The Most Brutiful Time of the Year

The turkey has been eaten, and the Christmas tree has been chosen, cut, and forced into service in our living room. We decorated it last night and now it's twinkling merrily in our front window and filling the house with its lovely smell. The Christmas cards have been ordered but not addressed; I've brainstormed a decent amount of delightful, age-appropriate, unique gift ideas for most of the people on my list but not purchased many of them; we're fielding lots of lucky invitations for little parties here and family gatherings there but still not sure exactly when we'll celebrate Christmas with my side. All of this to say, the holiday season is upon us.

The most wonderful time of the year? Well, maybe. In the years when the girls were younger and needier and I barely had a second to eat my own food without getting up to do something, I'd be in the car in the weeks before Christmas and feel decidedly un-wonderful when that song came on. I'd be hauling two small, grouchy children to the grocery store for the 87th time, perhaps, or trying to track down one last gift with a toddler in tow, and it didn't really feel like "the hap-happiest season of allllll." In fact, I pretty much wanted to punch someone in the face when that song came on.

Even today, I don't know if I'd say it's the most wonderful. It has moments of great beauty, to be sure: the traditional tree-decorating/Elf-watching/fire-in-the-fireplace coziness; the gingerbread-scented, peanut-butter-fudge-making, sticky little hands in the kitchen projects; the delight on Christmas morning; the friends and family raising a toast to another year together. For me, it's hard to beat Christmas Eve, with its candlelight carols at church followed by a fancy fondue dinner and, eventually, tucking the girls in with their hearts full of anticipation.

But there's plenty of darkness mixed in with those twinkle lights. Lots of people face the holidays missing someone they love. I don't know a great deal about that, but I couldn't miss the cracks in my grandpa's voice as he said grace over the Thanksgiving table on Thursday. My parents are getting used to a holiday season without their mothers, and lots of other people in the world are missing loved ones, too. And the bounty of the holidays always seem to stand in such stark contrast to those in the world who are struggling to get by in difficult circumstances. Not to mention the way the list of obligations (cards! presents! a dish to pass!) seems to grow exponentially this time of year.

To borrow a Glennon word, I think it's the most brutiful time of year -- part beauty, part brutal humanity. A few years ago, at the height of wanting to punch someone in the face each time I heard the aforementioned song, I found myself in tears on Christmas night, so overwhelmed with busy obligations and frantic expectations that I had completely lost sight of the joy and light of the season. It had been so easy to let others set the agenda that I found myself at the end of what was supposed to be the best, most special time of the year feeling depleted and disappointed, bitter and exhausted. It was time to make a change.

I remembered one of my mom's best pieces of advice, something she cribbed from Ann Landers -- "No one can take advantage of you without your permission" -- and I had a stern talk with myself about priorities and pleasing others. I read the book Quiet by Susan Cain, and I remembered that being an introvert means I need to build time into my life for quiet, even (especially) in a world that wants to speed things up at the holidays. I read a blog post by Shauna Niequist called Present Over Perfect (go read it) that articulated my own thoughts and experiences almost exactly and gave me the permission I needed to say no to some things in favor of protecting myself and my family at Christmas. I took a step back and realized the saying "You can't please all of the people all of the time" applies to moms as much as to politicians. And I reminded myself that I was a grown-up, 100 percent responsible for the ways I spend my time and my life.

This is the best and worst possible news. On the one hand, being a grown-up means that when the furnace dies on the day before Thanksgiving, I'm the one who has to call the furnace guy and haggle over price on the phone. Ugh. It means I'm the one who has to get the babysitter, get the groceries, pay the bills, make the reservations, make the decisions. On the other hand, it means I'm responsible for the way I spend my time, money, and energy. It means nobody can hijack my Christmas without my permission, and it means that creating a sane holiday season is up to me, too.

Here's what our family has done since that Christmas night emotional breakdown. We've said no, thanks to a few longstanding traditions that weren't working for us. We've set aside time during Advent to find the still, small voice that reminds us why we're celebrating in the first place. We've been more intentional about seeking out opportunities with our family to give back a bit, both during the holidays and throughout the year. And we've created a few new, more meaningful traditions that work for our little family of four.

This year, we'll continue our Sunday suppers as a way to hit "pause" each week. So far, this little experiment has taught us the value of setting limits, being intentional with our time, and building more rest and connection into our life. Tomorrow, my brother and his wife are going to join us, and we're looking forward to catching up with them since we missed each other at Thanksgiving. Last week, Jason's brother and his family came for a long, lazy afternoon and a big hunk of pork. (And if you think that having a brother-in-law who owns a brewery means he brings great quantities of great beer to your house for Sunday supper, you're right.) 

This year, no matter what other craziness is going on (cocktail parties! staff celebrations! choir concert at school! cookie exchange!), Sundays will find me basking in the glow of our Christmas tree, belly and heart full of the bruty of the season, trying to tip the scales in favor of beauty.

Pork Fried Rice

I've loved Molly Wizenberg's winsome food blog, Orangette, for years, and I devoured her first book, A Homemade Life, a few years ago. I still make her banana bread regularly, and her writing voice is one I really admire. So when she came out with her second book, Delancey, (about the trials and tribulations of opening a Seattle pizza place with her husband) earlier this year, Jason got it for me for my birthday and I gobbled it up too. I liked it fine, but it really reminded me of my brother- and sister-in-law, Trevor and Lisa, who, two years ago, opened a sweet little brewery downtown Holland. I still remember the conversation we had around the table a year or so before the brewery became a reality, Trevor announcing his plans and us nodding politely, privately thinking what a terrible idea it was. I remember Lisa laughing a bit maniacally months later, her eyes wide: "We own a bar!" And so they do -- a successful, wonderful one at that. These days, I'm a fan of Our Brewing Co's coconut porter, Jason's partial to the Careless Whisper IPA, and we're pretty proud of their DIY brand of business ownership -- and their real-life example for our girls of one way to follow a dream and make it a reality. It seemed appropriate to make a Delancey recipe for Sunday supper with Trevor and Lisa, so we made Molly's sweet and sour pork, loaded with fish sauce and cooked low and slow for hours. It was good, but the star of last week's menu was actually the fried rice I made with the leftover pork for dinner a couple nights later. It's modeled after another Delancey recipe, Fried Rice with Kale, but I subbed spinach for kale and switched up the seasonings a bit too. Jason had seconds, and I'll make it again, but get ready to ruin a pan if you don't have a wok. (Deglazing immediately with water helps with the clean-up.)

• 3 T. peanut or vegetable oil, divided
• one bunch greens, such as kale, spinach, or chard, torn into bite-size pieces
• 1 T. fresh lemon juice
• 4 cups cold cooked leftover white rice
• 4 oz leftover shredded pork
• 1 dash each fish sauce, soy sauce, and sesame oil
• 1 fried egg, to top, optional

Heat 1 T. oil in wok or large skillet until very hot, then add greens and sauté until charred and wilted. Remove greens to a bowl and top with fresh lemon juice. Add remaining 2 T. oil to hot skillet and add rice, smashing it to the bottom and sides of the pan in a single layer with a wooden spoon or rubber spatula and letting cook, undisturbed, for 30 seconds to a minute. Scrape rice up, redistribute, smash it to pan again, and continue cooking until rice is fried to desired doneness. Scrape rice up, stir, and add pork and seasonings, stirring constantly, just to heat through. Add rice and pork mixture to bowl of greens, season to taste with salt and pepper, and top with a fried egg.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Sabbath

The teacher in me loves Venn diagrams, and I sketched out a quick one today. 

If you think of the left circle as "Reclaiming Sunday" and the right circle as "Sunday Supper," you can see the shaded, starred area is where the two ideas overlap, and that's where I hope to focus most of my writing: on that sweet spot in the middle, where we talk about food and recipes and the way they're so connected to hospitality and rest. But sometimes I'll want to zero in on one circle and ignore the other, and that's what I'm thinking about today.

What, in 2014, is Sabbath? When I talk about "reclaiming Sunday," what do I really mean? Does a Sabbath - a period of rest - really need to be a whole day long? Does it need to happen on a Sunday? Does it need to be religious or Christian in nature?

The answer to those last three questions, I think, is no. Sabbath doesn't need to last an entire day, doesn't need to happen on a Sunday, and doesn't need to be religious in nature. But historically, the answer to those last three questions has been yes, and that's changed in such a short period of time that I think it's worth comparing the Sabbath of my grandmother's mid-life to the Sunday of today.

I lost both my grandmothers this past year. The eldest one, my dad's mom, was 99 when she died. Her life was very little like mine: she grew up on a farm, went to school in a one-room school house and only through 8th grade, she had five children, and she lived with her family above the grocery store my grandpa ran. On the Sundays of his childhood in the 1950s, my dad remembers church, a family meal, and then church again at night. That was all. He remembers not being allowed to swim, bike, clean, play, or do anything at all except those three things. He remembers my grandmother trying to make most of the Sunday meals ahead on Saturday, so she'd just need to turn on the oven and cook what she had already prepared. 

Fast forward to my childhood in the 1980s. I remember Sundays that featured church, coffee at my grandparents', a big noon meal, naps, playing in the neighborhood and maybe some homework, and that's about it. My family didn't generally go shopping, go out to eat, or run errands, and that's largely because stores and restaurants weren't open on Sundays, but it's also because my parents didn't like the idea of supporting a culture where others had to work on Sunday. Neighbors who washed their cars and mowed their lawns on Sunday were frowned upon, and the county in which I grew up didn't sell alcohol on Sundays. We had a pool, though, and would definitely use it in the summer, and we'd ride our bikes and occasionally go to the beach for the afternoon in the summer, and my brother and dad would likely play basketball in the driveway or watch sports on TV. Throughout childhood, I played a little soccer and my brother played basketball, but I never remember either of us having Sunday games.

This morning, I found myself standing on a soccer field at 9:00 a.m. with a birthday party and a Costco trip on the schedule for the afternoon. Later, Jason mowed the lawn while I cleaned the bathrooms and did a load of laundry. The girls rode their bikes around the block and hula-hooped in the front yard. In just two generations, Sundays have become totally unrecognizable as a day of the week that used to be set apart for rest. Many people we know do go to church, but it seems that even those families have to squeeze church in among several other commitments in their Sunday: kids' sports, training for their own sporting event, birthday parties, grocery shopping, running errands, cleaning, piano lessons, social events. I get work emails all weekend long, and I know I'm not the only one. Many of our friends who travel for business have begun flying out on Sunday afternoon in order to be at their destination as expected for the 8:00 a.m. meeting on Monday morning. 

So over a period of 60 years, give or take, a day of the week that, in the Christian tradition at least, had been set aside for rest and worship for hundreds of years, has become just another one of seven weekdays, nearly as busy as the other six. And here's what I wonder: Are we OK with this? Or are we not OK with this, but we don't think we have a choice? 

Because here's the thing. I don't especially want to go back to the Sundays of the 1950s; those days of enforced church and joyless rest sound pretty grim. And having actual laws in place that forbid businesses from being open on Sundays seems like a pretty blatant flaunting of the separation of church and state. (Let's not even talk about shunning the neighbors who wash their cars and mow their lawns.) I don't presume that most of the residents of my community, my state, or my country share my faith or should have to follow any sort of religious rules. But no matter your religion or total lack thereof, don't we all want a day to just shut it down? To hang around the house in elastic waistband pants, watch mindless television, cook good food, read, hike, play? To let go of the need to be productive?

When I think about what's changed in the last few decades (and what might have caused our culture's definition of Sunday to change), a few things come to mind: more women entered the workforce, fewer people attend church, more people live in cities instead of on farms, and technology has completed changed the way we work. But I was in Paris and Vienna last summer, and those world-class European cities still close their restaurants and stores on Sundays in spite of the fact that hardly anyone in Europe cares about organized religion and the majority of women work. People sit in cafes, read the paper, walk along the Seine, play with their kids in the park -- and it's not because they're required by a priest or shamed by their mothers or neighbors. It's because they value the time away from work and school. I'm not sure why, as Americans in 2014, the voices calling for sanity in scheduling seem few and far between. I'm not sure why we aren't taking a good hard look at what we've given up since we've let Sunday become just another day of the week. I'm not sure what it's costing our kids, our health, our creativity, our relationships. But I'm curious.

Here's what I know for sure. My grandmother would never have found herself standing on a soccer field at 9:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. 

“Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I’m wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don’t know anything, and I’m the first one to admit it.”

— Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love