PS: Thanks Bryce for your comment on my 'Thank you to Woody Radio' blog...very sweet ( I'm sure you devoted Bryce fans will like it.)

Today I will spend some time making presents for Christmas Eve...and decorating here and there. I'm looking forward to our family dinner... we've found some great recordings online, of Spanish and American Christmas songs...mostly from the 40's, 50's and 60's...what a great sound. Found a great album called "Navidad Con..." with the traditional songs sung by various artists including Flores and Mercado. Also excited about songs by Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney and Burl Ives.

These songs will be great to hear that night. Music makes a party....even if it's played softly in the background...it's just as magical as the little lights or the yummy things to eat and drink. Music is the ribbon that wraps everyone together. Most importantly, of course, is being with those we love...even if just for a little while...sharing a happy mood, laughing and relaxing in a cozy place together. 

 THANK YOU 

This is my favorite dance number from my favorite Christmas movie of all time...I hope you'll love it as much as I do...it's sure to make you smile! Love, Blanca

My friend got me a tree topper this year...it's from the 1950's...made of that thin Christmas ball glass...it's so great. There is a weird little vintage elf at the bottom of it, hanging on and waving. The string of lights for the tree are also fifties vintage magic...they are soft-toned, yellow lights that are meant to look like little candle flames all over the tree. 

The gold glowing softness reminds me of the that story "The Little Match Girl"...reminds me of an illustration from that story, in which she is standing in the snow, barefoot, in the the glow of imaginary candle flames as she dreams of good things at Christmas. Have you read that story? It's beautiful and very sad. Another sad and beautiful Christmas story is "The Snowman"...if you've seen the animated movie, you'll know what I mean. It's worth watching.

The rain has been good for the garden. I just visited with two of my dancer friends downstairs. One of them performed last night and though they were both up late at the show, they both looked beautiful this morning....happy too. The garden is wet today...all of the green leaves are glistening in the sunlight with last night's rain drops. We admired the garden's beauty as we chatted, and then I walked back upstairs to my place. 

Playing softly...strumming the strings...such a good and simple instrument...such an old friend: this guitar.

Outside, the sky looks to be later than the clock reads. I'm warm now. The new heater is here beside me, and it feels great. It's silent as a cloud...and as warm as a pot belly stove.

My ceiling is high and meets at a center point beam; it's an A-frame that I imagine to be the bound center of a half-opened book, looming overhead. A star made of stained glass hangs down from a fishing wire, in the middle of the A-beam binding. As the sun goes down, it casts a multi-colored star beam on the diagonal wall, through the star shaped glass...a transparent reflection that changes shape as it twirls in the breeze. The breeze enters through a a tiny bullet hole in the window glass; a hole that was here when I moved in. Sometimes the star reflection is still. And sometimes, like now, it dances. Tomorrow, that window will be replaced. I will miss the tiny bullet breeze that makes the star shadow dance. But I won't miss the tiny bullets of cold.

Drawing...all the time...drawing. Listening to Lionel Hampton and his Orchestra (1938)....Glen Miller too. Watching Lana Turner in 'Peyton Place'. What a great movie. Today is good. Dreaming of snow...the beautiful variety...thinking of Christmas dinner over here and the long table cloth that I'll need...dreaming of the happy faces that will fill this cozy, book-roofed, hide-out. My dancer friend downstairs told me that this place was built in 1901! No wonder it's so ghostly and full of dancing star beams...no wonder the walls seem to breathe in and out of whispers and secret songs.

Love, Blanca

It's very chilly now. There is a small space heater, but it's not enough for this weather...not in this old house. Now I know. Time to get a powerful heater. There is a fireplace in the yard...but it's all wet right now...surrounded by green trees and small puddles and flooded patio chairs. The garden looks so alive...green as green can be...the flowers and trees are quenching their thirsty limbs and their petals and their thirsty roots...deep in the black mud...deep in the fertile mud, where good and secret things happen....quietly happening now...in this rain.

This, to me, is heaven...even though my nose and hands are cold...this heavy white sweater is keeping me warm...and these cozy velveteen leggings and toe socks, leg warmers and slippers...all so soft and warm. The heaven part is in the contrasts and in the listening...it's in the sounds outside. The dogs are silent...they are indoors...but the rooster is crowing. The drumming on the roof is so wise...a gift to the living things...rain has all the potential to be rough, but it's a gift, when it's gentle like this. 

Now we're in the season of giving. It's a good feeling. There are so many gifts that can be made. Beaded bracelets...or little ornaments made from FIMO. Have you played with FIMO? It's colorful modeling clay that can be molded like Play-Doh, but unlike Play-Doh, it can be baked hard into little stars or tiny dolls or snowmen or lions or hearts or even beads...baked in the kitchen oven....like cookies. But keep your eye on them because they can burn like cookies too. It's good stuff. Sometimes you can make a little figure and poke a hole through the top, and then after it's baked, add a piece of knotted yarn for hanging. A card is a good gift too. It's easy to find crayons and glitter and glue, fold a heavy piece of paper in half and decorate it, kid-style. That's a gift for the person who makes it and for the one who gets it. I like to bake cookies while making things...cookies make the crafting hours smell so good...and good scents are always good for your mood.

The rain hasn't stopped the little birds from lining up on the telephone wire outside of my window. The cutest birds you've ever seen. Baby-sized birds. They seem to be chatting.

The raindrops make circles in the puddles...the kind of circles that echo into perfect rings across the water. Just to look out of a window like this is a gift. There's so much to be thankful for. There's so much to look at and love.

Sleepy now, Blanca

  

Robertson Davies is also a fan of Christmas time ghost stories....and of telling ghost stories with the purpose of eliciting good-natured fun. He tells of how he used to have these great parties, while he was attending University. Everyone wanted to hear him tell his ghost 'party stories' aloud, around the fire. He would tell of ghosts of suicidal students who'd been wandering the campus, still longing for acceptance...for as he so eerily put it: all Universities have their secrets. He would chill his friends to the bone, with the way that he would dramatically tell his tales...and later went on to write down a series of ghost stories that he'd originally invented just for party-telling. Here is the first page of his explanation of how his book "High Spirits" first came about; his first encounter with the power of a good and frightful party-story.

B.

***

"Ghost stories came into my life before I could read. How well I remember the first one; it was at a party given by my parents, and it was not yet time for me to go to bed, because I remember that the sun was sinking outside the windows, and as the guests ate tulip jellies--they were streaked red and yellow and topped with whipped cream of a deliciousness that seems to have departed from this earth--Mrs.Currie told the strange tale of the Disappearance of Oliver Lurch. 

He was a farm youth in Kentucky who had gone out one night from a gathering just like ours, to fetch some wood for the fire, had not returned and when the others went to seek him he could be heard calling from the sky, 'Here I am! Here I am! HELP ME! I am Oliver Lurch!' The cries became fainter and fainter, and Oliver was heard and seen no more. There were those who said he had been carried off by a great eagle--but a grown man? What sort of eagle was that? It must have been SOMETHING ELSE.

I fell asleep that night fearing the Mighty Clutch. And since then I have always felt that any party would be the better for a ghost story."

-Robertson Davies

***

Well, that's all for this morning...I've got some drawings to do later...but first...I have some cocoa to stir over the stove top. It's cold today! Chilly...how good that hot chocolate is going to be...I can't wait for that first sip.

Love, Blanca