Tis the Season for Family, Friends, Fun and Feasting

Here we are in one of my favorite times of year, the amazing mix of crazy and calm, frantic and reflective that I associate with the final two weeks of the year. Asked today by a young friend in China (with whom I email regularly) about how we celebrate Christmas, I had these thoughts: family, fun and feasting. One of her professors had started her thinking about it when they spent some class time on the way Americans view the holiday.

Once the Thanksgiving holiday is past, the momentum picks up. We try each year to buy things we think will make good gifts when we see them. There’s a closet into which these items go, awaiting birthdays and Christmas. The good news is that we find things that someone might really like and we get “ahead” this way; the bad news is that we often forget that we’ve already bought a present for someone, so we buy another. And, of course, as the season ramps up, the urge to buy ramps up, too.

Even when I’m fighting traffic at the mall, I’m thinking about family and friends for whom I’m finding gifts. As I’m vying for a parking spot with two or three other agitated drivers, I’m thinking that there must be one special thing or one more thing that will make this Christmas really special for someone we love. There must be something on sale that is really great, better than whatever I bought two months ago that was good, but maybe doesn’t seem so special now.

It’s the time of year, too, for the holiday letter. This is when we can catch up on our friends’ lives and tell them what’s happening with us. For our Facebook friends, it’s probably redundant, but others get our year in a page of highlights. It’s become a creative outlet for me and a way to show off some of Mike’s great photographs. My challenge every year is to try to remember how Microsoft Word works so that I can put words and pictures together. Our theory is that some will read and enjoy, some will be too busy to read it, but might look at the pictures and others will simply sigh and say this is what retired people do because they have too much time on their hands.

Now we’re getting down to the short strokes. Christmas is only a couple of days away and we’re ready to travel, the car is stuffed with the packages we’ve wrapped and the few clothes that we still have room to take. We’ll spend the next week driving from place to place, hugging and laughing and trading gifts, both precious and silly. And we’ll eat. Then we’ll eat some more.

There will be meals, of course, with the bounty of the holidays on each table. Meats and side dishes will be followed by cakes and pies. In between meals, there will be cookies galore and dishes of candy and nuts. Egg nog and mimosas will surely add to our caloric intake and I can’t pass through Nashville without indulging in the boiled custard that appears on store shelves there this time of year. Our “yums” will be followed by “ughs”, perhaps accompanied by a polite belch and, finally, “zzzzzs.” There will be a nap or two, undoubtedly, and, weather permitting, a walk to help digest the volume of refreshment that passes through our lips.

One final thought about my young friend’s query is ambrosia. When I was a kid, my mother always made ambrosia, a kind of fruit soup made from orange sections, crushed pineapple and coconut. We ate it as dessert or breakfast or a snack from a big bowl that she kept in the refrigerator.

As my life has unfolded and various folks have influenced the mixture of ingredients, I’ve added cherries and miniature marshmallows and deleted the coconut. These changes haven’t diminished in any way the dish’s diverse attractions. If we’re too sated to eat it after one of these filling holiday meals, we just attack it late at night or eat it for breakfast. I still use a spoon to scoop out the oranges, section by section, rather than cut up the orange or resort to canned mandarin oranges, already sliced. Mama always said having your hands in the process added to the sweetness of the result.

For me, the natural sweetness of ambrosia (no sugar need be added) with its mixture of flavors -- the acidic pungency of the orange and the exotic tang of the pineapple, the sweetness of the cherries and marshmallows – represent perfectly this time of year. There’s a certain amount of work involved in getting ready, an almost hour-to-hour variation in pace from frantic shopping, wrapping and decorating to the serenity of listening to our favorite Christmas music and reminiscing. Then there’s the finale: the opening of presents and the sharing of joys both hoped for and unexpected.

With any luck, we’ll all experience the wish expressed by Clement Moore in his famous poem, “Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.”

Photos by Mike Lumpkin

Remembering Dorothy Ann Moon Pettes

 I have been lucky in life, not least in the remarkable women I have known. These women have shared their strength and experience with me, mentored me and offered me their friendship, their warmth and their wisdom. They have, one and all, inspired me with a variety of ideals to be both admired and emulated.

Dorothy Pettes

One such woman died a few days ago in Atlanta. She left this earth richer for her time here and us poorer for her loss. Her legacy extends well beyond the children she raised and the friends she made. Her life achieved a goal many seek and fewer realize—she made a difference. Her integrity alone was a positive influence in the lives of many.

Young Dorothy

Dorothy Pettes was less than a month shy of her 99th birthday when she left this life. Born Dorothy Ann Moon in St. Louis in 1912, she had earned a nursing degree and worked as a visiting nurse and college nurse before her marriage to Tom Pettes. Once married, she became a wife and mother and, in my view, a true domestic engineer and the mother of four children.

I met Mrs. Pettes when invited to her home by her daughter, Sara, a high-school friend. I was amazed, first by the orderly and intelligent design of their home, then by Mrs. Pettes herself. I was not unaccustomed to formidable women as my mother was one herself. But where my mother’s force was some electric combination of high intelligence sparked with high emotion, Mrs. Pettes, also very intelligent, was more reasoned in her intellect. She was clearly cut of another cloth.

Her practicality was evident in her dress and style. She was attractive without having made much effort with makeup, lean and wearing a simple housedress with sensible shoes. No frills were in evidence, no hairstyle of the moment. Sara has said that her mother came to understand Sara’s love of fashion only late in life.

As I explored their home I marveled at the room in which one whole wall seemed taken up by a world map. I was awed by the design of the house with its retractable walls allowing rooms to grow or diminish in size as needed. What astonished me most was a posted schedule of activities and duties for mother and children. This was a practical household run by an educated, organized and pragmatic woman.

When it was time for dinner, rather than yelling for her children to come home, Dorothy Pettes simply stepped outside and blew a whistle. They not only knew what it meant, but learned to expect that sound near suppertime and to respond forthwith.

What I’ve learned about Dorothy Pettes since was that she was a woman of distinct and deeply-felt opinions, a life-long liberal who lived her beliefs, rather than just espousing them. Sara has told me that after Dorothy’s children were grown and on their own, she cared for foster children and, a lifelong member of the League of Women Voters, engaged in local political activities.

Engaged is a word that seems well-suited to Dorothy Moon Pettes. From her early decision to become a nurse through her years as an involved and loving parent to her lifetime commitment to social action, she was engaged in life. She saw the value of order in life and seemed to see clearly the way in which lack of disciplined care for others could be irresponsible and hurtful.

One of my favorite memories of Mrs. Pettes is that she took Sara and her friends (including me) to see the Paul Newman movie, “Hud.” For those who haven’t seen the film or don’t remember the main character, Hud is an angry, often drunk and abusive cowboy, described on the movie posters as “the man with the barbed wire soul.” I don’t remember clearly why she went with us. We might have begged her to go with us to a movie rated beyond our years or she accompanied us because she felt it inappropriate for us to see without an adult to provide perspective. In either case, it was we girls who simply had to see that particular movie and she acquiesced.

We girls, then teenagers with raging hormones, found Newman’s sultry portrayal of Hud at once frightening and exciting, crude and sexy. As we left the Emory Theater, Mrs. Pettes stopped on the sidewalk commented tersely that she “certainly wouldn’t want to live next door to that man.” I’ve never forgotten how stunned I was by her practical analysis of the character. Though we laughed at her comment later, we’ve acknowledged in our grown-up years that she had, indeed, hit the nail on the head.

Lest I paint a picture of a woman too orderly and practical to be warm, I must say that I always felt her sincere welcome when I was in their home. She had a beautiful smile that lit up her eyes. Her home was open to her children’s friends and she accommodated our silliness and our attempts at serious discourse with patience. A woman with a wry sense of humor, she must have found some amusement in the strange politics of the occasional Tri-Hi-Y club meetings held in that room with the wall-size map.

I think she might have agreed with what Confucius wrote: “To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.”

I am convinced that Dorothy Moon Pettes had set her heart right. She will be missed and she will be remembered with tears and laughter, affection and admiration.