“Enough is as good as a Feast.”

Happy Solstice Dear Ones!

As we hurtle through space, with stars above, below, and to the left and right of us, at the longest corner away from our sun, I go to and from the barn each day in a darkness that often feels internal. What a relief it is to switch on the lights to find a cozy manger scene of impertinent sheep, chattering chickens, and cattle gently lowing. It is my own private Christmas card, albeit without camels or bearded people dressed in flowing robes. (The shepherdess dresses in flannel pajamas tucked into muck boots with a purple Carhartt jacket thrown over. She’s doing her best to eliminate her beard.)

The steer are particularly delighted to see me, despite the fact that I am attempting to get them to accept wearing little elf hats on their heads for what I hope will be the cutest photo ever. They are not having it. They scrape them off impatiently and demand breakfast instead. Their brains work in curious ways. For one, they repeatedly refuse to learn to wear little hats and yet just once I gave them some apple chunks off the edge of the deck and now, every time they are running loose, they head straight for the deck to check for apples. They run to every window of the house to peer in and see if I am there, trying to catch my eye like I am an elusive waitress who has forgotten to bring them their apples.

The sheep, with their little spindly legs tucked up under them, look like mounds of dirty wool with eyes. You could make them out of filthy cotton balls and buttons and glue them to the straw. They are so wooly they have ceased to have ears. I feel tempted to hop the fence and use one as a pillow, albeit a pretty stinky one. (Most Christmas cards are not scratch-and-sniff for very good reason!)

I crawl into the loft and toss a bale of hay down into their manger. Something about the way they smack their lips in greedy appreciation makes me feel both whole and holy. “Feed My sheep,” I hear in my head. It’s good work. I need these corner posts of loft-iness and groundedness and hay-ishness at the dark margins of my days. It makes the middles seem less chaotic. The middles are where things tend to go awry.

You might think that the night is so long this time of year because it has something to do with the path of the planet around the sun. Nonsense. It’s to give us Crafty People extra time to destroy our homes after working a full day at our regular jobs.

We “Makers” have it extra tough around the holidays. The un-crafty go into shops, malls, or online, and pick out a bunch of thoughtful presents for their loved ones, have them gift-wrapped, and they are done. Not us. We spend these longer nights littering every surface of the living space with little bits of yarn and glue, swathes of fabric, knitting needles we sometimes accidentally sit upon, pins and patterns, salt dough and paint, wires and pine cones, until the place looks like it should be the nasty centerfold of “Rodent Décor.” Our neglected offspring and pets rely on purloined raw cookie dough to sustain themselves. Our partners peer wide-eyed from doorways, too cautious to tiptoe into the swirl of debris, lest they be yelled at. Corner cobwebs at the ceiling are coated with powdered sugar and despair. As the days spin faster than an Ashford traveler’s wheel, we grow more and more crazed, more frantic, more enthralled by our zeal. SO much is expected of us! THIS is our moment to shine… THIS is when everyone who tastes these cookies will swoon and wonder, “Is that a wooden spoon she has? Or a magic wand? Hmmm…” This is also the moment that shall vindicate our need to purchase thirty yards of Irish Linen in July… (Everyone on the list is getting hand-embroidered fabulousness, AND some crocheted sea creatures.) Exhausted, deluded, we MUST crash onward, towards Victory! Until we make THE THING, that thing that will be the Most Beloved Gift EVER—that thing that is way too good to come from a store, that only the extremely Skilled could even attempt to pull off, but is the secret heart’s desire of our Beloved. They would never ask for it by name, but we know… We Know. Even if they have no idea, still, we Know. The Soon-to-be Cherished Family Heirloom is nearing Parturition. We just need a little more (yarn/wine/glue/time). It’s history (and gawd-awful MESS) in the making. Strung out on pumpkin spiced eggnog and fantasies that we can do it all, we start pulling all-nighters, deluding ourselves into thinking that we can certainly knit a whole shawl or produce a baby quilt in one night. The only people who have more naive optimism are those poor souls one finds at the cutting counter of a certain fabric store chain the day before Halloween, clutching some faux fur and a Very Ambitious costume pattern—the sort of pattern that would take an experienced seamstress several days to make—and admitting publicly that “they haven’t really sewn before but how hard could it be?”

I know there are some tough people out there—people who train for and complete back-to-back triathlons, people who swim with buckets on their backs, people who run six miles and stop each mile to do a feat of fear or strength, like shimmy under barbed wire, or leap burning things. I say we put these folks up against a Christmas crafter who needs to hand-stamp 100 cards (and calligraphy the envelopes) by midnight, then take off her shoes and knit with her feet until dawn while her hands fashion ethnic delicacies flavored with anise seed and rum. Anyone who can do all that and simultaneously produce a cheery-smug newsletter full of Ho-Ho-Hos and an endless list of middle-school accomplishments from the child prodigies she is raising deserves a medal or a trip to the funny farm. (Hey!! wait a minute… I’m on a farm and it’s pretty funny… hmm…)

At some point, it dawns on us that Rumplestiltskin isn’t coming; we aren’t princesses in a fairy tale who have befriended a bunch of woodland creatures who will save us; and we find ourselves sleep-deprived and sobbing into the cookie batter to which we just accidently added raw garlic.

THEN…

Then we go to the mall.

Who says crafters aren’t serving Capitalism? First we buy all the shit we need to make our projects. Then we realize a pair of homemade socks (representing 40 hours of our life in stripes) is not nearly “enough,” so we panic and buy more.

The year I learned not to do ANY of that was the Christmas after my divorce. Working five jobs but still broke and feeling utterly broken, I had not done (or over done) a thing. I had a few token presents for the little nieces and nephews, something small for each of my own children and that was it. I was showing up to my parent’s farm, essentially, with just me and my children, or as I put it, “nothing.”

Amid the hoopla of hugs and hellos, no one seemed to notice that I brought so little. The tree was already packed. I dangled my toes carefully into the gene pool, rather than doing my usual canon ball, and adjusted to the currents of emotion swirling around me. There was drama in the kitchen as my parents attempted to cook an evening meal together. My sisters were on hand to keep pots and tempers from boiling over. No need to insert myself in that melee. I hugged my littlest niece on my lap and sat down. When my father was boisterously evicted from the kitchen, where he was causing trouble, he called “Hey, Nance! Come here. I have a favor to ask you.” I followed him to the cellar laundry room, where my mother has a small desk in the corner with her sewing machine and threads. He rummaged in the corner and emerged with a mysterious bundle and a guilty smile.

“Can you fix these?” he asked, extending a pile of ragged clothes. “Your mother was going to throw them out, can you believe it?” Yes, yes I could. His stained work pants were in tatters. The hems were down and the material over the knees fraying badly into holes. She hates stuff like this.

“This coat is a good coat, it just needs a zipper,” he said handing me a light jacket. He had sweaters with holes in them, pants to hem, a sport coat to tailor—seven repairs in all. “Please,” he said, “this is all I want for Christmas. I don’t need anything new, I just want to fix my old stuff; there’s life in it yet.” My father’s sentimentality reveals itself in his absolute refusal to throw anything away. EVER. It drives my mother nuts. She is forever slipping things into large, opaque bags and sneaking them into the trash to eliminate the clutter.

He held the clothes out to me with a look of boyish hopefulness. “Sure Dad,” I said, “To be honest, I don’t really have anything for you for Christmas anyway.”

“That’s fantastic!” He said, beaming. “Really, truly, this is all I want! I just need all this stuff fixed.” In the kitchen above, we could still hear the rumblings of dinner preparation. There were too many people in the kitchen—no need to go there. I sat down in the little chair and pulled out some thread. Might as well begin right away. He leaned against the washing machine and talked to me as I started mending a sweater. I don’t know how long he stayed there but it occurred to me that I was getting precious one-on-one time with my father, during dinner prep, with a house full of siblings and grandchildren. It was a good, old-fashioned, Christmas miracle.

He left and my sister came down, searching for her daughter. “What are you doing here?” she wanted to know, scanning the clutter, the pipes hanging with shirts to be ironed above me.

“I’m fixing some stuff for Dad,” I said. Her face lit up. “Hey! Rabbit bought a dress yesterday that has an open seam we didn’t see in the shop. No wonder it was on sale. While you have the machine out, could you just zip it up? I don’t care what color thread you use—whatever is on there is fine.”

“Sure!” I said. Rabbit appeared moments later, holding the dress and another blouse and a pair of men’s jeans.

“Can you fix these too?” she wanted to know. “My mama doesn’t know about the blouse. Let’s not tell her,” she said with a conspiratorial wink and guilty smile. “And these are my daddy’s jeans. He breaks jeans!” I looked at the jeans. Being a Texan, her daddy starches his jeans until they can stand up on their own. And yes, they literally “break” when the jeans get so frail and the starch gets so brittle—they crack right next to the pockets. One side had already been professionally repaired. “It cost Mama 25 dollars to have the other side done and it doesn’t even look good,” said Rabbit, as I examined the repair carefully.

“No,” I agreed. “Whoever did this does not know my little trick for getting around rivets!” She smiled and sat down nearby on an overturned bucket. “I sure wish I could sew,” she said wistfully. “It must be so nice to be able to fix things for people.”

“Well, I’ll be glad to teach you!” I said. “Us clever old ladies need to teach you clever young ladies how to do this stuff.” She smiled. With my hands busy and my ears open, I learned all about how she felt about school, what her friends do that bugs her, which boy she had a crush on, and how much she loved hunting deer with her daddy. There was none of the polite awkwardness that comes from a meddling aunt interrogating a shut-down teen. She kept me company, chatting and asking questions until dinner was called and we went upstairs.

“Where have you guys been?” everyone wanted to know. “Fixing things in the basement,” I replied.

“Aunty Nancy fixed my new dress I just got!” announced Rabbit, hopping happily.

After supper, while the clean-up crew swung into action on the dishes in the kitchen, I returned to the quiet of the cellar to work on my father’s ragged clothing. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve—I would have to work quickly to get it all done. While I was there, my sister-in-law knocked timidly at the door. She cautiously held out her son’s jacket and a blouse she had that needed a small repair. “Do you think you could do these things too?” She asked hesitantly. I was thrilled to be asked.

My next customer was a sister. She had pulled out her prom dress from the 1980’s. She laughed bombastically, flapped it a few times like a large wing, and chortled, “I want this thing to fit again. I am going to a corporate event that is being themed ‘80’s prom’ and I want to show up in my actual dress! I’m going to bring my pictures and prove to everyone that I wore it then and it still fits. Only, of course, it doesn’t. Can you make this fit me again? It’s the only Christmas Miracle I want.” I looked at it carefully.

“Of course,” I said finally. “I can cannibalize the sash into gussets under your arms and no one will know the difference. We’ll just have to make you a new sash, probably out of ribbon.”

“Oh, I don’t care about that!” she said airily. “I’m just thrilled you can do it. It’s all I want for Christmas, seriously. You drew my name out of the pot and it’s all I want. That and for you to fix some of Nemo’s dog toys. He humps them into shreds. It’s disgusting. But he is very fond of this squirrel.” She indicated a stuffed squirrel that was nearly the same size as the crazed looking Jack Russell at her feet, who was looking at the squirrel and whining anxiously.

“Well, you’re lucky I don’t actually have anything for you yet. And this is going to be about ninety dollars worth of repairs in a shop anywhere else so you are getting a pretty good deal.”

She gestured dramatically. “Oh! I KNOW!! You have no idea how much I was hoping you could do this. It’s going to make the corporate event such a scream. All of my younger colleagues are going to die. It’s going to be hilarious. Thank you so much!” She pulled up the overturned bucket Rabbit had sat on earlier and proceeded to tell me about the event, her work, how she was feeling about being home, and about all the drama I was missing in the kitchen. I threaded another needle and listened as I worked.

One by one, they all came with a want or a need—just simple things I had within my power to transform for them. And while they talked with me, they transformed me. I realized with great humility that I had never really listened to any of them before. In my former struggle to be seen and heard, I had forgotten to look and listen. I had closed myself off from the beauty of these people I was competing with. Appreciating them gave me a chance to appreciate myself. Instead of inflicting my gifts upon them, in a desperate bargain for love, I waited for them to ask me for what they needed. What they needed was so much more simple than I had ever thought. They just wanted little mendings, little tweakings, little fixings that were simple for me, impossible for them. It was the first time I had ever really given them anything they truly wanted.

Forget the Fabulous. Go Simple. Don’t think you have “nothing” to share. You do. Whatever it is, unique to each of us, we all have The Gift within us already. Forget all the tinsel and the cheap wrapping paper that shreds into hamster bedding the moment a scissor touches it. We just want YOU. You are enough. Show up. Be Present. I don’t mean it in a New-age, nauseating, self-realization kind of way that invites you to gaze at your navel and not help with the dishes. I mean, your happiness, and everyone else’s depends on recognizing and sharing the gift that is YOU. That sharing is the Miracle we seek.

Ask anyone grieving a loss—be it of a child, parent, spouse, sibling, beloved friend, or pet—what we wouldn’t give to hold our Dear Ones in our arms just one more time? If they could just emerge for a moment from the aching empty ether, would we need them also to bring a bunch of crap they got on sale from the mall? No. But we would want to hear them laugh. We would want to see them smile. We would want them to really hear us say “I Love You,” one more time. And We would say “You… just you… you are all I want.” Without ribbons or mistletoe or any sort of Christmas-ification whatsoever. You are enough.

I Love you SEW much!!!

Yours aye,

Nancy