Dear Family,
Let us begin by tying off two loose ends from last month’s letter so people will stop pestering me about them.1
First, regarding the demise of our 29-year-old bread machine last month, Grandma (Christine) and Grandpa gave us a new one for Christmas. Crystal put it to work that very day to make glazed orange rolls,2 a holiday tradition in both of our childhood homes. So, crisis averted.
The provenance of the orange roll recipe is not entirely clear to me. Crystal does not remember whether her mother got it from my mother, or my mother got it from her mother, or both women got it from a third woman in the Moorestown Ward more than 40 years ago.3 Both of our mothers occasionally read this letter, and I’m hoping one of them will be able to clear things up. I don’t think my mother made the rolls as often as Crystal’s mother did. (I hated them when I was a kid and, not unlike now, was quite proficient at letting the world know how much I hated the things I hated.) But I like them now.
The second loose end pertains to the outcome of Grace’s audition for the Maryland all-state senior chorus. She learned this month that she had been accepted. The choir will perform somewhere in Baltimore sometime during the weekend of March 4th/5th. As is often the case with school events, information sufficient to enter anything useful into my calendar has not yet been provided. (It was only this week that we learned of Grace’s graduation date — June 9th.) I don’t understand why that is. I don’t understand why it takes a month for audition adjudicators to enter scores into a spreadsheet, sort by the column with the scores in it, figure out who made the cut, and send out a couple of mass emails. Someone should have been able to knock that out in an hour, tops. (Two hours, maybe, if the people were music majors.) I also don’t understand why it takes people more than 30 seconds to scan and pay for three items at the Safeway self checkout. Come to think of it, I don’t understand why anything takes as long as it does. Maybe that explains why I am so frequently antsy and fidgety.
Other things of note that Grace is awaiting include various college admission decisions. She has received acceptance letters from, in order of proximity to our house, George Mason University (21 miles), Towson University (33 miles), Southern Virginia University (155 miles), and BYU-Idaho (2,148 miles). If these are the only schools she gets into, I would guess she’ll probably enroll at SVU. But my track record on predicting how 17-year-old girls will act is not the best. She may opt for SVU even if she gets in everywhere. She is still waiting to hear from the most selective schools she applied to,4 notably the University of Maryland (5 miles away) and BYU (2,091 miles away). Admission to either of these places would likely scramble her calculus somewhat, but who’s to say? We’re probably two issues of the Famlet away from knowing anything for certain. The waiting is driving me nuts.
The only thing we know with any certainty schoolwise is that Sophie will be heading back to BYU next week (having completed her mission to Ukraine/Temple Square last month). Having her around for the entire Christmas season has been a delight. She does not yet appear to have kicked any of her missionary habits, still waking up early for exercise and personal scripture study, still not losing patience with anybody and somehow managing to see the good in everybody (including in people who clearly have no idea how to drive), still spending what seems like every waking moment looking for ways to be helpful, still praying over all of her meals, including in restaurants. Sometimes I feel a little guilty swiping her french fries while her eyes are closed, but not guilty enough to stop doing it.
She is also going to church twice on Sundays. She comes with us in the morning and then attends a YSA ward in Chevy Chase (or maybe it’s in Potomac, I don’t remember) in the afternoons. The YSA ward seems to have a different event almost every night of the week, and she’s been going to most of those, too.
She also plays the piano more than anyone else in the house and occasionally picks up her cello, too.
Christmas — the run-up
As of last month’s writing, the Washington D.C. Temple Choir had completed two of its six Christmas performances. These six performances included one inside the temple, three at the temple visitors’ center, one at a stake center in Frederick, Maryland, and one at Capital One Hall in Tysons Corner, Virginia. The frequency of these performances meant that practically half of the days in between Thanksgiving and Christmas involved either performing a concert or preparing for one.
I can’t remember a December I have enjoyed more.
All of the events were great fun to perform in, but the concert at Capital One Hall on December 19th was unlike anything I had ever done before. There our choir provided the background singing for “Jenny Oaks Baker & Family Four” (i.e., Jenny on violin and her four kids on violin, cello, guitar, and piano) as they performed selections from their Christmas album, “Joy to the World.”
Washington, D.C. was the seventh stop on the family’s 10-city world tour in December that also included such well-known metropolises as Phoenix, Huntsville, Athens (the one in Georgia), Sandy Springs (also in Georgia), Idaho Falls, and four places in Utah.
It was an impressive little production that picks up local dance companies and a high school choir at each stop (except here, where they got us instead of a high school choir). Notwithstanding our being at only around 60 percent strength, mostly due to outbreaks of covid, RSV, and I don’t know what else that tore through the choir, I’d like to think that we were better than a high school choir — better at least than a non-Utah high school choir. (Utah punches well above its weight when it comes to music, among other things.)
Our call time was 1:00 p.m. for the 7:00 p.m. performance. The intervening time was used mostly for blocking, rehearsing, getting the balance and timing right, and (the best part of all) watching Jenny coolly negotiate with her children, a couple of whom were not always eager to take stage direction from their mother (if you can imagine such a thing). It was fun to watch and a pleasant reminder that even perfect families have their moments.
Christmas — the holiday
Christmas itself was pleasant. It included the now-traditional gingerbread-house-decorating luncheon at our house with all the local cousins (numbering 12, I think, this year). Most of these “children” are now too old to find much joy in decorating gingerbread houses, but they are also old enough to perceive value in the tradition.
After the big family gathering, the five of us (Crystal, Ari, Sophie, Grace and I) had our customary Christmas Eve dinner at the Red Lobster in downtown Silver Spring. (I can no longer remember the origins of this particularly goofy tradition,5 but we’ve been doing it for nearly two decades now and the tradition must be respected.) Fittingly enough, we ran into Andrew, Jess and their family as they emerged from the Thai restaurant directly above Red Lobster following their traditional Christmas Eve dinner there.
Christmas Day began with sacrament meeting at 9:00 a.m., as usual. A few parents of young children had advocated for moving it to later in the day. I had zero input into the decision to keep it at its usual time, but I’m happy we did. It amuses me that we spend all of December emphasizing to our children that Christmas should be about Jesus, not Santa, but on the rare year when the two actually come into conflict, it’s Jesus who should reschedule.
Golly, I’m such an old grump.
Church on Christmas was the best. Following the sacrament, we had a lovely little sermon offered by a 13-year-old girl followed by a slew of music by the ward choir, which may have consisted of as many teenagers as adults, and concluding remarks from an Area Seventy who happens to live in our ward. (He recently referred to me as “young” even though I’m 16 months older than he is.) The meeting ended with my resurrecting an old White Oak Ward tradition of blowing the doors off the joint with an adaptation of the David Willcocks/Choir of Kings College, Cambridge arrangement of O Come, All Ye Faithful. (The one redeeming feature of the dump where we worship every Sunday is a fantastic 60-year-old pipe organ that can rattle the windows.)
Mom, Dad, Peter, and Coco came over after church to exchange gifts (including the aforementioned bread machine). We then spent Christmas afternoon with our friends the Eskelsens, exchanging white elephant gifts, eating Maryland crab cakes, the aforementioned orange rolls, Crystal’s grandma’s raspberry Jell-O salad with sour cream and bananas, English Christmas pudding (which is gross) and lots of Christmas-related junk food while trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to remember that it was Sunday.
I really can’t think of any way the day could have been better.
Christmas — the aftermath
On the day after Christmas, we came up with the original idea (apparently shared this week by roughly 10 percent of the world’s 7 billion people) of spending a couple of days in New York City. On a good day, we can drive to New York in 3 hours and 45 minutes. I have no idea how many hours it takes on the day after Christmas. I stopped counting after 5.
The principal purpose of the trip was to see Hadestown at the Walter Kerr Theatre, which we mostly enjoyed despite being seated in an unusually tight row behind some hipster doofus whose wild hair obstructed my view during Act II. (Crystal switched seats with me during intermission after being stuck behind him for Act I.) As everybody except me knew going in, the show portrays the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which does not end well for either of them. I don’t much care for shows that don’t have happy endings – the main reason I never enjoyed Hamilton as much as everybody else claims to have. But to paraphrase the god Hermes (portrayed by a large woman channeling Aretha Franklin), it’s a sad song but we sing it anyway, hoping each time that it will somehow end differently.
It does a good job of that.
We filled the rest of our brief time in the city with various touristy things, rubbing shoulders with the 80 million other idiots wandering aimlessly around Times Square in the freezing cold taking selfies and generally getting in my way.
As further evidence that patriarchy is a myth (in our household, at least),6 we also visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was my first trip to the Met, which now allows me to state from experience what I had previously been able only to assert from assumption – that the Met is the most boring crowded place on Earth. But at least I can say I’ve been there now, which sometimes seems like at least half the reason anybody does anything.7
We stayed in Brooklyn like the cool hipster people we are. (As a general rule, I only sleep in Manhattan when someone else is paying.) We got an Airbnb in what I would describe as a “gritty,” decidedly non-gentrified neighborhood. Not being overly familiar with Brooklyn, I can’t really say where it falls on the continuum of Brooklyn niceness, but I was pleasantly surprised to walk out each morning and discover the car was still there.
Shortly after Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who is from the Bronx, not Brooklyn, but it’s all the same from my perspective) moved down here after being elected to Congress in 2018, I recall her describing her D.C. apartment as “bougie” in part because the kitchen sink had a garbage disposal — something she claimed not to be familiar with. I remember thinking that she was probably posturing and exaggerating (as politicians do). But I couldn’t help but notice that, in fact, our Brooklyn kitchen did not have a garbage disposal. No dishwasher, either. Fortunately we only used the dishes to eat the six-inch, fifty-dollar cake we brought back from Carlo’s Bake Shop on Monday night.
We commuted from Brooklyn on the subway, where, like with a lot of things in New York, I kind of know what I’m doing but not really. I used that time to push my New York Times crossword puzzle streak to 1,000 consecutive days, thank you very much. (If you do the math, you’ll discover that the start of the streak roughly coincides with the start of the pandemic. This is not a random coincidence.)
It took me a little longer than usual because I was tired and it’s hard to focus on the subway. Those are the excuses I’m going with.
(My Wordle streak, for what it’s worth, currently stands at 76 days.)
Here’s to hoping for even more meaningful accomplishments in the coming year!
Love,
Tim
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly
- My claim of feeling “pestered” stretches the truth somewhat. Asserting that anyone has asked me about these things at all is also something of an exaggeration.
- She used the bread machine to make the dough and did everything else the old-fashioned way
- Crystal’s family and mine briefly lived in the same Silver Spring ward in the early 1970s and then briefly lived in the same ward in Moorestown, New Jersey, in the early 1980s. As our parents regularly got together on holidays, Crystal and I have been having Christmas dinner together on and off since we were 8. (Well, since I was 8 and she was 10.)
- I have recently started dangling prepositions in my writing. Sue me.
- We almost never ate Christmas Eve dinner at home growing up. I seem to recall rotating among the plethora of excellent South Jersey diners, but I’m pretty sure we also did McDonald’s at least once. Someone needs to refresh my memory
- other evidence of patriarchy’s fiction is the fact that I share my house with a dog and a cat
- When it comes to art museums, I enjoy looking at 19th Century paintings, sculptures of people and things I can recognize, and very little else. The Met has a lot of both of those things, but you have to fight your way through a lot of less interesting stuff, including all that Byzantine, Middle Ages junk near the entrance, renaissance furniture and other pieces that are indistinguishable to me from piles of discarded crap you could pick up at any estate sale. There might be some subtleties that are lost on me.
I can easily clear up the orange roll question. That one was definitely mine and goes back even further. It was my mother’s recipe and her mother’s before that. I am 77 and have been eating those orange rolls my entire life. I can’t even imagine how long our family has been eating them. Glad to see the tradition is being continued.
I do think most other shared recipes from both of your childhoods came from your mother.
Your entire Christmas holiday sounds fantastic.
I absolutely love reading these each month and appreciate the Henrichsen..what’s a good word….well, your honesty. You say what many of us are thinking g.