Archive for December, 2024

Life

Living in a Christmas Movie

I haven’t done my usual binge of TV Christmas movies this year, and that may be because I feel like I’m living one. I’m the city girl who moved to a quaint little mountain town that has a bunch of customs and festivals. I feel like a Hallmark movie is going to break out at any moment.

I’ve spent the last couple of Saturdays caroling in the picturesque Victorian downtown full of cute little shops. There’s a downtown music school that puts this together, supposedly for their students, but they welcome the whole community to join in. There’s a bit of warming up and practice at the music school, then wandering the downtown area and pausing to sing. It was so much fun. Just about everyone in the group was a singer with some kind of training or choir experience, so we were throwing in things like harmonies and descants, and it sounded really good. People stopped to record us, and a lot of people took pictures. We added to the ambience for holiday shopping. Last Saturday, there were a number of events and other things going on downtown as part of the shopping day, so we ended up meeting with Father Christmas and “Merri Christmas” (his wife), who were dressed in Elizabethian-style attire (appropriate for the home of the American Shakespeare Center). Then just down the block we ran into the Grinch and Santa Claus. Santa was a signing Santa doing an event at the local Club for the Deaf, and he joined in with us, “singing” along in sign language. It turned out the Grinch could sign, too, and Santa and the Grinch were having conversations across the street, but I don’t know what they said. (I really need to learn sign language because there’s a large Deaf population in this town and all I can do is finger spell.) After roaming the main downtown area, we passed through the winter farmer’s market, sang a few songs inside the glass studio, where they already had some musicians playing (they accompanied us), and then made a stop at the brewpub, where they had a Christmas market in the beer garden. We sang for their Facebook Live to promote the market, then we had cocoa or beer before heading on to sing for diners in a restaurant, and we wrapped up at a spot where they have one of those public pianos on the sidewalk. It was all very fun and festive.

A group of people stand on the steps of an ornate early 20th century bank building, dressed for cold weather, holding music books. An old-fashioned Father Christmas in a fur hat stands with them.
Father Christmas (on the right) joined us for caroling in front of the old bank building. I’m the one in the long black coat in the middle.

Another tradition they have here is a holiday display along the road that runs through the park. Businesses, organizations, and individuals can set up displays, and the city provides electrical connections. We had a relatively warm evening this week, so I walked it. Some of the displays were blatant advertising, some were traditional Christmas scenes, some were pretty clever, some were pretty. As I walked around the loop, the Christmas movie was writing itself in my head. In the movie, there would be a prize (I don’t know if the real one is a competition), and the main characters would be competing for the prize because they need the recognition and prize money to save their business. Their displays would get more and more elaborate as they try to top each other, but then they’d learn about a charity that needed the recognition and money, so they’d team up to add stuff from their displays to the charity’s display.

A Christmas display designed to look like cut paper, showing the silhouette of an old church building with an arch over it and white lights giving it a glow against the night sky.
This was the light display in the park from the church I’ve been attending, showing the historic church building.

I’m probably going to stay inside this Saturday because I have housework and cookie baking to do and it’s going to be really cold. Then Sunday night the youth choir at the church I’ve been going to is having a concert, which is being followed by a carol singalong in the church hall (the reason I’m baking cookies). I might do a jaunt downtown on Tuesday, then there will be a candlelight service at night in the church. This church is a Gothic Revival church built in 1850 (the congregation dates to 1747) that’s on the National Register of Historic Places, and some of the stained glass windows are Tiffany originals. I imagine it will be magical on Christmas Eve with the candlelight.

We’re not supposed to be having any snow for Christmas itself, though there’s a chance for some flurries today. The mountains to the west will be getting snow, and that will be visible from here, so I’ll be able to see snow-covered mountains as I go out and about for the next few days. I need to get some nice boots I can walk in. All my boots have high heels, and it would be very Hallmark heroine of me to teeter around in snow in high-heeled boots (so I could fall and be caught by a guy wearing flannel), but I’ve lived around snow before and know that’s not a great idea. I live so close to the church that it feels weird to drive there, but the walk involves a pretty steep hill, and I wouldn’t want to try it in heels. My toes got a bit cold during the caroling, so my current shoes aren’t up to winters here.

I’m going to take a holiday blogging hiatus. There may be a year wrap-up post next Friday, but otherwise I’ll see you next year. Happy holidays!

TV

Skeleton Crew

I’m not really in the demographic it’s aimed at, but I’m thoroughly enjoying the latest Star Wars series, Skeleton Crew. This is an adventure set in the Star Wars universe about a group of kids who find what they think is a secret cave that might be a lost Jedi temple, but it turns out to be a buried spaceship that takes off and blasts into hyperspace when they accidentally wake it. Then they have to find their way home, but there’s just one problem: No one knows where their home world is (though everyone would love to find it, since it’s rumored to hold great treasure). They have the help of a shady man who seems to have Jedi powers and an old droid who’s the only survivor of the ship’s original crew, who seem to have been pirates. It’s basically Goonies meets Treasure Island in the Star Wars universe.

I know George Lucas has said that Star Wars has always been for kids, but that’s a bit of revisionist history (like so much of what he’s said about the development of the saga). The original movie was pure Boomer bait, a nostalgic reimagining of the adventure serials kids of his generation saw when they went to Saturday matinees at the movies, those cliffhangers that were swashbucklers, westerns, or space adventures. The movie was child-friendly, with sanitized violence (in spite of having one of the biggest body counts of any movie, thanks to the destruction of an entire planet), mild language, no sex, and some comic relief characters. It appealed to kids, but it wasn’t aimed at kids, and that’s part of why kids liked it. There were no shoehorned-in child characters so we could have someone to “relate” to, nothing inserted strictly to appeal to kids. It was a grown-up movie that was still fun, so kids felt like they were getting in on something. Today’s executives would call it “four-quadrant entertainment,” which just means that everyone enjoys it. The whole family can go and have fun. When Lucas tried to aim at children with The Phantom Menace, it just came across as pandering, like kids aren’t sophisticated enough to enjoy a movie without a kid in it and without a clown. Even though Lucas was a parent at that point, he seemed to understand less about what kids liked then than he had with the original movie.

This series is specifically targeted to younger viewers. Most of the main characters are children. But it feels a lot less like pandering than The Phantom Menace did, which makes it more adult-friendly. When I was a Star Wars-obsessed nine or ten-year-old, back when the only Star Wars was that first movie, I would have been over the moon about this series. It would have hit almost all my buttons. I would have wanted to be the main girl character, who asserts herself as captain of the ship but who fears she’s not up to the task when things get serious. There are adventures and narrow escapes. There’s a touch of humor but no annoying clowning. There are literary references (lots of hints of Treasure Island, and the droid on the ship is SM-33 — so he’s Smee!). The only thing missing for child me would have been a cute boy to crush on, since the main boy in the cast has a bad Too Stupid To Live problem and even child me would have found him annoying, and the other boy is basically an elephant (and a dweeb, though a sweet one). Adult me has Jude Law, who isn’t an actor I tend to look for but I like him when I see him. I wouldn’t go to a movie just to see him, but I always seem to enjoy him when he’s in a movie I’m seeing.

This series feels a lot like those old cliffhanger serials, with narrow escapes from dire situations, and each resolution leads straight into a new problem. The episodes even end with cliffhangers. It feels like Star Wars getting back to its original roots. There’s also an overarching mystery of what the deal is with the kids’ home world that seems to have been isolated from the rest of the galaxy for some time and which seems idyllic but which has some unsettling dystopian vibes.

The series is enough fun to help tide me over until Andor resumes next year, and I’m enjoying letting my inner nine-year-old come out to play. Star Wars + space pirates isn’t a bad combination.

Books

Bad Choice

I learned this week that I need to be a lot more careful when I’m selecting books at the library.

It’s the time of year when I want to read moderately Christmassy rom-coms/chick-lit/women’s fiction. Not necessarily an all-out “Christmas” book, but a book that happens to be set around the holiday season. That makes them tricky to find. If it’s not mentioned on the cover, I have to flip through it and see if any particular keywords pop out. It’s especially helpful if there’s some kind of date to start each chapter.

On my last library trip, I found one that I thought might work. It was in the “unhappy wife wanting a different life” category, and I tend to prefer single woman stories to either “unhappy wife” or “wife discovers that her perfect life isn’t perfect when her husband dumps her” stories, but I didn’t have time to do a serious search in the library, and the storyline sounded interesting. A flip through caught a mention of Christmas. The cover was cartoony, suggesting comedy. So I checked it out.

I should have also read the marketing blurbs above the book description. I tend to skip those because I don’t want the publisher telling me that a book is “unputdownable,” “heartwarming,” or “hilarious.” However, it would have been a clue that they used the word “sinister.”

It turned out that this was not a quirky chick lit/women’s fiction. It’s a psychological thriller—a quirky one using a lot of women’s fiction/chick lit tropes, but it’s still about a woman who becomes obsessed with a serial killer to the point she ends up institutionalized (that’s in the prologue, then the book is about how she ended up there). The Christmas mentions were in a chapter of her in the institution (the book switches back and forth between the present and the past), comparing life there to Christmas afternoon, with the staff bringing out puzzles and games with the kind of forced cheer a mom has on Christmas afternoon when she’s trying to keep everyone together and in good spirits with lots of activities. My quick glance had shown me multiple uses of the word “Christmas” and the mention of a mother bringing out puzzles and games. I missed that it was an analogy, and a fairly dark one at that, since the Christmases the narrator was remembering were tense and unhappy.

That’s not exactly the fluffy holiday read I was hoping for. Yikes! I guess I should read the marketing stuff. I may or may not agree with whether a book is “unputdownable” or “hilarious,” but I do want to know whether the publisher considers the book “sinister” rather than “heartwarming.”

I have now done some research and found a couple of books that might fit the bill, and I’ve requested them from the library, and I checked out an e-book for the time being. This weekend will be busy, but I’m hoping to finish the draft I’m working on early next week, and then I will have some time to sit, listen to Christmas music, drink hot cocoa, and read, and I’ll have proper reading material for that.

Now I kind of want to write the book I thought this one would be. It’s the kind of concept that could either be quirky and funny or sinister, depending on how it’s handled, and I want to do the funny version. I’ll add it to the idea file.

movies

Mean Girls

One of last weekend’s movies was Mean Girls (the original, not the musical). I’m not sure why I was drawn to it. I think part of it was that I was looking for movies that contained Christmas elements but that weren’t “Christmas” movies, and I remembered the talent show scene.

I saw this movie in the theater when it was originally released, though I think I caught it later in the run at the dollar theater. My agent had suggested I consider writing young adult, and since it had been a long time since I was a young adult, I was doing research. I read the non-fiction book the movie was based on, then decided to go see the movie. The book was a bit uncomfortable to read because it brought back a lot of memories. I’d seen and experienced so many of the things the author mentioned about how girls treat each other, and I had a similar reaction to the movie, though I was lucky to be a teen before three-way calling was common (and I can only imagine how social media comes into play).

Though one big difference for me was that my Mean Girls experience came in elementary school, not high school. The popular girl in my high school class was popular because she was really sweet and nice. She was also very shy and introverted, so she just hung around with her best friend. There was no entourage, no group of wannabes. I was sort of in the tertiary level of friends with her, since we had most of our classes together and were in the same Sunday school class at church, so we were “school” and “church” friends, though we never hung out together away from school. I wasn’t really included or welcomed in high school, since I was the new kid in a place where most of the kids had been there at least since elementary school, but I wasn’t bullied. I was just left alone. I think it did help that for my freshman year I had some bully protection from the senior girl I sat with in band who was the queen bee of the school that year. If you’ve ever watched that reality show about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, I shared a music stand with Kelli (the director of the cheerleaders) as a freshman, and although we didn’t really talk and I wouldn’t have considered us friends, I also got the sense that I’d been put in the “don’t mess with her” category, and the older guys kind of watched over me while the senior girls were fairly nice, and no one younger went against that.

But my elementary school experience could have been a case study in that book, not at school, but at home. We moved to a small, isolated neighborhood on an army post the summer before second grade. There weren’t enough girls for there to be multiple cliques, so everyone from first through third grade hung out together, with maybe eight girls at the most. I was the only girl in my grade most of the time, so it was the third graders, me, and a few select first graders. There was very much a queen bee who ruled the group and decided who was in or out, and she was a mini Regina George. She dictated what TV shows everyone watched (there was no point in looking for anyone to play outside with while the Bewitched rerun was on every evening), what clothes everyone should wear, what foods were in and out, etc. I remember that the worst thing anyone could say about you was that you were “conceited,” and it didn’t take much to be considered conceited. Just having confidence or thinking you were at all good was being conceited. She loved to set up traps. One of her favorite things for us to play was beauty pageant, where you had to show confidence and be willing to show off a talent to win (she was the judge), but if you acted like you thought you were any good you were conceited.

I think most of the power she held was because there were so few girls, so if she didn’t let you in the group, your only option for friends would be the boys or whoever was also an outcast at that time, mostly the one girl a year younger than I was who was never really in the group because she was considered weird. The queen bee mostly let me in the group, but I didn’t fit in well since I was younger than most of them. It was most stressful in the summers. During the school year I had friends at school and was involved in activities after school, so I didn’t need friends at home so much. It was during the summer when she really flexed her power. I remember a bit of angst especially the second summer, when I went in and out of favor. That was when I learned I didn’t mind playing with the boys or with the weird girl, and when the queen bee thought she was losing power over me, she really doubled down. I came in last for all the beauty pageants. She moved away sometime when I was in third grade, and all the girls in the neighborhood felt like we’d had a weight lifted. We didn’t have another mean girl like that, and the girl group was a lot less cohesive, more smaller groups of girls or else blending with the boys.

That experience inoculated me against the whole mean girl routine. I learned that they don’t have power over you if you don’t care what they think about you. I was bullied during the second half of sixth grade and seventh grade but I didn’t notice until they escalated to the point of getting physical because those girls weren’t even on my radar for noticing they existed, let alone caring, and that frustrated them enough to lead them to physically attack me so I had to notice them. I don’t recall them being particularly popular, and I don’t think anyone cared all that much about being friends with them (though it’s possible I was oblivious since none of my friends cared about them, but other girls might have wanted their favor). They didn’t have power and were trying to get it.

In the town where I used to live, they had a bad mean girl issue in elementary school. It got so bad they brought in counselors to try to deal with it, and it didn’t do any good. The son of one of my friends was in that class, and my friend said the boys in that class didn’t start dating until they were in college because they were so turned off by the girls they were in school with. They didn’t realize until they got to college that girls could be fun and nice instead of hateful bitches. That fits with my experience that it was less of an issue once we hit the teens. But I guess a movie about 8-10 year-old mean girls wouldn’t have had the same box office appeal. I don’t know if that crop of girls retained power in high school, but that school was so big that it would have been hard to have a core clique. It’s a lot easier to take over a class in elementary school and rule over who gets invited to birthday parties, etc.

writing life

Routines

I’m having a hard time getting back into the swing of “normal” life after Thanksgiving. Part of it is that driving 9 or so hours a day for two days straight is tiring and there’s some recovery time required. Part of it is the break in routine, with time to get ready for the trip, then being gone for so long. I’m very much a creature of habit and routine, and messing up my routine really throws me off.

When I find a pattern of behavior that works for me, I can go on autopilot and function really well. Stuff gets done. But break that pattern in any way, and it all falls apart. One phone call during a time I have designated for other stuff will ruin the whole day. I have a really hard time getting back to where I should be. One ruined day can throw off the rest of the week. I also form new habits pretty easily, intentionally or not. A couple of days of doing things differently, like taking a day off, and that becomes the new normal, so it’s hard to get back to the routine.

This is why I struggle with work/life balance. It’s very all or nothing. Either I’m working according to my usual routine or I’m getting nothing done, and deliberately taking a day off for holiday or vacation will mean my routine falls apart and I have to rebuild it when I go back to work. If I take a week off, it’s like “what was I doing and how does this work?” when I come back from vacation.

I’ve tried all kinds of time management systems, and what works best for me is a fairly rigid schedule that I don’t deviate from in any way — I write at this time, exercise at this time, do this housework task at this time on this day — but I’ve never managed to stick with it for long because life happens to disrupt any routine and I burn out if I try to keep up a rigid routine for an extended period without a break. And then when I take a break I have a hard time getting back to the routine, so it falls by the wayside for a while until I get frustrated with myself and create a new routine.

I have managed to do okay with a weekly reset, so I’m hoping that on Monday I can get back to “normal.” It’s always hard to try to start a work week in the middle of the week. I will give myself some time off for the holidays later in the month, but I may not try to take a big break from writing.

And I’ll keep trying to come up with a system that works to keep me on track. In my dream life, I work diligently on my writing until I hit my daily goals, then do some business and promo work, and then the rest of the day is used for housework, life maintenance, and leisure. I would take long walks, read, do some music stuff, and go to local events. As it is, I fritter away time throughout the day, not accomplishing much or doing anything really fun, manage to hit my writing goals by the end of the work day (maybe), then have to deal with cooking and housework and fritter away more time. Writing down how I spend my time doesn’t work because it changes my behavior so that what I record isn’t an honest assessment of how I really spend my time but rather a record of how I want to spend my time. So maybe I should do that — make a grid for the day and keep track of my time like I had to do when I worked for a PR agency and billed my time to clients.

But for now, I need to get to writing and get my brain back into this story.

Life

Back Home

I’m home again after more than a week away and after two long days of driving. I can’t make that drive too often, but I enjoy the thinking time along the way.

Something occurred to me as I got closer to home: I’ve now made that drive three times. The first time, I was on a vacation/recon mission to a place I’d been reading about but that I’d never visited to see if I liked it. The second time, I’d uprooted my whole life and was moving to an apartment I’d only seen online on a street I’d only seen online. This time, I was coming home, and it really felt like home, even though I was coming from a place I’ve considered home (though I’ve never actually lived in the house where my parents live now). I missed my mountains.

With Christmas coming so soon after Thanksgiving this year, it’s a good thing I got my fill of fall. We started getting fall-like weather and color in mid-August, and there were still a lot of pockets of red and gold leaves along the journey. But on the way back I got a real transition to Christmas mode, since it started snowing soon after I stopped for the night outside Nashville on day 1. It was a light snow, mostly just flakes dancing in the air, and the ground was warm, so it wasn’t sticking. The roads were clear the next morning, but there was a light dusting of snow on the hills facing the road. In spots, it was a heavier dusting, while in others there was just snow in the nooks and crannies. I’d made a playlist for the trip that mixed Christmas music in with other music, and the occasional Christmas song made a nice accompaniment to the scenery. It seems to have been a narrow band across northern Tennessee and southern Kentucky, reaching into southern Virginia. I dipped below it when the road went south to Knoxville, then came back into the snow when I turned north in far eastern Tennessee and headed for Virginia. There were some flurries there, but the roads were still clear and I never had to use my windshield wipers because the flakes were so light and my car is apparently so aerodynamic that the flakes just went up and over my car instead of hitting the windshield. It was a best-case scenario for snowy driving, just enough to make it pretty without affecting the roads or visibility. As I got farther north, I made it above the band of snow, and it was just green around my area. We’re supposed to get some snow tomorrow morning, though.

I’ve done my holiday travel for the year, and I already got my shopping done, gifts wrapped and left with my parents, so now I get to have a no-pressure holiday season. I’m not in a choir now, so there are no rehearsals or performances. I don’t have any parties I have to attend. There are a lot of local events that I can do, so I won’t be bored or lonely, but there’s nothing I must do. I can choose the things I want, or I can stay home in my pajamas, drink cocoa, and watch Christmas movies.

Among the activities are multiple Christmas markets, a group getting together to do caroling in the downtown shopping district on Saturdays, a couple of holiday teas in historic homes, a tour of historic homes, multiple church services and concerts, and a Christmas dinner at a church for anyone who might be alone (I plan to help out and eat with them). I could probably fill up all the weekend days and nights between now and Christmas, plus the week of Christmas, but I imagine there will be a few quiet days or nights at home, especially depending on the weather. It doesn’t feel as cold here for the temperature as it does back in Texas — I felt colder in the 40s in Texas than I did in the 30s in Virginia — but we’re going to have some days that are really cold. Right now, I’m waiting for it to go above freezing before I run some errands. One errand in the next couple of weeks may involve buying a new winter coat. I’m not sure my Texas “heavy” coats will be heavy enough for the weather here.