The Little House in Miami

“The house is closed.  Your keys are now mementos,” was the text that I received from my brother Steve after the family home had sold last week.   I stood there in my office and let out a small gasp.   I knew the closing was supposed to be that Friday or Monday in Miami depending the last minute details from the buyers.   Still, the idea of never going into the house which we had owned since 1958 seemed at bit surreal.   My arrival at the house on 90^th court did not happen until 1963, so my sister Kathy and brothers Bill and Steve had some extra time to make it their own before they had to deal with a new baby.  Sharon was born in 1964 which then made the family complete. 

I had not been home since my father died in 2002 when I went down for the funeral.  Being in the house and not seeing him sit in his recliner also seemed to be surreal although ironically that’s where he passed away.   Max and I had moved to Georgia in 1998 and had been down periodically, but Mom and Dad came up so often it didn’t seem necessary to go down there to see them.   A few years ago when Mom could not live alone anymore she moved up to Tallahassee so the house had been vacant since then.  My mother still had to pay the taxes and run the AC so that her South Florida home would not be overrun with mold which the moist tropical weather can do in just a few weeks.  

The words of the text were still stinging.  Fighting back tears was a losing battle so I quickly ducked into the bathroom so none of my co-workers could see me.  The house I grew up in was no longer ours - I could never go home again.  I had to work late that night so I didn’t get home until after 10:00 p.m.  I told Max the house was sold and he could see it affected me.   He hugged me and said it was a very good house.  I told him I wanted the new family to laugh and love as much as we did. 

The next morning I cuddled with my husband, put my head on his chest and started to cry.  A large chapter of my life was now most definitely closed and could never be reopened-and now it belonged to someone else.  So much had happened in the Cody house.  I knew how rare it was that one family could own a house that was not a farm or an estate in England for over 56 years - in the South Florida suburbs that is just unheard of.  

Gazing out of the second floor window of my own house, I thought about when I was a little girl.  I would look out my bedroom window during the Christmas season and I felt especially safe seeing the holiday lights.  I guess as a kid, I reasoned that nothing bad could happen as long as my window was framed in multiple colors of red, green, blue and orange.  When I put the Christmas lights up at our house, I make a special effort to have lights frame our bedroom window so I can look outside and feel that all is right with the world.  Our ranch house did not have a fire place (we lived in Miami, which is not a place known for cold weather hence the lack of a hearth) - so my parents would tell us that they would stay up and let Santa in.  

On Christmas morning, the Cody kids would descend on the presents that were in five different piles that all had the same number of presents.   We got to open two before church and then the rest after services and going out to breakfast.   Since Miami never really got cold in the winter, we’d run around in Miami Dolphin Jerseys with shorts and go to our friend’s houses to see what sort of  holiday haul they got.   Yeah, back then, you could just walk down the street and hang with your friends - there was no cell phones, Facebooking or Tweeting.   You could also smell the different holiday feasts being cooked as you walked on the sidewalk from house to house.  

Our backyard had a swing set that my sister Sharon and I would play on since we were close in age - just 16 months apart.   Unlike Georgia, the terrain in Miami is pretty flat so our backyard was fenced in but connected to four other houses in the back and to the side.  You could cut between the yards to go directly across to Southwest Sr. High which was literally a stone’s throw from my house.  If the jalousie windows were open, you could hear the marching band practicing for football season.   The backyard also kept a little plastic kiddie pool which Sharon and I splashed in as little three and four year old girlie bears.  It was an idyllic little house on a little lot in a simple middle class neighborhood - it was home.  

It was the place I learned to walk, talk and  have my hair done by my big sister Kathy.  It was the place where we did Easter egg hunts year after year even after we had grown up and gotten our own homes and apartments nearby.  It was a place where you could walk for hours on Halloween and come back with a pillow case full of candy.  It was the place where my family discussed around the dinner table what was going on the Vietnam War and my sister’s need to demonstrate against it, the assassinations of the Kennedys, why Nixon was a crook, the first gay rights demonstrations with Anita Bryant, the Dolphin’s perfect season, etc.  It was a place where you could eat politically incorrect food like a sausage noodle casserole, ham & corn pudding and bacon and swiss cheese quiche (which my dad and brothers devoured easily because they didn’t care whether people thought they were real men).  It was the place were I got my two front baby teeth knocked out riding a bike in the street and where I hit my head on the water heater and sliced my forehead open both of which resulted in panicked runs to South Miami Hospital (luckily, my being a genuinely clumsy kid did not warrant a visit from DFACS).  It was where Max and my dad bonded over cooking and our refrigerator made chirping sounds like a bird - that went on for years which Max found charming. 

As I look out my own living room window writing this, the leaves are beginning to change  because it’s autumn - something I never got to experience in Miami.  We’ve lived in this house for 10 years and it’s bigger than that petite house in Miami.  Each of my kids has their own rooms and the bathrooms are a pretty good size.  It’s two stories which is not something you saw a lot of in Miami in the late 1950’s to 1970’s.  We get snow here from time to time and are not any better prepared then the folks in South Florida were when it snowed in 1977 as Snowmaggeon this year so painfully pointed out.   I’m not sure we’ll live here for 56 years, but I hope that my kids have the sort of happy memories I had in that little house that managed to shelter two parents and five kids who could not have been more different.  Maybe the proximity in that house helped us learn the fine art of having to get along.  The beauty of having a big family in a little space is that it’s always noisy and sulking quietly in your room is impossible because once one sibling pisses you off something else happens and you form a temporary alliance for pay back.  

As I texted back to my brother Steve - he reminded me that I still have the

memories and I reminded him I still had the canisters of home movies in which I transfer every year for the family to look at for the holidays.  Maybe this year I can find footage that is strictly about the house - that little house that held a family together through for almost six decades of Easter Egg hunts, Halloweens, Christmas mornings, Thanksgivings, five weddings, 14 grandkids and a funeral.  Maybe my brothers and sisters will remember how close we were physically and emotionally - even though we live in different states.   And maybe my kids and I will watch TV together in the master bedroom because watching TV in your parents room while sitting on their bed is the best thing ever and we’ll have bacon and swiss cheese quiche for brunch.  Yeah, Max was right - it was a very good house. 

Super 8

For those of you that are under 40, you probably don’t remember the ritual that was watching home movies.  Not to sound like an old fart, but back in the 1960’s we didn’t have the instant playback that you have with digital video, your cell phone or hell even VHS video back in the 1970’s.  First you had to get a super 8 camera where you could take home movies and purchase the cassettes which held about 50 feet of film or two and a half minutes of action.   Needless to say, you couldn’t linger too long on one subject because after a little over two minutes, your film would run out.  This situation led to wedding movies going from a quick ceremony, to a few seconds of the first dance, a quick look at the sharing of the wedding cake, a few seconds of the tossing of the bouquet and finally leaving the reception in a hail of rice.  Your wedding could be condensed to a few minutes with no editing needed, and no audio.  There was no sound to go with the movies until 1973 when a sound track was added to Super 8 film. So if your drunk uncle got up to give a toast, there was no audio record of it.  All you saw was either people laughing or mortified but no sound to give you a hint that he blurted out that it would never last, he slept with his sister-in-law or that he was pretty sure the bride was knocked up.  When it was played back, the only sound you heard was ticking of the projector as the film popped up and down.      

The limited amount of time that you could record on a movie cassette led to people trying to pack in as much action into 150 seconds as possible.  Many of these movies ended up feeling like you were seeing the 1960’s through the eyes of someone who had Attention Deficit Disorder.   Even if you had 10 to 15 rolls to record that special event, it still took a few seconds load between switching out cassettes so you would still have lost pieces of action between where the last roll ended the new one began.  Worse, it would take at least a few days to send off the film and get it developed so you couldn’t really be sure that you got everything.  Primitive as it seems now, it was the best technology that we had at the time.   It was the only way we could go beyond capturing  a nanosecond of action in a photo.  Rather than explaining how your child learned how to walk, you could show them taking those precious tentative steps out into the world.  You could see them doing it in those ridiculous puffy pants with ruffles on the back, the hair in a silly sprout and toddler saddle shoes.   You could see the pride of the Mom or Dad taking their child's hand and leading them down that path with a big silent smile on their face – and appreciate how timeless that moment is.   Different clothes, different decade, but still those tentative steps have to be taken by every toddler and experienced by every parent.

I guess the reason I’m waxing nostalgic about all this is because for my holiday project for my mother and my brothers and sisters this year, I decided to convert a few reels of personal home movies into digital video.  I tried at first to do it myself but trying to get a 40 year old projector to gently play the precious moments of my recorded childhood  didn't work out so well.  I found that the decades of dust made the machine smoke and when I tried to un-jam the film, my finger got shredded in the sprockets before I could even get my video camera set up.  I decided then and there to have the professionals transfer it.  The quality would be better and the chances of bloodshed were much lower.

My brothers got a selection of home movies from my mother’s house which has been pretty empty since she moved from Miami to Tallahassee to go into assisted living.  The films spanned from 1957 from when they lived in Medford, Massachusetts to various vacations up to 1974.  My mother was pretty meticulous about labeling the outside of the film canisters so it was easy to see what year it covered and what activities were documented.  I got a dual 8 mm viewer from the place that I was having the film transferred so that I could see the movies in advance to decide which movies were worth transferring.  Putting the film on the spools and cranking them through the viewer brought  back to life those memories that had remained still for all these decades.  Birthday parties with pony rides, trips to Mathason Hammock, a family vacation to Pioneer City, or just playing in the backyard were all subjects of these long forgotten films. 

I picked out the best of our collective toddler-hoods.  I got 200 feet of film from 1957 when my parents still lived near Boston and my sister Sharon and I were still six to seven years from existence.   It was interesting seeing my older sister Kathy playing with her baby brother Bill in the pool in their backyard, seeing her climb on monkey bars and totally mug for the camera.  Again, these films were silent so any sound of her little voice singing to her brothers was never captured.  There’s the footage of my brother Bill’s second birthday which proved that no matter how advanced we as a species become, kids will always love ice cream, cake and getting presents – those emotions are pretty timeless.  Then there are the images of my brother Steve as an infant being passed around and adored as infants always are.  Then there is the footage of my parents young and just starting out with their family.  My mother is wearing bright red lipstick which was your make-up basic back then with matching nail polish.  She looks vibrant even in light of the fact she had three children in five years.  My dad looks thin and has no problem pushing a stroller or shooting some of the movie footage so that my mother is actually documented in the movies.  My grandparents still look like my grandparents but with less gray and more energy.  It’s a little freaky to see all these people and how they looked before I was born.  I’m not jealous mind you, just interested in the dynamic before I came along.  There is one part where my mother is throwing back her head and laughing out loud - something I rarely saw growing up probably because probably after having five kids to look after, she didn’t has as many LOL moments.

When I got to the footage of 1966, I got to see myself at three and my sister at two playing in the backyard.  My brother Steve who is about nine at this point is clowning around as I douse him with a hose.   My sister Sharon running around topless in the backyard with me in my favorite bathing suit (I still remember how much I loved that suit!)  The two of us were so close then, she was my little Dee-Dee. I was 16 months old when she was born and I couldn’t say Sharon but I could call her Dee-Dee.  It stuck through the time we went to college.   I remembered how much she hated sand on her toes and would insist on sitting in a chair while the rest of us played in the water.  It’s those little seemingly small details you remember the most.

I decided to get about 600 feet transferred which would be about 40 minutes of digital video.  Ironically, I had to drop off the film and wait for about a week for it to be transferred much like my mother used to when she took her movies to be developed at Zayre’s or Walgreens.  I asked them to put it in a Quicktime format so that I could edit on iMovie.   I uploaded the video into my computer and watched these images come to life once again but without being washed out by a projector bulb.   There we were, the Cody kids in all our youthful glory – just learning to walk, play and swing.  I looked at one scene of me at three getting ready to jump into a plastic pool with a blue two piece bathing suit.  I take a running start then hesitate and go back and run back before stopping again and then plopping with both legs bent.  I’d watch that piece and want to tell that little girl that it’s okay to be bold – jump in without hesitating.   As I grew older, I would often hesitate – sometimes it worked in my favor but most of the time it didn’t.  I guess that’s why I became so attracted to improvisation in college – you can’t hesitate if you want to be any good at it. 

I finished the editing the video and put the holiday footage together at the end from 1957 and 1963.  I hoped my mother and my siblings would like it.  I took it with me to Tallahassee so that my sister Kathy, my brother Bill, my mom and our families could watch it together.  I also uploaded it on Vimeo for my sister Sharon and Steve to watch.  The time came for us to watch it in Kathy’s living-room on her DVD much like we used to as kids when my mom got our the projector so we could see the footage she had just gotten back.  I was amazed how much Kathy and Bill remembered of their Massachusetts days.   We laughed at the our antics as children and at the patience my father had at trying to keep a band of five kids together while my mother documented what she could.  My mother remembered people we couldn’t and it felt good to hear her connect to those old memories and see herself as that young mother excited to have her daughter try on a coat from Felines Department store.  Here’s a link to a 60 second mock movie promo I did for The Codys – A Party of Seven.

I guess my hope with all this is to remind the Cody kids how close we used to be before adulthood, marriage and our own families got in the way.   Our mother is beginning to lose her memory and soon these home movies will be all we have to connect us to our past because she won’t be able to recount those moments to us anymore.  In a way, I guess that’s what this blog is about.  If my kids ever wonder who I was, they can look here and get an idea of what their mother thought and the things I went through, both good and bad.   It also makes me think for all the video equipment I have around here - I need to take video of them and save it because they will be grown and out before I know it.  I’ll want them to remember the good times and not all the times I had to say that we need to watch our money. You know, the silly times in the park or on vacation in Chattanooga or just playing around in the living room.  I'm going to be 50 years old this year and yet I still remember vividly playing in my childhood Miami backyard, the smell of the fresh cut grass and how much my brother Steve used to make me laugh.  It seems like yesterday and yet it was 47 years ago.   I just want my kids to remember their childhood and to be able to smile about it because it all goes by so very, very fast.  

Santa the Stalker and other Holiday Mishaps

I was one of those little kids that hated to sit on Santa's lap.  I put up with it - but that was just to insure that I got what I wanted.  My mother even insisted that she proof read my Christmas list before I sat on his lap to make sure there were no typos.  She would even let me know if there was something on the list that Santa might have a hard time getting it into the house.   Down the chimney was not an option since we lived in Miami and fire places were rarely needed when most of the December morning temperatures were in the 60's and you could play outside in your shorts by noontime.  

Standing in line to meet Santa always seemed to me what it would be like after you die and you're waiting at the pearly gates for Saint Peter to peruse his naughty and nice list to decide if you made the cut into heaven.  To me, Santa was omnipotent and in a sense more real than God - I mean his branding was the white beard, red suit, reindeer and a bag full of toys - that was a form of omnipotence that any kid could grasp.   I knew that God was out there but short of the Sistine chapel and Michaelanglo's vision, you didn't have a consistent view of what God looked like and he sure wasn't known for giving toys out on a specific night.   Santa could "see you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake, he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake." If that is not Godlike, I don't know what is.  

So I would stand there and see kid after go cheerfully and sit on Santa's lap.  Sure there was the occasional crybaby - but for the most part kids were excited to be there.   I always had to share my Santa time with my youngest sister, Sharon who I nicknamed Dee-Dee. I stood there year after year trembling wondering if any of my past misdeeds would haunt me like the time my mother gave me money for the ice cream man and I lost half if it and told Dee-Dee it was her half that got lost.   I used to scratch and bite up until the age of three but after that, according to my siblings, I grew out of it and was a pretty sweet kid.   Dee-Dee never seemed to be phased by Santa, maybe it was because she was more fearless than me or maybe she honestly never thought she did anything wrong - being the youngest she could get away with more than the rest of us.   Each time a child finished his appointment with Santa meant Dee-Dee and I got closer to the all knowing one.   The "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town" lyrics continued to haunt me as we were just feet away.   Was he stalking me - always watching through some sort of digital camera from the year 2011 that only he would have access to in 1969?  Did he see me shove clothes into my toy chest because I didn't want to put them away?  Did he see me not make my bed for the fourth day in a row?  Or did he (gasp) see me pour my milk down the drain because it got warm during dinner and now my mother expected me to drink it.   How many points did you get counted off for each of those transgressions before you officially crossed over into the naughty list?   How could anyone be expected to be perfect - the strain would be too much. 

Finally, it was time to face the Santa.  My sister and I were put on his lap and he looked to me as the oldest and asked my name.  I always wondered how someone who would stalk you year after year could forget  your name, but I went with it and told him.  "Well, Kelley, have you been good this year?"   My blue eyes got bigger, my face got flushed and even my white gold hair seemed to turn red, I stammered without saying a word.  Finally, my mother spoke up, "They have both been very good girls this year."   A good word from the mother must have some pull in spite of the hours of video he probably had to the contrary.   "What would you like for Christmas?" the jolly old elf asked.   We both answered in unison "A Mrs. Beasley doll!"   For those that don't know the show Family Affair, Mrs. Beasley was Buffy's favorite doll and every girl her age wanted one.   Santa spent the rest of the time talking to Dee-Dee who also rattled off a few more things that every younger sibling had to have.  I was happy just getting out what I wanted and feeling like I had a pretty good shot of getting it.    Sure enough, on Christmas morning, we both got Mrs. Beasley dolls which prompted many a tea party with the other dolls and stuffies.   It was one of the most perfect Christmases I can remember.   

The next year, I felt a little more confident and a little edgier.   I asked for a Flip Wilson doll.    Again, for those that didn't grow up in the 1970's, Flip Wilson was a comedian who also did a character in drag named Geraldine.   That was back in the days when the whole family could watch sketch comedy shows that came on before 11:30 p.m. on Saturday nights.   They had made a doll of Flip Wilson in a groovy suit on one side and Geraldine on the other.   I remember asking Santa for that and getting a bit of judgement from Kris Kringle.    "You're parents let you watch that show?" he asked quizzically.  "Yes," I replied -  again surprised that after stalking me all these years, he didn't know my favorite TV shows.   The great thing about my sister and I both getting the Flip Wilson doll was that we could turn one to look like Flip Wilson and the other could be Geraldine.  They generally had some funny things to say like "The Devil made me do it" and "I'm going to sick Killer on you!" at the tea parties.  Mrs. Beasley actually got most of their jokes.  Who says a white doll with glasses and polka dots is not hip and urban? 

Another holiday photo ritual was capturing the five of us in various poses for the holidays.   My mother would try to color coordinate and pose us somewhere in the house to present a perfect group of children.    The outfits needed to look just right and hair in place - an image of perfection that just wasn't us.   We were a group of very diverse people even as kids.  It's always fascinated me that the same group of people could have the same parents and the same upbringing and be so totally different.   In the beginning for the holiday photos,  it was probably a chore to get Dee-Dee and I as toddlers to sit still for the photos.   But as the years passed and the older siblings got into their teen years, tempers were bound to flare during the quest for the perfect family photo.  Finally, the night of the guitar holiday photo, it all came to a head.     My brothers Bill and Steve mouthed off to my teenage sister Kathy who finally had enough and seconds after this photo was taken, took a guitar and hit both my brothers over the head.   They didn't need medical care, and all three got a stern look from Mom and sent to their rooms.    She still managed to get a good shot and sent out copies of the photo with the holiday cards but that was the last year of the Christmas family photo.  The pursuit of perfection ended with near concussions.  I'm pretty sure this is not what the baby Jesus had envisioned.  

I'd like to say that I've learned that you don't have to be perfect to still make the nice list.   But when you're a kid and you ask Santa for something and it magically appears under the Christmas tree just as you had imagined it - you get a sense of euphoria and belief in the impossible that is very enticing.   That sort of  high comes just once a year and you want to make sure it happens again so that it can sustain you for the next 12 months.   It's Christmas, the lights are up, people are happy and life is perfect as you move to that one day when all is right with the world.   But as you grow older, you realize it's not as simple as it was when you were six.  So in your adulthood, you try to recreate that for yourself and your children or the nieces and nephews.   You want them to have that same buzz and to feel that anything is possible.    It's that drive towards the perfect Christmas that can make you lose your compass of what the season is all about.    I'll be the first one to admit that I'm guilty of that.    Each year my husband Max asks me not to go crazy for the holidays and my initial response is "Crazy is the only way I know how to do Christmas!"  I've come to the conclusion that I'm a Christmas crack addict.  I got that first high during the Mrs. Beasley Christmas and have been in search of the same fix ever since.    It was great when I was a kid, but now that I'm a seasoned addict, I need more from Christmas than I'm getting.  It means that I keep needing a bigger and bigger December 25th crack rock but the reality is that I'm not six years old anymore and chasing that feeling just leading me down another alley of disappointment just like a real addict.

So this year, I'm scaling back.   I'm not blowing my budget.   I'm not buying a ton of gifts and I'm not making a ton of gifts (I've done as many as six quilts for gifts which sounds good unless you enjoy being at your sewing machine until 3:00 in the morning on December 24th just to get it all done and sobbing uncontrollably when you have to rip out a seam and start over).  It's smaller and more meaningful and I'm beginning to look forward to the holiday and letting it build slowly.   It's not going to be perfect  - it's not going to be grandiose and I'm not going crazy.    I'm not going to martyr myself in the name of Christmas.    I'm going to have it all done so that I can enjoy a glass of wine on Christmas Eve in front of the fire place, tackle my husband and kiss him hard without a speck of mistletoe in sight - and if he asks what brought all this on -  I'll tell him in my best Geraldine voice "The Devil made me do it!"

The Toy Drive

I've done quite a few things working for non-profits but by far, the best and hardest thing I have ever done was run an annual toy drive at Children's Home Society of Florida for 500 to 600 children who had been abused, abandoned and neglected.    I was playing Santa for kids to whom a present for the holidays meant everything and it was a huge responsibility to get it right.    I liked working behind the scenes with a team of elves to help St. Nick bring hope to these kids who needed it most during that time of year.  Short of raising my own kids, it's probably the most important thing I've ever done.   

Back in the early 90s, Children's Home Society (CHS) had emergency shelters for young children, an infant center for abused, abandoned and crack babies, a daycare program for kids with HIV, group homes for teens, HIV foster care and regular foster care.   In an average month, they had between 500 to 600 kids who needed services.   I worked in the administrative offices which was on the second floor of the emergency shelter.   You'd often see the children as they were entering the shelter.  Sometimes they were very scared - sobbing and clutching the hands of their caseworker or sometimes very happy like they were checking into a hotel holding all their possessions in nothing more than garbage bags.   I would look out my window and see those children be very reserved their first few days at the shelter, but once they got a warm bed to sleep in, three meals a day and a predictable schedule, they really began to thrive and smile - seeing that always made me work harder.  

When I first took over the toy drive, it seemed like the kids in McLamore Emergency Shelter got the lion's share of the gifts - after all they were the ones that people could see and visit.   We'd have all sorts of well meaning groups bring tons of toys and sweets to the 22 shelter kids not realizing that it was the literal tip of the CHS iceberg.   There was no one person handling the donations, so the program managers that had contacts with community groups were the ones that got presents for their kids - the ones who didn't have the time or connections to ask, went without a gift for their kids for the holidays.   To me this was not a fair situation - no child in the program should wake up on Christmas morning without a present to open.  I decided to take on the entire drive to make sure that every child in the programs got something for Christmas.   So as the CHS "Santa" I would ask the program managers to get lists from each of their kids.  I would then type each Christmas list into an excel list and sort it by program, age, sex of the child, program and donor company if I had one.   That was as computerized as you could get in the early 90's and I was able to keep track of the toys coming in and what to send out. 

The first year was a learning curve.   It was hard getting the managers who had their contacts to open up and share for fear that their kids would lose out but once you explained that there were kids in the programs that barely got anything - maybe one toy from the Dollar Store that their case managers bought them versus the kids who got 10 to 20 gifts that were worth hundreds of dollars from other donors - they saw the light.  I got access to a large office space to sort the toys as they came in.  I needed to get the deadlines from the foster care programs because their items needed to be ready two weeks before Christmas so that the case workers could have plenty of time to deliver them to their clients who lived all over Miami.   We needed to tell our donors not to wrap them because we needed to see if they were appropriate.   We once had a well meaning person donate a father and son boxing set which under normal circumstances would have been fine but as a gift for an abused child, not so much.  

I coordinated with businesses and got them to adopt a program and gave them the wish lists which sometimes I had to modify.   The teen girls would ask for half carat diamond earrings and large TVs which was understandable but not realistic - so we'd ask for gift cards, costume jewelry and small TVs they could have in their rooms.  I always asked for books for the kids that were age appropriate and the donors got to pick those - it gave them a chance to share the joy of the Cat in the Hat, Hop on Pop, and Good Night Moon with another child.    The important thing was to give them a good Christmas but not one so extravagant that when they got placed in a home it would be hard for their parents, foster parents or new parents to live up to the a very grandiose CHS Christmas.    

I learned to start contacting businesses in September to get on their radar and ask if they wanted to do a general toy drive or adopt a program.  I would make sure to ask for batteries for all those toys that needed them.    I learned that kids from ages 4 to 10 got the largest number of the donations so I had to educate people that we had infants and teens in the programs and they needed things too, like gift cards for the kids 14 and up and socks, diapers, onsies and pajamas for the infants.   

By mid December my office would became Santa Central.  Toys coming in every hour on the hour.   I also had people asking me every 30 minutes where their toys were even through their deadline was a few days away.   The interruptions became so bad that I decided I needed a spokesperson who would answer the gift questions for me.   So I would find a talking Barbie, put a ribbon around her and wear her on my neck.  When some asked me for the 20th time that day when their presents would be ready, I'd ask my spokes model who usually had some words of wisdom like "I love the sun!",  "Ken and I are going shopping!" and "My job is great."   I would smile and tell them they had their answer and I would call them when their gifts were ready. 

Each year, the drive got bigger and bigger and I would end up working 10, 11 12 hours a day for a month leading up to Christmas and managed to lose seven pounds each year because I never had time to eat.   It didn't matter, getting the presents to those kids was the most important thing.   I needed to give them their faith back and let them know that people cared about them.    I was usually exhausted by Christmas Eve and wondered how Kris Kringle did it.   I only had 600 kids to help - he had billions. 

We'd usually have people bring toys unannounced on December 23rd or Christmas Eve hoping to save the day but the toys had already been distributed or were ready to be placed under the tree at the shelters for Christmas morning.  What we did with those toys was put them in the gift closet so that kids could have a present on their birthdays or we'd give the extreme overflow to charities whose toy drives were not going so well. 

Once the holidays were over, I'd clean up my office and get back into my regular schedule.   I'd wonder how Christmas morning at those homes and shelters went.   I knew that me and the CHS team had pulled off another Christmas miracle and all our kids had a wonderful day.    A week after Christmas, one of the case workers named Andrea called me and I could tell she was holding back tears.   "Are you okay?" I asked trying to figure out what was wrong.   "I just got a call from Octavos' mother -" she said quietly.   I know that Octavos was in the HIV daycare program and I really wanted to make sure that they had a good Christmas since his mother had full blown AIDS and Octavos was HIV positive.  "He didn't get his gifts?" I asked as my heart sank.   "Yes, yes,  he did get his gifts and it was wonderful.   His mom is very sick and could barely talk but she kept on saying 'Thank you, thank you, thank you.'  I thought you might want to know."   We were both quiet and you could hear us both sniffing on each end of the phone.   "I wanted you and your donors to know what a difference it made to that family."   I thanked her for sharing that, closed my office door and cried while I heard the sounds of the McLamore kids play outside with their new toys.  I learned later that it was the last Christmas that Octavos and his mother would ever spent together.  She died a few months later and Octavos died that fall.   

I guess that people who give to toy drives don't always get to see the faces of the kids they help on Christmas morning  - they are with their own families having fun or trying to prevent a meltdown either from a child or an in-law, but I can tell you from my experience that anything that you can do helps.   It doesn't even have to be for kids, it can be the elderly who are in assisted living or nursing homes, they need things too like blankets, socks or big print books.   It doesn't matter if you can give money.   Volunteers that help sort cans for food, clothing or toys drives are priceless.   Just call the charity you want to help in advance and ask what they need.   Trust me, they will be grateful that you asked first and will be more than happy to let you know.   Because my guess is that there will be a Santa's Helper on the other side of the line who hasn't had time for lunch but who believes in what they are doing so much that they don't need have a spokes Barbie to say "My job is great!"

Thanksgiving Lost and Found

I was just recovering from a fun Halloween with the kids and an evening of way too many Reese's peanut butter cups when my Outlook reminded me of a tree lighting the next day.  After 8:00 p.m. the door bell ringing got lighter and lighter as the trick or treaters were getting ready for bed because it was a school night.   All that Hallows eve on TV there were references to the spooky holiday.  Then the inevitable happened:  a new slew of Christmas commercials started running around 9:00 p.m. before Halloween's body was even cold (okay, granted I had tombstones on my yard, and a fake dead body that was parked next to the one that said, "I'll be back).  This grand rush to Christmas seemed to be a bit premature and annoying.  The next night, I was watching an 18 foot Christmas tree get it's first lighting to great fan fare for an event at work.  It looked beautiful and put everyone into the Christmas spirit, but what about Thanksgiving? Didn't anyone care about that holiday anymore?  I mean it's two and a half weeks away!

You hardly see commercials for Thanksgiving anymore.  Maybe that's because the industry that profits the most from it are the supermarkets - not departments stores, not toy stores, not computer stores and not car dealers.  Thanksgiving is all about food and football.  Who really needs to think about preparing the feast aside from the holiday martyrs (moms, sisters and grandparents) that volunteer to have the dinner at their house?   Thanksgiving is not about anything material - it's about being with the people you love or at least have to stomach one or twice a year to keep the family peace.   Besides, the next day is Black Friday - the greatest shopping day of the year.  Thanksgiving has now become a speed bump between Halloween and Christmas.  

Unfortunately, I think the act of giving thanks has been lost along the internet highway.  As our society has gotten more tech savvy and let's face it - more snarky - it's not cool to think about all the gifts you have and to be grateful for them.  It's easier to hide behind a laptop and send instant messages rather than talk to someone directly to hear their voice and really gauge how they're doing. It's so much easier to make snide comments on YouTube  anonymously about Lindsay Lohan or Kim Kardashian's 72-day marriage rather than praising your spouse and children for sticking it out with you.  You can share a link to a pithy saying on Facebook rather than just taking the time to actually thank the people who need thanking.   You see and hear folks being rude to each other on TV on a regular basis and unfortunately our kids are beginning to model it themselves based on the diva fits they see on Real Housewives and other reality shows.   But few programs show people taking someone's hand, looking into their eyes and just telling them how much it means to have them in their lives and making it look cool. 

I began to believe that we had lost the art of being grateful.   It's not easy to  say a heartfelt thanks to those that help us rather then just assuming that they know how we feel.   So we numb ourselves into silence hoping that we'll get appreciated without taking the step of showing it first.    So I began to wonder if with all the bad economic news, the political backbiting and negative media stories, was the United States losing it's optimism?  Were we becoming the snarkiest country on earth - unable to appreciate even the smallest things?  I was wondering if I had lost that ability myself as I struggled to deal with a recent job loss and now know first hand the anxiety that many Americans feel in this questionable job market.   

I was driving into work on my last day and listening to the Bert Show on Q100.  They had recently completed Bert's Big Thank You and had asked their listeners to hand write letters to thank every soldier serving overseas for their service so that they would know that someone took the time to tell them how much they cared.  Amber and I had done some letters through our church.  The drive had been iffy - they needed over 400,000 letters and just a week out from the deadline only had 40,000 - but human nature being what it is, a slew of letters came in that last push and they had actually received over a half a million.  Now that they had the letters, they needed volunteers to help sort them out.   Realizing that after today, I'd probably have some time on my hands, I signed up to help. 

I went to the radio station and was brought to a large room with hundreds of mail tubs full of letters.  They asked us to take a tub, count by sets of 100, and spot check the letters to make sure they were appropriate, i.e., were not greeting cards that someone had just signed, pictures without any writing on it or had anything political or inappropriate.   As I combed through my large mail tub, I saw stacks and stacks of letters from people in Atlanta, Indianapolis and Nashville - the three markets that the Bert Show presently reaches.  They were on notebook paper, construction paper, personal stationary, artwork with a note inside, etc.  A lot of the letters were from kids who expressed how proud they were of the soldiers who were helping other children overseas.  There were letters from retirement homes that expressed support as many of the residents had served in WWII and the Korean War and knew what it was like to be far away from their own families for the holidays.  Letters from mothers who prayed for the soldiers safe return to their mothers, wives and children.   Many expressed in simple terms their gratitude for the service that these brave men and women were giving to our country.   It was inspiring and humbling to see so many people pour out their hearts to these strangers - praying for them and knowing that on Thanksgiving a soldier they wrote to would read their words of love and support.   

I also loved the artwork that some of the people included in their letters.   There were a lot of drawings made by tracing a little hand and coloring it to look like a Thanksgiving turkey complete with pilgrim hat.   There were letters with kids dressed as Harry Potter who represented the soldiers and a picture of Valdemort who represented the people we were fighting.   There were also pictures of the children holding the soldiers' hands and smiling.  Perhaps the one that touched me the most, was a picture that a teenage girl who was an art student drew on the back of her letter.   It's of her giving a soldier a hug.   Her notation on the back reads:  "not finished yet, but you get it :).  Me being thankful for the soldiers."   I love the expression on their faces - it's so genuine - something Norman Rockwell would be proud of. 

I left that day feeling very proud of the people who had written those letters and of helping to sort them so that they could go overseas in time for Thanksgiving.   It seems that Americans do what we've always done:  listen for an appeal on a way to make the world better and respond the best way we can.   Do we still have problems in this country?  Hell ya, but what country doesn't?  Instead of each political party vilifying each other, let's appreciate what we have here, which is that we can talk about what's wrong with the government without being hulled into prison for having that conversation. We can be grateful that our daughters can aspire to be Secretary of State or President instead of treated like second class citizens in countries where many of our soldiers are based.  In short, I got my Thanksgiving spirit back.   

I'm grateful for what I have and plan to play that forward.   Sure my job future is uncertain, but I'm trying to look at it as a chance to reinvent myself and when I apply for a job - that is one more opportunity that I didn't know about yesterday.   If I see a serviceman in uniform, I'm going to thank them for their service to our country.   It's all any of us could do no matter which side of the political aisle you sit on.  You can hate the war, but love the warrior.  Probably the best line I saw all from those stacks of letters  was from a teenager who wrote, "Heroes don't wear capes, they wear dog tags."  That's a great line - it made me realize how much people care and for that I'm grateful -- very, very grateful.