Enveloping the Word: Christmas Card Envelopes

  "Not every act of art creates something special, but it does create something. It is the act of art that is important, not the result." Michael L. Goodman

Last week, I was hurkle-durkling [a Scottish term for waking up but lying in bed for a few minutes, thinking, pondering, reviewing the need-to-do list, and mentally preparing for the day]. I remembered with shock that it was already December, and I had not started decorating my Christmas card envelopes. I send out close to eighty cards every December, tucked in hand-decorated envelopes. We bought the cards in early November so I could get started earlier than in past years. Did I get started early? NO! I had not even decided what to doodle on the envelopes. Ack! I haven't written my yearly Christmas letter yet!

That morning, I hurkle-durkled for longer than usual, pondering and hoping for a quick solution. I needed a design that was simple and would not expend too much of my time to finish each card. I settled on circles, or globes, encircling the address field in a wreath. I cut a simple stencil of circles that I could easily and quickly embellish, and proceeded from there.

This is the stencil pattern transferred to an envelope.

This was the first attempt. I added another circle. Eh

This is the second rendition.

The third iteration. My wife likes this one, so I am going with it.

Here are a few of the letters I mailed in November while I should have been working on Christmas cards.

Commit Acts of Art Every Day!

Christmas 1953

I have been doing a lot of Family History/Genealogy work during the last three months. I went through the boxes of papers that I found at my father's house after he died, and I found a lot of interesting artifacts and photos. Some of the photos I already had in my collection, but I recovered a few that were in better condition than the ones I had. Here are some from a Merry Christmas from my past.

These photos were taken in Lordsburg, New Mexico, in 1953. I turned six in October, and Jill turned three in November. We look mighty happy here. You don't see tinsel on a tree anymore. I don't think you can even buy it now. I loved to watch the old bubble lights on the tree, and the tinsel shimmer and wave in the air currents. Ah, the by gone days.

My Christmas letter for 2015

December 2015

Merry Christmas from Mike and Chris:

We have been into our main floor remodel for over a year now. We were hoping to be finished by Thanksgiving. Then it was by Christmas. Now it is, “When will this be done?” The walls are painted, the carpet is in the bedroom and office. The flooring for the dining, kitchen and living room is waiting to be installed, which should happen this weekend. The cabinets are supposed to be ready, and all the appliances are at the warehouse waiting to be delivered. The master bath hasn’t been started, and all the electrical has not been completed. There are three other bathrooms we can use, but it is hard to have a bedroom and walk-in closet without lights. Shall we hope for MLK’s birthday or Presidents Day?

My dad died last in January, so we made two weekend trips down to California for two different memorial services. One in La Mirada, where he coached football for so many years, and one in San Diego where he was living. The tributes that came in from former students and his many friends were overwhelming. La Mirada High School dedicated this year’s football season to him. All the home games were played in Goodman Stadium at the high school.

This picture was taken twenty or so years ago. That is Rachel and Rebekah at the top.

Chris retired in June and is busier than ever. She has been our general contractor on the remodel which is using up a lot of her sanity. She volunteers at her old school once a week and is directing the school play again (there goes the rest of her sanity). Two days a week she takes care of three-year-old Gabriel. It is not tending-it is a four hour play date twice a week! He commands total attention; no playing by himself. He is a charmer and a cutie, but he has occasional manifestations of terrible temper. I call him my little “frumious Bandersnatch!”

Alexander and Isaiah are enjoying high school. They love the activities, especially the sports events and parties. Isaiah is in honors math, and Alex is in honors English. They are both in French, and sometimes they let me tutor them. I still drive them to school on my way to work, and pick them up on my way home. The high school is about three blocks from my school. Alex was one of only three freshmen to make it into the fall musical. He had no speaking lines, but he had a one line solo during one of the chorus numbers and was in most of the dance numbers. The play was Urinetown. The play was very strange, but it had some nice songs. Alex was fantastic, of course.

I am retiring at the end of this year. After 43 years I am throwing in the towel. I have been teaching longer than 90% of the teachers and all of the administrators at my school have been alive. I stayed this year because I wanted to have one year in the brand new school building. My last day is June 4^th. I wrote my retirement letter last week. It felt a little disconcerting to actually put it down on paper. Counting all the years I was a student and all the years teaching, I have been in school around 62 years. It’s about time I graduated.

Chris and I had our cataracts removed and new lenses put in both eyes. I am amazed at how beige the world was before the surgery. Everything now is so bright and colorful, and the distance vision in my right eye is so clear that I can see details in the mountains that I never knew were there. And that is without glasses. My left eye is better, but still blurry and will always be that way from laser surgery scars on the retina. But my vision is so improved, that I can drive without glasses. We both still have glasses, but they are mainly for reading and computer and to correct a little astigmatism.

The kids are all well and working hard. Rebekah just returned from a three week cruse around Australia and New Zealand. She had a wonderful time, but said there was too much time at sea and not enough time in ports. She will move up from a 30 hour to a 40 hour position at the library in January. She has been waiting for those ten hours for a long time.

Emma is an administrative assistant at a home health and hospice agency. She recently got a part time job at a multiplex theatre complex to make a little extra money. She gets to go to movies free. The only problem is she has no free time to see any.

Rachel has been doing some work on her home. She was able to pay off her new windows and put on new shingles and rain gutters. Exciting stuff! She still hosts fantastic programs for children at her library and gets to spend lots of money on BOOKS.

Joe got a promotion in the Murray water department. He is an inspector. He still does his old job, but he also inspects. What he inspects I don’t know. Joe has really done a lot of work on our house. He did all the new siding on the addition, finished the fantastic gabbled porch, insulated the addition main floor and basement, and at lease a hundred other things on our remodel. We couldn’t have done it without him.

Hyrum and Emery are always happy to jump in and help us out when we need it. They are installing the new floor in the kitchen and living room with Joe. They are real troopers and always cheerful. Emery is still working from home doing accounts and invoices and whatever else for the steel company. Hyrum builds houses all over the place. Sometimes he has to spend weeks away from home with his crew building in the Utah outback.

So, except for a few scrapes and bruises, we are all healthy and happy to be busy; and we are hoping you are too. We wish you a Merry Christmas and happy 2016.

They finished the floor a few days before Christmas, and we were able to do a little decorating.

The piano nook.

December Postal Art I

I joined an ATC swap for the first week of December. The challenge was to create a card with two or more Christmas seals, or any of the stickers that charities send out at this time of year seeking more donations. I have made 10s and 10s of ATC backgrounds. Of the backgrounds I especially like, I make multiple copies. So I pulled out a bunch of background cards and started to explore what I could create. It was a bit more difficult to create an interesting card with a couple of stickers than I had anticipated.

My wife's sisters, Jennifer and Lora, were visiting from California for the weekend and a few days before Thanksgiving, so I thought it would be fun to give Lora the ATC challenge as well. She is a very talented quilter, crafter, and ATC artist, of whose work I have several pieces. Amelia, my grandniece (Lora's granddaughter) was also at the house for a big family dinner for the California visitors, and she also wanted to make a card with us. I thought she made a great card for a six year old. My daughter Rachel also got into the act and made a zentangle card. She didn't follow the rules of using two "charity" stickers on the card. Naughty daughter.

We each chose a different background for our cards which enhances the variety. I wonder what variety we would have had, had we each use the same background. We will never know now. That exists in another time stream.
This is my card:

This one is by Lora. It has a very Salvador Dali-esque flavor to it, I think:

 

My daughter Rachel penned this one. It reminds me of a Pysanky egg:

 

And finally, this is the one six-year-old Amelia created. I don't know what the little drawings represent:

I am sending the three extra cards to my Swap-bot partner as a little Christmas bonus.

Christmas 2009

Merry Christmas to one and all. The snow from the 22nd of December is still clean and bright, so we are having a white Christmas. We had a big family and friend dinner last night at our home (24 guests), and the Big Guy with the flowing white beard (Bekah this year) came to cheer everyone with a little gift to tide us over till Christmas morning. Santa did a great job for the little ones who were with us, but Alex slipped once and called Santa "Bekah." I sent out 38 Christmas cards this year before the big day. There are a few more to get out when I find the addresses. Last year all my cards were late and became New Years cards. This is the picture I sent out this year. We took it after the luau at the Polynesian Cultural Center during our October trip to Hawaii, which was a Christmas present that we promised the family three years ago. It took that long to get everyone on the same scheduled week so we could actually take the trip together.

Box of Little Bricks

I survived the winter solstice and am so ready for the longer days ahead. Today was my annual library open house for the teachers and staff at Mt Jordan Middle School. I started this open house a few years ago to treat all the people I work with. It is hard to give out little remembrances and cards at the Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, and other religious/secular festivals at this time of the year and not forget someone or go broke or offend one or another of our diverse group. Everyone seems to like the schmooze time throughout the day, and I thoroughly enjoy it. I get to be Julia Child for a day.
I make hot sausage dip, three batches this year, will probably need four next year; cheese trays, crackers, chips, salsas, fruit and vegetable trays, salad and desserts. This year I added Grenache Marin-cabbage, noodles, and ham cooked in chicken broth. My aide helps with the food and set-up. Several teachers have also brought things to contribute to the buffet table. We ran out of somethings before the second lunch was able to make it into the library. Next year I will have to double up on everything.
I am taking the memoir writing class again this year for the fifth time. The second assignment topics did not thrill me, and after a month of false starts I threw something together the night before on the topic of a toy. Here it is:

The Box of Little Bricks
© Michael Goodman
While digging in a back yard flowerbed, I unearth a weathered piece of milled wood. A little brick shape, a quarter inch thick, two inches long with eight round nibs on one side and eight matching round slots on the other. Holding it in the palm of my hand, I turn it over a few times rubbing off the dried, powdery clay. The once bright red stain, where it hasn’t worn off, is faded to a pale, dusty pink. This relic was part of my “Santa” present in 1959 when I was barely twelve.
Actually, my big Santa present was a deluxe magic set that had some parts missing out of the box. The week after Christmas, my mother took me back to the toy warehouse where Santa had bought it. Unfortunately, there were no other deluxe magic sets in stock, but not being too interested in magic tricks anyway, I wasn’t extremely disappointed. Especially not when my mother said I could buy whatever I wanted from the store, as long as it didn’t cost more than the refunded money.
I ambled up and down the aisles of floor to ceiling shelves carefully investigating and examining box after box of play time fillers that would totally bore an electrified kid of the 21st century. It must have been an expensive magic set because I was able to buy two big toy sets: a huge set of Civil War battle figures complete with soldiers, horses, cannons, caissons, supply wagons and assorted accoutrements molded in blue and gray plastic; and a heavy box of miniature, wooden building bricks.
My sister and I spent hours on end sprawled out on the floor of the den building houses for her paper dolls with the bricks and our old Lincoln Logs. I am sure we exercised our imaginations and had more fun with those building bricks than anything else we ever owned.
In the first couple of years of high school, I had a few friends who enjoyed combining the bricks with the Civil War set to have massive battles with bombed out farm houses and walls. It is impossible to picture high school freshmen and sophomores today doing anything akin to that. We, or the times we lived in, were much simpler then, less sophisticated. We discovered that the bricks were fairly steady when stood on end like dominos, and we pains-takingly created long interweaving lines of “brick-inos” that would start a cascade with the least breath. I later gave away what was left the Civil War set, but I kept the box of bricks.
Mastering the art of standing the bricks on edge, I fashioned structures that resembled Greek and Roman architecture, my classical period. On a base of interlocking bricks, I arranged vertical bricks in rows like columns. On top of the columns, a double row of interlocked bricks solidified the structure and allowed for another level of columns to arise or for a carefully gabled roof to be built. Those miniature temples were amazingly sturdy until a strategic column or two were removed and sections would collapse like a fabled edifice of antiquity. Even in college, when I needed some down time from work and school pressures, I would pull the box of bricks from under the bed, clear a section of my desk, and build a fantastic structure fit for the Olympian gods.
After leaving California to finish college in Utah, and marrying, having children and buying a home, the box of bricks showed up at my door one year in the back of my parent’s truck along with other childhood paraphernalia that my mother miraculously had not thrown away. We stored the tattered, sagging box in the basement until our children grew older; then my wife let them play with the treasure of my early years. They scattered the bricks throughout the house and into the yard, and over time my treasure, which meant nothing to them, was lost to all but memory.
I turn the artifact over in my hand several more times and put it in my pocket. There are days even now when I wish I had my box of little red bricks, the ancestors of the boxes and bags of shiny, multi-colored, sterile, plastic Legos that infest the toy cupboard in the family room.