Traditions by Konnie Enos

Last week sometime I got into a conversation with one of my daughters who brought up family traditions and asked me if we practiced any traditions from my family during this season.

“No.”

That’s the simple answer.

Yes, like most Christians today we put up a tree and hang stockings. We buy gifts to exchange with our loved ones. And yes, Santa still comes to visit.

We did all that growing up.

Things we didn’t do?

We never really did an advent calendar. The closest we came was those chains they’d have us make at school and more than half the time we’d forget to remove the links and have to count the days remaining anyway.

I don’t remember my mother ever sitting down with us on Christmas Eve and reading us the First Christmas story out of Luke. In fact, I can’t think of a time my father did it with us, though it’s far more likely that he did.

I can remember my step-mother reading Twas the Night Before Christmas to us, but I’m not sure it was on Christmas Eve and I’m certain it wasn’t a yearly thing.

I do remember doing some traditional things growing up.

I remember one year, with our mother, doing an advent wreath.

I remember our step-mother’s near nightly “tricks” to keep the little ones believing “elves” were watching them. Believe me when I say it’s far more pleasant to wake up to find a piece or two of candy in your shoes than to find peanut shells in them. And mind you, this was in the Eighties, long before Elf on a Shelf was invented.

As I’ve thought about, I could come up with only one thing that has become a tradition in our family. I even know where it got started.

I learned a long time ago how to wrap most anything, neat and tight. But the most important thing I learned to do was to tape. Every. Single. Seam. Why do we tape them so well?

Our super snoop brother.

I think he was about three when he started successfully finding any and all hidden “Santa” gifts weeks before the actual event and telling his three big sisters exactly what they were getting from the “big guy”, who, he informed us, had to be our mother.

I think we eventually convinced him we didn’t want the surprise spoiled but it was always obvious he was still very much into finding out what the gifts were long before the event.

Once, our mother curbed this tendency by hiding our gifts at someone else’s place. Our step-mother taught us how to wrap gifts tightly, sealing every seam, so he couldn’t peak without it being obvious. She also came up with the ingenious idea to mislabel all our brother’s gifts one year, though clearly identifying them by using a special type of tag, so that he’d think none of the gifts were for him. That year he was surprised to find anything under the tree for him.

And yes, I still wrap like this. I’m sure Bonnie does too and I think I’ve passed it on to my children if the way the gifts we got from my oldest daughter this year were wrapped is any indication.

As we were unwrapping my youngest son quipped. “Mom must have wrapped this, there isn’t any seams.”

Most of his gifts were wrapped by his sisters and his aunt. I only wrapped one of them, and to be honest nearly every gift I opened had the seams well covered.

The only real tradition is as a family we try to read the First Christmas story out of Luke and I read Twas the Night Before Christmas to them. One year I read it five times, because they were at their aunt’s and I ended up being unable to get there, and their aunt didn’t have a speaker phone.

Thanks to speaker phones, this year, I read it to all my children, and my son-in-law, in just one reading.

Of course, because our oldest is expecting, we’ve talked about traditions and which ones to carry on and even what to change. She and her husband are discussing which things they grew up with that they will continue with their children and which ones they won’t.

Though, considering how much she loves hearing the story each year, and the fact she already owns the book, I’m sure the tradition of reading Twas the Night Before Christmas along with the story in Luke, will continue with her family.

As I finish writing this, my thoughts go to friends who have lost loved ones this week. Paul, you and yours are in my prayer.

Everyone, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Happy Kwanzaa, and Happy New Year. Also happy birthday to my wonderful son-in-law.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.

Merry Christmas by Bonnie Le Hamilton

At this moment, I’m at a point where I both can’t believe two weeks has past since my last post and knowing that much time has to have past because of everything that’s happened since then.

To say the least, I’ve been busy. Okay, not busy on the level of Konnie’s life. Frankly, I don’t think I’d survive that level of busy, but I have had things on my calendar pretty much every day for the last couple of weeks. In fact, there are a few things on my calendar that I didn’t actually manage to do for one reason or another.

My calendar is still quite full. And by full, I mean I have at least one event or appointment a day, along with chores and or errands listed most days. Konnie is probably reading this and wishing her calendar looked like mine.

Busy is relative. I don’t have kids to run hither and thither. I do have gifts to wrap, or rather I did. Thankfully, I finished that – yesterday. I also managed to get all my gifts shipped yesterday. Which for me was quite a feat because I had a dentist appointment and company for dinner yesterday.

As I told my guests last night, the longest I’d managed to sit down all day, up to that point, was when I was in the dentist chair. I did manage to sit for longer after my guests left, but I was so exhausted by that point I could barely think. I managed to do one more crochet project and talk to Konnie, but I didn’t manage anything else.

Yeah, I know Konnie accomplished a lot more yesterday then I did, because she always does, let alone she was still up when I went to bed. I could not handle that.

And I’m not sure how I’ll get through this weekend because I’m double booked just a little bit. You see, my sister-in-law roped me into helping her with a craft fair this weekend – Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Three days, the Sunday before Christmas, so I also have choir practice Saturday and of course 

church on Sunday.

Thankfully, my sister-in-law is okay with me being gone for a couple hours those days, because I was committed to the choir long before she asked me to help her with this craft fair, but this craft fair is why I was trying to finish one more crochet project last night. I haven’t got much, but I’ve got a verity of things to sell and I will be doing this with my sister-in-law, so she has some things to sell too. And of course, we won’t be the only ones there.

Anyway, at this point, I’m hoping my life will settle down a little after Christmas, but I’m not sure it will because, one of the things I have managed to do in the last two weeks is buy a car. Yeah, that’s right, I’m mobile again, which is actually why I managed to get so much done yesterday. I didn’t have to wait around for rides, just the dentist.

And I still have my Christmas baking to do. Plus, my sister-in-law and I talked about driving around to see the lights sometime before Christmas, we’re running out of time to do that. And I may actually have to eliminate something else from my calendar, because I don’t think I have enough time for everything. After all, I’ll have to do dishes, and laundry, and all those sorts of chores in there too. I may live alone, but I still need to do those. Not as often as they are done in Konnie’s house, but there is that issue of how many people live with her. (I'm not going to try to count animals.)

And I’m running out of time for the things on my agenda today, so I’m cutting this post short.

Happy writing everyone and Merry Christmas!

Mom Mode, Again by Konnie Enos

Okay, confession time.

This is my fifth attempt at writing my post and all the others crashed and burned. Usually because they started sounding like pure drivel. Though at least twice it was because I could not make any sense of my point or how to get there.

At about two this morning I decided it was because I was just too tired so I closed my laptop and went to bed, for a few measly hours of rest. I’m not sure four hours of fitful, and interrupted, sleep is very helpful.

Yes, I knew I had a post to get up. I’ve known for a couple of months now I’d be doing the post this week. However, for the last few weeks to a month, every time I need to get things done, and even plan time to do it, someone comes up with “but I need this and you have to do this for me”.

Instead of doing finances or paying bills, I’ve had to drive people to or from appointments or school or take them shopping. Unfortunately, tis the season.

Every single time I thought there was nothing on the schedule that I had to worry about one or more of my family members would come up to me and say they needed, or wanted, to go someplace. In a couple of instances they told me we had to get something done and there wasn’t a lot of free time to do it in.

As a result of taking care of my family’s needs, I have missed my writer’s group meeting at least three weeks in a row now.

Even when I’ve wanted to write, and thought I might have time, what “free time” I had was spent trying to catch up on finances and clearing out my emails, which I’m still behind on, so I haven’t done any writing. I can’t even remember the last time I opened any of my files.

This busy mom mode has gone on so long I’m beginning to feel I will always be running my kids hither and thither and have no time for me.

Pretty bad.

Especially when you consider three of my four children still living at home are high school graduates and two of those are in college.

I mean they are old enough to be on their own, paying their own bills, and taking care of their own transportation without bugging mom, or dad for that matter.

But even knowing they could move out at any time or that our youngest is a senior in high school and so very close to old enough didn’t leave me with expecting any reprieve, most particularly not in the near future.

My youngest hates both school and change and has declared he was never moving out of this house.

Of the other three, my oldest daughter still at home does want to move out and is trying to work out her plans to do so. She keeps hitting roadblocks.

My youngest daughter has had her plan in place for years and is following it step by step. She graduates from the local (read inexpensive) community college in May and will then move on to university, armed with a degree which can get her employment which pays well while she continues her education. She’s determined not to incur any student loan debt on her way to getting her DVM if at all possible.

So of those three I have known for some time my girls are planning on moving out, just not exactly sure when. Sometime in the next year? However, I felt I would be stuck with my son for life.

There is also my oldest son.

For years he told us he was moving out as soon as he turned 18 even though that was in the middle of his senior year in high school.

Then he told us he’d move out when his best friend turned 18 so they could move in together. So a few months after his birthday.

Then he said they were waiting until graduation.

Then they were waiting until after his friend returned from spending the summer with his brother.

Then they were waiting until they got jobs.

Somewhere in there my son decided to join the Army instead, something he’s still working on but he’s also broke.

He keeps talking about getting a job but so far he’s given more talk than action.

For a young man who insisted he’d move out as soon as he was old enough, he now seems quite content to stay right where he is, because his eighteenth birthday was last year.

Maybe by his next birthday.

Happy birthday Anthony.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.

Time and Distance by Bonnie Le Hamilton

Have you ever stopped to think about how much time it takes you to get from point A to point B? or how much time it takes to get from point A to point B then to point C then point D, and finally back to point A?

Trying to figure out how long certain things will take, depends on distance, how large of a city (population), and even the number of people with you and how many places you’re planning to go. All of which add time to how long it will take. And your character running into someone else will add more time to the trip.

Which is what Konnie and I were talking about not too long ago. She said something about my characters getting too much done in one day. But, well, I always think her characters take too long to do simple tasks.

I’m guessing that both of us need to work on it, but in a lot of cases we’re guessing how long a certain action or event will take, we have no real way to tell us how long it will really take. There are some things that are easy to guess, while others are not so easy.

I mean I can have my characters drive across town in twenty minutes or less, but I generally put my stories in small towns, that’s what I know. That’s where I live and I rarely put my characters in larger cities. I may have lived in those larger cities in the past, but I don’t now, and I’ve lived most of my life in small towns, so its just easier to put my characters in small towns.

Konnie on the other hand lives in a large metropolis. For Konnie, she can drive ten miles in any direction from her home, and still be in the city. I can drive that far and be out in the countryside, sometimes in less distance than that. For Konnie, traffic is a constant problem, and traffic jams happens, routinely.

The last time I saw anything close to a traffic jam around here, a train had just gone through town, shutting off roadways for several minutes. Cars were backed up a whole quarter of a mile! 😊 There was once (years ago obviously) when Tom and I were watching the news and the reporter was standing with interstate behind him talking about proposed construction in that area and how it would affect rush hour traffic.

As he talked cars were zooming past him at about one every two to three seconds (it was rush hour). Then the reporter drew everyone’s attention to those cars, saying, “As you can see traffic is bumper to bumper right now.”

I turned to Tom and asked, “If that’s bumper to bumper, what do they call it when your bumper is literally touching the bumper in front of you?”

He said, “Around here that’s a fender bender,” deadpan and straight-faced. And it still makes me laugh because it’s so true.

At any rate, travel time is affected by so many different factors making it hard to figure out while writing a story. And of course, there is the issue of actually doing the shopping, and how long it will take. I’m sure some people think it takes them a matter of minutes to do their grocery shopping, but I’m telling you, I rarely finish in under an hour, and I’m just shopping for me. Think about how long it takes all those people who actually fill their cart, or even more than one cart?

How do you figure that out? I’m not sure. I guess. Maybe I guess wrong sometimes, but I think it’s possible to go too far in the other direction where you have characters barely managing a couple of things in a busy day. I manage to accomplish more on my busy days than my lazy days, because I keep going, keep working.

But when writing my stories, I need to remember that my characters aren’t working alone, and those characters they interact with might be having a bad day, or my character didn’t realize how long it would take to chat or whatever.

However, I think sometimes that Konnie is too vague about the passage of time, and she has her characters accomplishing too few things in a single day. If you have your character taking a half hour just to brush his teeth, you have two valid choices, either this is a character flaw of some importance to your story, or you have some editing to do.

Anyway, consider the time it is taking your characters to accomplish tasks, look at them closely. Is it taking too much time? Is it taking too little time? And how can it be fixed?

Happy writing everybody! 

Of Being a Busy Mom, Again by Konnie Enos

I kid you not, I was eating breakfast this morning and it suddenly dawned on me that it was Wednesday, and it was at least a quarter after seven and it was my turn to post. A post mind you which I had not written yet because I was dealing with my daughter’s doctor’s appointments.

She had one on Monday all the way over in Las Angeles which required packing, planning, a hotel, the whole thing. What we didn’t plan on was the doctor she went to see admitting her to the hospital. Yes, I’m still in Las Angeles and I was supposed to be home yesterday. I still don’t know when I will get home.

Anyway, as I was eating my breakfast I realized I needed to post something and quick, so here it is. I had plans for a longer post but life got in the way and I never managed to get it written. The woes of a busy mom.

To all you NaNoWriMoer's, I hope you are successful in making it to the end.

To my middle brother, happy birthday, today.

To my husband, happy 28^th anniversary, last Friday.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.

Thanksgiving and Birthdays by Bonnie Le Hamilton

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and I certainly have a lot to be thankful for. I could make a very long list indeed, but what is on my mind right now is something which is happening next week. It’s the birthday of one of my little brothers. The middle one. The one who came the day after Thanksgiving the year he was born, something his mother will never let him forget since she went into labor just as her Thanksgiving feast ended.

But what I remember most about him was his enjoyment of riding in his stroller. When our family first moved to Rexburg Idaho, he was eighteen months old and he loved his stroller to the point that when anyone headed for the front door, he run out and climbed into it (it was the old style which didn’t fold). This made things difficult for our father and his mother when they left for work, but for the rest of us, it just meant the first teenager to leave the house during the day had to take Ben with them.

Quite often it was me. I ended up taking him with me three or four times a week. Now let me remind you, I was fifteen back then, and well endowed. More than once someone thought Ben was my son. I can’t tell you how many times someone asked me, “How old is your son?”

I’d always answer, “My little brother is eighteen months old.”

Sometimes, just to make it clear, I’d add my age, and when that didn’t work, I added my status as a virgin, but it was only once I had to do that. It was Rexburg after all, and most the people were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and they don’t even let their children date until they're sixteen. I might add I wasn’t a member yet, but I was a good girl.

Of course, that was also the summer when my then only two brothers walked to the park a block away and returned with one huge dog trailing them! Once upon a time I wrote about that dang dog. I might add I’m not a dog person, never have been, and I really don’t like large dogs – they scare me. And Jim Boy was exceptionally large.

Later on we learned his size was due to being half timber wolf! Yeah, he was big, but he won the heart of my stepmom that day by stopping Ben from falling off the steps. Dang dog.

Though that’s another story, getting back to memories of Ben. He, being so young, came up with nicknames his older siblings,but he had hearing problems, so he didn't talk much beyond those nicknames, and it didn’t help that there were so many people in the family, we got used to his hand gestures. And even after his hearing was fixed, when he was around four, there were still some words he wasn't saying.

Namely Dadda. He started with Momma but then went on to those nicknames; Be for his big brother, Le for me and De for Konnie, and I believe he called Jacki Jay, but he hadn’t said Dadda yet. And Dad was getting annoyed about it to the point that he told Bryon, Konnie, and me that he’d do the chores for one week for whoever got Ben to say Dadda.

Several weeks later I managed it while Dad was at work, so I called him and got Ben to say, “Hi, Dadda,” into the phone. Then I pointed out to my dear father which of his twin daughters had managed it, so there was no mistake as to who earned one week without chores.

Near the end of the week Dad complained at dinner about the bathroom not being clean and demanded to know whose chore it was; my stepmom smiled and said, “Yours, dear.” To which everyone else agreed, but Bryon told me I should have held off and let Dad know I’d won the deal when my chore was dishes for the week. Which wouldn’t have worked because in the rotation we had bathroom came after dishes.

Ben was a cute kid, and sweet, my sister’s and I used to sing “Close to You” to him all the time. He isn’t so little anymore, in fact now he has a sweet little teenage daughter. Where did the time go?

And right now, I need to get baking, so happy Thanksgiving and happy writing everyone. 😊

The Name’s the Issue by Konnie Enos

Back in mid-September Dear Abby responded to “Making Life Easy”, a father concerned about his wife, who was raised in India, giving their children Indian names. Dear Abby said, among other things, that foreign names are difficult to pronounce and spell and the children would be teased unmercifully.

According to a more recent article on Newser by Rob Quinn this answer created a firestorm with many readers accusing Pauline Phillips, the writer of Dear Abby, of being racist.

If you read through the comments on the Dear Abby site, many of the readers point out easy to pronounce and spell Indian names. One I truly love is Indira, I’ve used it one of my stories. In the same story I have a brother and sister named Aiman and Amita Patel. If any of you can remember the old TV show “Numbers” the pretty female who ended up being the love interest for the leading character was named Amita. I also use the name Sumati in my story.

In the comments on the Dear Abby column one of the other names mentioned is Ravi, which is a totally easy name to spell and pronounce. Then there is my O.B. I readily admit I refuse to try and pronounce his last name. I can say his first name and so far I haven’t run into a single person who didn’t know who Dr. Nadar is.

So spelling and pronouncing some foreign names isn’t impossible.

The other issue was teasing.

When I was in fifth grade several members of our class ended up with nicknames. One girl, whose name was Monica Marsh, was nicknamed Harmonica Marshmallow.  A boy named Scott was called Scotch Tape while one, who had shown up to school one day with a red nose because of the cold and had the unfortunate name of Rudolph was called Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. My sister and I also got teased unmercifully, but usually, because we’re a pair. I ended up being called Clyde, as in “Bonnie and Clyde”. As you can see having perfectly ordinary European sounding names didn’t get any of us out of being teased.

Of course just saying European names would be much easier to spell is completely overlooking perfectly ordinary names which are either hard to spell or have several different common spellings. Or, like my name, not spelled in a common way.

I could not spell several of my nieces’ and a great-nieces’ names for years, not until my own children were old enough to read and write. They told me how to spell them. Why? Because my husband’s family (it’s his side) just kept telling me to sound it out. I had no clue and the one girl has a perfectly ordinary European name.

I am extremely aware of the fact you will have to spell your name for people regularly if it is unusual or uncommonly spelled.

One of the funniest stories I tell my kids is about the time Bonnie and I and our younger brother went to enroll in our new high school in the town we’d just barely moved too.

The secretary, after establishing we were siblings and new to the area and needed to enroll in school, turned to me and asked me my name. I told her, but did not spell it. She wrote down my first and middle name exactly how she thought they would be spelled then asked how to spell our last name.

 I could see what she had written so after clearly pointing out our last name was two easily spelled four letter words, I said, “You spelled the rest of it wrong.”

By the time she was finished writing our names down she was all but moaning. Our brother’s first name is unusually spelled and, of course, Bonnie’s name matches mine letter for letter other than the initials, so her middle name isn’t spelled how you would expect it to be.

Now my second daughter has a perfectly ordinary first and middle name. There are three, yes I said three, different common ways to spell her first name and two common ways to spell her middle name. Not uncommon, not unusual. They are the normal ways people spell those names.

As one of the commentators on the Dear Abby column put it, “if you don’t know, ask.”

It’s as simple as that.

Beyond that, why can’t parents choose names that mean something to them?

I personally like the name Talitha. It’s an ancestral name and from what my daughter has learned of her story, she was one amazing woman.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.