Category Archives: nostalgia

‘Tis The Season to be Gifty (and Thrifty!)

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For me, gift shopping has to do with the experience. I rarely buy gifts online. I much prefer holiday craft bazaars and going to magical shops like New Moon and Royal Towne Gifts in Randolph, Free Verse Farm Shop in Chelsea, Althea’s Attic Boutique in Montpelier, Yankee Bookshop in Woodstock, a dozen others. Go see the lights in Bethel one night! Lovely.

Books make great presents because they can be re-gifted to friends or donated to charities. I’m currently digging a book by local publisher, Inner Traditions in Rochester, “The Culinary Pharmacy: Intuitive Eating, Ancestral Healing, and your Personal Nutrition Plan.” For the health conscious, crunchy people, and self-improvers on your list, it’s ideal.

For those being tormented one way or another at work, school, or home, let them Snark in the New Year with “The Snark Handbook.” This will arm them with witty zingers. Hilarious. The GIFT of laffs – and verbal self-defense. Sample: “Gee what a terrific party. Later on we’ll get some fluid and embalm each other.” – Neil Simon.

Instead of gift cards to big box stores, try gift certificates at local stores. Even auto parts stores sell them! Your beloveds may want art or art supplies or a haircut or movie tickets or dining … almost any place you can think of sells gift certificates, at the amount you want. It keeps your local economy going and your gifting off the internet, which has sadly destroyed independent shops worldwide. I’ve had stores invent a gift certificate for me on the spot.

I particularly like gifting something to do. Show tickets, a season’s pass or gym membership, or a class such as ceramics, stained glass, or any of the many offerings at the White River Craft Center. Piano lessons, horseback riding, Reiki … any class at all. What about a blank book you give to a retired person, in which they can chronicle their life? Gifts of fun! And really, what’s more fun that reading your local newspaper? A subscription to the Herald … perfect.

If you’ve written a book or are thinking of it, or know someone who did and want to give them a monumental gift … might I suggest the audio book recording maven in Shelburne: Voice Over Vermont. She’s super relaxed, nice, and smart, with the coziest setup (or she can direct you from your home or local studio). Not only is she affordable compared to other, less-excellent companies, she is a fantastic director. Which I promise you need. It’s far harder to read out loud than you think.

And at the pinnacle, there’s the most precious gift, the gift you made yourself.  Pen a song or poem or cartoon for someone. You can gift food, knits, cuttings from your favorite plants, bathtub gin, art, or anything else you’ve created. I’ve concocted uneven pot holders, crooked scarves, sketchy pillow cases, sorry-looking hats, childlike tree ornaments, lopsided ceramics — and exquisite deodorant. Each was well received. For the person who has everything, a calendar with meaningful photos is fantastic. You can now order them easily online (and in some pharmacies), but for years I made mine with actual photos glued carefully into a calendar sold for this purpose at the Pink Smock Shop at Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital. When you come across these years later, they blow your bean, pleasantly. Tip: hospital gift shops can always use your money.

Broke? Gift a service you will provide with a homemade, redeemable coupon. Surely I read this in a women’s magazine in 1982. It can be a massage, errand, snow shoveling, planting in the spring, or, if you’ve completely lost your mind, oven cleaning. Maybe you could teach someone how to do something. Show them how to make a Manhattan? You can use a low-end whiskey like The Famous Grouse as long as you use top shelf cherries, like Luxardo Italian. Boom.

Honestly, I think the most enchanted part of winter in my childhood was quietly shoveling people’s driveways in the dark while they were still at work, so they’d come home to a nice surprise. Heavily influenced in youth by the “Brownie Scout Handbook,” wherein at some point elves called Brownies did tasks for people (cobbling shoes?) anonymously at night without asking for any thanks (a true mitsvah!), I felt my secret shoveling a kind of sacred mischief. I relished every pass with the shovel, every sweep of the steps. It used to snow more back then, the big white fluffy kind I call “Hollywood snow” falling gently on my eyelashes and cheeks as I did my good deed. I shoveled out a Danish widow who worked long hours at the United Nations. A woman who’d fallen and had her jaw wired shut to heal. An elderly couple. A woman who championed, way ahead of her time, the rights of – and employment opportunities for – her intellectually disabled daughter and others like her. For these kindhearted and hardworking neighbors, it was the least I could do. I hope that today kids get off screens long enough to experience the unspeakable joy that comes from doing a good deed. And knowing their neighbors.

Funny, I’d forgotten entirely about all that. Also this: a decade ago I was panicking on my way back to Vermont on Amtrak. A massive storm had struck the east coast and I had to roll my luggage from the Randolph train station to my house in snow that the plows could not keep up with, a good quarter mile. The train had arrived late. It was dark and the snow was really coming down. I dreaded the final lap of wading through two feet of accumulated driveway snow with my suitcase in my arms like a giant baby … until, sweating, I approached my dimly lit home, stopped to catch my breath, and looked up. What had happened here? What was going on? Why, someone had snow-blown my driveway! I was exclaiming out loud, crying with thankfulness at this great kindness. I don’t generally believe at all that what goes around comes around, but in this case it did.

Well, Dear Reader and your Humble Columnist better get a move on. As you approach the clubhouse turn of holiday shopping, I do hope this has been of some use, or at the least entertaining. Because sometimes in the midst of all the holiday prep and partying, it’s best to don your gay apparel and just … sit down and read the paper. Good prep, good holidays, and good new year to all.

Ann Aikens is an author, columnist, speaker, and blogger. Her darkly comical book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, was published in 2023, her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find events and bookshops at annaikens.com; her blog is uppervalleygirl.com.

Halloween, Pagans, and Religion in General

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I know some readers ran from the building upon seeing the word religion, above. And I know it should not be discussed in polite company. But I further know that many readers – and nutters I call friends – would not consider themselves polite company. 

Ah, Halloween! A magical holiday where I grew up, a place then not as rural as Vermont, yet not the overdeveloped bastion of privilege that it sadly became. Back then, it was a lot of houses made by dads and uncles moving their families to “the country” from the Bronx and such. A lot of woods. And a heck of a lot of childhood mischief, especially on Halloween.

I recall like yesterday the thrill as we crunched through (mostly oak?) leaves in inventive costumes, dragging wands, too-long skirts, broomsticks and giant satchels, delighting in autumnal smells. The real excitement began once we were old enough to go out without parental supervision. It was invigorating as hell. Our antennae (lit. and fig.) were on high alert. We had minimal street lighting. No halogens. Dark! There was a palpable sense of danger in the air. Little to do with honoring the dead or saints on All Hallows’ Eve, or the possibly pagan roots thereof.

Melissa Kirsch suggested in the NYT that we all try not knowing everything in advance. Not spending hours comparing products before buying. Not researching the heck out of each place before going there.  Letting an adventure unfold, and inspire wonder. Doing an unscheduled, impromptu, playful thing. 

This holiday was that. We had no master plan for maximum treatage. We weren’t greedy. We were just roaming in the dark, tittering, wondering what was around every bush, house, and corner. The older kids were generally menacing on any given day. What might they do to us on this day? Attack? Plunder our treat haul? Anything but that!  

Raised Episcopalian, to my Catholic grandmother’s dismay, I later became a bit of a pagan in the original sense (not as in the polytheistic belief in multiple gods, but as in the Latin pagani: people who lived rurally, thus considered ignorant). I’m happily, rurally ignorant. Due to unexplainable events and crazy coincidences I experienced, over time I came to believe in energies and nature spirits, certainly ghosts, and in celebrating the change of seasons. Which might make me Wiccan. A modern pagan.

Dear Reader may find that nuts, but what sissy writes about religion without stating where she stands? I’m not too worried what people think of me. I go to a great church. I also believe that trees have a kind of consciousness (which has been scientifically examined), as does everything in nature. We should honor nature. We should cheer it on. I feel it would respond in kind. More oxygen. Cooling temps. Fewer storms. 

Is this paganism? Wicca? A heretical blending of “true” religion with fanciful notions? Does it matter what it’s called? I just call it energetic. Have you never nursed something or someone back to health by your own seeming sheer force of will, with or without prayer mixed in? Thoughts and desires carry energy.

As for the earth’s widely accepted Abrahamic religions, and any other I’ve read about, I find some of it silly – including in my own Christianity, which I very much enjoy right along with my less conventional beliefs. Still, I think the world would be a lot happier if more people regularly practiced some form of religion (spirituality?) without judging the others. It has been proven that people who live in groups are happiest. And I can tell you for sure that people who gather in groups to give thanks, to commune, to do good works, and sing maybe, and pray for each other and our planet, and to celebrate together, absolutely get a happiness and a peace from it. I doubt most people attend services these days because they’re afraid of eternal damnation. They go because they feel good there. Hopeful. Valued. Useful.

I’ve been in mosques, Russian Orthodox churches, JW meetings, Jewish temples and Chabad Houses, weddings of all stripes, Buddhist funerals, a Catholic Easter in Rome … and honestly, they all felt spiritual, holy, life-affirming. I’m not keen on those run solely by men (still?!?), but no one forced me to attend.

Many don’t believe in any God at all, regarding earthly suffering as proof that no loving being is In Charge. I’ve waivered myself, and understand. I don’t believe in predestination or fate; I do believe in free will and in luck — including bad luck. I don’t believe in a punishment/reward-based karma, but did when younger, and I do believe in multiple lifetimes. Is there truly no divine being of any kind? The universe is too magnificent, with too many synchronicities, for there not to be something larger than ourselves at play, way I see it.

I get your God, if it’s love-based. What I don’t get, as perhaps Dear Reader does not, is why so many consider their religion superior — in fact, the only valid one. If that were the case, you’d have to be born in a certain place to certain parents to be lucky enough not to burn in the fires of Hell (or whatever) for eternity (or whatever). To wit: all the poor slobs who weren’t born like you were just born damned. And should be punished or enslaved, in life or in death? I’m not buying it. 

Surely all religions, when not misinterpreted by maniacs with agendas, basically lead to the same place. Be kind. Stand for what’s right. Make amends. Help others, including strangers. Respect however our planet’s beauty was created; steward its health. Do good works. Spread love.

Ideas
• Try taking time off weekly, a secular sabbath of sorts, to appreciate things. I’m awed when something nice, even a cloud formation, is delivered unto me. I thank the Forces almost daily for something, however small, because my belief is that there’s no way this whole show is running itself. I think we’re co-running it with some benevolent spirit or spirits, and if we’d just quit screwing things up on our end, everything would get a lot nicer real fast. 

• If you can’t do, CHEER ON. Can’t run or perform? Go see a footrace or a play or a concert. Participants are boosted like a rocket when spectators are rooting for them! Feel the energy travel around the participants and spectators. It’s magical. My niece said that a dog got so excited as she ardently cheered on 5K runners that he “piddled.” Feel the love. Good day.

Ann Aikens is an author, columnist, speaker, and blogger. Her darkly comical book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, was published in 2023, her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find bookshops at annaikens.com; blog:  uppervalleygirl.com.

Change of Seasons, Change of Heart, Change

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At the end of an idyllic college reunion weekend, a friend said three words as we watched a classmate loading his car become morose. “Transitions are hard,” she whispered.

Truer words never spoken. I wish someone had said them to me decades ago. 

Because emotions are more dealable when you know why you’re feeling them. Such as: “I’m despondent because I’m going through a transition.” Not: “I’m overreacting.” Or “I’m losing my mind for no apparent reason.” At reunion, it was this: “I had the best time this weekend. I love my funny, smart college friends. Now I have to go home.”

Transitioning seasons is a hard one for many. Some lament the end of summer, particularly the gardeners and the sun- and water- lovers. Myself, I welcome fall. Summer drags on too long for me. When the sun shines, we feel obligated to make hay. When we have a summer with little rain, that’s a lot of haymaking. Read: outdoorsy work, socializing, exercising. There’s not much time to … reflect. It feels to me like a lot of “racing around,” as my mother would put it.

Fall’s shorter days heighten our more introspective inclinations, for good or bad. I savor the colors and the smells of autumn (if not the Leafer traffic), the harvest, the stews, the cooler temps, the colder waters. Stick season delights me, while it sends others spiraling downwards.  A few weeks ago was monarch butterfly season. Then, termite season. Now: wasps-looking-to get-in-the-house season. Some geese already heading south. Boom boom boom, one after the other. Change. 

The longer you live, more change. With each season, an anniversary: we remember something – or someone – now gone. Family and friends who have died. The houses loved, with so many memories, sold. My pal I used to take to the summer fried clam shacks or the fall apple festivals now unable to leave his residence! Nieces and nephews I rarely see! Who, when small, had inventive costumes for Halloween. (One Halloween the youngest declared she would be: “a marshmallow on a stick”. And she was). Little them, all running up and down streets for tricks and treats. I’m terribly nostalgic for those times. I am gladdened when anyone says they miss when their kids were young. Then I’m not alone.

I asked a college friend, what change was hard about becoming an empty nester? Was it that the house grew quiet, that you missed your daughter’s presence, that three was now two? He said, “All of it … and just … where did 20 years go?”

There’s that – the growing up of the youth below us – sometimes as the people above us, who took care of us, now need caretaking. And when the once-capable parents die, as a sage friend put it, “It’s like losing a roof over your head that you never even knew was there.” Heck, it’s hard enough for me when friends move away. 

Nostalgia is an odd thing, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition.” The American Heritage Dictionary takes it one further: “Homesickness; esp., a severe and sometimes fatal form of melancholia, due to homesickness.” Yipes! I hope I don’t have the fatal kind. I do hate change. Except for a change of heart. That I like.

I think we’re born with a degree of nostalgia, and life circumstances make it grow more for some people.  Some of us are barely nostalgic at all (I envy you), and some are what I call “nostalgia monsters.” A scientist might call us “superstalgics”. 

A niece and I are both that. We’ll talk about things we miss, and bawl. When I suggested that we are both nostalgia monsters, she said, “I’m so nostalgic that once I rearranged my room and immediately cried because I missed the way it ‘used to be’ an hour earlier.” (One advantage to kids’ growing up: their self-awareness and humor become more sophisticated.)

I’m not sure what function nostalgia serves. It’s mostly just painful. Perhaps, in the way spiritual and artistic and carpentry gatherings connect people within a community, nostalgia connects time within ourselves. It connects our present to our past in a mostly good way. There might be some biological survival-of-the-species value in this. I don’t know. All I know is I couldn’t bear saying goodbye to my elementary school teachers at year-end and I haven’t changed a bit.

It doesn’t matter how logically superstalgics think. We can’t embrace change when our heart is throbbing with sorrow.

Back to fall. Stick season was at one time, for me, a harbinger of the noisy, wonderful family gatherings of Thanksgiving. But my family doesn’t have those any more. My mommy was the center of them, as a mother so often is. Maybe, with age, you have less to look forward to in general. For yourself. You can be happy for the pivotal events in the lives of those younger, but for you, not that much is happening. Maybe you can’t get off work for holidays, or traveling has become difficult. Maybe money is tight, and you can’t visit your people. I get it all.

So if you wax gloomy as the leaves fall, I feel your pain. I won’t say, “Let us embrace change!” any more than I’d say, “Let us wrap barbed wire around hot dogs and eat them!” But I for one can and must distract myself from nostalgia. “Life is for the living,” my sage friend says. 

I yank myself into the present. I help others as able, attend the New World Festival, the Tunbridge Fair, the Morrill Homestead Apple and Cheese Festival, consider crafting holiday gifts. I ponder the Covid-19 test called BinaxNOW and wonder if the NOW indicates urgency, or if it’s an acronym (No Organisms Within?), and whether NOW should be applied to other products, such as TortillasNOW, Old SpiceNOW, or – definitely – ImmodiumNOW. Needs an exclamation point. Good day.

Ann Aikens is an author, columnist, speaker, and blogger. Her darkly comical book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, was published in 2023, her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find bookshops at annaikens.com; her blog is uppervalleygirl.com.

Prize-winning entry in the Children’s Decorated Vegetables at the Tunbridge World’s Fair

The Summer Olympics Enchant Us – Especially Now

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My family, as perhaps yours, was always glued to the TV the entire Olympics. It brought our family together. The theme music sent us sprinting to the living room. Takashi Ono, Muhammad Ali, Larisa Latynina, Peggy Fleming, Dorothy Hamill, Katarina Witt, Mark Spitz, Carl Lewis, and – perhaps most charmingly of all – Nadia Comaneci, blew the world’s collective mind. 

In 2000, the Olympic Committee’s slogan was The Joy Unites Us. Coke’s current ad campaign is: “It’s magic when the world comes together.” I do hope that these are both true, and happening. I admit I entered this 33rd Olympiad in a jaded state. The world has gone cuckoo. I miss the (innocent!) Russian gymnasts, and the Refugee Olympic Team breaks my heart conceptually … but, man, it has all turned out exciting. 

Summer has 329 events, 32 sports (winter has 15). Daytime and weekends are the best time to watch. At night, NBC seems to think Americans only want to hear about Americans. Well sure, NBC’s viewers are mainly American, but in the past, we got far more background on athletes of all the Lands. Now it’s all “USA! USA! USA!” 

I love Simone Biles and other remarkable American contenders as much as anyone, but surely there are “foreign” athletes that have overcome adversity whose stories are worth telling? And we’d like to learn more, maybe, about the host nation’s athletes?

As a sports fan I’m a perpetual underdogger, beyond thrilled, for example, when the Netherlands, Kenya, Ukraine (Mahuchinkh in her sleeping bag between high jumps!), and the tiny Caribbean nation of St. Lucia strike gold in track and field, Algeria in uneven bars, or Armenia medals on vault. Refugee team member Simone Ngamba of Camaroon with at least a bronze in boxing: I wept. 

The point of The Joy Unites Us, the best slogan ever, was the jubilance on the beaming faces of medaling athletes of any nation whatsoever, captivating and connecting an entire globe. It wasn’t about the largest countries with the most athletes and biggest pocketbooks to train them. 

Seeing Greece’s and Ireland’s absolute elation at capturing bronze (rings; swimming), and (especially underdog) winning athletes and coaches from around the globe crying freely, Djokovic full-out sobbing … that’s what it’s about for me. I panic whenever someone falls off a device, wipes out, trips, disqualifies, loses a medal last-minute due to the judges’ gaffe (what?!), or blows a dive, after years of training. That’s sorrow, an empathetic sorrow. But when NBC shows us a team celebrating the low score of another country’s athlete because it means they just went up a notch themselves, I want to turn the TV off.

Yet mostly, as ever, I’m bawling. United in joy with humans planet-wide! Many things remain the same. The butterfly stroke still boggles. The insane balance beam, rings, vault, pommel horse, bike racing, and hurdles still terrify. 

Newer events astound. Surfing, skateboarding: yipes. I dug the Mixed Relays in track and swimming. In track, it’s men vs. men and women vs. women for each leg; in swimming it’s anyone’s choice for each leg. Please know I don’t consider women superior to men, but how amazing to see women best men in any race at all. I’ve seen no broadcast of Breaking or Canoe Slalom. I guess that’s why God invented YouTube.

Mercifully, there is way less Beach Volleyball this year, which felt like an endless broadcast of women in microkinis, when there are dozens of other competitions going on.

So watch the athletes put the final pedals to the medals and pour on the gas, with much drama remaining. You just might feel something in that place where your heart used to be. Closing Ceremonies on Sunday. Next up: the Paralympics. Riveting!

Good Olympics, good Paralympics, and good day.

Ann Aikens’ book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, is at Amazon & Vermont shops. She has written her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find shops & events at annaikens.com; more of her writing at uppervalleygirl.com.

Don We Now Our Gay Apparel 

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I remember when there was no VHS, no DVDs, no streaming. It was a very big deal when “The Wizard of Oz” came on TV. If you didn’t catch it, you had to wait another year. There was no way in heck you were going to miss out.

The same went for “Monty Python,” “Benny Hill,” and “Saturday Night Live.” Those shows, aired late at night, forced you to stay up because if a brilliant skit happened at the end and you’d already gone to bed, you were out of the loop at school while absolutely everyone discussed it. 

Point is, much as I enjoy the convenience of watching a holiday movie at a convenient time with my peeps, the devils of video, cable, satellite, and streaming have largely thrown a fire blanket over the magic of broadcast television. Which everyone had been enjoying simultaneously, at least with viewers within their time zone. There was something special in knowing that people were out there laughing or crying right as you were.

Sadly, the changes in TV program delivery meant also the death of one of my favorite publications ever, “TV Guide,” with its crossword, vital information, and wry synopses (e.g., “A light romp starring the unlikely romantic duo of…” or “A whimsical if entirely forgettable yarn about…” or “A frisky reporter teams with a hardboiled gumshoe to solve a…”). Such notables as Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Margaret Mead, and William F. Buckley, Jr. actually wrote articles for “TV Guide.” It was necessary for us commoners, God knows, but also taken seriously by the literati.

Similarly, home screening rooms, Tivo, then streaming, demolished the beautiful magic of the shared experience at movie theaters. It became harder and harder to find a cinema, where an audience of friends and strangers sit in front of a big ole screen together, riding a rollercoaster of emotions (“Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Exorcist,” “Sophie’s Choice,” “Jaws,” “Gran Torino,” “Milk,” “Memoir of a Geisha”, “Philomena,” “Hidden Figures,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Moonlight,” “Forrest Gump,” “Shawshank,” “Silence of the Lambs,” “Doubt,” “A Man Called Ove”). Let’s not forget our collective gasps at hair-raising visuals (aerial heart-pounders in “Star Wars,” “Top Gun,” “Crouching Tiger,” “Avatar,” “Polar Express”; James Bond’s hilarious evasive skiing antics; creepy trike rides in “The Shining”; and stunning vehicular scenes (“French Connection,” Bourne Identity, “Stuber,” “Christmas Vacation”—the sled). Nothing competes with the shared experience. Nothing, people! Watching a story unfold in a roomful of guffaws and sobbing … there’s nothing like it.

That Rutland’s Flagship Cinemas has become a gym (oof!) breaks my heart. So many theaters have become magicless businesses — or parking lots. Movie enchantment turned by evil sorcerers into a bunch of bench presses or, worse, pavement. 

If you’re having a blue Christmas, or your Solstice or Chanukah was lonely or just “entirely forgettable,” you are in good company. One in four adults reports suffering from loneliness in the U.S. I, like many, have endured terrible disappointments and losses in recent years. Those are hard to shake off. The holidays launch a tsunami of memories and feelings that we don’t always welcome, particularly if we are already down to begin with.

It helps to remember that it will soon be over, to wear clothes that make you feel snappy, and to make a list for the new year — not a list of behaviors or qualities that you should change in yourself, but a list of actions that might make you or others happy. Or: nice things you did for others, or that others did for you, like a woman in I met at a holiday craft sale who, unprompted, mailed me sewing instructions for a pillowcase. Or things you accomplished last year. Or things you’d like to accomplish, places you’d like to go, in 2024. Ways you can make a difference in this crazy world. A list just might remind you that last year held more wonder than you recall. A list might give you something to reach for, reinvigorate your good will towards men, and make you realize, “It is a new year. It is new. I ain’t dead yet.” 

Never a fan of the term “self-care,” I’ve been seeking an alternative. Maybe “self-sanity” or perhaps “making it nice.” This from the Italian proprietor of Caffé Reggio in New York City, who would say, when he saw that you needed it: “Come. Sit down. Have a cappuccino. We’ll make it nice.” 

Really, no one’s going to dump a big plate of happiness into our laps if we wallow in nostalgia and loneliness. And decency is not going to be thrust upon us. It’s up to is to gather together, make lists, and do something for someone else, perhaps a total stranger. What I noticed this year about “The Wizard of Oz” is that it is ultimately out of their love for each other that Dorothy’s companions become courageous, smart, and full of heart. Love of any kind brings out the best in us.

Sometimes you have to go a few miles to get with people you feel that kind of love for. Make the trip. Or make a new friend. It may not be your holiday tradition, but: home is where the heart is, and family is whomever you choose it to be. Feeling love for each other makes us better people, and tranquil. Go give, and get for yourself, a big serving of THAT.

So at this overwhelming time of year, make a happy list, don your gayest apparel, express your love for your chosen family, and — even if alone — go to the movies. Go. Sit down. Have the popcorn. Make it nice. Good New Year to you and yours.

All Aboard the Holiday Express – Feel Good or go Sleeper Car

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My Thanksgiving column had to be re-written because it didn’t make it into the paper. This starts differently and has minor improvements IMHO. Posted for posterity!

The Holiday Express pulled out of the station in September (Labor Day, Yom Kippur, International Talk Like a Pirate Day, World Beard Day), then chugged through October (Halloween, Samhain, National Name Your Car Day – I’m not making these up), and has now pulled out of the November station (Veterans Day, National Vinegar Day, Thanksgiving).

While some of us have had low-key Thanksgivings in recent years, some enjoyed wild ones. I envy your big-group noise and merrymaking and even the fighting. It makes me wicked nostalgic. A quiet Christmas I don’t mind, but Thanksgiving is supposed to be full of joyful hoots as people walk through the door, with lots of chaos and exploding casseroles.

A friend lamented when his daughter left for college, “Where did 20 years go?” For me it is, at this time of year: where did those beloved people go, those sacred homes, those raucous laughs of holidays past? Those kids all growed up. We all growed up. Sigh. Do you ever wish you were a kid again? Our elders, so many of them now frail or gone, back in charge? 

I looked up “nostalgia” and found the craziest assortment of definitions, ranging from “a sad longing” to, for real, “mental illness.” The latter does make sense. Because if you wallow in a sad longing for the past long enough, you are probably 1. Ignoring the bad things about those times, 2. Experiencing mental anguish, and 3. No longer living your life.

An odd detour in an alleged humor column, I realize. Stay with me.

Alas, many best-loved beings have left the building. Favorite musicians, actors, friends, lovers, pets, family, neighbors. The world seems a giant mess. While nostalgia implies a glossing over of history, I feel that my own generation’s past was, in fact, lovelier – before the major disasters (you know the names) that imperiled our overall sense of safety and trust in humans, no matter where we live. At least in the US, by and large, life was easier back then. We just didn’t know it. The oceans, lands, air, and wildlife now at risk. Homeless tent cities common. And there is so much hate now. Or else we see more hate, due to the devil that is 24-hour news on TV and other screens. I say, some nostalgia is legit.

In our messed-up powder keg of a world, it’s difficult to remain hopeful or sane. Especially as it seems there’s little be done about much of it, by us ordinary people anyway, aside from writing checks and voting. It’s distressing.

But I have discovered this: that making an effort to feel good can actually pay off. It’s not easy sometimes, but worth the attempt. I went to see a magical band at Chandler, helped collect gifts for kids, and baked for a dear friend. I went back to choir. Do you know that singing in groups (even small) increases your oxytocin and other good brain chemicals? Head to a tiled bathroom for some doo-wop harmonizing with your housemate(s).

When you feel good, you feel somehow … loved.  And conversely, when you feel loved, you feel good. If you’ll allow me to wax Cosmic here: feeling good allows great amounts of what some call the Life Force to flow through you. This makes you healthier physically and emotionally. This makes you better able to navigate illness and difficult situations. Energized. Motivated. Resilient. So feel good if it kills you. Hang out with people that make you feel loved and loving. Okay, maybe for now you’d rather lie around feeling like holy hell. Go right ahead, but don’t do it for long. It’ll make you sick.

Like many of you, I always dug Thanksgiving because my mommy put on such a good one and because it’s non-denominational. We’d host people who had nowhere to go, much as my loud family’s antics were no doubt technically embarrassing. The guests didn’t seem to mind. We all laughed and laughed. I miss every single person in those blurry old Instamatic photos, whether they moved away or died or just grew up. In recent years, I’m the person with nowhere to go for holidays. Someone always invites me in.

In an effort to feel good, and in so doing make others feel good, this Thanksgiving I endeavored to focus more on who’s here than on who’s not. I’m carrying that to each remaining stop on the Holiday Express. 

What I suggest this holiday season to you and me both is this: really marinate in communal happiness. No matter how small or random your group, no matter how holidays of years past appear happier in your mind, feel the love right where you are. When at the table, honoring the memory of beings we adored who are now gone, really savor those that are here. Right here. Love the one(s) you’re with. And if you just can’t deal at all this year, get into your berth solo in the Sleeper Car. It’ll be over before you know it. 

Feel good. Spread love. Bring leftovers to someone left out. Or invite them in? Good day. 

Ann Aikens’ darkly comical, uplifting book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, is available at Amazon & Vermont shops. She has written her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find shops at annaikens.com; sign up for her blog at lower right at uppervalleygirl.com.

Thanksgiving Serving Suggestion – Feel Good

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While some of us are having rather low-key Thanksgivings in recent years, some of you are enjoying wild ones. I envy your big-group noise and merrymaking and even the fighting. It makes me wicked nostalgic.

A friend lamented when his daughter left for college, “Where did 20 years go?” For me it is, at this time of year: where did those beloved people go, those sacred homes, those raucous laughs of Thanksgivings past? Those kids all growed up. We all growed up. Sigh. Do you ever wish you were a kid again? Those older people (now frail or gone) still in charge? 

I looked up “nostalgia” and found the craziest assortment of definitions, ranging from things along the lines of “a sad longing” to, for real, “mental illness.” Sounds melodramatic, but makes sense. Because if you wallow in a sad longing for the past long enough, you are probably 1. Ignoring the bad things about those times, 2. Experiencing mental anguish, and 3. Not living your life.

This is an odd topic for a holiday column, I realize. Stay with me.

Many best-loved beings have left the building. Favorite musicians, actors, friends, lovers, pets, family, neighbors. The world at large seems a giant mess. While nostalgia implies a glossing over of actual history, I feel that my generation’s past was in fact lovelier – before the major disasters (you know the names) that imperiled our overall sense of safety and trust in humans, no matter where we live. At least in the US, by and large, life was easier back then. The oceans and wildlife and all of the Lands are now at risk. Homeless tent cities everywhere. And there is so much hate now. Or else we see more hate, due to the devil that is 24-hour news on TVs and screens. So don’t feel too bad about feeling nostalgic.

In our messed-up powder keg of a world, it’s difficult to remain hopeful or sane. Especially as it seems there’s little be done about much of it, aside from sending checks and voting. But I discovered this: that making an effort to feel good can actually pay off. It’s not easy sometimes, but worth trying. I went to see a magical and upbeat band at Chandler Center for the Arts, helped collect gifts for Ukrainian kids, and baked for a dear friend in need. I plan to go back to choir. Do you know that singing in groups (even small) increases your oxytocin? And surely other good brain chemicals.

When you feel good, you feel loved. And when you feel loved, you feel good. It works both ways, right? Well, guess what: feeling good allows great amounts of what some call Life Force to flow through you. This makes you healthier physically and emotionally. This makes you better able to navigate illness and difficult situations. Energized. Motivated. Resilient. So go feel good if it kills you. Maybe right now you’d rather lie around feeling like holy hell. Go right ahead, but don’t do it for long. It’ll make you sick.

Like many of you, I always dug Thanksgiving because my mommy put on such good ones and because it’s non-denominational. We would host people who had nowhere to go, much as our family’s loud antics were no doubt technically embarrassing. The guests didn’t seem to mind. We laughed and laughed. So did the guests. I miss every single person in those blurry old Instamatic photos, whether they moved away or died or just grew up. 

But in an effort to feel good, and in so doing make others feel good, this year I endeavor to focus far more on who’s here than on who’s not.

What I suggest this holiday to you and to me both is this: really marinate in communal happiness. No matter how small your group, no matter how past holidays appear happier in your mind, feel the love right where you are. When, at the table, verbally honoring the memory of our global and familial stars now gone, really savor the people that are here. Right here. Love the one(s) you’re with.

Feel good. Spread love. Bring leftovers to someone left out. Good Thanksgiving Day. 

Ann Aikens’ darkly comical, uplifting book of advice, A Young Woman’s Guide to Life: A Cautionary Tale, is available at Amazon & Vermont shops. She has written her Upper Valley Girl column since 1996. Find shops at annaikens.com; more of her writing at uppervalleygirl.com.

Remembering the Things that Matter

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Delivering a eulogy for someone you’ve known for decades isn’t easy. There’s a bottomless treasure trove of memories, so it’s hard to select the right ones. The ones that will matter to most of the funeral attendees — or that might matter the most to one person? Or maybe that matter most to you, as a speaker? Without the eulogy going on for like two hours. I bet someone, somewhere has set a record for the longest eulogy. Maybe in other countries or galaxies they are very long indeed.

Recently we held a service for sacred Aunt Natalie. Natalie was not technically our aunt, she was our cousin once removed, the cousin of our father. She grew up in Vermont, became a teacher, married a state trooper, and had my two cousins—I mean second cousins. They were the reason my family visited Vermont, and came to love Vermont for more than just her natural beauty.

O, her seasons, all distinct! The fifth season called Mud Season. Stick Season, when the leaves have fallen off the trees, revealing magnificent textural backdrops – and awful housepaint jobs. Grit Season (when winter’s road-sand blows around after the snow’s gone) and Manure Season (when the entire state is fertilized, to our vegetably anticipation and olfactory dismay). Surely there are sub-seasons involving flora or fauna that Dear Reader relishes. Not Black Fly Season.

Sometimes I’ll be in the middle of one season and flash forward into another season entirely. Do you do this? It’s mind-blowing because Vermont is like a different planet in each. I time-travel to the alternate season and think, “Wow, winter: white!” Or: “Summer…wow.”

As with the seasons, I flash back to years gone by. Younger versions of us, the now-gone people still alive — all laughing — us kids up to some mischief. Feels like yesterday. It blindsides me when I’m driving. I cry. As friend Lee says, “It always seems to happen in the car.” 

Back to the cousins. We visited Vermont because our Scottish great-great-great grandparents, blacksmiths, had settled there. The introduction of the automobile caused my dad’s father to pursue other work, in Ohio, where he met his bride. Their summer trips back to Vermont got my dad hooked on ‘mont. Once a parent himself, he got us kids hooked. Back then, kids didn’t get to choose family vacations (as if!). Thank God our parents chose Vermont.

You visit a place not just for her physical characteristics, but for her people. Think of places you’ve been (Maine, the south, islands, Italy) and the locals there with qualities different from people at home, lending that place its particular flava. 

When even one person leaves the planet, the flava of Earth changes, no? Most of you have lost someone close to you. In my (second) cousins’ vernacular, it’s wicked hard.

My Aunt Natalie was born with a spark. Neighbors, hairdressers, toll booth operators … she left an impression on each. You know how some relatives were old your entire life? Natalie always looked to be 50 years old, even at 80. She always wore shorts. But mostly I recall her sparkle and humor and a kind of innocence that seemed like it was from another era. Because it was.

Swimming with Natalie by moonlight in Silver Lake! As my sister said, she had a way of making the everyday magical. She was a true lover of children. Whether you were you pounding out Grand Old Flag on the piano or had sketched an inscrutable picture of nothingness, she’d exclaim, “BeaUtiful!” She made children feel valuable, which I think many children did not feel in decades past. 

Ah, cousins: the gift of noisy fun. Those classic Thanksgivings, Memorial and Labor Days, and of course The Fourth. Something called “bull beans.” Treks via inner tubes to the Barnard General Store for penny candy. Making a game of anything at all. The parents sending us to Richardson’s with returnable bottles to get them “supplies.” We got candy. 

Countless holidays over countless years, always with music, always with laughter. Ever effusive, Natalie would tell my mother, “You make the BEST salads!” My dad would howl, because what’s really involved in a salad? When it was time for my family to leave Vermont, I would cry and my brother would hide, so that leaving became – briefly – impossible. 

Natalie passed bit by bit from our lives.  But these memories remain forever indelible, of an energetic and vivacious woman so greatly loved.  As Dear Reader knows, we never forget those we adored. Our pain at our loss is a beautiful pain. An honoring. As sad as it makes us.

Thank you, Aunt Natalie, for years and years of fun and art and music and jubilance and adventures and hilarity … and most of all, most of all, for your smile and voice and laugh. 

If Dear Reader knows what I’m talking about, maybe today at some point: look up! Say Hello to your people gone by. Tell them you remember, you remember all of it. That you just know you’ll see them again. Good remembering, and good day.

Have Yourself a Sorry Little Breakdown

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The doldrums is a nautical term for the belt around Earth’s equator where sailing ships can get stuck on windless waters for days—an apt metaphor even in landlocked Vermont.

For those who get in serious doldrums after the holidays, you’re not alone. In the 70s, as the tree splintered and shed, we’d beg our mother, “One more day!” Understanding, she’d consent to leave it up. I still suffer while boxing up decorations accumulated over 50 years, many hand made by beloved people now grown—or gone. It physically hurts and I go down.

My theory on the plummet’s severity is this: a combination of most humans’ inability to make transitions easily, plus the nostalgia of where one was 5, 20 or 30 years ago—or even just pre-COVID.The holidays are an annual plunge into sentimentality that wrecks some people for a while. After all the togetherness, even if at times fighty, many have to part with beloved people we wished we still lived with, or near, now miles or oceans away. Add to the emotional soup that sometimes we can tell when these people have had enough of us, or vice versa.

There’s something about that pre-holiday hustle and year-end philanthropy. I love the craft sales and transformation of everything from garlanded gas stations to tricked-out buildings. Carols evoke a simpler time. In truth, there were untold disasters and wars and far more domestic abuse back then, fueled by widely accepted over-drinking (think: the “hilarity” of Red Skelton’s drunk character; Dean Martin crooning basted). But hear the first couple of bars of O Holy Night and smell that balsam fir and you are swept back into your own (hopefully abuse-free) childhood or a dreamy image of happier times before you were born. When the decorations left up too long start getting dusty and something—anything—to look forward to seems a long way off, it’s easy to to go into a death spiral.

So last week after a Covid exposure, for the very first time I decided to wallow. None of this Yankee toughie bootstraps crap. No health-giving exercise or efforts to cheer self or others. Just a marathon of self-isolation, sorrow, and mourning.

It was not at first intentional. After leaving family to return to Vermont, I drove and cried until distracted by old radio interviews with Desmond Tutu (an evolved human, yet strikingly down to earth). But then Christmas music came on and sunk me anew, thinking of this very drive I had taken countless times with my now-gone mommy. Once home, I carried inside only my freezable belongings, got in bed, and let it rip. I cried over everything. Loves, parents, pets, houses and friends lost forever. Strangers who got stuck home alone for the holidays by cancelled flights. Refugees. Great people who died in 2021. Awful situations endured both by people I adore and by complete strangers. Sad pieces of fiction I read that never even actually occurred. I ate nothing but old foods around the house. Slept, woke, ate garbage, cried, slept. And you know what happened?

I’d love to say something profound here. But basically….nothing. Nothing happened. I didn’t come up with a grand epiphany. I didn’t resolve to start a new career or humanity-saving nonprofit, invent a climate change solution or clever movie plot. Nothing came of it. As Yukon Cornelius says, “Nuthin’.”

If you bottle it up and never let it out, you’re in trouble. That’s called being repressed. Although I did ask a male friend how he deals with the deaths of his legendarily party-throwing, smarty parents within weeks of each other. His answer: “I keep that locked up deep, deep down inside.” Hell, maybe that’s the right approach. 

The virus and supply chain madness factored in. Due to Covid exposure, I couldn’t leave my apartment for a week upon returning home — Xtreme solitude rarely boosts mental wellness. As for the supply chain, disappointing in December was the lack in stores of favored holiday items, e.g. the annual “limited edition” cookie by Pepperidge Farms’ called Snowballs®. They were only on Amazon—for $19 a bag. A year without Snowballs® is like a year without…Snowballs®. And this year I didn’t get into preparations or meticulous wrapping the way I once did. Threw things into bags with tissue paper. No hand-drawn gift notes. No Christmas cards.  I skipped movies I watch yearly. And all of that, while freeing, ultimately felt crummy. Next year I’m going back to overdoing it. Obviously, that’s the answer. So there’s the epiphany. 

At this time of year I usually suggest one of three things. 

  1. Make a list of what you got done in 2021. You’ll be surprised.
  2. Make a list of intentions for 2022, before it gets frittered away.
  3. Books: Greenlights; A Girl’s Guide to Missiles; Life (Keith Richards); Boys in the Trees (Carly Simon); Good Habits, Bad Habits; Olive Kitteridge, Olive Again, and Oh William; Mobituaries (Mo Rocca); Dodging Energy Vampires; A Girl Named Zippy; All The Light We Cannot See; The Power of Now; How To Be Alone; Joyful; Elevation (S. King); and my personal favorite, A Man Called Ove. Email me for a personal recommendation for you. That’s my gift.

Good repression, good wallow, or good New Year with light at the end of the pandemic tunnel.