He is Risen, and Others Have Fallen Asleep

Happy Easter, my friends. The tomb is empty.

But no joy in this life is without its shadow. This past Monday, the first day of Holy Week, my college roommate and dear friend, Nammon, passed away at the age of 28.

I don’t usually mention others by name in this blog, or post their pictures, but I hope Nammon wouldn’t mind if I bend my rule this once. She’s actually made an appearance here before, when I wrote about my visit to her in Santa Barbara in March. In our little roommate joke about the Buddhist, the Lutheran, and the Catholic who walked into an In-and-Out, she was the Buddhist.

We knew then, when we visited her, that it would be the last time al three of us were together; Nammon had been fighting cancer for some four years already, and in February she had told us that she was stopping treatment (which had produced no results) in order to “choose to live” for the rest of the time she had. I will always be grateful that the three of us were able to be together again when we could all still fully enjoy it.

Nammon passed away in Santa Barbara on April 18, peacefully from what I hear, spared from the long and slow decline in condition and faculties that we all feared she would suffer toward the end. She left us sooner than we’d expected, in fact. You could never tell Nammon she had to do something a certain way; I think, ultimately, she went when she was ready.

But I don’t want to talk about her passing; I’d rather talk about her life. This collection of memories and trivia is my tribute to one of the best friends I’ve ever had. It’s small, but it’s all I can give her now.

*Nammon loved ice cream. She always used to say that if her PhD in Physics didn’t work out (which, by the way, it did, despite all obstacles), she would open an ice cream stand and probably make more money that way. She also loved Piglet, for reasons that I never really understood.

*We had two running jokes in our room in college, among us three roommates. The first was that if Nammon didn’t want to do work, all she had to do was ask our third roommate (then a Southern Baptist, now a Lutheran) a question about God, and she would be set for a multi-hour conversation that would give her a perfectly good excuse not to do her homework. The other joke was that when I was putting the final touches on my paper, it was time for Nammon to start writing hers. (She was an excellent student, but also a very creative procrastinator.)

*She and I once took fencing together as a P.E. credit. She was much better at it than I was. After each class the two of us would go to Food Court just as it was opening and be the first in line for dinner, which we would eat in the nearly-empty dining hall while we chatted about classes and movies and all the things that friends chat about.

*We also took translation theory together, where we discovered a shared (strong) dislike of anything written by Walter Benjamin. We would sit in our room working on our respective translations (she translating Thai, I translating Spanish), and while I pondered the profound implications of various rhymes for “shore,” she would ask perplexing questions like, “What’s a poetic word for cow?” Apparently Thai has several. English is sorely lacking, we discovered, in poetic words for practically everything.

*Nammon was terrible at answering emails, and she got one of her favorite professors addicted to Diet Coke.

*Her English was almost flawless, though she always pronounced “jealous” as “jeelous,” and the word “caffeine” had three syllables (“café-een”). She had a very distinctive way of saying, “Hello?” when she answered the phone, and I hope I shall never forget the way she used to inflect her favorite phrases, “How should *I* know” and “Point taken!” She taught our other roommate to say “hello” and “bathroom” in Thai (the first two words you’d like to know while traveling in a foreign country), but in practicing them, the two always turned into one phrase, so she ended up saying, “Hello, bathroom,” as if she was pleased to meet the lavatory.

*When the three of us first started rooming together, we all had very similar blue jackets, and we joked that we were triplets. Then Nammon went through a very girly phase in which she wore beautiful skirts and heels even in the iffy New Hampshire springtime. The last time I saw her, in California, she was back in the sweatshirts and jeans we all used to wear when I first met her; she’d gone full circle, while I’d never left it. But one of my most vivid memories of Nammon is when she got a new skirt that swished around at the hem when she twisted her hips; Finding Nemo had recently come out in theaters, and she called it her octopus skirt because it reminded her of the baby octopus that was one of Nemo’s friends.

*When someone told her to strike a pose for a picture, Nammon would always puff out her cheeks and stare placidly back at the camera. It was endearing and self-deprecating, and I sorely wish I had a picture of her in that pose.

*She loved teaching. She volunteered with the Thai Scholars Program (the foundation that brought her to the US from Bangkok) for something like 10 years running, helping new generations of exchange students adjust to life in the chilly hills of New Hampshire. They all called her “Pi-Nammon”—something like “Aunt Nammon” from what I can gather. When she taught physics to undergraduates in Santa Barbara, she jumped up and down and bounced back and forth in her enthusiasm.

*Nammon loved her closest friends with a dedication I’ve never seen before. I knew her to pull all-nighters making pop-up cards and hand-knitted scarves for one of her friends, she cherished singing the duets from Moulin Rouge with another, and the only time I saw her deeply upset was when someone she loved inadvertently hurt her feelings. Nammon knew, even before she got sick, that heartache is worse than bodily pain, and I never knew her to inflict it on anyone else.

The strange thing about Nammon’s death is that, after the initial sadness, I started to feel so very alive—as if knowing that she was no longer seeing sunsets and watching spring arrive and eating chocolates made me suddenly appreciate that I was. I hope she wouldn’t be offended that that’s the feeling I take away from her passing. Somehow I think she’d approve; she was a vivacious and spirited woman and even when, as she put it, she and her body were no longer on speaking terms, she faced life—and death—with the resolution and good humor with which she faced everything from physics exams to knitting.

Nammon’s legacy will be the changes she wrought in the hearts of those who loved her. In honor of my dear friend, I will endeavor, as best I can, to live with the gratitude, humility, affection, and joy that she left as an example—and a challenge—for everyone who knew her.

May the One who conquered death find a place in paradise for this beloved young woman, and may He grant consolation to those of us she left behind.

Happy Easter, my friends.

April is the Cruelest Month?

I don’t often have an occasion to quote T.S. Eliot, and if I happen to agree with his assessment of April, it’s for a very different reason than his. This year, for me, April is one of those months which, when you look at your Google calendar, sort of makes you want to cry. Or breathe very quickly into a bag, one of the two.

We started off the month with a bang in the English Department, with a weekend-long grad student conference. It was a wonderful hit, but everybody who was involved in organizing it (of which I was one) needed another weekend to recover from the excitement. It didn’t help that I also went to Cirque du Soleil on Sunday night, which was amazing (a dazzling adaptation of medieval mumming, acrobatics, and grotesquerie!), but see again my comment about the excitement.

Next week I have a dissertation chapter due as well as an important public presentation of my project (the last mandatory event before the dissertation defense, actually—though that’s still a long way off, thank goodness). On the same day as my presentation, I have not one but two choir concerts. That’s in addition to two other singing engagements for church, plus all the dress rehearsals. And then the week after that is Holy Week, which I don’t think I ever considered a time-consuming event—until I joined the church choir. I might as well just bring a sleeping bag and live at the church from Thursday through Sunday, for all the time I’ll spend at home. Gives one a better appreciation for how busy priests and pastors are during the high holidays of the liturgical year.

Not that I’m really complaining; I like being busy, and I certainly brought this all on myself. But if I don’t post on my blog again for, oh, another month or so, let the preceding paragraphs stand as my excuse. Before my enforced hiatus, though, I wanted to post some pictures of the unseasonable snow showers we got a few weeks ago, just when we were thinking it was about to be spring. And here are two fun little “bloopers of the real world” that I’m so fond of. I encountered them just recently, and if the pictures aren’t great quality, it’s because they’re from my phone.

First, a statuette in an antique store labeled “White Horse.” WHAT kind of creature is this exactly? Animal identification failure much?

Second, a lost and found notice in a local high school’s choir classroom. In case you can’t read it, it says: “Found: Black Womens Sock/Hose/Foot Cozy: 3.” (We’ll turn a blind eye to the lack of apostrophe in “Women’s,” since no one is ever sure which side of the s to put it on.) Somebody instead has helpfully added a little comma in between “Black” and “Womens.” I like how the punctuation is supposed to fix this whole strange sentence.

The grammar police seem to have been concerned with political correctness when really they should have been asking themselves the much more important question: under what strange circumstances could one contrive to lose not one or two (which would make some amount of sense) but exactly THREE footies?

A Buddhist, a Lutheran, and a Catholic walk into an In-and-Out

No, it’s not a joke, it was my weekend. Last week I was blessed with the opportunity to fly to sunny (well, mostly sunny) California to visit my old college roommates! Our freshman year of college we were hall-mates, but from second year all the way to the day of graduation, we were the unstoppable trio. In fact, it’s been odd NOT being roommates for the past five years since we graduated.

We were, as the lead-in might suggest, just about the most unlikely roommates imaginable—even more so given that the Lutheran started out a Southern Baptist in our college years. One of us is from Bangkok, one is from Oklahoma (and Massachusetts now that she’s married), and one is from…where am I from again? One of us is a scientist, one is a linguist, and one is an English major. One of us is Thai, one is Lenape, and one of us is just about as mongrel Caucasian as you can get. We had practically nothing in common but what we cultivated over our years together. What can we say? Some things just work, and there’s no telling why. So from chick-flick movie nights and ice-skating on Occum Pond to teasing over boys and late-night discussions about God, we were terrific roommates for three years. We were also excellent at procrastinating together, but that’s beside the point.





I can’t say enough about these wonderful girls, and they remain wonderful and amazing women now, who have faced and are facing the kinds of trials we all pray to escape—and they’re doing it with grace and wisdom and extraordinary humor. Their stories are their own to tell, but I’ll just say here that if I can go about my own life with even half the grace, wisdom, and humor that my old roommates show every day, I will be a force to be reckoned with.

I had never been to Santa Barbara before this past weekend, but now that I’ve been, I already miss the West Coast ways! To fly out of dreary, wintery Virginia and land in sunny, flowering Southern California was like fast-forwarding from early March to late May. The whole place looks like a movie set (and in fact, I thought about the opening credits of M*A*S*H every time I looked at the hills), and of course my allergies kicked in right away. I didn’t mind; the flowers were worth it.

We sampled the local fare from Mexican to Spudnuts—and of course the In-and-Out burger joint, which I’ll compare to its East-Coast rival Five Guys as soon as I visit one. We visited Stearn’s Wharf despite the gusting wind (at least it wasn’t snow!), and we drove out on Highway 101 through the Santa Ynez Valley and into wine country. I don’t particularly like wine; I was excited about the horses.

And we visited Solvang, a town that seems to have been built up entirely on the tourist trade, with replicas of Dutch and Danish buildings all housing restaurants and toy stores and hobby shops. There’s a windmill that actually turns and even a replica of the Tower in Copenhagen, though inside it is a pizza place instead of an observatory. What a strange little town to find in the hills of Southern California!

It was a lovely trip that was all too short, but I have to content myself with what it was, because I don’t have much of a prospect for going back in the near future. Still, even though it only lasted a few days, I’ll always treasure my Santa Barbara reunion with the best college roomies ever to grace a dorm!

In Praise of Graffiti (well, some of it)

I never understood the purpose of carving one’s initials on poor innocent trees. Perhaps I saw Fern Gully at a young enough age that I always sympathized more with the trees than with the lovers who immortalized their infatuation in a living plaque. Nor do I have a very great appreciation for the work of so-called “graffiti artists” whose garish and cartoony murals cover half the walls and subway stations in the major cities of the western world. (Maybe the eastern world too; I never thought to look when I was in
Seoul.)

But I have to confess a fascination with graffiti in classrooms and libraries—even (forgive me, fellow bibliophiles) graffiti in library books. Most of it’s juvenile stuff, of course—people’s names and initials and, on college campuses, fraternity symbols. But every once in awhile you get something really clever, and then you feel rewarded for spending your valuable study time reading all the other fluff. In a classroom in the English Department, I once saw a note on a desk that read, “Who is John Gault?” which is, of course, the famous first line of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Even better, in another classroom I once found a medieval palindrome:

SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS

(It doesn’t mean very much, but it reads the same forward and backwards and up and down, and in addition it can be rearranged to read “PATERNOSTER” (the medieval name of the Lord’s prayer) in a cross shape, with two A’s and two O’s leftover (for Alpha and Omega, of course). The fact that some student knew the palindrome and took all the time necessary to carve its letters indelibly into the desktop impressed me, and I felt a sudden kinship with this unknown mind from an unknown time.

Probably my interest in graffiti is very much tied into my dissertation project, which studies medieval marginalia (I swear, more interesting than it sounds!). I’m fascinated by the way in which medieval, and even post-medieval, readers of manuscripts immortalized their names and comments and complaints on the leaves of the books themselves. Not only that, but later readers read and commented on THOSE comments, carrying on a conversation across who knows how much time and who knows how much distance, with people they likely never met, and who were likely dead by the time they read their notes. It is a form of very, very slow but immortal community, and I think it’s wonderful.

That’s why I spend as much time when I’m in the library carrels reading what’s written on the walls and shelves as I do reading what’s in my books. I’ve seen actual conversations (“Hi.” “Hi yourself.”), vigorous disagreements (“What are we here for?” “To learn to live to our potential.” “No, to get a degree and get a job.”), and even some kind if not particularly effective encouragement (“Orgo is eating my life.” “Don’t worry, Jesus loves you!”).

Here are some fun ones I found recently, all in one carrel:

“My spoon is too big”—a reference to a very, very strange series of parodic animated shorts by Don Hertzfeldt.












“It’s hotter than a toasted cheese in here,” which someone else glossed as “grilled cheese” and snarkily added, "FTFY"—"fixed that for you."














“Kill ‘em all,” which someone crossed out, then another person wrote, “Let God sort ‘em out,” to which someone else responded, “And I’m God’s intermediary,” to which, of course, yet another hand added the very clever riposte, “FU.” Disturbing enough but very dynamic.











But this is my favorite:


The symbol of the Deathly Hallows, which coincidentally started appearing chalked on walls all over campus shortly after the seventh Harry Potter film came out. Every time it rains, someone chalks them up anew.










College students have far too many ways to procrastinate.


I’ve often thought the experience of reading a medieval manuscript is very much like trying to study in a subway station, with all the voices in the margins calling for your attention and distracting you from what you might otherwise focus on. More recently, I’ve decided it’s much more like reading in a library carrel, where despite the silence, the walls themselves speak and speak loudly. But perhaps it would be more accurate to reverse the comparison say that studying in a library carrel is more like reading a medieval manuscript: they came up with it first, after all. We’ve just taken things off the page and stuck them on every other surface we could find.

So long live library graffiti—but please don’t take this as an encouragement to become vandals yourselves. I don’t even write in my own books, much less the library’s books. But when the crime’s already been committed, I see no reason to pretend it isn’t fascinating stuff.

PS: While we’re at it, sometimes the officials commit faux pas themselves. Remember the misspelled book binding I mentioned a few months ago? Well here’s an elevator button from a library that just tickles me pink:

If I hit it, do the doors open or close??

Twenty-Something

When I turned twenty-six, I had to get over the strange sensation of knowing that I was closer to thirty than I was to twenty. Thirty is the age when people are grown-ups and have things like careers and mortgages and spouses. Twenty has much less weighty associations, and by those standards, that’s still pretty solidly where I am.

But now that I’m even CLOSER to thirty (not quite there yet!), I have to marvel at how fast the time has gone. I still think of scholarly articles that were written in 1999 as being fairly recent—according to the five-year expiration date on scholarship, they are not. Not by a long shot. I still think of high school as not all that long ago, and it staggers me to think it’s been fully half of my life since I was a freshman!

And it’s not just things in relation to me that seem to have flown by either. My college first-year students are now upwards of an entire decade younger than I am. They call me by my last name like I’m some kind of authority figure (though I still have to dress up on the first day of class or they look at me like they can’t figure out what I’m doing behind the Teacher’s Desk). They were eight years old when 9-11 happened; they don’t really remember what it was like when you could accompany your loved one all the way to the very gate at the airport even if you weren’t flying. They don’t remember NOT being at war with Terror. (I don’t dwell at length on this sort of thing in my daily life; I just had it brought home to me when I gave my students a reading on post-9-11 political rhetoric and realized they’d never really heard anything but.) Heath Ledger stands in about the same relation to them—a Hollywood leading man who died too young, a long time ago—as James Dean does to me. They’re starting to look at CDs with the same wary mistrust as most of my generation looks at LPs. “Why don’t you just get it on iTunes?”

It all gives me a very odd sympathy for folks who have been around a heck of a lot longer than I have. If 20-some-odd years have gone by in the blink of an eye, I really can imagine waking up one day and realizing I’m 85 years old and I won’t know where the time has gone.

This is starting to sound rather negative, but I don’t mean it to. I feel blessed to have experienced every one of my 20-some-odd years, and I look forward, I hope, to experiencing many more, however fast they fly. I have ambitions to be one of those crazy cat ladies who wears purple dresses (make that trousers) and red hats—someone who loves her crow’s feet and her gray hair. (“Yeah,” my older friends smirk, “wait until your metabolism slows down to a crawl and you have arthritic knees and you turn into that person at the movies who keeps going, ‘What’d he say?’ to your neighbor: see how much you like getting old then.” Well, I’ve been warned that getting old ain’t for sissies. I hope I’ll prove not to be a sissy. I’m sure I’ll complain bitterly, but I hope I’ll like my wrinkles anyway.)

Birthdays have never been a particularly big deal in my household, any more than New Years. The last time I remember being particularly excited about a birthday was when I turned seven, and that was only because seven was (and, illogically, remains) my favorite number. Ever since I turned nineteen or so, the numbers don’t seem to have mattered much (except for these odd occasions when I have a reason to stop and marvel at how many years I’m wracking up without even trying).

Of course, I have had some memorable birthday parties, for good and bad. The best was probably my surprise birthday party when I turned ten. You wouldn’t believe the scheming and the cleverness that went into making that one happen! The worst may have been my twenty-first, when I spent all evening desperately studying for a test and writing a paper, all the while trying to keep the blood flowing through my legs in an inhuman New Hampshire January “cold snap.” My nineteenth birthday I got a fire-truck as a gift—unintentionally, of course (it involved trick candles and a dorm-wide fire alarm system: don’t ask). This birthday that just passed, I had a dessert party, which involved some lovely friends and probably about three weeks' worth of chocolate, licorice, and cheesecake. Three weeks' worth apiece, mind you. I probably won’t be able to handle something like that when I’m forty; I figured I should do it now while I can enjoy it.

This birthday has given me occasion to stop and notice how much things keep on changing in the world. But it doesn’t take a birthday to notice that; in fact, I noticed it long before my birthday, but this seemed like an appropriate post in which to bring it up. Birthdays, in my opinion, are really best celebrated not by serious reflection but, as I celebrated mine this year, with some good friends and as much chocolate as you can possibly handle in one sitting. Count the candles on the cake if you want to, but don’t count the calories until tomorrow.

Tour: Pronounced with Two Syllables

For the past ten days, I’ve been touring around the “Deep South” with my concert choir, the University Singers. We bussed from city to city, singing for our supper at churches and high schools and staying with generous locals who had spare beds. This is the second tour I’ve been on with the U-Singers, and despite the fact that I probably should have been working on my dissertation during this time, I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to sing instead.

And more than just sing, too. We visited eight cities, several of which I’d never seen before: Lynchburg, VA; Charlotte, NC; Abingdon, VA; Memphis; New Orleans; Birmingham; Atlanta; and Christiansburg, VA. Not that we got to do much sightseeing except for in New Orleans, but still, we always met a few locals, so I think it counts. I won’t give a day-to-day rundown of our adventures, because let’s face it: most of the time was spent either on the bus or eating (sometimes both at once), and no one who’s not in the group would care to know which nights we went flat and which nights we made all our entrances on time. But a few interesting notes never go awry, do they?

First, just a note that all of these pictures, except the first one (which was taken in Abingdon) are from New Orleans. More on that later. Now, to business. To begin, “tour” is properly pronounced with two syllables, rhyming with “sewer.” I don’t care what the dictionary says, it sounds silly when pronounced like the past tense of “tear.” This was a heated debate amongst the singers both before and during the tour. But I’m right, so that’s that.

Next, I have decided that barbeque is the southern answer to lasagna. When we went on tour two years ago to the Midwest (which, in our math, incorporated both Rochester and Buffalo), the churches where we sang gave us lasagna for dinner practically every night. It’s a classic tour staple—because, really, what better way to feed seventy-some-odd people at one go? But in the South, it’s barbeque. We had pulled pork or barbeque chicken no less than four times in eight cities, and not a mention of lasagna even once. Last tour I pitied the lactose-intolerant; this tour I pitied the vegetarians and the folks who keep kosher.

On another food-related note, it will be a VERY long time before I feel the need to eat (or even smell) fried chicken again. Usually when we stopped for lunch on the road we could find some place with a Subway at least, but there was one day in which every blessed option was fried chicken: Chick Fil-A, Popeye’s, KFC, Raising Cain. The bus smelled like a deep-fryer the rest of the day.

I also have to point out the irony that confronted us on our trip: we thought we were making a wise decision to tour the South during this nasty, cold month, considering we were wandering around in Chicago this time two years ago. But no! We were hit with snow in Abingdon, Charlotte, and Memphis (small audience that day—most people stayed in during the blizzard that was falling as we sang). It was frigid in New Orleans on our free day, and Atlanta was so buried under three inches of solid ice that all our venues (and almost all our home-stay hosts) cancelled on us. In fact, instead of being a two-day stay in which we were to sing a concert the first night and do a choral workshop at a school the next day, our Atlanta sojourn turned into four hours killing time at an OUTDOOR shopping mall, a night in a hotel, an impromptu concert at a retirement community, and then a 10-hour drive back to Charlottesville. (We stayed overnight here, then drove back to Christiansburg for our last concert the next evening.) However, that impromptu concert was actually a really lovely experience, with a large and appreciative audience and time afterward to talk with them and enjoy some very positive feedback. So, as our director said, we made some lemonade out of the weather lemon. (That’s pretty much a direct quote.)

The most amusing concert we had, at least in my opinion, was in Abingdon, where I lost my shoe coming onto the risers and had to stand half barefoot, trying not to crack up and watching everybody else stare at my orphaned shoe as they filed on, until someone had the opportunity to grab it and return it to me. At that same concert, the dimmer lights were making a constant, very loud hum. It was somewhere in between a B and a B flat, and it threw us off entirely, since several of our songs start on a B. However, our director made some lemonade there too, and since the program is mostly a cappella, he simply had us take our pitch from the lights instead of his pitch pipe! Singers out there will find this amusing; I may not have explained it well enough to make non-singers appreciate how bizarre a solution it was.

I can’t pick the best or the most moving concert, because several moments stand out in my memory from various nights throughout the trip. People would mouth the words or even stand up in their seats when we sang “Loch Lomond.” One man told somebody in the choir that our Szymko piece made him cry, and he hadn’t cried in six years. That means something. We also sang Franz Biebl’s “Ave Maria” (choral people tend to know this piece, but there’s a version on youtube if you don’t), and almost every night it moved somebody to tears—usually someone in the audience but more often than not someone in the choir as well. It’s one of the most beautiful pieces I’ve ever had the privilege to perform. But it’s never all serious; I can’t tell you how many times people told us how very much they liked “the Bieber piece.” Oh, Justin, you should aim so high.

Now, as promised, I'll wrap up by saying something about our free day in New Orleans. Every U-Singers tour has a free day; last time we explored Chicago in the snow, and this time we explored the Big Easy in barely-above-freezing temperatures, which the locals pretty much considered the end of the world. My tour buddy and I (yes, my tour buddy. Don’t you keep a tour buddy on hand?) walked around the French Quarter, had beignets and café au lait at the Café du Monde (oh, my goodness, the sheer amount of powdered sugar!), then took a walking tour of the beautiful Garden District (I’ve never seen so many famous people’s houses). Later, we braved a walk down Bourbon Street (wouldn’t want to be there on a weekend), and took in some genuine New Orleans jazz at Preservation Hall (the atmosphere was like an old speak-easy—shabby but somehow just right for that sort of music). But actually, my favorite part was the hour we spent with an old Cajun man who ran a mask shop in the French Quarter. He found out my tour buddy and I weren’t locals and was very happy to share with us his rather impressive knowledge about the history and culture of New Orleans. He even pulled up his family pictures from Mardi Gras and showed us the enclosed courtyard behind his store where a well-known local artist used to stage photo shoots. As we headed out of his shop, he left us with his one Cajun phrase: “Laissez les bons temps rouler”—let the good times roll. One of the best parts of tour is getting to meet locals who love their city and are eager to talk about it, and since we didn’t have home-stays in New Orleans, this lovely old man was a terrific answer to our wish to see the non-tourist side of the Big Easy.

So in the end, dissertation, schmissertation. How often does a trip to New Orleans go (literally) for a song?

Holidays--Oh how swiftly they fly!

Even as I kid, I always thought that there was something one-sided about the way holidays worked: for weeks and even months you build up to and anticipate the Big Day (in my family, Christmas, though for some people it’s birthdays or another celebration), then in a mere 24 hours, it comes and goes and suddenly you’re left with a lot of empty boxes and torn wrapping paper. Well, in our case, wrapping paper with the tape neatly sliced open, but still.

The whole build-up followed by an almost instantaneous tearing down of decorations and return to non-seasonal radio selections is really a modern thing. The Christmas season, liturgically and according to the celebrations throughout most of history, BEGINS on the 25th and doesn’t end until the Feast of the Epiphany a week and a half later. (How many people these days know that the twelve days of Christmas START on the 25th and go through the 5th of January?)

My family is chock full of holiday traditions, most of which take place before Christmas, and most of which involve chocolate. Starting as soon as my sister and I get home (and we’ve been fortunate enough so far always to have lengthy Christmas vacations), we start baking Christmas goodies. Then we watch all our favorite Christmas movies whilst eating those goodies. (Our viewing list includes the mandatory Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life, if we can convince my sister to sit through it, but it also includes some movies others might not even consider particularly Christmassy—like both installments of Home Alone—and some movies that most of the world has forgotten—like the Muppet’s Christmas Toy and the 1987 Muppet Family Christmas. Our favorite, however, is the Muppet Christmas Carol. We like Muppets. A lot.)

We decorate our tree with every single ornament we own, which results in each branch having two or more ornaments hanging on it, and my sister always puts the first gifts under the tree. Then my cat licks all the ribbons. We go to the Vigil Mass on Christmas Eve and then drive around the local neighborhoods looking at the Christmas lights. (When we were younger, we would literally say, “Ooh, aah” when we saw a good house, but we’ll still break out the phrase even now for an especially impressive display.)

On Christmas morning we open presents, and it usually takes half the day because my sister and I insist on unwrapping neatly so the paper can be reused—and we also usually get distracted by eating more Christmas goodies; it’s the only day out of the year when we eat chocolate before noon.

Every family has its own traditions, some probably much more exciting than ours, but this year we added something new: we read Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol aloud to each other as we baked our Christmas treats (often interrupting the reading to interject quotations and musical numbers from the Muppet version), and when we finished that, we read Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. If you don’t feel Christmassy after those two books, I don’t know what can be done for you!

And we bookended our Christmas celebrations with birthdays. My sister’s birthday is just before Christmas and mine is just after, but since neither of us is ever home for the actual day anymore we’ve taken to celebrating a little late and a little early, respectively. So the first and last vacation goodies that we baked were birthday cakes! We used those tasty store-bought sugar letters to spell out an appropriate message on my sister’s, but when we got to mine we discovered we didn’t have a particularly good selection of letters leftover. So my sister, creative thing that she is, played Scrabble on my birthday cake. I was favorably impressed with the result and thought it was worthy of sharing.

So I guess in the end we actually drew out our holiday celebration much longer than most people do, since we were still celebrating until the 3rd of January! Perhaps that can become part of our family tradition starting next year: Christmas for as long as possible. Maybe we’ll even manage to make it to the Feast of the Epiphany and revive the celebration of the Twelfth Night. After all, Christmas Day isn’t the END of something—it’s the beginning of everything!