Singing the post-holiday blues to feline family

Singing the post-holiday blues. Yep, that’s what a lot of people are doing these days. It’s the holiday hangover from the good times you may or may not have had, but are now paying for in multiple ways. It can make you want to hurl, no matter how cheerful you normally are or try to be.

First, your home, which looked all beautiful and decorated for Christmas, down to the neatly wrapped presents, now looks like a bomb went off. Worse, you spent all your energy to plan and pull off Christmas, so you have no ambition left with which to deal with its aftermath. And as usual, no one else wants to help.
Second, who wants to do anything when temperatures after Christmas are dipping into seasonal lows, some in record-setting numbers?! Baby, it’s cold outside! Nobody likes to start his/her day starting up a lawn tractor or snow blower just to be able to get out on roads that are unfit to traverse.

Just why would we get out on unplowed and/or unsafe roads unless it’s a certifiable emergency? This brings me to my third observation about post-holiday blues-born behavior: we risk life and limb leaving home in the name of the almighty dollar – going to work because we really need the money to pay off the Christmas items we have floated on our already bloated credit cards.

That reality is hardly morale-boosting or inspirational, which brings me to my fourth point: as of December 26, the peace, joy and goodwill to all humankind that’s espoused in Christmas cards and songs disappear faster than the seed mix in your bird feeder when a squirrel arrives on the scene.

Given the post-Christmas crappy home conditions, the crappy weather, the crappy temperatures, the crappy roads, the crappy debt and the crappy attitudes of humanity, really only those truly deranged don’t find themselves feeling flattened and blue after being run over by the commercial Christmas train. Unless you’re a cat.

Whether they possess an innate species-specific resistance that insulates them from depression, or because they’re predators without creditors, cats’ outlooks on life do not seem to appreciably change in the direction of blue the minute Christmas is over (please note, I am not including those that received catnip for a gift and/or imbibed in it over the holidays). They just kept going about their cat business as if nothing had changed.

Never have I known a cat to ruin what might turn out to be the start of a promising new year by making resolutions he will most likely fail at fulfilling. Although our cat, Sequel, could stand to lose some weight, she woofs down her food on New Year’s Eve without self-recrimination. Similarly, Grady refuses to set himself up for failure. He doesn’t waste any time paying lip service to a pledge to stop surprising us by randomly pooping in out-of-the-way places. We humans could take a page from their playbook.

Not only that, but keeping an eye on our three cats the day after Christmas, I noticed none of them so much as glanced at the calendar or the clock on the kitchen wall a few feet away from it. This lack of situational awareness appears to have a protective quality and actually works in their favor. It forces them to live in the here and now (a place some of us visit far too occasionally) which is the only place real change can occur. Hmm. That’s worthy of deeper consideration.

None of my cats ran up significant debt during the month of December. They never even take a credit card or wallet with them when they go out the door. Instead of giving expensive gifts purchased online, they give things they can acquire through hard work. Why just the other day, Tiger brought me a ground mole he had captured and left it where I would have to acknowledge it if I wanted to exit out the side door. So much more personal than a pre-packaged gift!

It’s no wonder the felines in our family looked at me dubiously when I tried singing the post-holiday blues to them: they just can’t relate to my indirect, internally-manufactured human nonsense.

Christmas memories are catalogued by smell

As a visually-oriented person, I catalogue experiences through what I take in with my eyes. I am frequently oblivious to the sounds (however they abound), the taste, the smell and the sensation of what’s going on around me and instead focus mainly on what’s in my line of vision. Shallow as it sounds, that’s how it happens because that’s how I’m wired.

But all that changes at Christmastime, when different senses start registering involuntarily and demanding my attention. The result is much more interesting – especially with what’s out there to smell this time of year. Everything evergreen gets my attention by stimulating my olfactory receptors. I love the smell of pine, even the smell of fake pine that’s produced by candles, air fresheners, and tree sprays.

Of course, similar seasonal-stimulating smells may be achieved through similar methods, but using sweeter holiday smells, such as gingerbread- or cinnamon-scented ones. There’s no scents that appeal to the senses more than those of a home that has holiday cooking and baking happening. Along those lines, a couple of my favorite smells are related not to cookie baking aromas, but to seasonal snacks my maternal grandmother was locally famous for making and giving away to friends and family.

First comes caramel corn. I would help Grandma Kate stove-pop huge batches of popcorn. Later, on my own, I’d usually use an air popper to make the recipe healthier, but Grandma was a purist and insisted on the stovetop-popping method. Next, she’d put the popped corn in roasters, over which she’d drizzle a special boiling caramel syrup concoction made to fizz up like lava from a volcano following stirring in last-minute a small measure of baking soda. Accidentally getting some of the syrup splattered on your hands or wrists helped you fully appreciate my allusion to its molten properties.

Then it was time to race the clock. A huge burst of speed and energy was required to stir the syrup into all of the popcorn in our respective roasters to ensure it got evenly coated before the caramel began to harden, which took roughly 60 seconds. Not beating the clock meant game over and an inferior final product.

We would put the topless roasters of caramel-coated popcorn into the oven at a low temperature and take them out periodically to stir the whole sticky mess, ending with finally allowing the caramel to harden. The smell of the caramel coating permeated the whole house. For me, it served as the scent of holiday spirit.

Those roasters of Grandma’s saw a lot of November through January action, from cooking turkey and ham, to making the above caramel corn and Nuts & Bolts, a salty treat our family strongly associates with New Year’s Eves past.

In case you are wondering, “Nuts and Bolts” were early on named after the Cheerios (nuts) and pretzel sticks (bolts) that constituted a large part of the multi-product combination snack – before the cereal company decided to change the recipe’s name to “Chex Party Mix.”

Please note, the cereal maker was not the only entity to put its own twist on the snack. Our family goosed the original recipe of Cheerios, Chex, pretzels and peanuts to include potato sticks, cheese balls, Cheez-Its, Triscuits and mixed nuts.

After you stir these items together in a roaster, you drizzle over everything a seasoned sauce containing butter, garlic salt and Worcestershire sauce, among other things, then put the Nuts & Bolts in the oven on low heat to bake in the unique flavoring.

There’s no time battle to be fought with Nuts & Bolts, but the prevention of people cherry-picking certain, preferred snack items from the finished product requires a certain amount of policing. “Hey, quit snatching the Triscuits!” or “Pick out any more of those cheese balls and I’ll break your arm!” are the kind of things you sometimes overhear (or say) when Nuts & Bolts are served at family functions.

There’s nothing as aromatic as having the scent of a seasoned butter sauce and multiple snack foods wafting through your home as you bake the party mix. Maybe Glade should capture it and caramel corn in air freshener form. Good for a between-holidays spiritual pick-me-up!

Accidentally sucked into cleaning the fridge

I am not a neat freak. I will never be. Life is too short for that kind of thing. Sure, like the rest of us, I have certain pockets of obsessive compulsive behavior that can’t stand certain states of disorder (i.e. dirty dishes left undone in the sink), but overall, I can let things slide until I have adequate time to deal with them.

That’s why I know it was completely by accident the other night that I found myself cleaning out my refrigerator. Nothing foreshadowed that act of inspired clean-up that suddenly showed up on my early Sunday evening agenda. I feel I must officially proclaim this, lest someone think I’ve championed any aspect of OCD cleaning of the “out, damned spot” variety –except for the results, which stand on their own merits: Exhibit A: a clean fridge.

It started out innocently enough: I’d just returned home after having grocery-shopped at four different stores as part of my ongoing quest to secure commonplace products that have post-pandemic have remained mysteriously absent from retail store shelves. All I could think about was refrigerating the ricotta cheese I had finally found to stuff the manicotti tubes it had taken weeks to secure.

But alas, the opening of my refrigerator door yielded more problems than it was supposed to resolve. It figures! I was immediately confronted and confounded with the reality of having no room to refrigerate what I’d just purchased. Sitting at the front of the top shelf was a half-consumed half-gallon of chocolate milk four days past its expiration date. In addition to its potential toxicity, the container’s height successfully blocked my ability to see what was behind it, a major no-no in refrigerator organizing circles!

When I removed the offending half-gallon container from the shelf, my no-longer-obscured-vision gazed upon a clear plastic tub of unnatural-colored humus that had been hiding in its shadows. It also clearly needed tossing; however, I was unable to pick it up due to an unidentified sticky substance adhering it to the top shelf.

That had to be the sticky ooze from the small, overturned Rubbermaid container of leftover caramel apple salad that fell off the jar of minced garlic that was precariously perched behind a now fizz-less bottle of Canada Dry cranberry ginger ale and a half-container of whipped topping. Yup. Once fresh, but now shriveled blueberries my daughter had spilled dotted the landscape. C’mon, man!

Guess I missed National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day on November 15! Normally I make a diligent fridge cleaning effort just before the holidays, but I’d been pretty ill at that point this year, so a lot of things went by the wayside. And my kids are notorious for turning a blind eye toward such dirty jobs!

None of my causal insights to the refrigerator mayhem made things any more organized or less sticky. I pried up the tub of hummus with a pie server and tossed the soggy contents of the caramel apple salad container along with it. Then I had to put a warm, wet dishcloth over the sticky spots to erode their adhesive properties so I could wash off the shelf top. I was still wearing my winter coat as I performed these refrigerator exorcisms.

Next, I checked the cheese drawer, found in relatively good condition save some Muenster slices gravitating toward the dark side. Nearby were two 32-ounce bags of Mexican cheese – both open and one not re-sealed by my son! Grrr. To their right was a partially-opened, now oddly solidified, soap-like block of former berry-flavored cream cheese looking grossly cool.

Eventually I got to the bottom shelf, with its left side catch-all area where my produce likes to go to die. To the right were two disgusting, abandoned Styrofoam take-out containers that I told to beat it. Honestly!

I don’t think Marie Kondo deploys her KonMari system of de-cluttering specifically on refrigerators, but I found myself engaging in a less delicate method of re-organization (which I didn’t pioneer) called “heave-ho.” None of my fridge stuff was sparking joy. In fact, there was no joy in Mudville the whole cleaning session. But it did register strongly that even an accidental refrigerator cleaning beats none.

Bandana wearing symbolizes hard work ethic

After staying up too late on Thanksgiving Eve, phoning some friends, my son tiredly ambled downstairs Thanksgiving morning. He tentatively popped into the kitchen long enough to size up the status of my home kitchen holiday food preparation operation, complete with large kettles, crockpots, roasters, sauce pans, cutting boards and miscellaneous utensils. He looked at me engulfed in cooking chaos, the bright purple, paisley handkerchief print bandana atop my head radiating “to-do rag” or “dew-rag” (versus simply “do-rag”), and he burst into laughter.

“You know there’s gotta be some serious work going on when my mom’s got her bandana on!” he announced to no one in general. “What is it with you women and your bandanas?” he wanted to know. “Are they some sort of warning signal to stay out of your way because you plan to move mountains today?”

“Precisely,” I told him. “And in this case my bandana provides the added bonus of preventing my hair from getting into the food I’m making,” Silly boy. He has a lot to learn about women, food safety and busting your butt crack at the crack of dawn to ensure you’ve prepared enough turkey, gravy, stuffing and potatoes for a crowd.

“My girlfriend and her mom do the same bandana thing when they’re trying to get a lot of work done,” he reported. “And I’ve seen other women do it, too. So it’s starting to seem like some kind of a universal behavior among females.” Perhaps we were all inspired by Rosie the Riveter. I’ll have to get out my Rosie socks and wear them along with my bandana.

“Yeah, my mom doesn’t wear a bandana just when she’s cooking,” my son continued mocking me. “She also wears one when she’s taking care of recycling, mowing the lawn, scrubbing the tub and doing other household tasks. She can’t work hard unless she’s wearing a scrap of cloth on her head.”

Well, there was some truth to that. There’s nothing more annoying than trying to work hard and having your hair fall into your eyes. A bandana worn sweatband-style prevents that from happening. Folded in triangular-half and worn Babushka-style, a bandana also protects me from tree branch and bush attacks and the dust I kick up when I’m mowing lawn. Further, I like that if I overheat, I can unfasten the bandana, turn it inside-out and use the clean interior of it to mop the sweat and dirt from my eyes. A bandana also absorbs blood quite well, too, when the need arises.

If I were really cool, I would master the art of wearing a bandana as a sweatband, with a baseball cap or cowboy hat resting atop it, but alas, I’m not that cool. I’m also not cool enough to pull off a bandana in that grunge way Johnny Depp and Bret Michaels make look so effortless. I end up looking like a cross between Aunt Jemima and Raggedy Ann: hard-working; non-threatening.

Never was I more in my bandana-clad glory than during the summer of 2011, when I was without a year ‘round fulltime job, so I could spend endless days in the fields of our family’s farms, picking specialty crops by hand, while by night cranking out dozens of resumes and cover letters. I went through so many bandanas in the hot sun, bent over five-gallon pails (into which I was tossing ripe jalapeno and banana peppers) that in order to have a clean bandana, I had to borrow a couple bandanas that belonged to my dog. And yes, I have gone out in public, proudly styling my dog’s attire.

My favorite image is a photo taken of me, glistening with sweat, all stooped over a row of jalapeno peppers, wearing a formerly white sleeveless shirt and denim Capri pants, with one of my trademark bandanas folded into a strip that’s tied neatly around my head. You can’t get any more real and hands-on than that: doing whatever it takes to support my family

If you would have asked my elementary-aged (at the time) kids what my super power was, they would have claimed, “It’s all in her bandana. Without one she would be powerless and accomplish nothing.”