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Tag Archives: holidays

to drive the cold winter away

23 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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holidays

It might be forecast to reach seventy degrees tomorrow here in Boston, but nevertheless it will still be Christmas Eve and our household is ready for a week’s quiet vacation here at home with the cats. Plans include the carol service broadcast from King’s, reading, quilting, Murdoch Mysteries, writing drabbles for our TwelvetideDrabbles2015 challenge, and doing our holiday shopping, wrapping, and mailing of Christmas parcels.

Our hallway is slowly filling with Holiday greetings… pic.twitter.com/iX6FcZpR42

— AnnaClutterbuck-Cook (@feministlib) December 20, 2015

It’s been lovely to get cards from you all, adding to the festive decorations in all hallway (above batting level for curious kittens).

A better picture of @StillLifeFarm handiwork on its way home. pic.twitter.com/AYzlidXCPj

— AnnaClutterbuck-Cook (@feministlib) December 12, 2015

This year, we’ve branched out into a balsam, juniper, and winterberry “swag” from Stillman’s, our CSA farm, and it’s making the apartment smell like Christmas (at least we hope so; both of us have been stuffy with colds since we brought it home!).

Advent calendar at the Clutterbuck-Cooks, day twenty-three pic.twitter.com/3R7vd0g4bQ

— AnnaClutterbuck-Cook (@feministlib) December 23, 2015

And the advent calendar has been steadily counting down the days. Today was our last day of work for 2015 and we’re looking forward to closing out the old and welcoming in the new as the days slowly, imperceptibly, begin to grow longer.

May all of you have a safe and restorative holiday season. See you in 2016.

turning thirty-four: history without nostalgia

30 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in life writing

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holidays

Today is my thirty-fourth birthday. I’ve reached a point in a human life where you can start measuring things in decades: ten since I last traveled to…; fifteen years since I wrote….; twenty years since I first read…; twenty-five years ago I first saw… which is the blink of an eye in history-time, but kind of daunting in terms of individual lives.

Except I find that I’m not particularly daunted, looking back over my own lives past. I own them – they don’t feel distant from who I am today in any disorienting sort of way. But they are firmly past.

Earlier this winter I found myself at a function for a friend of mine that took place on the campus where I completed my graduate studies. I rarely return there, these days, and when I do it’s always disorienting — because that landscape belonged to a different chapter of my existence. I find it holds little interest to me know, positive or negative. I am lacking in nostalgia for its contours or content.

I’ve similarly never — never! — returned to our old neighborhood since we left last May. In the weeks leading up to our move I was intensely nostalgic about the place and the experiences we had had there. Since moving, I’ve hardly looked back.

I’ve been mulling over this question of personal nostalgia this season and wondering what place it has in my life. There are many ways I continue to feel deeply connected to the landscapes and experiences of my past; it can sometimes be physically painful, even, to come across reminders of places and people I used to experience daily intimacy with. I will never stop missing, for example, the Michigan landscapes of my childhood. There is a part of me that only awakens when I am on Oregon’s high desert. Cumbria (where I spent the week of my 25th birthday) was a combination of foreign land and familiar that I have never experienced at quite the same pitch in any other locale.

Yet I do find I am at peace with there where and the when I am now: I don’t feel anxious looking back at my own past, nor overly distressed looking forward into the future.

My parents visited us in Boston last week, and we spent several days in a shuttered, off-season Provincetown. On Friday my parents and I walked out along the seashore to Race Point lighthouse, automated since the 1970s, where one may pay to stay for the week in the keeper’s house or the newly renovated whistle shed.

Since I was three years old and first saw Pete’s Dragon I’ve harbored the desire to live in a lighthouse (if you haven’t read Peter Hill’s Stargazing I highly recommend it as a love letter to the near-extinct profession!). In the early months of our relationship, Hanna and I played a fantasy game constructing our future together as lighthouse keeper librarians. Both of us are drawn to the solitude of place which lighthouse locations often provide. Perhaps in our forties, I found myself thinking. Perhaps in our middle age.

Whether or not the lighthouse fantasy per se ever becomes a reality, it seemed a mark of good health to be thinking of all the things that may yet come to be. And also like a mark of good health that, lighthouse or not, I’m interested in what the future will hold. I’m down with what these coming decades will have to offer.

new year’s eve epiphany presenting!

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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cat blogging, holidays

Given that the last few days of 2014 has kicked our asses, it was nice to wake up this morning feeling halfway normal and be able to walk out in the winter sunshine for breakfast at Fazenda and a visit to Harvest Co-op for groceries and Papercuts JP for a few final Christmas-cum-Epiphany presents. This evening, after naps, Teazle and Gerry assisted us in preparing hot cocoa mix to be included in some of the Epiphany parcels.

Has there ever been a prouder kitten? We think not.

Teazle wishes you all a 2015 full of muttering to yourself, eating things not meant for consumption, chasing your buddy’s tail, touching your toes to your nose while you sleep, and going out … and in … and out … and in … and out.

christmas on minden st. [photo post]

25 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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boston, cat blogging, holidays, photos

It was raining steadily in Jamaica Plain when I woke up this morning. While Hanna slept in, recovering from a long night of bad dreams and insomnia, I unboxed the gifts that had arrived in the mail. We’d left them packaged until this morning because Teazle (as you will see below) loves ribbon.

One of our neighbors had departed yesterday, leaving a small tree “gratis” out on the curb, which we rescued and put out on the back porch. We left it undecorated so Teazle wouldn’t electrocute herself.

Last night I made us tea and thumbprint cookies rolled in coconut and filled with wild blueberry jam. They turned out a bit on the toasty side, but that really only enhanced the coconut flavor.

Once Hanna had woken up and done yoga, we sat down for our eggnog au lait, corn honey muffins, and of course unwrapping of packages. Teazle helped.

Y’all are so generous! Epiphany packages and thank yous will be in the post before our Christmas vacation is finished, but in the meantime some thank you snapshots . . .

Who doesn’t need TARDIS (TARDII?) Christmas lights to adorn their houseplants?

. . . and Hanna’s face lit up when she unwrapped this adorable coloring book . . .

Having a mother-in-law continually working on spinning, dyeing, knitting, weaving projects means that Christmas is often full of new handmade things to keep us warm and our home beautiful.

My brother and sister-in-law sent, among other small goodies, this delightful tin ornament that we’ve hung on the knob of a kitchen cupboard, where it swings in the heat from the stove.

Art from my parents (right) and brother and sister-in-law (left) gave us an excuse to finally get out the stepladder and move our collection of stuffed creatures up atop the kitchen cupboards where Teazle cannot steal them for cat toys.

Yes, the rabbit print does — delightfully! — proclaim “fuck you.” And the print on the right is this whimsical Kliban.

Now there is a cake in the oven, Gerry is asleep on a kitchen chair, I have a glass of Merlot, and am off to find a broadcast of Handel’s Messiah or similar before settling in to finish a crocheting project or perhaps a bit of steampunk YA for the late afternoon.

This has been a photo post from Hanna, Anna, and the cats. Hope all is well with you and yours.

twelve days of christmas

24 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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holidays

100_4260Merry Christmas Eve to one and all!

This year, Hanna and I have twelve days off between Christmas Eve and January 5th, when our libraries open back up for the new year. We’re looking forward to doing … not very much. 2014 whupped us good and hard, as it did many folks in our circle, and we’ve chosen to clear the final days of the year as a time and place of rest and recovery. I hope that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, and whomever you’ve chosen to share those activities with, is exactly where you want or need to be this season. Be enough. Care for yourselves. See you on the flipside.

(Except maybe for some photos … if this damnable rain clears or snow begins to fall!)

movienotes: miracle on 34th street

22 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in media

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history, holidays, movies

Hanna and I watched Miracle on 34th Street over the weekend — the proper 1947 version, of course! — and it was interesting to consider some of the adult characters and their storylines in what is on its surface billed as a feel-good children’s story about wish fulfillment and belief and hope and goodwill during the holidays.

In the twenty minutes before the workday begins, here are some “history hat” observations… Continue reading →

more self-care december

12 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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family, holidays, work-life balance

100_1952

Snow falling in Norridgewock (Maine), December 2011.

Yesterday I wrote about the end-of-year pressures the holiday season creates in our culture — compulsive happiness, travel and social stress, gift-giving dilemmas and demands — and some of the opting out we’re doing this year. But I’m not a total sourpuss when it comes to Christmas. It was a magical time of year for me as a child, and not solely (or even primarily) because of the prospect of opening presents on Christmas morning. I liked the rituals of the season: the activities and pleasures enjoyed between Thanksgiving and New Year’s that recurred year after year, could to a certain extent by counted on — familiar, with subtle differences. A unique advent calendar every year; a new Christmas cookie recipe. Attending to the season is one way of slowing down, of mindfulness, during otherwise hectic times.

Here’s a list of five things I particularly appreciate about this pivot-point of the year. Continue reading →

self-care in december

11 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in think pieces

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depression, holidays, work-life balance

100_2824

Fenway Victory Gardens in Snow, December 2007 (photograph by the author).

I’m home this afternoon with an anxiety-ridden wife, trying to help keep the white noise of depression at bay. We’re watching Emma and Grandpa while Hanna dozes on my lap and I catch up on emails and a few work-related tasks.

I’m so thankful for a flexible-ish work schedule and understanding colleagues; it means so much to me that I’m not in a position of having to choose between my job and my family.

I’ve been thinking a lot this month about the stress of the holiday season — in part because Hanna and I are doing what we can to avoid it this year. After our extended visit to my parents’ last December-January (thank you polar vortex!) and a lot of additional, stressful, travel in 2014 we decided to stay put in our new home this Christmas. We sorely need the ten days of holiday leave to just be as a family, without the scramble of schedules and press of adult responsibilities. We’re using our advent calendars to count down to the solace of this time together (twelve days to go!) and looking forward to being quiet and in place.

Another aspect of slowing down for the season has been the decision to not rush holiday gift-giving. The members of my writing group, #firstthedraft, have been talking this week about gift-giving, gift-receiving, and the December holidays. We hold an informal weekly chat, to keep our virtual community connected, and this week the conversation evolved into a discussion about the stress and expense of gift-giving for many of our little families. While I completely understand why families with children feel both pleasure and pressure to engage in gift exchanges in December, it struck me that one of the freedoms of adulthood is the ability to step back from the seasonal rush and choose to select and give gifts outside of a strict timetable.

Hanna and I do still send treats to our close friends and relatives during midwinter. But this year it won’t be happening before Christmas — I couldn’t face the coordination of selection, purchase, wrapping, and the trek to the post office. So our families and friends will be getting a surprise in the mail in early-to-mid January instead.

The end of the year, and the winter season (at least for those in the northern hemisphere) is a really difficult one for many people … it’s kind of odd that as a culture we’ve chosen it as a time in which to pressure people into increased sociality, travel, expense, and enforced cheer.

Perhaps the holiday festivities help some among us get through the darkest days of the year. But those traditions don’t help everyone. What do all of you do to combat the December blues (if you get them)?

wedding anniversary the second

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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art, domesticity, family, holidays, move2014, wedding

100_4267

As this post goes live, Hanna and I are on our way to Northampton, Mass. to enjoy lunch at the Lhasa Cafe and a wander with friends in celebration of our second wedding anniversary.

31169-tattoocalligraphy

I spent some of yesterday hanging art on our walls (finally!) including the framed tattoo concept drawings my father did for our wedding tattoos, and my sister-in-law Renee’s two landscapes — one painted in honor of her marriage to my brother (9/9) and one in honor of our marriage (9/14). We’ve hung them in a triptych on the bedroom wall (pictured above); they face this housewarming gift from my parents, who obviously know their daughter and daughter-in-law well: Continue reading →

vacation reading! (aka #bibliojoy)

12 Friday Sep 2014

Posted by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook in our family

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books, holidays

22024-book_cat

Toby camouflaged as a book in my pre-Boston library! Very sneaky.

Hanna and I are starting our vacation-at-home today, and will be enjoying a wage-work-free ten days here in JP while Hanna puts on her historian’s hat to finish a conference paper on memes in Irish nationalists’ life writing (damn cool, huh?) and I get my reading on. I super happy to be spending ten days reading books that I specifically do not plan on reviewing. Anywhere. I need to do some reading purely for fun, and that’s what this vacation is gonna be about.

I’ve made some heavy use of the delightful Brookline Public Library’s inter-library loan system and assembled myself the following titles:

Briggs, Patricia. Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson. Ace, 2014.

Feder, Ellen K. Making Sense of Intersex: Changing Ethical Perspectives in Biomedicine. Indiana University Press, 2014.

Harris, Charlaine and Toni L. P. Kelner. Home Improvement: Undead Edition. Ace, 2011.

Kohn, Alfie. The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Children and Parenting. Da Capo Press, 2014.

Rybczynski, Withold. Home: A Short History of an Idea. Viking, 1986.

Susanka, Susan. Not So Big Solutions for Your Home. Taunton Press, 2002.

And we will also be binge-watching season two of Orphan Black which has been sitting on my desk since mid-July. Hell yeah.

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"the past is a wild party; check your preconceptions at the door." ~ Emma Donoghue

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