I've changed the date of my giveaway to January 15:
Mommy Has To Stay In Bed is available online at Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble, but you don't have to let your fingers do the walking any further than the comment section of this post, because I have two copies of this delightful book to give away to two lucky winners. Just leave me a comment about why you'd love this book, or who you'd give it to, and I'll draw two names on January 15, 2008.
Maureen Dowd digs below the surface to reveal truth in a manner that seems focused and effortless. This comes from Wednesday's New York Times:
"When consumerism curdles, it’s tempting to become an emotional Marxist about Christmas.
Not Karl. Groucho.
“Now the melancholy days have come,” Groucho Marx wrote to pal and fellow comic Fred Allen on Dec. 23, 1953. “The department stores call it Christmas. Other than for children and elderly shut-ins, the thing has developed to such ridiculous proportions ... Some of the recipients are so ungrateful.
“For example, yesterday I gave the man who cleans my swimming pool $5. This morning I found two dead fish floating in the drink... For Christmas, I bought the cook a cookbook. She promptly fried it, and we had it for dinner last night. It was the first decent meal we had in three weeks. From now on I am going to buy all my food at the bookstore.”
I found Groucho’s grouchy letter in Caroline Kennedy’s “A Family Christmas,” a selection of songs, poetry, prose, letters and a list of the questions most frequently asked of Macy’s Santa.
...
As I read her book, it struck me that everyone must have a holiday tale they could write up and paste into the back of “A Family Christmas.”
Mine would be about Trigger.
When I was little, I got one of those wooden horses that bounced on springs for Christmas. I loved him and rode him every day.
One morning, I came down to the porch and the horse was gone. My mom explained that a poor woman and her son had walked by, and the little boy had stopped and stared longingly at the horse.
...
When she told me that she had given my horse to another child — a stranger — I was crushed. Whenever we fought for the next 16 years, I reminded her of her perfidy.
On my 21st birthday, I came home to find a bouncing horse with a handwritten sign in its mouth. “Hi. I’m back!” It was signed: “Trigger.”
I brought the horse of a different era to live with me, as a rebuke about how long it took me to appreciate one of my mom’s favorite sayings: “Don’t cry over things that can’t cry over you.”
Her lesson was lovely: that materialism and narcissism can only smother life — and Christmas — if you let them."
Aahh Maureen. I had the exact same experience at a similar age. My lost love was a gigantic stuffed Huckleberry Hound that disappeared one day while I was at school. I was furious, until my mother explained that she'd given it to the housekeeper for her nephew, who had almost no toys, while we had way more than we needed.
As a child who lusted after and begged for everything I saw anywhere, any time, even I had to admit she had a point.
The same thing happened in college as I was stopped cold during preparations for a world class tantrum over a missing Halloween pumpkin, when my roommate admitted having given it to one of the dorm housekeepers to make pies. When a tantrum is interrupted in mid tirade, you feel like one of those movie martial arts figures that freezes move in mid-leap so the camera can rotate around the figure.
It's not that I want to go all Joan Crawford on my kids ("NO! WIRE! HANGERRRS!"), but I do try to help them remember that there are so many people out there who don't have a tenth of what they have. Now that Hannah Montana's circling back for a second concert here I keep responding to Cleopatra's baleful looks with the calm explanation that we need to sit back and let someone else who didn't score tickets to the first concert have a turn.
We will go see the movie, however.
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