Christmas Ornament #11: ???

Hey, we made it to the present!  Despite four nights in the hospital this week, we managed to not only buy an ornament, but I even wrote up this blog post!  2 weeks ago, we went into the city primarily to visit the Chicago Art Institute.  (When you live here you just talk about going to "the city".  People never say they're going to "Chicago".)  The art institute is free on Thursday evenings (for Illinois residents) and the girls really wanted to go, so we made the trek and had a good time.  But if you're going to go all the way into the city, you'd better get your money's worth, so we also stopped by the bean, and the Christkindlmarket.  As you can tell by all those words smashed together to make one big word, this is a German thing.  It's a traditional outdoor market where they sell food and Christmas-y things.  So, we stopped by and picked up an ornament.  Now, I know that it was probably mass produced in Asia somewhere, but we'll pretend that it was hand carved by some little German shepherd or something.  Either way, it's from the big city and now lives on our tree.

Christmas Ornament #10: The Fox

Now you finally understand why we move so often.  If we don't move, we don't know what Christmas ornaments to buy.  2013 was our move to St. Charles, Illinois, which sits on the Fox River.  There are a lot of things out here with Fox in the name - roads, shopping centers, ice rinks, etc.  The river runs right through the center of town and has great running paths up and down it.  It was an easy decision to get a fox for our tree last year, though we did have to pick from 3 or 4 different foxes.  As I recall the voting got pretty contentious in the store, mostly because Ella always wants to get her way about everything.  Eventually we settled on this guy with his suspenders and bow tie.

Christmas Ornament #9: Tree

Once again, there's no story here, it's just an ornament we liked.  It's felt circles all stacked up to make a Christmas tree.  But what I think we need is little miniature versions of all our ornaments to hang on it.

Christmas Ornament #8: Reindeer

There's no story behind the reindeer, really, but I think he's super cute.  He's got little wooden legs and antlers and tiny little bells on his blanket.

Christmas Ornament #7: Sweater

We pulled into Midland, Michigan on October 30th, 2010 and realized we were going to have to figure out where we had packed away all of our winter clothes.  The sweater ornament commemorates that move to the arctic north.

Christmas Ornament #6: Snowman

This snowman is an embarrassment to us all.

Without a doubt, this is my least favorite of all our "special" ornaments.  Which means there must be a story here.  The scene is December 2009, and Shannon is 8 to 10 weeks pregnant.  Weeks 6 to 16 of a Shannon pregnancy at our house is a bit like the bombing London in WWII; you hole up, live on whatever rations you were able to carry with you, hope no one dies and wait for it to be over.  December is a busy time under the best of circumstances, but with Shannon mostly incapacitated, it was particularly crazy.  All three of us did make it out of the house for a trip to Walmart in the week before Christmas, and that is not the time or place to find nice Christmas tree ornaments.  But we had to get something, because we were nearly out of time, and there was no way of knowing if Shannon would feel well enough to go shopping another time.  So, this is the least bad of the ornaments that were left.  I have a vague memory of little Julia liking it.

Christmas Ornament #5: Baby Bell

I think this one is pretty self explanatory.  This baby is made just like the Red Hat Lady and obviously commemorates Julia joining the family.  Like the awesome parents we are, there is no ornament for Ella's first Christmas.  (There are barely pictures of Ella.)

Christmas Ornament #4: Red Hat Lady

You might think that our annual Christmas ornament is a big deal at our house, but it's really not.  We put the tree up each year the day after Thanksgiving, and then about a week before Christmas we realize that we haven't bought a new ornament that year.  So, during a regular shopping trip, we stop by the ornament section and see if something catches our eye.  If we don't find anything we like we don't get anything, but we're not all that picky.  This is just to say that we don't visit 20 specialty shops and spend hours searching for the perfect ornament.  We just pick from what happens to cross our path.  Such was the case in 2007 when we stumbled across the Red Hat Lady:

It's hard to see with that feather boa getting in the way, but she has a purple bell body, a red feather boa and a red hat.  When we saw her, we knew she was just too fabulous to pass up.  We didn't know it at the time, but she belongs to the Red Hat Society.  There is great poem by Jenny Joseph titled "Warning" which begins, "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me."  This prompted a woman in California to give a few friends red hats for their birthdays, and then in 1998 the Red Hat Society was formed, which is a social club for women.  Now that I know they're a thing, I've seen a group of them once or twice out having lunch at a restaurant or something like that.  The poem is about how when she is older, she will be able to do unconventional things and "make up for the sobriety of my youth."  So now, when I see our Red Hat Lady, I think a little bit about small acts of rebellion against society's expectations for good behavior.

Christmas Ornament #3: Hula Snowman

In 2006 we moved to sunny St. George, UT.  That meant saying goodbye to white Christmases and hello to being uncomfortably hot for about 8 months of the year.  We needed an ornament that would match our new tropical clime, and found some festive hula snowmen.  Unfortunately, they had a problem: legs.  The 4" snowman had skinny 2" long legs sticking out the bottom.  If you're familiar with snowmen (which the creators of this ornament apparently were not) you'd know that they don't have long skinny legs.  The story has a happy ending though, because one of the snowmen hanging there didn't have legs.  I don't know if it was from an unsupervised kid, or if the snowman had a run in with the mafia, but either way, in our eyes this was a feature, not a flaw, so we bought him.

Christmas Ornament #2: The Disco Ball

Some of our Christmas ornaments have little stories behind them.  Not so much for 2005.  In our search for a new ornament that year, we were at Target and we found this disco ball, and it seemed fun and we liked it, so we bought it.  That's pretty much the story.  I like having a tree with some personality - something that is severely lacking in too many designer trees.

Christmas Ornaments

Shannon and I got married in 2004, and when Christmas rolled around my mom bought us a little 4 foot Christmas tree.  As we were living in about 550 square feet at the time, it was the right size for us, particularly because we'd be spending the actual holiday at our parents homes.  Christy bought us some basic ornaments along with the tree, but we didn't have a star, so we went out and bought one.  It's a four foot tree, so you can't go too overboard with the star.  We picked a very simple star that really isn't meant to be a tree topper - it's just an ornament.  But we liked the simplicity of it, and besides, we had a plan.  We knew that we wouldn't have our little tree forever, but we'd be able to keep that star as a regular ornament on the tree each year after we'd upgraded to a bigger tree, and it would remind us of our first little tree all those years ago.

Well, the joke's on us.  We still have the little four foot tree set up in our home for the 11th year now.  Each time we get close to actually buying a new tree, something gets in the way.  But I'm happy with our little tree, and each year that we've been married, we've gone out and picked out a new ornament to add to it.  When we started, we had lots of branches on the tree for our nondescript white balls, but as time passes our tree is getting over run with our annual ornaments - perhaps in another decade we really will be forced into buying a bigger tree.  This month I'll be sharing each of the ornaments we've picked over the years, each with their own little story.

So that's our little star, that keeps sitting on top of the tree year after year.  We still plan to get a new, bigger tree someday.  Maybe next year . . . .

River Trips

We don't go on exciting vacations, but we do read about them.  And if you're going to read a book about people nearly dying while going down an unexplored river, why not two?

The River of Doubt by Candice Mallard (353 pages)

Lets review what we all know about Theodore Roosevelt.  He was a scrawny kid, had asthma, became a boxer, grew a fabulous mustache, became president, went on a hunting trip to Africa, ran for president again, split the republican vote with Taft and let Wilson win.  So what does a guy do when he's bummed out after losing a presidential election? If you said, "Lead a trip down an unexplored river in the Amazon." you win a cookie.  (I'm sure this is what Mitt did, right?)  The ex-president booked a trip to South America to deliver some speeches, look at a few museums and then do some adventuring in the Amazon down a known river.  The trip would have been exciting for sure, but not all that note worthy.  But, as they were making their way through South America, he seems to have realized that the trip as planned didn't meet his uber-manly standards (can you imagine the memes if he were still around?) and he adjusted the itinerary to go down a river known as The River of Doubt.

Isn't that the best possible name for a mysterious river in the Amazon?  It's a pity that they re-named it the Roosevelt River, though as a consolation prize I do get to imagine Brazilians trying to say his name.  (It would come out something like "Who's a velch?")  The Brazilian government hooked him up with their most famous explorer, Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, (so that's who all those roads are named after) who had found the headwaters of a river that went off into the rain forest and ended up who knows where.  I mean, really, they didn't know where it went.  Obviously it ended up in the Amazon River eventually, but they weren't entirely sure how long it was, or even which other river it would hook into.

So, after sending half of his fellow travelers off on an easier adventure, they set off down the River of Doubt.  It turns out going down a river involves a lot of not sitting in a boat, because if you get to rapids too big to run, you've got to carry your boats around them, and that is hard work.  Oh, and there are mosquitoes, and malaria, and hostile Indians, and piranhas, and at least one crazy dude in your expedition.  They made it out alive (you'd probably have heard about the trip if Teddy Roosevelt had died down there) but not without some seriously close calls.

Apparently President Roosevelt had not read Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick (294 pages).  We'll cut him some slack because it wasn't published until 2001, but if he had, it might have helped him out on his trip.  The full title of the book, Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy through the Grand Canyon could have given him a heads up on what he was going to face.  Powell was a Civil War vet, explorer, geologist and whatever else he decided to be, who hatched a plan to hop on the Green River in Wyoming and hop off the Colorado River in Nevada.  Easy peasy.  Ok, I don't think he ever claimed it would be easy, but that was the plan.  He and 9 other guys set off in 4 boats to go down two rivers that had never been traveled before.  Between them, they had absolutely no river running experience.  One of the first days, in calm water, when they pulled over to camp for the night, one of the boats missed the landing point and ended up 400 yards down stream.  Yup, these were the guys that were going to take on world class rapids in the Grand Canyon.

This book made me long for the bare, red rock and steep canyon cliffs of the southwest.  Once again, going down the river involves a lot of getting out of the boat and carrying it, or, more often, hooking ropes to it so you can guide it through the rapids while you're not in it.  This trip had many of the same components of danger that Roosevelt had - Indians, rapids, etc. - but got to trade in the malaria and piranhas for cliffs and bigger rapids.  The cliffs don't sound like such a problem until you realize that sometimes the Green and Colorado rivers fill the canyons from wall to wall, which means there is a risk that as you round a bend you can be faced with a set of rapids and getting out to walk around them simply isn't an option.  Powell made it out, as did most of the crew (they named a Lake after him, after all) but 10 guys with 10 months of food and 4 boats went in, and when they made it to the confluence with the Virgin River, there were only 6 guys, 2 boats and 5 days worth of rations left.

Both books were pretty entertaining.  In the middle, they both got a little bit slow as the monotony of a river trip wore on.  With journals to work from, the authors are able to account for each day with detail as they went through each set of rapids, portages, and spoiled soggy rations.  At times, I was really hoping for a sentence that started "Then it was pretty much more of the same for the next 10 days until . . ."  In the end, the authors managed to pull it out and rescue the narrative before it got too bad, though.  Both books were worth reading, though I think I liked The River of Doubt more (though it had the advantage of being the first one I read.)

One final thought from John Wesley Powell.  He wrote up a 300 page first person account of his trip afterwards and in the entire thing, never found a reason to mention that he only had one arm.  (Lost his right arm in the Civil War.)  So next time you're tempted to complain on facebook about something, consider a man who climbed and rafted through the Grand Canyon in a wooden boat, with no map and only one arm who knew what it meant to only worry about the things that you could do something about.