th in number after pornography and cats. And probably, somewhere there is a site dedicated to lists of cat pornography …

Today, my blog server WordPress sent me my stats for 2014; which I promptly posted as Blog #1 for the day. It was full of fun things, like the fact that in the past year I have had visitors from 41 foreign countries. I suspected I was getting more of those, because my spam file is full of dubious comments by people whose native tongue is clearly not English. (Most of you Dear Readers sign in from the US, the UK and Australia.)

I finished a novel and sent it to my agent. I also wrote three stories, and sold 1; which will appear in March 2015. Not an amazing record for this year, but it was my very first one, after all. The list has lots of room to grow longer.

In 2014, I accumulated about 2 dozen rejected comments a day – all consigned to spam, and ultimately flushed by me, but not before I gathered a few rough ideas of my audience. Those sent to Coventry were predominantly trying to sell me things – usually sex, or at least the use of new and/or improved sex organs; but also lots of real estate, haute couture of dubious authenticity, and Schedule 1 drugs.  Lots of them included cheery remarks about my blog, which made no reference to anything I said or indeed, any concrete topic at all – although all assured me I was doing a wonderful job. I’ve never gotten such friendly snow jobs anywhere as I got via this blog in 2014.

Great statistic: more people in general looked at my blogs. Good statistic: many were referenced on and on through the aether. Bad statistic: this year had the most gaps, where I failed for days to write anything here. Worst statistic: my best-read efforts were obituaries.

Lots of my friends died in 2014. I have the honour of being part of a large and very strange community, those who work and perform in Renaissance Faires. We’re entering our 4th generation of participants – the grandchildren of people who worked the first Faires are having babies – and consequently Time has claimed a lot of us who are first and second generation. It’s hardly a surprise, when you stop and realize that most of your playmates are in their 60’s; but it’s been one of those years when my especial friends have been kicking the ol’ jam jar with alarming frequency. Maybe I’ll get used to it. Maybe more of us will manage to survive 2015.

Lots of other people, too, of course: people I don’t actually know, but whose deaths are general losses, like Robin Williams and Joe Cocker.  Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Lauren Bacall, Harold Ramis. Many poets and writers and scientists; a king in Saudi Arabia, a queen in Belgium.

One of the last 5 white Southern rhinos in the world, the last Chinese river dolphin, the last Christmas Island Forest Skink. A variety of snails and spiders and snakes. An insect species a day, and a bird species a week. Billions of honey bees, which pollinate most of our food. Billions of fish, whom we (used to) eat. Untold numbers of plants, that variously fed, clothed and physicked us, and which – who knows? – might have rendered us immortal, or permanently peaceful or turned us all blue. It might have been interesting, but they’re gone now.

Hundreds of people dead and vanished in airline accidents. Thousands of Ebola, malaria, plague, measles, influenza. Millions of violence, starvation, exposure, thirst, and being the wrong colour, religion, political faction or gender. Heck, at least 3 dozen people died in a volcanic explosion – which is probably some sort of modern record – even as the remains of the victims of Pompeii are on a world tour …

And untold numbers of people who fell in love, had babies they wanted, survived tragedies, helped one another, loved on another. Saved one another. A weight of life and love and courage that really can’t be added up on a list – we lost the knack of listing joys, I think, about the time we figured out how to count the beer.

Life is not lists: but history is. It’s the part of human memory that doesn’t die when that lump of fat in our outsized skull shuts down. Lists are the voices of the dead, reminding us not to poke things with teeth, or eat poisonous plants, or how to keep a fire alight through the long dark.  Lists are what turns us all, eventually, into lights ourselves …

No wonder Kage liked them.

 

 

 

 

 

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2014 In Review – By WordPress

Posted on December 29, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker, Dear Readers – my perennial header – has inspired WordPress once again to compare us to the Sydney Opera House. This time, we could have filled the Fish-swallowing-a-fish-swallowing-another-fish Hall 9 times!

Readers have come from 41 countries, which I think gives us a better track record than most UN votes.

And blogs prior to 2014 are still drawing looks, too. I have at least as much staying power as your average detergent commercial. The American dream of success lives …

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here's an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 25,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 9 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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There’ll Be A Hot And Cold (and Quiet) Time Tonight

Posted on December 27, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker always did her best to spend the week between Christmas and New Year in quiet  and privacy. A seasonal hermitage would have  pleased her most – as it was, living 300 miles from any notable population centers and interfacing with the world through electronics was just her glass of Coke.

Ideally, this week between the two goal posts of the Western Calendar should be spent as quietly as possible. It’s a null time, a spacer bead on the annular necklace: bracketed between two enormous holidays, this winter span is  a deep breath taken and held in the cold, cold air. You draw your collar close, and shade your eyes against the icy glitter on the horizon – the icy glitter that is the horizon, hiding all your future in a grove of blades and silver lace – and give some quiet thanks for the chance to catch your breath at all.

Of course, that’s easier when your house isn’t trying to blow up and catch fire. As some of you Dear Readers are already aware, my Boxing Day was enlivened by the furnace in my sister Kimberly’s house going into a meltdown. And just as the Los Angeles Basin entered its one annual phase of frost, too …

December is a season of fires in most places – chimneys, braziers, kitchen hearths, candles and propane heaters and barbecues dragged in from the porch to warm up the house on a cold night: even in California, where it mostly doesn’t snow, the Christmas season is also the season of house fires. The wild fires settle down and sleep – most of the problems this time of year arise from dry Christmas trees, badly insulated Christmas lights and batteries put in new toys backwards and upside down. At least a domicile a night makes the news every night: and that’s just the ones that catch the media’s attention. Lots of fires are prevented, or forestalled, or fought to a desperate standstill by people who get no camera time at all.

Had our furnace actually succeeded in exploding, we might have made the Channel 4 News. They have a studio not far from Silver Lake, which we also border on one side. But when the furnace in the basement (which is itself rare in LA, and doubtless helped save us) went critical, the first hint was the power going out. The circuit breakers refused to be flipped back, and while we were investigating that, a smell of charring insulation began spreading through the house. Nephew Michael, a young man of his hands (thank all the gods), tracked it down to the cellar – where he found the copper gas hose feeding the forced air heater had blown a hole in itself, and was directing a 6-inch exhalation of blue flame against the main electrical ganglion of the house …

If the heater had been built into a wall, we’d have burned. If the wiring had been laid on higher up, instead of in our rare California half-basement, we’d have burned. If the furnace had been in a utility closet, instead of in a dank, icy-cold, earth-and concrete floored cave, we’d have burned. As it was, all it did was create a few short circuits before Mike got the gas turned off, the ignition uplugged, and the blowtorch off the wiring. It took half an hour for the hot stink to dissipate, but everything cooled down without unnecessary seizures and hysteria. (We had a little of the necessary kind – Christmas fires are scary, even in potentio.)

Of course, the wiring was somewhat bollixed, and the power kept going out as we traced the damaged lines through the network of the house. The place was apparently wired by a demented  alien – probably the Doctor, judging by the ham-fisted techniques – and it took several more outages before we had the bum outlets isolated, and plugged in the essential items in the ones that worked. (Michael, young and strong, ran tirelessly round the house from door to door and the circuit breaker box on the outside cellar wall, cursing in a manly way each time I plugged something in and the power died. Again.) We ultimately discovered that the front porch shares a circuit with the laundry room, on the other side of the house; the stove is connected to the bathroom circuit, but the refrigerator is connected to one half of the living room; the pantry – which has but one appliance in it – stands alone.

By a cunning re-assignment of priorities and power strips, we have the fridge and the stove working; lights in all the rooms; the Christmas tree and the computers. A space heater and the fireplace are standing in for the forced-air furnace, and the laundry room can be rung in at need, if we unplug my printer and the microwave … I’d say, at this point, that the house is working slightly better than the International Space Station, and we still have hot water and flush toilets!

Plumbing and heating guys, and electricians too, apparently share with Kage the conviction that the world ceases to exist between December 25th and January 1st. No one on our list is answering the phone. Monday may prove more fruitful – in the meantime, we are forted up for a slightly chilly interval. But we have plenty of quilts and blankets, sweaters and socks and knitted wool. The animals are all happy to share a lap or a shoulder when invited.  Even the television works.

So – a quiet day tomorrow, to be sure. We’re set up safely, and in all the comfort we could salvage with a dead furnace and 30-degree nights. We’ve got electricity, which leaves us light-years better off than the majority of human history; and all the festive goodies of the season are available in pantry and fridge. Hell, they’d stay fresh on the back porch, at need: it’s that cold. But we have down sleeping bags and fuzzy socks on our side, so we will triumph.

And we didn’t blow up or burn down. As Kage would wisely quote from Romeo and Juliet at times like this: “There art thou happy!”

Yes. Yes, we are.

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Boxing Day

Posted on December 26, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker always planned for a quiet, insular Boxing Day.

Traditionally, in its homeland of Merrie Olde England, Boxing Day was the day employers gave presents to their employees – especially household servants. Those were ordinarily loftovers of food and clothing, and people either prepared boxes to hand out or brought one to work for the give-away. It all depended on which level of the stairs you were on (Above or Below) but boxes were the medium of the exchange.

Americans think it’s the day you return the boxes of gifts you don’t want. Or, conversely, put all the Christmas glitz back in its storage boxes. But traditionally Christmas does not end  on December 25th; that’s when it begins – so the season actually runs on until January 6th, unless you adhere to 20th Century American customs …

Of course, this day is noted for other things as well. In England, this used to be the day the fighting season began – back in the days when boxers fought bare-knuckled, in black leather pumps and no shirts or gloves: this is when the formal schedule began. It’s when the horse racing season legally starts, too; and even in sunny California, race tracks were advertising their season openers today. More sources for the Boxing Day appellation, maybe. Or maybe not.

Kage’s personal definition was that it was a day to live out of boxes. New games, new books, new clothes – all had arrived in boxes, and would be set tastefully around her armchair to be serially sampled through the day. The contents of stockings were usually small fancy edibles – those would be in a box, as well, to be nibbled on at her leisure. The leftovers from Christmas Eve and Christmas Day dinners would be in the fridge in yet more boxes, mostly – plastic Tuppers in every size, shape and colour, preserving the broken festive meats (And creamed spinach. And mashed potatoes. And Yorkshire pudding.) for Boxing Day nibbles.

Last night, for Christmas dinner proper, I made the best Yorkshire puddings of my life. Taste in Yorkshire puddings runs to extremes – some people, like Kage, prefer a thick loaf of Yorkshire pudding, like a sergeant-major sort of dumpling. Welsh Grandda Tom served that kind; Kage usually made hers in actual loaf pans, and served it in broad country slices.

(That’s the kind Kimberly made when she actually succeeded in making it in a Dutch oven contrived over an open oak fire – the only person I know who ever made an edible Yorkshire pudding at an outdoor Renaissance Faire.)

But some people prefer little golden hollowed disks of Yorkshire pudding, that look like tiny UFOs and hold a half cup of gravy in their hearts. Those latter examples of Yorkshire pudding are the ones I initially encountered in the writings of English vet James Herriot, of All Creatures Great and Small fame. Herriot comes to hilarious grief over the delectable little morsels, but they have fired me with insane lust since the age of 17 or so. And I have tried ever since to produce them.

It’s not a question of the batter, which is the same for both – a mindlessly easy recipe of flour and milk and eggs and salt  and drippings from the beef roast. No matter what you bake it in, you grease the vessel with more drippings. And Kimberly and I, after successfully making almost perfect puddings in muffins tins and popover molds, finally splurged on actual, realio trulio Yorkshire pudding pans this year … they have wide, shallow indentations, and the batter floats in the amber drippings like exotic islands …

When they had baked for the requisite half hour, I tremblingly drew them out – and behold! They were the legendary golden bowls  that the lovely  Zoe Bennett  feeds to a sensorily-overloaded Herriot … I did it! When filled with gravy and conveyed to my waiting mouth, they proved to be as delicate as bone china; crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, but all in a delicious thin curve of biscuity goodness: perfection. With hot gravy and rare beef.

“Pretty good,” opined our menfolk, addressing their plates with workmanlike gravity. Kimberly and I rolled our eyes at one another.

Those Yorkshire puddings were my favourite boxes this Christmas: packed full of literary goodness and wonderful gravy, brought to life from the dreams of books read in my distant girlhood.  I’ve been eating the stuff all my life, but this year – Real Yorkshire Pudding. Kage would have laughed at me. But she’d have understood, too.

Happy Boxing Day, Dear Readers. May all your leftovers be as magical as mine.

 

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The Day Itself

Posted on December 25, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker actually enjoyed Christmas Day. Hip-deep in family, noise and kitchen disasters though she usually was, she enjoyed the mad whirl of The Day. Even on years when we got up at 3 AM to drive to Los Angeles from Pismo Beach in time to herald dawn with nieces and nephews, she was happy to do so.

Mind you, she generally slept through the trip South. She’d wake up when the sun finally crested the sea hills, somewhere around Ventura, and open her eyes to the dun-silver hills and the sea. I was the one who enjoyed the race through the starry night – I cherished all those long treks, the car full of sleeping family (sometimes we had niece Emma or nephew Michael. We always had Harry.) and piled presents, loose bows rolling around on the floor with emptied coffee cups from the weeks of Dickens Fair …

It was always my favourite night of all the year, Christmas Eve-not-quite-morning, running through the night with the stars. In some places the road would be shining with frost most years; in others, various strangers’ lights were left on to guide Father Christmas, Grandfather Winter, Santa Claus and Odin to their banked hearths. I’m pretty sure it was Odin they were waiting for, that one year I passed the little house alone on the cliffs between Reina de Mariposa and Isla Vista, because the white lights on its roof formed a valknut symbol. You get some funny things lighting up the night in empty places, and near universities.

But the whole point of the night runs was to arrive at our destination with the Yule sun. Which we did, most years. Triumph was ours, climbing the stair with the newborn shadows still ice pale and frozen, before the new sun quite illumined the world. Which was extremely handy. There is no sun so blindingly bright as Mid-Winter’s dawn.

This year, as in the past several, I have had the easier route: I slept in my own bed all night, and woke up waaaay past dawn to fresh-baked all manner of delicious things. Kimberly is a morning person, and was up before the laggard sun, I think, popping yummies in and out of the oven at various temperatures: which is certainly a kinder, gentler way of waking up the rest of us. The dog was up, of course, unshakeable in his faith that this year, she’d finally drop the standing prime rib roast on the floor. The cats were still stoned and boneless under the Christmas tree, drug socks clutched in their paws.

I didn’t even have the midnight drive home down I-5 after the closing of Dickens: I was already home by then, fighting off pneumonia while my heroic cast began breakdown without me. (This Sunday I will be back up there, though, to supervise the annual storage of the props and furniture; which means, sitting on the last chair until the last minute, watching the young and strong interweave all our couches, sideboards and love seats into an architectural knot for the year.) No, I rose straight into the long white light of Christmas dawn, ready for the family rituals.

Some years one is blessed by the most unexpected things. At the advanced age of 61, I am grateful as never before to be sleeping in my own bed. Grateful to wake up with the family I would happily drive 300 miles in the dark to see, already gathered in the living room. Grateful to sleep in the coruscation of coloured lights from tree and wall and window and desk-edge that – on any other night at all – would have kept me fretfully awake. Grateful for the new miracle of greetings via the aether from friends all over the country, and grateful for the old, old miracle of the fire on the hearth and its ancient message:

Oh, the running of the deer and the rising of the sun: Sol Invictus! The Light returns, Life wins again, and with any luck – per the blessed Sir Terry Pratchett – the oxygen will thaw out.

Merry Yule, Dear Readers. unto you all. Happy Christmas, Holy Solstice, Well-Balanced Perihelion!  Merry Yule!

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Christmas Eve

Posted on December 24, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker liked to retreat on Christmas Eve.

It was time to fort up, she said, as early in the day as you could manage it. Ideally, one didn’t have to work; on years when we did, we headed home as soon as we could and got cozy.

Most years, we were off work by noon or so. We’d speed home, hitting our last ritual tasks and obligations on the way. Sometimes we went and picked holly and pyrocanthus branches, to deck the mantle with fresh red berries. Sometimes we picked up our Christmas roast, paid for with holiday bonuses. Sometimes we’d stop in various parks or isolated wooded canyons to liberate some fresh mistletoe. It grows all over California: usually in sycamore trees in the South, instead of in heraldic oaks. I’ve climbed the sycamores by the Griffith Park Carousel many times in my life, to toss down cut sprigs to Kage on the ground … no golden sickle, but I did use my cool Swiss Army knife. And Kage always made a point of catching it in a white cloth …

The whole idea was to be home, all goodies in hand, in time to cook Christmas Eve dinner. On Christmas Day itself, we’d be off at the family events, laden with presents for our multitudinous siblings, nieces and nephews – despite there being only the 2 of us in our own house, our Christmas tree was always an amazing sight on Christmas Eve, before we’d delivered all the presents!

But on Christmas Eve, we lit all the candles and lights, the house was full of wonderful smells, the table groaned under the feast. We played Christmas carols and ancient music; one of Kage’s favourites was a recording of a Yule Mass in Anglo Saxon. That Worde was Gott/That Worde was Manne, she would chant exultantly while she beat eggs into Yorkshire pudding batter … and my spelling is approximate, Dear Readers, because all I have are the memories of the sound of it over the years. You have to imagine the glottal stops and extra syllables yourself.

Right now it’s a warm, mild, dim afternoon – the classic California winter sky, a grey cloud ceiling breaking into faint prisms at the edges where the haze dissolves in distance. Lights are coming on early all over, where Christmas displays are turned on as soon as the daylight begins to diminish – in this neighborhood, most of them will burn all night, so neither the Christ Child nor Santa gets lost in the nearby dark of Griffith Park. We have a lot of Filipino neighbors, too, so every two or three houses there are enormous multi-coloured stars made of capize shells and oiled paper, that strobe fast enough to bring on epilepsy in the unwary.

star 1

My family has just about reached the point where we can settle in and down and let Christmas Eve fill up the house like a warm bath … the big dinner will be tomorrow, so tonight it’ll be soup and sarnies and pizza and fruitcake. All we still need to do is run out to the store for firewood and whatever last minute goodies catch our eyes.

The UPS trucks (3 of ’em) are still booming up and down the street in the twilight; the USPS trucks, much smaller and quicker, are zipping up and down driveways as all the drivers try to deliver last minute packages. The neighborhood dogs have simply given up – they’ve been warning us all that strangers are all over the place for weeks, and no one’s paid any attention at all. In fact, more strangers just keep coming …

Maybe the raccoons will sing carols at midnight (they’re certainly out there, in the warm Halcyon night). It’ll be the most useful thing they’ve ever done;  despite the myths of talking beasts on Christmas Eve, the only one who ever speaks in English around here is Harry the parrot. The cats are just nuts, with the lights all glowing on the inexplicable tree to match their mad, whirling eyes.

Meet Me In St. Louis is playing on the telly. Judy Garland has to go to the ball with her grandfather, and is dissolving in tears … wow, not only a First World Problem, but a just-past Fin de Siecle one.Wait’ll she finds out she has to dance with all the geeks she signed up with her arch enemy! A sweeter age, from our perch here just inside the edge of the 21st century – but their problems make them just as wretched as ours do us. And the answers are surprisingly the same, too.

Family. Love.  A safe, warm place at Mid-winter, redemption for our sins and our neighbors and the terrors of the cold and dark.  A fire on the hearth and a light in the window.

Pizza doesn’t hurt, either. Share it with your loved ones. And have a Merry Christmas Eve, Dear Readers.

 

 

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The Halcyon Days: On Time & In Place

Posted on December 23, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker, as I have mentioned before, loved the Halcyon Days.

That’s not a generalization, though in these less-than-golden times the phrase has come to mean simply “calm weather.  The OED refers to “a period of peace and happiness; an idyllic time; also, a period of calm weather during the winter solstice”. It refers to a period of warm, quiet weather that appears outside its ordinary range – the fortnight around the Winter Solstice is the traditional time to expect the Halcyon Days. St. Martin’s summer, or Indian summer, refers to another such idyllic period, that arrives just about when you expect the autumn storms to start.

California, not being what any of the European emigres considered a normal sort of country, has weather patterns unique to itself. But it also keeps the classic Greek calendar marks to a large – and unexpected – extent. If you consult global maps, you find that Los Angeles and Athens have very similar latitude and longitude readings; the greater areas of California and Greece, even more so.  You’ll find resemblances in photos, too – the rocky gold and white cliffs, the hills thinly clothed with oats and barley and wild grasses; olive trees, grape vines, pomegranate groves.

So California keeps the Halcyon Days. Especially it does so here in the South, where the cities and gardens all lean on the hot smooth shoulders of the desert and get their water from the cloudy North. It happens up there in the North, as well, though not as often nor as warm – but usually, around Solstice and Christmas and the New Year, the skies will clear and the air will warm and for a few days you can run about barefoot on the winter-whitened lawns where the frost was lying the week before.

Kage loved that. Not that she went barefoot! She was probably more likely to appear in her underwear than barefooted; she had a weird modesty concerning her feet. But those mid-winter days when the roses went mad and put out buds, when the orange trees turned into demented clouds of blossom and perfume: Kage would go a little crazy, too, and wander outside  in her sandals, without a coat or a shawl, to work bare-armed as a nymph in the delusional garden.

Within a few days, of course, the span of sweet weather would pass – somewhere, according to the old myths, Lord Kingfisher and his lady Alcyone would have hatched their brood in their floating nest, and led the fledglings to safety over the Agean Sea. The temperature would plummet, we’d get frost-ferns on the windows, and if it was a year with rain, the storms would resume. Even in dry years, the coldest month of the year is usually January: the dark heart of winter, once the Halcyon Days have passed.

We’re two days past the Solstice today, and two days yet to go to reach Christmas; and  we’re smack in the middle of as classic a halcyon period as I have ever seen. It got up to 83 degrees here today, and even now is still at 75. The air is as soft and mild as powder, though it looks like a crowd of insane fireflies have descended on us – all the trees and porches on the street are alive with coloured lights, a brighter display than any summer night ever shows. There are children outside as if it was August, chasing one another through the illuminated deer and snowmen and creches, screaming with laughter.

Kage loved it. It was the briefest of seasons, and her utter favourite. She always said, though, that we oughtn’t broadcast the Rose Parade and show the rest of the country what our lovely false spring looked like – they all saw it in Montana and Maine, and headed West expecting Paradise …

But the warmth won’t last. The air may be seduced by the sun, but the earth knows very well what season it really is. Cold waits in the quiet earth and strikes up through the grass and the sleeping flower beds like blades of ice. The concrete is as cold as death; the asphalt holds no heat now that the sun is set. Winter in the earth is a lot harder to shift than in the fickle air.

The stars burn with all their winter strength, no illusion of warm lights there. There are no Halcyon nights, after all – by Christmas Day, the heat will rise up as all heat does, and vanish somewhere between the hilltops and the moon. By the New Year, winter will rule again and everything but a few crazed roses will go back to sleep. The hyacinths and crocus will have to sprout before the gardens wake up again.

Tomorrow, though, I’ll be racing around in a t-shirt to do my last minute shopping. I’ll roll down the car windows and let the warm wind in, while I sing along with the Hallelujah Chorus on the radio:

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

 For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

The kingdom of this world
Is become the kingdom of our Lord,
And of His Christ, and of His Christ;
And He shall reign for ever and ever,
For ever and ever, forever and ever.

Not forever, no: sorry, Mr. Handel. It lasts barely more than a day or two. But it does happen. And the Halcyon Days are most surely the kingdom of a god.

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Feeling Like Christmas

Posted on December 22, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker was always concerned about the amorphous condition of “feeling like Christmas”.

It was something she wanted, and courted quite seriously. There was no one, definitive path to the feeling – but there were landmarks and sign posts that had to be met in order to ensure it happening; not all of them all the time, but some of them and in the right order. Otherwise: no Christmas feeling. Just a fancy dinner and presents: neither of which Kage scorned. But what she most earnestly wanted was that particular spiritual feeling.

Anything, she said, could bring it on. Dickens Fair almost always did it for her; it’s damned hard to avoid feeling like Christmas when you’re spending your weekends in a fairytale London. Even there, though, it required some specific markers – not the tinsel and snow and carols, so much, as a few quiet moments for us to share a paper cone of roasted chestnuts. Breakfasting at least once on fried oysters and deadly wonderful cocktails of Guinness and champagne. Listening to Charles Dickens reading “A Christmas Carol” aloud in our very own Parlour – warming his hands as Bob Cratchett at one of our battery-operated candles, snarling at his audience as Scrooge, wailing as the grieving Marley’s Ghost: Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!

That is Christmas, man.

She loved driving out and looking at other people’s holiday lights, especially if she could glimpse the shadows of people and parties through the windows. Kage loved that feeling of voyeurship. She collected views of other people’s cozy houses like private Christmas cards. It made her feel twice as warm and safe when we eventually came in out of the winter dark to our own safe haven. Sometimes she liked to stand on the sidewalk in front of our house, admiring the spread of lights we’d put up – which was always as wide and as high as I could reach, and ran off our roof onto all available fence lines and tree limbs. Sometimes we would stand out there and sing Christmas carols to our lit windows, until Harry decided we were nuts and yelled at us to get in the house …

Sometimes we’d go walk on the beach in the sounding dark, where the winter winds blew the sea-foam like glass into flying white stars. Sometimes we went to what is now The Grove (though when we went, it was the Farmers Market) down on Fairfax in L.A. – we’d wander between the booths, under the miles and miles of cut fir and cypress and coloured lights, eating roasted nuts and chocolates and French dip sandwiches out of waxed paper cocoons.

I wrapped most of the presents, because I got the wrapping gene and Kage didn’t. What she did was hand-letter tags on slips of parchment paper, in Celtic uncials and scarlet ink. When she was, perforce, wrapping my presents, the house rang with seasonal profanity … but it always left her with that Christmas feeling, somehow. She said the relief of getting my presents wrapped without losing a finger or taping Harry to something eased all the stress.

In lean years we saved up for a month, and then bought the world’s smallest rib roasts a day or two before Christmas: we usually had the butcher cut TWO (2) precious little ribs, and bore the resultant prize home all wrapped up in white paper like a proper Victorian indulgence. Eating a traditional dinner was fun, but what really made Kage feel Christmas-y was carrying that white-paper-wrapped package home.We made Yorkshire pudding, and later in the evening Kage would set the traditional pot holder on fire trying to light the brandy on the plum duff.

This year … well, things have not gone quite as planned. Sometimes the Christmas routine is like a well-maintained express train; other times, it’s like the ride down Mount Crumpet in an overburdened sleigh. It’s been a Mount Crumpet year for me. I missed most of Dickens, I caught flu and bronchitis and pneumonia, and lots of cherished rituals have been observed in the breech; or watching other people – people who could breathe properly – perform them through closed windows.

And now here I am in Los Angeles, which can’t make up its mind if it wants to broil or drown. We’re having torrential rains, winter brush fires, rock and mud and ash slides, avalanches and tornadoes. Last week it poured. Today it is clear and mild and even with the sun beginning to set on the shortest day of the year, it’s 75 degrees here. The air smells like pine trees and feels like milk.

But you know what, Dear Readers? I feel that Christmas feeling anyway. Our house is bedecked in lights in and out, from the naked mulberry tree outside to the green garland over the living room arch. There’s a lit-up Solstice Moose on the front lawn. There’s a string of tiny blue-white stars on my desk, and a wee LED Christmas tree that plugs into a spare port on my USB hub. The fireplace is lit every night, and the entire living room pulses with the soft heart-beat of  moving flames.

I’ve no idea what brings it on, that feeling. Kage always seemed able to pinpoint the moment – I just wander on through the season until it smacks me in the face. Is it the thousand things done just the same every year for a lifetime? Or that one unique beauty you never thought of before, that ambushes the heart?

It’s a mystery. But it always happens, which I guess is both the mystery and the point.

It always happens.

 

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Nearly Solstice

Posted on December 20, 2014 by Kate

Kage Baker always celebrated the Winter Solstice. The Summer one, as well; and the two Equinoxes, those festivals of equipoise and calendrical toe shoes … but the Summer Solstice was inarguably her favourite.

“The longest day!” she would exult. “The high point of the Sun!” And she’d eat pizza for the ritual meal. Pizza was designated since our adolescence as the perfect Summer Solstice food; being, as it was, the nearest edible object Kage could come up with to a burning wheel …

It’s a matter of perspective, I guess. In Kage’s perception, the Summer Solstice was a solar triumph, a deep well of sunlight striking through the calendar year and the turning ecliptic. She never thought about the fact that, in reality, the Earth begins at that moment to turn back into the embrace of Night. It’s the beginning of our long fall into the dark.

Conversely, I love best the Winter Solstice – but not because now we begin to climb back into Light. I love it because of its dancer’s balancing act on the diamond linchpin of the Dark, the perfect stillness of the turning world there on the summit of the Winter. It’s where Winter begins, after all; though its glittering, frozen heart won’t be triumphant for another month or so, the ice crown settles on the brow of the world now.

I don’t look across the rim of the wheel to the fever days of Midsummer, any more than Kage paid attention to the icy jewels on the opposite diadem of Midwinter. We just spun in place, where our hearts were happiest.

Tomorrow is the Winter Solstice. To be precise, it happens at 23:03 PM UTC, which translates out to 3:03 PM here in Los Angeles. Still an hour and a half shy of sunset, but with the grey ceiling we have over the Basin right now, it’ll be getting dark already. And if you go out in the back yard and turn your face up to the unseen stars and spin as fast as you can for a moment – well, you can feel the abyss of the winter sky drawing you up like ablating frost from the cold ground. You can fall into the sky, between the dark moon and invisible Venus, and from there into the cold silk of the new grass that’s sprung up from the winter rains.

This year, the winter seems especially dark,  with not even the memory of light to be seen. The Universe is all black glass and bell tones, velvet and matte silver: no reflections. No echoes. If we’re spinning, I can’t by looking this year.

And yet (as Galileo muttered under his breath): Eppur si muove.

Still, it moves.

 

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