Learing to Drive

Learning to drive is a rite of passage for most American teens.  My mother was nervous about me driving.  I think in those days, in Louisiana, you could get your learners permit at about age 14 and your license at about age 15.  I had to wait an extra year and I don’t think I got mine until I was 16 or so.  I think these ages have now been upped. 

Now as all good kids do, your Dad sits you on his lap, and lets you steer while he does the pedals, but other than that, I had not had much experience behind the wheel until I was a teenager.  I learned to drive on my family’s 88 Oldsmobile.  It was white with this gold metallic vinyl top, that we had to have re-toped at some point.  Daddy took me down the Bogle Road, out close to where my Great-Grandmother’s old place was, where we used to go fishing, and taught me to drive.  Oh I was the worst at getting the pedals mixed up.  The Bogle Road, for those of you who don’t know it, is this long stretch of black top, undivided, that goes for many miles back in the woods, on the outskirts of Logansport.  Few houses and lots of oil well sites, and lots of trees.  I think most of that land out there now is owned by Dow Chemical. 

Daddy pulled over to this well site and had me get behind the driver’s seat and then we eased off.  Driving that car, was like driving a tank, that back end was just huge, it was also kind of like driving a truck.  You have to remember your butt is extra long and trailing behind you, and you need to remember that you have to calculate for a bigger turn radius and parking.  Kind of like wearing a wedding dress or anything else that trails behind you.  We pull out of the site and on to the road, and Daddy is screaming at me to break.  I finally remember which one it is and apply it, about a foot from hitting the embankment in front of us.  Daddy, ever so calmly takes out his snuff and makes himself a dip.  I think he was shaking over the fact I had nearly killed us.  It took us a few more tries, before I was going down the road smoothly.  I did a lot of over correcting, but there were no cars coming so we were okay.

We had a few more of these sessions, with a lot more yelling, before Daddy finally handed me off to Mom to teach me to drive.  She taught me the finer points like driving on the highway and how to pass another car.  Scary stuff for me back then.  I still drive on the shoulder too much, when there is one to drive on around here.

So it was a while before they would let me out on the highway by myself, in my Comet.  I was told to practice in the front yard.  Now we had a big place about 5 acres total, but only about 2 or so of that I could drive on, and only when it was dry.  I remember driving between these great big pine trees.  Still don’t know how I didn’t end up in the ditch. 

One day I am practicing backing up and PAWYAH!  I hooked this little Pecan tree with my driver’s side fender.  It kind of stuck out a few inches from the car anyways.  The car was hanging, oh a good 6” to a foot off the ground, and Daddy had to come and pull me off with a chain on his truck.  None of them was too pleased with me.  Grandpa was mad I had hurt his tree, Mom was mad I had hurt her car, and I was embarrassed about the whole thing.  Now the body was solid metal, and I had bent in a section of car, so we just took a hammer and beat it back out.  You hook a tree today with one of these plastic cars and you will have to buy a whole new side of your car, if you don’t total it.  Yep metal cars were great, sucked on gas millage, but you could put them threw just about anything. 

Not long after I started driving I got my first job, outside of the family, babysitting Dobermans, for Phil and Ardella Browning.  I think I met them through my local library.  Either they knew me from my volunteer work there, from the community in general, or from a genealogy workshop I had taken from them.  I don’t remember and both of them are long gone now, so I can’t ask. 

They had been raising championship Doberman Pinschers for many years, but now only had two females left from their years of breeding.  Ardella and Phil wanted to travel, but needed someone to watch their dogs and their house for them.  They knew of my passion for animals and asked if they could hire me to watch over their dogs while they were gone.  I said sure!

Ardella thought it was best that I should meet the dogs first, and have her go over everything with me.  I will never forget driving up to her place.  There was a long drive way of the road to their house and at the end was a big gate.  Inside was a 2 story house, a rare thing in my neck of the woods, a greenhouse, and a pond out back.  Running lose in the front yard, with a florescent green color, was what I thought at first was a deer.  I got out of the car and said, “Ardella you have a deer running in your front yard with a collar on.”

She said, “Actually that is Bambi.  She is a fawn colored Doberman.”

I was dumb struck.  I didn’t know Dobie’s came in that color.  I had on only seen black and tan.  I was a bit frightened by these dogs.  All I knew was they were aggressive and used for dog fighting, but Ardella and Phil were not like that.  Suddenly this monster started to charge me, but I held my ground.  This massive black and tan Doberman, with cropped ears and tail, is coming at me full speed.  I’m terrified but when she gets to me, she doesn’t bit me, she swings her butt to me.  Confused I looked up at Ardella, who calmed me by saying, “This is Ursa, and she wants you to scratch her butt.”  She explained to me that Ursa had been taken from her mother too early, at 5 weeks, and she constantly wanted to be petted.  You could not stop petting that dog.  I’d be sitting in the swing, petting her, and my arm would get tired from so much petting.  I would quit and she would bump me with her nose to make me pet her more.  She was such a silly girl.  I loved her so.

I was paid $5 a day to come out, get the mail, check the answering machine for any important messages, feed, water and play with the dogs.  I was given the numbers to where Phil and Ardella would be and I was to call if anything happened, and they would come home instantly.  I am happy to say that I worked for Phil and Ardella for many years, and became good friends with them.  Only once did I have to call them home from a trip, when Phil’s sister became very ill and soon thereafter, I believe, passed away.

To keep myself straight on what day was what, and when they were coming home I kept a log of my time at their house.  On an old yellow legal note pad, I would write the date, and what happened that day.  If I had given medicine to one of the dogs, what the weather was like, any animals I saw, or what new dead thing had been drug up in the yard.  I always started it with something like, “Today was a great day.”  I always tried to use a new descriptive adjective every day, and never repeat myself.  It got quite tricky there when they were gone for two or three weeks at a time.  I’d pull out words like groovy and keen.  Ardella told me one time, “I look forward to coming back, just so I can read your little notes.  I didn’t know you kids even knew what keen meant.”  I just laughed. 

Phil and Ardella were married for more than 50 years.  They had met at a dance at a town Phil and his buddies had randomly chosen to go to.  Phil worked in the oil business, for Shell Oil Company, most often off shore.  He still wore the jumpsuit uniforms that lots of oil field works do.  He was the nicest guy, big and tall and with very broad shoulders.  Ardella was bright in her own right.  She was strong and independent.  She had obtained a HAM radio operators license, so that every night her children could say ‘Goodnight’ to their father.  This was in the 70’s.  Long before cell phones kidos.  She still had all her equipment and tower when I knew her 20 years later.  They had traveled all over the world and Ardella talked about learning to speak Portuguese when they lived in Brazil.  I’m tearing up now just thinking about her.  I miss her a lot. 

By the time I knew both of them, their children were all grown, and moved away.  Being in their house was like a refuge to me.  It was full of books, that I was welcome to read.  They helped me with my genealogy. There was this huge wind chime that was hanging between the dining room and the living room.  I loved to ring it, and hear it’s sound.  Ardella had her own art room with her sewing machine, and an organized yarn stash like you would not believe.  I think she was a knitter. 

My favorite part of the house was this little sunny area, on the other side of the kitchen sink.  It had two comfy chairs facing each other and two book cases, a his’ and her’s if you will, beside these very large windows.  This little cozy space looked out on the pond and Ardella’s bird feeder on the deck.  She used to sit in that chair, watching the birds and try to identify them.  While Phil sat and read his paper or did his crossword.  Happy to be together, and each still doing their own thing.  I loved this idea, that a woman did not have to give up being who she was in, order to be married.  That she could have interests outside church, cooking, cleaning, sacrificing for her children, and gardening.  I think that was new for me back then. 

I kept that job until I went to college.  I even worked for them the summer between graduating high school and starting college when I worked for McDonald’s in Center, Tx.  I handed the job off to a friend of mine, who worked for them for several years as well. 

Ardella battled cancer in the end.  She died when I was working at Fort Jesup.  My mom called me, at the Fort, to tell me that she had just found out.  It had been some time since she had passed.  I was so upset that I burst out in tears, and was inconsolable.  I handed the phone to the other ranger standing behind me, who had never spoken to my mother, and had no idea what was going on.  I had to sit down, before I fell down.  Although it had been many years since I had seen her, I still loved her very much.  She was my good friend.  Finally the other ranger hung up the phone, and I sat and told her most of what I have told you here. 

Phil remarried and died some years back.  I miss them both dearly and wish them well on the other side. 

Ilsa

Riding Around

I have the most wonderful cousins in the world.  One of them is named Drew who I have talked about a bit before.  Drew and I were tight.  Right after Drew got his first truck, a real piece of crap that he paid $300 for and pulled out a creek, he started picking me up from school.  The truck was originally this orange yellow color, and then he spray painted it dark blue.  It took him a while, but he did it.  It had rusted floorboards, and a door seal that leaked, so when it rained and even if the window was up the seat often got wet.  I remember many mornings riding to school in a wet seat.  Oh well. 

Drew and I had the best time in that old truck.  Sometimes we would pick up one of his friends.  Sometimes he would just pick me up and we would go riding.  We would listen to music on his tape deck.  Gods we had the best time in that old truck.  We had the best conversations.  We dreamed and planned for the future. 

I had known Drew was gay almost since the day I met him.  He always wanted to play with my hair and play with my Barbies.  In my mind I thought, oh cool he is a girl and guys body.  I was 6 and he was 7.  But let me be clear here.  Drew identifies as a gay man and not as transgendered.  That was just what made since in my little girl heart and head.  Drew did not officially come out to me until I was 19 or so.  He brought me back into his room one day, when I was visiting and told me.  I told him I had known our whole lives, how I had suspected it, that I loved him, accepted him as who he was, and it was a non issue with me.   

In those days of riding around in the truck we made plans, that if we were not both married by the time we were 25 we would get married.  You know by then we felt we would be ancient.  That he could live his life and be with fellers, and I could do my thing on the side.  That way there would be no questions asked, by the family as to why he was not married yet.  My dad had already said, “Why don’t you and Drew get married?  You know keep it in the family, since y’all are not biologically related.”  I think he was pretty drunk when he said that.  I think that is the spark that got us talking about that.

So why talk about Drew being gay, because I want to say this.  At no time in my life did I ever decide to sit down and like men, neither did Drew.  As one of my oldest gay friends once told me, “Why on Earth would we chose this life?  Where we could be hated, ostracized and possible killed.”  I have had the joy and privilege to love someone who was gay from an early age.  It has helped define me.  For most of my life I have been an outspoken advocate for my gay brothers and sisters.  I want them to have the same rights and abilities that I have.  Why? because I love Drew.  I want him to have every happiness that I can be afforded.  I want him to find a good man and have a fabulous wedding, I want them to be able to have babies, and go to the grocery store and hold the hand of the man he loves, openly and in public, with no fear of being hurt, or someone saying something nasty to him.  Being gay is only a small part of who he is.  He is wonderful and loving and kind. 

Although Drew still identifies as Christian, I could not stand by and be part of a faith that in large part, condemns my beloved cousin for being true to himself, so I left the church.  I believe when Jesus made Drew, he made him gay.  Just as when Holda stirred me in the cauldron of life, she made me an Animal Communicator.  It is simply the way our brain is wired.  It is in Drew’s DNA, just as is his crazy curly hair, and blue eyes.  If we demonized gay people, we miss the chance to love some truly awesome people.  My life is better for knowing and loving Drew.  He has forever transformed who I am, just by being himself.  I wish him every joy that this life can give him.  Blessings my brother.

Drew and I rode around in that old blue truck for a long time.  Just talking, some of the best memories of my life.  I road with Drew on and off until he graduated, the year before I did.  Drew and I would go to the Opera together.  It was the truck we drove the first time Drew took me out bar hopping when I was 18, cause you could drink when you turned 18 back then.  I know I drove my car my senior year to school some, but I also still rode the bus a lot.  Because I remember falling off that bitch a lot! 

I was the last one on the bus and it was such a short ride from my house to the school, that by the time I walked all the way to the back and fought for a seat, we would be there, so I just stood, or sat on the steps.  We would pull up to the elementary side of the school and I would step off to let the little ones off.  I would give hugs, tie shoes, make sure they had jackets on and stuff, and wipe noses.  Then I would get back on the bus, ride 40 feet to the High School side.  I would take one step out the door to get on the concrete, inevitable miss, and fall flat on my face.  Everybody would just laugh and laugh their heads off.  Most people didn’t bother to come over and help me up, but many did ask if I was okay.  That’s about the time I started learning to say out loud, “I’m good,” when I fall, because so many people asked.  I still think I fall so much because my tits are so huge, I feel they make me unbalanced.

My first car, which was never titled in my name, but that I got to drive to school, was this beautiful 1973 Gold Mercury Comet that my mother had driven to high school.  She was a 4 door, automatic, 8 cylinder, 302 cc, with and engine built for drag racing in her.  My mother used to drag in her and would occasionally win.  The car had originally been built for drag racing, but when the original owner went to pick it up, he decided he didn’t like it and never bought it.   She had a solid metal body and these horrid vinyl seats with a western motif pattern on them.  So in the summer when you wore your shorts, and you got out of the car, you had this print on the back of your thigh!  Ha! Ha! 

Gods I loved that car.  We had a new windshield put in it and must have been done improperly, because it started leaking under the gas pedal every time it rained.  So I had to keep a pan under it.  Eventually it started to rust out the floorboards. 

She could do 90 like she was sitting still!  PAWYA! And done the road I went.  Boy could she fly.  I tore the roads up in that car.  I think Me and Mom and Grandpa, put a tape deck in her and I would make these great mix tapes, give them awesome names, and I would put them on and just drive around listening to my music.  That car was freedom to me. 

I would put Texas, my dog, in the car, and down the road we would go.  Gods I loved him so!  I think he was the first dog I ever really communicated with.  My dad had brought him home years before.  This skinny little thing, that had been sleeping under dozers at my Dad’s pipeline location.  He was giving him his sandwich everyday.  Finally Dad brought him home.  He said, “I had to bring him home, or I was going to starve to death!”  My Daddy has always had the biggest heart.  Texas was covered in oil, and mud, and gas.  It took us 2, if not 3 baths to get him clean, and that water was just black.  He was the best dog.  We believe he was part Border Collie and part Lab. 

Texas and I would go get gas together, I could fill that huge tank up for $20 back then and drive around for almost two weeks on it.  I would go in the gas station and get candy for me, and Famous Amos Chocolate Chip cookies for him.  He loved them!  Back before we knew not to give dogs chocolate.  One cookie for me, and 2 or 3 for Texas, then we’d drive a bit, and then one for me and more for him.  He was so heavy that when he road in the front seat, and it bounced the seatbelt light would come on for him.  He loved to go ridding with me.  I knew if he was in the car with me, nobody was going to mess with me, so I went anywhere I pleased.  I really liked to go riding when the flowers bloomed.  I would watch the land over the years, and knew where the flowers bloomed in spring, and I would just go down some lonely road and pick flowers, Texas in tow. 

Texas was my best buddy.  When I had no body to talk to, I talked to him.  He was a great friend.  He never told anybody my secrets.  He just wanted his belly rubbed.  I have this great picture, that Mom took of us, sitting on the porch, a book by my side, and his head in my lap.  I had no idea she had taken it.  It’s one of my favorites.  Here I am holding court with my dogs, in my favorite blue dress.  He died 6 weeks after I went to college.  The vet said he had Hepatitis C, that he got from eating something dead.  I think he died from a broken heart of me not being there.  I still miss him.  I have his picture on my ancestor altar.  I think of him often.

Ilsa

 

Christmas 2015

It’s coming on Christmas/

Cutting down trees/
Putting up reindeer/
Singing songs of Joy and Peace/
-          River by James Taylor

I’m sitting here listening to James Taylor’s Album Christmas to a song called River.  I love the first few lines I have posted here for y’all.  I am trying to get in the Christmas / Yule Tide spirit.  I thought I would tell y’all a few stories of Christmas past, and as always we will start with Oma.

Oma made the holidays joyful, with a huge tree covered in lights, lights on the house, and a plastic Santa complete with Reindeer outside.  What I remember about her most was Christmas at her house.  The whole family would gather.  My uncle and his family would drive in from Houston, and the rest of us would come in from our local towns and communities.  There was often a well timed phone call from Germany calling to wish us well.  With a seven hour time difference they would have already had Christmas and be heading to bed at that point.  With that call and all of us there, it would seem as if we were not so far apart, for one night we were this big loving family, even if there was an ocean between us.

I think Christmas was when we expressed most of our German culture and traditions.  A week or so before Christmas a large metal box would arrive from Germany sent by Oma’s brother, from a company in Nurnberg.  It was filled with all kinds of candies, cookies, and breads.  For us it was Christmas Eve that was most important.  That’s the night we opened presents.  There were lots of presents, but nothing extravagant.  Angie and I often got matching gifts.  One year we got these huge life size dolls that Angie’s mom had made for us.  Angie’s looked like her’s, with blond hair and blue eyes.  Mine looked like me with brown hair and brown eyes.  We both got typewriters that year.  That was Oma’s last gift to us.  We were 6. 

In our area of Germany they did not do stockings.  The custom was to do Weinachtstellers, or Christmas Plates.  They were these thick paper plates with Christmas images on them, and fluted edges.  They were filled with nuts, an apple and an orange (luxuries during winter, not that many generations ago), a good chocolate bar, cookies, gold chocolate coins (for wealth), Marzipan, a few candies and sometimes a small gift.  My last plate from Oma had a lip gloss dressed up as a dolly, on a string.  Everyone had their own plate, per their own tastes.  I have a wonderful photo of those last plates she made sitting on a table in her house.  Christmas at her house was always warm and loving.

We kids had our own table, where the appetizers were, I always ate heavily from the relish tray.  The relish tray for those of you, who are not from the South, had black and green olives, and several types of pickles on it.  We kids would all get excited and run to open the presents, or try to eat from our Christmas Plates, have to be corralled back, told that no, we had to eat our dinner first, and then we could open presents and have our plates.  Only after dinner, desert, and finally when they were almost done with Coffee and/ or starting on the Schnapps would we be allowed to open them.  Oh waiting was such agony!  That joy and wonder of the season, that since of family and connection, across towns, states, and continents, when Oma died it all went away.  As far as I remember, after her death, we never gathered as a family again to have Christmas Eve.  Oma’s brother kept sending the metal boxes from Nurnberg, until his death, but it was never the same.

Christmas at Novelle’s, Daddy’s Mom, was different.  There were no plates, no calls from Germany.  I have this great memory of us going to hunt for a tree for Novelle.  You didn’t go buy a tree back in those days.  We drove down the road, until we saw some trees we liked, and then got out of the truck with an ax and just cut one down. 

We were out doing this one Christmas, and Daddy had been chopping on this tree for a bit, and this man walks up to us.  He was dressed all in hunter orange, gun over his arm, and I think carrying some birds.  He stopped to speak to us and my Daddy got real nervous like, and the man says to us, “This your land?”  Daddy says, “No sir.”  God I knew were in so much trouble, when he said it like that, and the man says, “Mine neither,” and then he just walked right past us.  It never occurred to me, until much later in my life, that we were not supposed to be on, whoever’s property we were, and damn sure not stealing their tree.  I think Daddy chopped down a little scrub pine, could not have been more than 4 feet tall.  We brought the tree back to Novelle’s, stuck it in a coffee can full of dirt, put some paper chains on it and called it a Christmas Tree. 

Mom and I have continued with the tradition of Christmas Plates and talking on the phone to the family in Germany on or around Christmas.  Calls to German, for most of my life, were just too expensive to do any time you wanted, so you had to save it for something special.  Now we have Facebook and can talk to them anytime we want!  Yeh for technology!

I went looking for the origins of the Christmas Plate early on in my Pagan path.  I found that it comes from the tradition where a bowl of milk would be left out on Christmas Eve as an offering, and if it was accepted the next morning, it would be filled with nuts and gifts.  I believe, although I cannot think of the reference at the moment, that the milk was left out for Odin and the Wild hunt, which includes Holda.  Milk is a traditional offering left for her, since she is related to children and domestic animals like goats and cows.  That makes sense to me.  Offerings for Odin and the animals that pulled his chariot could also be left in the bowl instead of milk, things like hay and carrots. 

In my family traditions the Christmas Tree does not come down until the New Year.  Oma refused to wash clothes between Christmas and New Years.  She believed it would bring bad luck.  She was big on luck.  She loved shamrocks and had lots of superstitions, like no shoes and no hats on the table or bed.  She loved shamrocks so much that she took Good Luck Bear, the green Care Bear with a shamrock on his stomach, as her personal totem, when she got cancer.  He went with Oma everywhere.  I think we even buried her with it.  On his stomach Oma wrote her personal mantra, “I can, I will, I must.”  

It took me a while to track down the origins of leaving the tree up and not washing clothes.  Oma was unknowingly passing down to us, old traditions of Yule.  The Christmas Tree was left up from Christmas to Epiphany, which covers the 12 days of Yule, a holy time for our ancestors, a time out of time.  House work was traditionally not to be done during this time of year, cause you cleaned like a mad woman right before it.  You were to take these days off and not clean house, or wash clothes.  The old saying is that, “no wheel, should turn during Yule.” 

I have, since I became Pagan, tried to keep the 12 days of Yule, which starts on Mother’s Night the night before Winter Solstice and goes until New Years Day.  I used to clean like a mad woman starting about Halloween and going right up until Mother’s Night, until Jay told me he didn’t like that, cause it just about drove me crazy.  The old belief is that when the Wild Hunt pass over your house during Yule, and finds it neat and tidy that Mother Holda will bless you.  I hoped each year that she would bless us with a human child, but that didn’t happen.  So the crazy cleaning has fallen by the wayside, but I am still anxious to get up and clean the top of my kitchen cabinets before Yule starts.  But Jay will have to help me with that, so we will see. 

For the last, oh so many years, I have made sugar cookies for Christmas.  I always try to leave Mother Holda an offering of these cookies and milk on Mother’s night.  The next morning I remove the milk and pour it in her well, a sacred spot, in my little grove area, where my outside altar is.  I split the cookies between our fur children (7 dogs,3 goats and pig). 

I hate the commercialism of Christmas / Yule Tide.  Some of my Christian brothers and sisters get it right.  I feel most Americans today are missing the entire point of Christmas.  Excluding Christmas in July, in this country we start putting out Christmas stuff just as soon as the Halloween stuff is sold out.  Christmas commercials start before Thanksgiving, which has gone from a major holiday into a minor one.  I like my holidays one at a time, Halloween, Thanksgiving and then Christmas / Yule Tide.

We can’t even give thanks in this country for all we have, without being bombarded with what almost seems like the foreplay of Christmas.  This ecstatic rush of presents, and lights, and parties, and charging up one’s credit cards to keep up with the Jones, and so that no one in the family might for a moment, be denied the smallest things they want.  People fight each other over dolls and rolls of wrapping paper, that will all at some point be thrown away.  It all finally culminates in Christmas Eve / Morning with the ripping open of presents, and beleaguered now broke parents.  These happy children who have no value of a dollar, who as adults will be dismayed when they finally learn, they can’t have everything they want.  When the kids go to their room and the parents are left to clean up all the mess, they are as exhausted as if they have just had a long loving session.  And in a way they have.  They have been fucked by this idea of crash commercialism that we are feed as Americans.  Buy more and you will be happy!  It’s all about making the kids happy!  X marks the spot, sorry darling, but that’s not it.

Long before the myth of Santa, or of the Wiseman giving gifts to the Christ child, or of Odin and Holda in the Wild Hunt, it was about Winter.  We forget in our cushy lives of AC / Heat and ready available food supplies, that winter used to be the time when lots of people died, those most vulnerable among us, the young, and the old.  Presents were given at Winter Solstice, the start of winter, so one might SURVIVE to see the next spring.  Gifts were practical, warm clothes, good portions of food, blankets and furs to keep warm with.  Anything that might help that person you loved, get to the Spring.  Neighbors helping neighbors, family helping family, friends helping friends, no hospitality was to be refused even to one’s enemies during winter.  The most valuable resource we have, is each other, both now and then.

Parties were held in the north lands on Mother’s night to honor the mothers in our lives, both alive and long dead.  To honor the gift of life, and the sacrifices they made for us to be here.  I think of those Viking Mother’s often, in the dark, by a smoky fire, never quite warm, and never with quite a full stomach.  Spinning, knitting, weaving, a gift to keep a brother, a husband, or a daughter warm and to make it through to the warmth of Spring.  The mother’s worried then, if she could ration out the food they had stored up long enough, to get them to the first harvest, and to when the chickens would again lay eggs, and they would have fresh protein for their children and themselves.  During Yule the family would come to visit and gifts would be exchanged, it would be one of the last times they would see their families before Spring, because soon the snow would be so thick, that traveling would be almost impossible. 

So as you are maxing out your credit cards this year, standing in line at Wal-Mart reading this on your smart phone, I urge you to think, “Will this gift help the person I love get safely to the Spring?”  Maybe put back the Xbox that you can’t afford, and get them some fuzzy socks and a good book instead.  I’m just saying.

Last year Juno told me that she had never really had a Christmas, that her family had always been too poor.  So Jay and I gave her and Kay one.  Many poor kids grow up thinking that Santa doesn’t love them, or that they were not good enough to be given gifts at Christmas.  I hate that.  I hate that in this culture, some poor kids believe that no matter how good they are, they will not be rewarded by presents, because that is what our culture teaches them.  If you are good Santa will come, and give you these lavish gifts.  Maybe if we didn’t buy into all of this, and got back to what the root of what each of our holidays are, no matter your tradition, it might be better for all of us.  Me, I’m hoping for functionality and practicality this year, I am hoping for fuzzy socks.

Blessed Yule to all of you. 

Ilsa

Many thanks to my Heathen Brother Rob who proofed this for me. 

http://urglaawe.org/Englisch.html