Mrs. Teabody Receives a Special Gift
The greatest gift is a portion of thyself. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson  |
| Mr. Teabody at the fireplace he created. |
Not a single glimmer of daylight pierces the horizon on this third day of winter, but Chez Teabody is lamplit and humming along inside where Mrs. Teabody sits happily pecking away -- once again bundled up in winter flannel as the short-lived summer that waltzed through with its fifty degree temperatures has just as willfully waltzed off. In no way is this a complaint, mind you, as everyone will agree that it is easier to be filled with the Christmas Spirit when one is not dragging about a nearly frozen posterior. It is Christmas Eve, 2013.
Are you ready for Christmas? How many times have you heard and/ or uttered this phrase in the past few weeks? What happens inside your brain when someone asks? Do you envision a checklist of things done and to do? Perhaps a list of names pops into your frontal lobe and you are at once pleased with the perfectly-imagined gift already wrapped and under the tree for someone you love while at the same time you are dismayed that NOTHING has crossed your mind for someone else you love : the picky aunt, the couple who have everything, the surly teenager. If there is any comfort at all in knowing you are not alone in this quandry, well, you must know this: you are not alone.
Mrs. Teabody holds great esteem for the wonderfully motivated gift giver who starts early -- sometimes as early as the day following Christmas -- and by October has his or her hoard of treasures just waiting for tissue and shiny, curling ribbons. No frowny lines cross THEIR foreheads, and they enter the official season ahead of the game. These paragons write their Christmas cards the day after Thanksgiving, and their freezers and bins are packed to overflowing with homemade gifts as well: the blackberry jam of August, the fudge that did NOT turn to sugar crystals, the traditional- but-pain-in-the-keester-to-make snickerdoodles, the amazing venison mince, and the tedious and smelly but loved by a whole buncha folks, homemade SOUR kraut. (Bad spelling intended). For those of you with hearts that give all year long, Mrs. Teabody tips her fedora for you are the standard by which others gauge their response to this season of sharing. Mrs. Teabody recalls with a great sense of loss that her Christmas stocking ALWAYS contained --probably for thirty years or more -- a Ball or Mason pint jar filled to the tippy-top with carefully picked black walnut meats from her mother's only sister, Aunt Lois. Mrs. Teabody misses you, Auntie; she misses the love that went into that most time-consuming and generous gift. Who else but you was ever willing to gather the windfall from the black walnut trees, tear off the acrid husks with stained hands, crack hundreds of walnuts and sort through to remove all the bits of shell? No one else. No one till now.
Some weeks ago Mr. Teabody asked Mrs. Teabody what she would like for Christmas, and she told him. For the past few weeks Mr. Teabody has been a paragon -- that word again! -- of industry in his office where a specially-purchased printer has been at his side as he masterfully made his way through pounds of prose - the stuff of one hundred and thirty-nine blog posts. Mr. Teabody is the perfect creator of such a gift as he ran a very successful printing company for thirty years and he is a genius at formatting and spacing and removing extraneous punctuation. Mrs. Teabody grudgingly allows that his editing skills are on a par with her own. Mon Dieu, Gentle Reader! That ouched a bit as an admission. :)
With the loving industry of an Aunt Lois, Mr. Teabody has gathered all those pages from the blog, and he has carefully picked through each post, reformatting EVERY SINGLE PAGE, fitting the pages together, first from most recent to most ancient and then reversing the order. All the photographs that worked as links had to be scanned and inserted. Can you imagine the frustration, the exasperation, the why-the-heck-did-I-get-myself-into-this consternation? Mrs. Teabody's finished book of blog entries: Mrs. Teabody Greets the Day, one hundred and thirty- nine posts written over two and a half years, now sits on the coffee table as an inch-thick, three hundred pages-long manuscript-- a galley proof, as it were, done in house by the expert, Mr. Teabody. Could anyone ask for a more perfectly-imagined gift? One could not. Thank You, Mr. Teabody.
Gentle Reader, Mrs. Teabody KNOWS that a "portion of thyself" has gone into all your plans and preparations for this most joyous of seasons. Smell it as the fragrance of cedar or pine or the aroma of Christmas foods fills your house. Hear it in the carols, the urgency of plans, the whispered prayers. See it in the strung and lighted fairy lights, the inflated reindeer-filled plastic snow globes on front lawns, the candles shining in every window, the garland framing a doorway, the glimmering tree, the nestling presents beneath. But most importantly, feel it. Open your heart and know that the love that you have put into every baked cookie, every holiday decoration, every curled ribbon on every painstakingly-selected gift is FELT. And needed. And welcomed. And, most of all, returned.
Merry Christmas! And God Bless us, every one.
Are you ready for Christmas? How many times have you heard and/ or uttered this phrase in the past few weeks? What happens inside your brain when someone asks? Do you envision a checklist of things done and to do? Perhaps a list of names pops into your frontal lobe and you are at once pleased with the perfectly-imagined gift already wrapped and under the tree for someone you love while at the same time you are dismayed that NOTHING has crossed your mind for someone else you love : the picky aunt, the couple who have everything, the surly teenager. If there is any comfort at all in knowing you are not alone in this quandry, well, you must know this: you are not alone.
Mrs. Teabody holds great esteem for the wonderfully motivated gift giver who starts early -- sometimes as early as the day following Christmas -- and by October has his or her hoard of treasures just waiting for tissue and shiny, curling ribbons. No frowny lines cross THEIR foreheads, and they enter the official season ahead of the game. These paragons write their Christmas cards the day after Thanksgiving, and their freezers and bins are packed to overflowing with homemade gifts as well: the blackberry jam of August, the fudge that did NOT turn to sugar crystals, the traditional- but-pain-in-the-keester-to-make snickerdoodles, the amazing venison mince, and the tedious and smelly but loved by a whole buncha folks, homemade SOUR kraut. (Bad spelling intended). For those of you with hearts that give all year long, Mrs. Teabody tips her fedora for you are the standard by which others gauge their response to this season of sharing. Mrs. Teabody recalls with a great sense of loss that her Christmas stocking ALWAYS contained --probably for thirty years or more -- a Ball or Mason pint jar filled to the tippy-top with carefully picked black walnut meats from her mother's only sister, Aunt Lois. Mrs. Teabody misses you, Auntie; she misses the love that went into that most time-consuming and generous gift. Who else but you was ever willing to gather the windfall from the black walnut trees, tear off the acrid husks with stained hands, crack hundreds of walnuts and sort through to remove all the bits of shell? No one else. No one till now.
Some weeks ago Mr. Teabody asked Mrs. Teabody what she would like for Christmas, and she told him. For the past few weeks Mr. Teabody has been a paragon -- that word again! -- of industry in his office where a specially-purchased printer has been at his side as he masterfully made his way through pounds of prose - the stuff of one hundred and thirty-nine blog posts. Mr. Teabody is the perfect creator of such a gift as he ran a very successful printing company for thirty years and he is a genius at formatting and spacing and removing extraneous punctuation. Mrs. Teabody grudgingly allows that his editing skills are on a par with her own. Mon Dieu, Gentle Reader! That ouched a bit as an admission. :)
With the loving industry of an Aunt Lois, Mr. Teabody has gathered all those pages from the blog, and he has carefully picked through each post, reformatting EVERY SINGLE PAGE, fitting the pages together, first from most recent to most ancient and then reversing the order. All the photographs that worked as links had to be scanned and inserted. Can you imagine the frustration, the exasperation, the why-the-heck-did-I-get-myself-into-this consternation? Mrs. Teabody's finished book of blog entries: Mrs. Teabody Greets the Day, one hundred and thirty- nine posts written over two and a half years, now sits on the coffee table as an inch-thick, three hundred pages-long manuscript-- a galley proof, as it were, done in house by the expert, Mr. Teabody. Could anyone ask for a more perfectly-imagined gift? One could not. Thank You, Mr. Teabody.
Gentle Reader, Mrs. Teabody KNOWS that a "portion of thyself" has gone into all your plans and preparations for this most joyous of seasons. Smell it as the fragrance of cedar or pine or the aroma of Christmas foods fills your house. Hear it in the carols, the urgency of plans, the whispered prayers. See it in the strung and lighted fairy lights, the inflated reindeer-filled plastic snow globes on front lawns, the candles shining in every window, the garland framing a doorway, the glimmering tree, the nestling presents beneath. But most importantly, feel it. Open your heart and know that the love that you have put into every baked cookie, every holiday decoration, every curled ribbon on every painstakingly-selected gift is FELT. And needed. And welcomed. And, most of all, returned.
Merry Christmas! And God Bless us, every one.
Wow! Fantastic gift and fantastic blog, as usual.
ReplyDeleteOnly Thrup and the Mr. could send us such a warm and heart-felt greeting this lovely Christmas Day, thank you and as Mr. Dickens said, "God bless us, everyone".
ReplyDelete