It is a good thing to remember to eat your fruits and vegetables.  If you don’t, you’ll be forced to fill in the deficit with chocolate.  In this cheerful season of diversity and culinary debauchery, you can hardly help but fill just about every part of you in with chocolate: dark chocolate peppermint bark (food of the gods), chocolate covered pretzels, peanuts, pecans, walnuts, coconut blueberries, cherries with liquor of some unnamable and fatally sweet kind, nougats, creams of orange, lime, lemon, raspberry, mint or even more chocolate, truffles, bars, sprinkles, dribbles, wafers, milk – hot and cold.  So much chocolate, so little time.  So much of me, so little left of any waistband I own.

         Sorrows drowned in.  Spirits raised by.  Table covered by.  Guilt over.  And all of it will hit the trash Friday morning because there will be no holiday left with which to excuse gluttony any more.

         Not that real life hasn’t already raised its ugly head.  Did I want to spend all day yesterday at least trying to do the year end accounting?  But I had to sit on the other side of Curt’s desk and show him numbers that actually made sense this morning.  So I planned it carefully: one day to make up for an entire year of being really, really flighty and oblivious.

         Okay, really I am a very responsible person.  Serious bookkeeping goes on here.  I have been mocked to tears because I used to have to sit down with the bank statement the minute it came—and it always came on Saturday, which is why G was able to mock me, because he was home to see me ripping open the envelope and tearing out my hair for an hour afterwards.  Now, I just reconcile every week or so.  Or usually, I reconcile every week or so.  Other years I have. Honest.

         I learned money from my mother who kept hers in a very complex notebook, all entries made by hand.  She kept every receipt, neatly clipped to the correct category page, wrote every amount in a clear and no-nonsense hand.  She knew every penny by name and had plans for its future.  I had to find my own way of doing this because the notebook didn’t work for me, and finally ended up using the computer(oh, I love, I love, I love computers), which never did appeal to my mom.

         But she was the one who taught me to take care, to plan, to budget—and to make sure I was in a position to pay off debt and help my kids when I could.  And so I have done for three decades, meticulously.  Except sometimes.  When I hit an idiot year.  Which I do every so often. Like this year.

         There’s this old story about Hugh Nibley who once sat down on his couch with his coat and hat on one Sunday evening, ready to leave for some fireside he was supposed to speak to and whiling away the last few minutes with a twenty pound tome of Sanskrit he’d just cracked for the first time.  His kids said good-bye to him, headed to other places.  And when they got home, hours later, found him sitting in the exact same spot on the couch, coat and hat on, with the exact same block of book in his lap.  “How was the fireside?” they asked him.

         He blinked, looking up.  “Oh,” he said.  “What time is it?  I hope I’m not late.”

         And that is pretty much my last year in a nutshell, except I don’t read Sanskrit.  A little Old English, maybe.  And some Middle.  But no Sanskrit and no Coptic.

         So here I was, yesterday, with my church offerings report in my hand—which had errors—and my breakfast cooking, staring at a Quicken screen I had pretty much forgotten how to understand. 

         It had been a long year.

         I had one whole day to work through all my numbers, line by line.  And then Geneva called and needed help.  And while I was waiting for her to be ready to need me, another friend called for assistance.  Half of me pulling my hair out, the other half piously delighted to be of service somewhere far, far from this desk.

About the time I’d settled in to one particular investigative Quicken probe, Geneva was ready.  She does this treasure hunt for her riding students each year, and it’s almost a tradition, me showing up to slog through hip deep snow (okay, shin deep)on foot to plant the clues and prizes for the riders.  We must have tramped five miles back and forth across that pasture.  But heck, it was nearly forty degrees out there, and no wind coming off the lake.  Just like Florida.  Would I rather be tramping through the snow (got it packed into my boots, which was interesting), laughing with Geneva than doing accounting? 

Uh.  Yeah.

But good times can’t last forever.  So I got home, dried off and plunked myself down again.  It turns out that bookkeeping is actually easier to do if you reconcile all your accounts first.  Which is easy unless you have somehow changed something that you’d already reconciled so that your old reconciliation doesn’t balance anymore.  Then you have to retrace not only your money steps, but your state of mind – what the heck, in other words, could I ever have been thinking when I did that???  And what, exactly did I do?  And wait – why did I do that?

Hours later, it’s like I’ve worked through this huge gordion knot of sticky twine—kind of like trying to straighten out twelve strings of last year’s Christmas lights.  And things kept changing – like, G came in and asked me a question, and I said, “Just a second – I’ve got to follow this line of – wait.  Wait.  Now it doesn’t balance.  (voice rising) It was balanced.  Now it’s not.  I didn’t touch anything. (screeching) How did this happen???? AHHHHHHHH!!!”

But G was long gone and nobody, not even the heavens, had an answer.  A moment later, the program wouldn’t even let me enter a statement ending date.  Or a statement amount.  Nothing.  Dead data fields.  It had freaked out.  Had I freaked it out?  Or the other way around?  Restart.  Restart the reconcile.  Four times.

But I did finish.  Sort of.  Not really finished yet, but I can do that next week.  This was just to pre-pay state taxes.  Good-bye money; I knew you well.  But at least, at this point, I think I know how much money is left after this really strange year—Gin moving to the east, M going to Argentina, Scooter born, Mom in the nursing home.  I finally have a sense of the shape of our money as it is now, at this second.  I’m not sure how it got there, and where the rest of it (I really thought there was supposed to be more) is hiding.  But hey, it’s only money, right?

Uh-huh.

Resolved: pay attention to what day it is.  Never fall for the: “I don’t have to write it down; I’ll remember” thing.  Hire a bookkeeper.

          P.S.  Has anybody else noticed that some comment of theirs has disappeared?  Sometimes Wordpress freaks out and eats things, and I’ve lost at least some of one person’s comments.  I love love love the comments.  I don’t want to lose any of them.

Okay. So on Christmas morning I learned something: going back to bed and pulling the covers over your head? Not a good plan. Oh, yes, it sounds good. Here—everything in your life has changed, nothing is working right or feeling right. But giving it all up to live in a quilt cave? Even if the place could sustain life—what kind of life would it be?

And what exactly was missing? Oh, sit down and give me a minute of your time. Did I stay awake half Christmas Eve night, waiting for excited little animals to close their eyes and submit to sleep so I could deliver the benighted ritual slippers and go to bed myself? I did not. I slept like a baby, not even troubled by visions of the morning’s long planned delights. Did I wake abruptly and early, finding myself eye to eye with some berserker child who could not bear to be abed another minute? No, I did not.

I rolled out of bed at a slovenly eight o’clock on Christmas morning to find my husband off feeding the horses. The one person in the house still left to play the part of the child? Stuffed with sleep and not even twitching. There were no stockings ready downstairs. Because I hadn’t made any; we are all too old now for silly things like that (sob). I went downstairs to find the colored lights all lit, the carpets vacuumed (that would be Guy). But nobody had, after bouncing on my bed, followed me, perching themselves at the top of the stairs, breathless and jigging. Nobody to torture with hair brushes and rules about making beds and wearing robes. Even the married children who had, at one point, announced that they would be up by seven thirty? Awake all night trying teething tricks on Scooter, and so bleary-eyed by ten o’clock, that they were still in their own house.

Through which friends and neighbors, saints and angels, enter—

Our home was all dressed up with nowhere to go. Me, too. Silent, sparkling house. Me, sitting there on the couch kicking my heels, dressed (if you want to call it that) for the barn. But the horses were fed. All that was left for me was the treadmill. Jingle bells and awaaaaaay. And even though it was right across the hall from the sleeping “child,” my morning gallop made absolutely no dent in her sleep.

Storm light

You’re going to think this is stupid. M’s missionary call. Skype for the first time. At ten o’clock he was supposed to call from Argentina. What if something went wrong? What if the call never came? What if we couldn’t figure out the Skype? Cam is the Skype guru, after all, and where was he? With Lorri, still messing with that grandchild of ours.

Ten o’clock came. G and Chaz were hanging out at my desk, waiting. Nothing happened. I knew nothing was going to happen, which is why, even though I was now showered and in my best flannel jammy pants (the green plaid ones), I was back on the couch again, trying to pretend that nothing was actually supposed to happen. Ten-O-four and still nothing. “Are we supposed to call him?” I heard them saying. And then there was a series of mysterious, Skypie noises. “No.” “Yes—look—wait, is that his name? That’s not his screen name.” “But it’s ringing.” “Rejected—the call’s rejected?” More Skypie noises.

And then a voice. I thought it was Cam’s. But no. It was Murphy. Murphy talking out of my computer. (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.). “Come in!!” they called. But I didn’t want to till I was sure. Pressure behind the eyeballs.

But it was he, his own self. And they sat me down behind the desk. There he was—a little green sound bar. And he said, “Mom?” and water gushed out of my face. Then Gin was on and Cam was on – four little green sound bars, filling up all at once. I could see that they were there, but all I could hear were these little electronic burps—voices phase canceling each other. Total confusion. And then total collapse. No sound bars. Call gone.

“He’ll call back,” they said. But he didn’t. And I went to sit on the couch again. When dogs and horses are sad, they don’t show it on their faces. The faces are, in that way, quite dumb—all the desires and disappointments and fears and angers and joys all present behind the face never show on it. And so I sat on the couch.

But then he was back on. And we learned to mute ourselves so we didn’t cancel each other out. And we figured out the slight sound delay. And M talked. He talked smiles and work and what he did during a day and answered questions, and asked them. And Cam gave him advice. And G did. And Gin was there, too. All of the little sound bars back, and I realized that I was staring at them as if they were faces, the whole time. Our family gathering, not around the table, but around the desk.

It was only later that I realized the miracle of all that. It was after his time was up, and he’d sent kisses and hugs by proxy. So wonderful to hear his sweet voice, and the growth in him. The man he has become. We’d rung off (he had to be the one to hang up). And then I called Ginna on Skype and we video chatted so that she could show me how my gifts looked on her little person (Skype is SO much better than video iChat). Another miracle. I have read letters in equity court cases that date back to the very late seventeen hundreds, letters stating that such-and-such a son had taken his family west years before, that there had been one letter, and then nothing ever again. That the remaining family had no idea whether that son and his kids were still alive or where they were.

But we know, now. Because we can see our kids through the computer screen. Is this not magic? Is this not an age of miracles? We call it technology. But God probably has a term for it too and has been using it for millennia.

And then the world woke up and shook itself. Scooter came through our front door in the arms of his folks, and there was breakfast. And after that, presents (Scooter chewed all the bows off for us). Some good presents, and some silly ones too. And talk and happiness and singing and chocolate, and neighbors dropping by with treats. We ended up happy, slightly bilious, bent over under the weight of so much contentment.

My dad called me. And that was exciting. My dad who began to know me the first time he ever looked at himself in a mirror. He called, he called—my dad, my dad, my dad who told me that he trusts me and loves me and who thus, strength and comfort gives. And I was so glad.

The kids finally went home with the weary, wounded baby. We slogged off to bed the horses down. Then it was night again, and we were left with music and the wind and the books we were reading and the one child left—who is not exactly chopped liver, herself. The family apart, but all together in ways no one has ever dreamed of in all the history of the world.

So it ended well. Happily. And things finally felt right.

There, Gin.  You like where we put him?

Just before bed, we found a leak in the roof. Slept with big old bowls covering the damp spots in the upstairs hall. At about one o’clock this morning, Chaz fished me out of sleep to say that the electricity in the house had pretty much exploded. There’d been a brown-down, then a terrific pop when the power surged back on. “The lamp almost blew up.” And what about the DVR, the clocks, the computers? What about the three months of work on my Dad’s book all saved on my backup drives? But here’s the odd thing: that evening, when the eyes were finally closing on their own, I did something I always think about doing and never get around to: I’d pulled the backups off my system and actually unplugged them. I’m not sure that saved the day; everything else works this morning. Still.

The fat dog started whining about five hours later (we’re talking about just before six in the morning). Considering that this bad dog had somehow gotten up on his arthritic back legs and raided the dining room table, the whining is no wonder. I found the cheerful cellophane bag that had once held about three pounds of fudge, now licked clean under the table this morning.

It is now officially the day after Christmas. The accountant called. There’s that hill of emptied present boxes to deal with. And next week, the year end mess. But for now, G is in the kitchen playing with the krumkake maker, and the computers seem to be bright and perky. So life starts all over again—another year cycling, another adventure.

Okay, so here’s the thing about the quilt cave: the only antidote for not knowing what is going to happen next is simply to decide to do something. Janus, the two-faced God, was able to look back and forward at the same time. Not a bad trick, if you can get it. And you can get it – if you try.

(Caution Dick - recycled and refurbished)

My mother used to type out her annual Christmas letter so carefully—on a real typewriter, no tech help. After it was perfect, she—I don’t even know how to explain this. She had a flat, paper sized box of this strange gel. She’d put the letter face down on the gel—the color purple is almost all I can see, trying to remember this. After a time, she’d lift the letter off and I guess the gel had pulled off all the ink. Then she would press more paper, one leaf at a time, over the gel, just long enough to pick up the ink again. I remember slightly smeared letters, my father and mother hunched over this box. I was too young to know what it meant really, only to appreciate the alien magic of the process. I have none of those letters now, so I don’t know what she put in them. Sad, that none of them should have survived. My father, later, probably took a look at whatever copies mom had saved and took them for junk, such low-res copies.

I, myself, never did send out a family letter. I sent out odd little philosophical tone pieces of essay instead. I do enjoy reading the letters from other people, old friends far away, and like comparing their contemporary photo faces with the ones I always carry in my mind for them. But I never did get off on the lists of awards and accomplishments of their kids, most of whom I haven’t known well. My friend, Steven Perry, sent out a hilarious send up of that kind of letter one year, and it really was funny - all about his own kids.

Dogs in snow.  Ears up on one. More poor white balance.

 Over a decade ago, I started sending little (sometimes interminable) essays and thought puzzles out to friends via email. I did it not because I needed an audience - although I did need one - but more, and primarily, because I had reason to love each person on my list. Some I had known for years. Some were from my ward, some from BYU days, some were my students, my editors, kindred spirits. Some were family—even cousins I’d found through genealogy (that’s you Pat!!), though most of the family I came from were not enthusiastic about these, as they weren’t real letters and not one of a kind for them only. But the letters actually were very real to me. And so my friends gradually came to know me well, and we grew close.

 In the end, that was the reason I sent an essay out—like a touch on the hand, the tone of my voice, the thoughts of my heart—an embrace. Short of being with those I loved, I sent little pieces of my soul. (No. Not like sending pieces of a person in order to collect a ransom. Maybe close, though.)

 I finally succumbed to the web log. Well, obviously. And that has been satisfying. Dick Beeson declares that blogs are simply year round Christmas letters, which is probably true. But I love them, because now I can get to know the children who were once strangers to me in the old once-a-year letters, and I can watch Frazz grow up and see what Gin sees and know how L is feeling as she works with her first baby, and have a window into my Cam and my Chaz – and keep my fingers on Rachel’s pulse. Once a year is not enough.

But the end of this is that I don’t send out Christmas cards anymore, though I was so careful to do it for so long—buy the card, write the letter, take the picture, duplicate the letter, duplicate the picture (that takes three trips to the photo place – drop off, choose and order, pick up), get everyone together around the table and do a round-table signing, stuff, seal, address (finally with computer on clear labels), stamp, send. It’s just too much now, although I miss the beauty of the cards themselves. But I’ve hit a wall. I make no cookies—not even peanut brittle this year. And this year, I may not even get out the nativities because I am so tired, and the lights and the tree, along with the gifts I am still trying to finish seem to be pretty much enough.

 And really, when I think about it, what could I say in a letter? Guy and I are old now and the kids have flown - one with her fam to Rhode Island, one to Argentina, one to grad school, one to a little house a block and a half away. I guess I could try to be funny, but that’s not my gift.

The attaching bows ritual.  I have wrapped.  Now they embellish while I read Dickens out loud.  I read it quickly, and skip to the good parts.

 I asked Terri, as we sat quietly talking after the party, “Is it arrogant to write blogs?” And she said, “Of course it is.” I am afraid she is right. But I can’t help myself. Just introspection and more introspection - like I expect anybody to be all that interested. Remember shopping with a three year old? “Look,” they say to EVERYBODY in every store, waiting in the lines, walking out to the parking lot, “I got NEW SHOES!!!!”

 On second thought, maybe that’s all any of this letter sending is, God’s children, trying to show everybody their new shoes.

Here’s the part where we wish you a Merry Christmas (how nice not to have to get this all on one page). Because we do. We wish you merry and quiet and peaceful. We wish you games to play and children to kiss and work to do. Slower paced lives, turned family-ward. Less money spending, more time spending. Less fear and more faith. Less TV and more singing with a guitar on the front porch. Less hurry and more meaning.

Much love. And much gratitude for your kindness, and your patience. When I die, I will commend you to God the Father each of you, one by one. I hope that doesn’t hurt your chances . . .