Lysistrata's Daughter

My husband loves Christmas. By which he means that he loves the hymns and services of Christmas, both East and West. He loves to have an Advent wreath and sing the O Antiphons of the Roman rite. You know? Christ-mass. The lovely churchy parts of Christmas. The hymns we love because we only get to sing them once a year. I love all that, too. What I hate about Christmas is something quite different, and it was on full display today. It started this morning, with NPR hinting darkly that people who do not spend every penny they can afford on Christmas presents, and a few more after that, were nothing more than economic jihadists, determined to sell the country into financial ruin. As if the brainiacs of Wall Street hadn't done that for us already. And I'm so sorry that I'm not willing to spoil my child rotten and fill up my little house with kitchen gadgets we'll never use in order to save an economy already being killed much more effectively than I ever could with...

BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Edinburgh, East and Fife | Rom-coms 'spoil your love life' : "They found fans of films such as Runaway Bride and Notting Hill often fail to communicate with their partner." Ha! I always thought romantic comedies were pernicious crap.

Usually, when I think of A, I have a jumbled impression of his wildly convoluted stories about building houses and killing bad guys, tantrums over going to bed, elaborate coffee table altars and painstaking Lego constructions. Occasionally, though, I am struck by A as, simply, himself. The first instance I remember is when I realized he no longer had the baby smell, that soft aroma of milk and soap, but instead, smelled sweaty and dirty, because he was no longer a baby but a little boy. He must have been around two at the time. A year ago, when he was three, I was holding his hand after he had fallen asleep, and I felt the calluses that had grown as a result of his hard playing. It was a shock to discover that he no longer had the soft, fleshy hands of a baby, but the vaguely hard, dry hands of a man. Tonight I checked on A after he was asleep. He was rolled up in his comforter, and as cute and vulnerable as he looked, I also felt that I saw a glimmer of the man he would become...