I think I love Bing Crosby

There are days when all it takes to make me happy is an email. 

Dear Lulu,

Just to let you know that I have finished running the world (for the time being) from Madagascar, and will be returning home to you and ours, tomorrow.

Best Regards, Mr Dear Husband

The stress levels dropped back to normal… that is my normal stress level, which would be the equivalent of being held hostage during a bank hold-up for anyone else.

With the load lightened, I found my second wind.  The night was young, the kidlet tucked up in bed, and Bing Crosby was warbling away on the iPod.  Time to do a few chores.  It started with another batch of Christmas cookies, I had prepared the dough earlier, so this was very satisfying:

Last weekend, I was given some gorgeous new decorations made from Felt. who knew you could do so much with Felt.  This doesn’t look complicated, but it fell off about a dozen times while I was putting it up and was christened with flood of choice words!  Remember those felt picture games we had as kids?  I loved those:

What do you do with a glass vase and an abundance of Christmas tree ornaments?  Well you shove them all together, add some lights and Hey Presto!  Magic!  Ok, maybe not magic… man, you are a tough crowd.

 

Once I started, I couldn’t stop.  More things needed to be sorted, and I was wide awake.  Tackled the cupboard with the Christmas stash next.  I think we might have enough now?

Found this little Gingerbread house, just waiting to be put together, but my eyes were starting to get heavy and I was beginning to change lyrics to Bing’s tunes… and some of them weren’t very Christmasy at all.  Bing would have blushed!

Left the Pepparkakshus house for another day… oops!  it is already ‘another day’, and in just four hours I would be listening to the wake up call of the German weather report on the radio alarm.  An odd collection, redistributed to accommodate Christmas decorations, greeted me on the way to bed.  I always like to say “it takes all kinds”… and in this house, we have them all.  Good night. Sleep tight…

Oooooooooh the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightfuuuuuuul
And since we've no place to goooooooooo
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!

Kneading Help

“Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread: remade all the time, made new.” Og Mandino

Just in case it looks like this blog is going to become all whinging or whining. Or perhaps something like the local newspaper for the North Pole, I thought it might be time to toss in a few other thoughts.

I lived in Germany over 20 years ago, just for 18 months, with a small baby girl on my hip, in a tiny town outside Munich. It was tough. My German was limited, and I was pretty much alone. In this small town, everybody was about 15th generation, and outsiders were looked at with suspicion.

My first trip to the bakery ended in tears as I tried desperately to explain that I wanted 6 Brötchen. A shrug of the shoulders from across the counter. I could feel my face starting to colour up and my heart thumping in my chest.

“Ich möchte sechs Brötchen bitte”, I tried again, using my most winning smile. Nothing, nada, nix. So I tried pointing. Doing that weird thing that we do when trying to convey a message, all exaggerated and campy. It never occurred to me EVER to use English, that just felt like it would aggravate the situation even further. Finally, she took pity on me, gave a little snort, stuffed the bread rolls into a bag and handed them to me. I threw some coins in her direction and fled.

By the time I got home, I was rapidly heading into hysteria (as I am wont to do under stress). The words tumbled out of my mouth as fast as those bread rolls were chucked on the table. Mr Dear Husband was staring at me with that expression we normally reserve for the insane.

“Oh, I should have told you that down here in the South of Germany, they don’t call them Brötchen, they call them Semmel.”

He is lucky to be alive today.

In the end, as soon as we got the marching papers to move to Istanbul, I had our bags packed and waiting in the car before he had time to change his mind.

Today, it is different. I am different. The language is no longer a struggle (although it continues to have its moments). And I have lived in enough countries to recognise just how great it is here. I spend a lot of time noticing the little things that make life easier.

Like, window sills. Yep, love’em. Big wide window sills that make excellent spaces to put pots of flowers. Or pots of fresh herbs, or a few pretty things to look at…

“A little bit chatty”

“By learning to discover and value our ordinariness, we nurture a friendliness toward ourselves and the world that is the essence of a healthy soul.”  Thomas Moore

“A little bit chatty” was written on the first report card that Miss Eight ever brought home.  Even today, I can’t tell you what else the report said, most of it wonderful I suppose, but this, I remember.

It struck home with a blow.  Most of my life, I had pretty much the same thing written on every report card I ever brought home too.  The sound of my voice seemed to aggravate my teachers beyond despair, to the point, that a certain math teacher once resorted to throwing a chair at me, in a vain attempt to get me to shut up.

Recently, in a passing comment to Mr Dear Husband, I mentioned that people don’t seem very friendly at the supermarket.

“Well, what are you doing to them?”  He inched a little to the right, and put up his hands into a classic boxing pose.

“What do you mean doing?  I just chat to them while I am waiting in the queue!”  I am feeling a little indignant… could I have made another blunder in the complicate world of German etiquette?

Mr Dear Husband cleared his throat a little, took a deep breath… “It could be, in fact quite possible, well maybe…”

“Oh get on with it please!!”  Now I am sensing that something unpleasant is coming.

“Honey, people just don’t chat with complete strangers here.”  He started doing that squinty thing with his eyes… and twisting his hands together.

HUH? Confusion.  “How can it be that they don’t chat… what else is there to do while you are waiting in a queue?  It’s not like you can flick through the latest magazines as your groceries are shot-gunned through the Aldi checkout.”

Mr Dear Husband did that tiny shake of his head and slight nibbling on his bottom lip.  That is code for ‘No chance she is going to let me get away with this one’.  I let him go… very Diane Fossey of me.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised he was right.  The reactions to my ‘chattiness’ have ranged from a half-way friendly nod to outright hostility.  On one occasion, there I was just chatting away about some product or other with the lady in front (she was a non-German born chick too), when she mentioned that it wasn’t her groceries we were discussing.  I turned slowly to find the tallest woman on the planet staring down at me with such a grim face that it gave me nightmares for a week.  I didn’t even attempt to chat to her…

It is something so Australian to chat when you are standing in a queue, be it about the weather or the lousy service, what you are cooking for dinner tonight… it doesn’t matter, you just chat.

Germans don’t do chat, it would appear.  It goes a long way toward explaining why I get strange looks when they see me coming… the sort of looks usually reserved for the weird, wild-haired lady that lives with 47 cats.

Full as a Boot

Too full of cookies and goose to write anything worth reading, so I will just give you a photo post.  My camera is playing up, at least the Macro seems to be doing something weird, so they are not great, but you get the picture.

Went for a walk yesterday and fell over came across this branch.  It gave me an idea.  Turned out pretty good, I think! I can enjoy a few minutes of self appreciation before Mr Dear Husband arrives back from Madagascar and asks why there is a stick hanging in his living room.

This morning got off to cracking start.  Not sure if I dreamt it or it was real, but my door bell rang at 6:30am.  I lay in bed trying to work out what was real and what was not.  Figured that if there really was someone at the front door, they would press the button again… nothing happened so I went back to sleep… for about 14 minutes, then Miss 8 decided it was time to check out whether St Nikolaus had paid us a visit.  He had!

Once we had eaten our body weight in chocolate and biscuits, it was time to head over to the Outlaws for Lunch.  Miss Eight decided try on the Nikolaus decoration boot… then couldn’t get it off!  Whoops!  She pulled the “If you take my photo I am going to beat you up” face… so I did… Never dare me to do anything…

So then I suggested that we might look into cancelling Christmas this year, and she pulled her “this is what Mum looks like when she comes down for breakfast every morning” face…

You get what you pay for when shopping in discount stores for children.  It never pays to pick up the last kid on the shelf, marked down to $19.99

When the Mother Outlaw says “Your goose is cooked!” I get nervous.  I am pretty much everything she ‘didn’t’ want in a daughter-in-law.  It is a credit to that woman just how much she endures and still manages to smile when she is around me (personally I think she is plotting all the ways she can hook up her son with a good, catholic, German girl).  But hell!  The woman can cook!

When everyone else passed out after lunch, Miss Eight and I ploughed our way through another 20 batches of cookies.  My edible tree ornaments turned out fabulous… shame I forgot to put a hole in them before baking… guess we will just have to eat them all.

The big guy in Red

Being a mix of Australian and German, the whole deal with Santa, Nikolaus, Weihnachtsmann, Kristkind, etc has always been messy.

So we just enjoy ALL the Big Guys in Red.

The first is coming tonight. He sometimes brings a mate… a dark character called Knecht Ruprecht. It is the day of reckoning, when children are called on anything that Mum might have missed during the year. Before they go to bed, they polish their boots (hmmm gortex and boot polish, hello?) and leave them neatly in front of their bedroom door… with the hope they will wake the next morning and find them filled with lovely goodies. Nuts, clementines, chocolates, cookies and small gifts are the norm.

We started early. Jumped out of bed and fired up the oven. So far, we have managed to shake together a couple of batches of coconut macaroons (Miss 8 loves them), Vanilla Kipfler, and we have the dough resting in preparation for the edible Christmas tree ornaments. And just to make the house smell nice, we stuck cloves into oranges and mandarins, wrapped a ribbon around them and tied on a cinnamon stick.

George Michael (half of WHAM… who was the other guy?) is warbling away on the radio. Come on, sing with me. It has been ages since we had a singalong:

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
But the very next day, You gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I'll give it to someone special
Last Christmas, I gave you my heart
But the very next day, You gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I'll give it to someone special

Turkey in a Yellow Sack

“I'm happy that I have brought laughter because I have been shown by many the value of it in so many lives, in so many ways.” Lucille Ball

So here is how it went down.

There was a few more hours of frenzied panic, of measuring ovens, of searching for over-sized baking dishes. Then I could contain no more.  When in doubt, pass the buck.  There was an email sent:

Dear Mr Husband,

It would appear that I have made a slight error.  In place of the golden, delicious roast Turkey we were planning for Christmas lunch, I may have ordered a Pterodactyl.  Not sure that it is going to fit in the oven.  I know you are out running the world from Madagascar, but when you have a minute could you please fix it.

Signed, The Wife

And he did.  There is a lot to be said for having a husband that knows how to keep himself and his children safe from a marauding, hysterical female.

With that little job out of the way, it was time to move on to the next job on the list.  Rubbish. Yep, it has become the bane of my life.  I can remember living in Germany 20 years ago and being tormented by my vegetarian, eco, Greenie, bio, tree-hugging, organic, hand-woven, unwashed neighbour.  She would regularly go through our garbage bin, and selectively lay out any offending, incorrectly recycled items for the rest of the street to view.  I developed such an animosity toward her, that I often dreamt of sneaking down to her apartment and cutting the tassels off her undyed, hand-spun, hand-knitted beanie… for no other reason than it was just plain ugly and made her look like she was walking the earth with a dead squirrel on her head.

Sorting your garbage is almost a full time job in Germany.  Normally I wouldn’t make such a fuss, but after taking delivery of 160 boxes packed full of plastic and paper, well, quite frankly, I have recycling coming out the waazoo.  In addition, each delivery of white goods has included a substantial amount of polystyrene, which needs to be broken down and put into  a ‘Gelbe Sac’.  By the time I had used up all the yellow bags, the cellar was looking like a birthing centre for that creature that had its arse kicked by Sigourney Weaver in Alien.  But finally it was my turn to put them all out for collection.  I waited until after dark, in fear that the reaction from the neighbours would be more than I could take after the Turkey drama.  Then I stood nervously at the kitchen window waiting for the ‘truck’ to arrive… and at 6:54am this morning, it did.  Arrive that is… then it just kept driving… right on by my house…

PANIC!!! What the hell!  I pulled my coat over my PJ’s and dived through the door, ready to give chase to the incompetents.  As I turned through the front gate and started to sprint down the road in hot pursuit, I tripped over something.  A Yellow Sac… and not one of mine.  The blinking lights of the garbage truck turned the corner and I looked up the street to see that, in fact, ALL the Yellow Sacs were still there.  Hmmm… oops… “Oh Hi Mr-Neighbour- leaving-for-work & your lovely Mrs-Neighbour-who-likes-to-watch-through-the-net-curtains—Yep, just out for a little jog, yep… have a nice day too!”.

Twenty minutes later another truck arrived and dutifully collected all the pods yellow sacs.  The birthing centre is now closed for the holidays, and the people across the street were heard whispering something about ‘Lucille Ball” as I passed them by today.

Heartectomy

“Something about being with my mother for longer than an hour turns off my heart. For 24-48 hours after seeing her I feel nothing for nobody. Really. Nothing. I am like Spock. It is as if being with her gives me a heartectomy. I can't even feel love for He-weasel. It is always scary when it happens. Happily, my heart always comes back---at least so far it has.” La Belette Rouge

I read this on another blog, and it has stuck with me ever since. This morning I was grouchy, seriously grouchy. The sort of grouchy that can make a small girls’ beautiful, big, brown eyes fill up with tears and hurt. Inside of me is a pressure that I am creating myself. It is the ‘I want a Doris Day perfect Christmas’ syndrome. When, in fact, it is looking more like a ‘Marge Simpson Christmas’.

Mr Dear Husband has done a bunk. He is off running the world and won’t be back for two weeks… just four days before half of Australia arrives on my doorstep. You can imagine how that conversation went…

“Honey, I have to go to Madagascar (made that bit up to protect the innocent) again tomorrow.” He laid this on me about 9:30pm the eve before.

“Aha…” My nanna always told me, if you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all… But inside my head, I was having a serious wig-out. Visions of stuffing mince pies up his nose danced in my head.

Christmas without resentment. That would have to be the goal for the day. Resist the urge to curl up on the sofa and do nothing. To not eat all the chocolate that has been safely hidden away for St. Nikolaus in three days. I’m thinking I might need one of those poodle skirts that Doris always wore, and some Gwen Stefani Red Lipstick… perhaps that would help my heart to ‘come back to me’.

More important than that, I need someone to reassure me that I have not ordered a turkey that will be too big to fit in the oven!! Might have gone a little overboard, we are 9 adults and 2 children and I have a 7.5kg (or 16 pound) beast being delivered. Too much? What have I done! It’s freaking me out!