CHRISTMAS JUST WON'T BE CHRISTMAS WITHOUT

My Christmas mixtape.

For some families, the day after Thanksgiving is for Black Friday shopping and decorating the Christmas tree. At my house, the day after Thanksgiving meant that it was socially acceptable for my mom to have our taped-from-TV version of White Christmas on continuous play. We could also listen to Christmas music. In the 80s and 90s, my dad devoted lots of time to making mix tapes. Our Christmas house blend combined my mom's and dad's favorites with a heaping side of Elvis.

I wouldn't have it any other way.

TWO TRUTHS

I am a horrible speller, (sorry, Carl) and my dad usually has the perfect response for everything.

EAR ROSSY

I saw this graffiti while driving to Illinois. It was in Arkansas on the side of the interstate, about as close as you can get to Missouri without actually being there. It amused the hell out of me, and I was unable to photograph it because I was driving, and my dad was catching up on some sleep in the passenger seat. I filed it away to use someday in a painting. Maybe. On the way back we were lucky (?) enough to be snagged in a black ice traffic jam. Here was my grand chance. My second chance!  I was still driving, but managed to get my dad to take this picture for me. I never told him exactly what it was... just some stuff spray painted on the side of a building that was coming up soon. Mom laughed, horrified that I'd conned my dad into being a complicit participant in my crude sense of humor.

I guess the real lesson here is that a few extra passes of the spray paint and some inventive spelling is far easier than whitewashing a wall.  Where's Tom Sawyer when you need him?

ID

Several years ago, I was looking through some boxes of family photographs and found my grandmother's ID badge for Fort Benning in Georgia. I'd never seen one like it before. It was metal and weighty, and wearing it would be more like wearing a very small framed picture of yourself than any laminated, holographic, plastic card people use today. The badge is over 60 years old, and is in far better shape than my sad looking student ID. After 4 years of swiping it at the dining hall and the library, it resembles more of a faded smear than me.

I found out about this exhibition that opened last Friday at Ricco/Maresca in New York. It is a very small portraiture show focusing on ID badges from the '30s-'50s. If you visit the link, you can scroll through several badges featured in the show. I had never seen another badge like my grandmother's before, and here on the New Yorker website were 15 more I could look at. The show features 250 of these tiny portraits, and Frank Maresca, co-partner of Ricco/Maresca says, “The show is an important portrait of the American worker, during a time when workers changed America as we know it.”

My grandmother's badge. Wasn't she pretty?

HOLLY DAZE

I'll be spending the next 2 weeks with friends and family feeling holly jolly. In the mean time, look for my work hanging early January at the Small Hall Gallery between Magpies Bakery and the Glowing Body Studio in North Knoxville.

See you in 2014.

PIGGING OUT

I am a spoiled child and lucky to have a dad who humors my need to ceremoniously mark the demises of faithful, family cars. Last year I wrote about stringing Christmas tree lights in his 79 Volkswagen rabbit. This year, our old Chevy Malibu is up for honors and decorations. This car replaced the Rabbit when I was in the 6th grade. I used to not like it for this fact alone. It was a Rabbit Killer. 

Then it became my teenage freedom, and I became Malibu Barbie. (Just to my mom.)  The Bu, my co-pilot B, and my cassette tapes rode all over Memphis. And in the Bu I could do things that my parents didn't do, like singing along to loud music and having my windows down. When I come home for holidays I like to borrow it and do just that. There are parts of being a teenager that I would go back and do and driving my old car is one of them.

I've made a pig stencil from some old BBQ ads my dad posted on his blog. The roof needed to be repainted and I offered to do it up right (not boring). My ultimate goal is to get the Google Earth satellites to take a picture of it when the car is parked on the street. So while I'm painting the pig, I'm going to pep talk the Bu into lasting that long.

That's really my only holiday plan aside from stuffing my face. I'd like to propose a toast, and I'm raising my glass (of the special sauce that keeps the Bu emission free for inspection.) Here's to good food, family, and the faithful cars that drive them.

THANKSGIVING

I traveled home to Memphis for Thanksgiving. As it's a very short very family holiday, none of my friends were in town. Apparently, all I did was eat with my family -- exactly what I was supposed to do. I learned this from my drawings and photos during my trip. Mostly about food....

I've only been away from my family for three Thanksgivings. I missed my first shortly after I turned 21. I was doing a semester abroad in London. The country voted least likely to celebrate Thanksgiving. Our program put on a dinner for us. It was on a boat anchored in the Thames, and while it was a nice dinner, it wasn't the Thanksgiving I knew. There were Yorkshire puddings. The next day, I took the Oxford Tube to visit my friend who was studying there. I was staying overnight for Thanksgiving dinner, so clearly I packed a toothbrush, fresh underwear, several pounds of potatoes and a potato masher. We ate an obscene amount of food prepared in a kitchen no larger than my parents' bathroom and tried to convince her English friends that millions of Americans played the classic after dinner game of Pin the Hat on the Turkey. They bought it.

After college, I moved to Pennsylvania and flying home for two days really wasn't practical. It took planes trains and automobiles to get me there and almost 12 hours of travel. I spent my second Thanksgiving with a friend, and we prepared a spread of sides.... but no turkey. Turkey for two is laughably impractical, and neither of us wanted to spend a whole day cooking, so we fried up a pound of bacon instead. There are no leftovers for days when a pound of bacon is involved. I took myself on a date to the Philadelphia Museum of Art the next day.

The next year I was adopted by my boss and joined a large and ragtag bunch of children, significant others, mothers, friends, dogs, and cats. I initially balked at the idea of spending it with someone else's family and not having the role of girlfriend or distant cousin to play, but it was really nice, and one of the largest Thanksgivings I've been to. After that, I drove to Boston to stay with a friend from high school. We made silly faces and ate cannolis. I went to two museums, Sunday services in the "One if by Land, Two if by Sea" church, and reunited with some old friends from my first family-less Thanksgiving.

You'll be my family for a little while, / Until we get to where we're goin'.

My favorite song about Thanksgiving, written by some folks from home.
Cornucopia by Scandaliz Vandalistz

I learned a while ago that Thanksgiving is what you make of it, and as long as you spend it with people you like, it will usually be a great time. 

BIG TEXAS STYLE

My dad's Aunt Marion was always put together -- white shirts, black slacks, dyed red hair, and lipstick. She would probably qualify for a spot on the Advanced Style blog. I remember her as being petite, though I suppose you're always short when you're married to a man who was well over six feet tall, even into his eighties. But like any good Texan, she went big when it mattered. Aunt Marion had large, turquoise charms with big bales that could be slid onto necklaces and wires. And she had huge turquoise rings. They were as long as her fingers, and she always wore more than one. My favorite one was made of turquoise stones that had been cut and set into the shape of a woman.