Christmas 1993

Lately our mailbox has been filled with a daily load of mail-order catalogs. We have begun carrying credit cards around again and our statements show the effect. More than anything else these are the recognizable signs that Christmas must be approaching. Let me take a few minutes to give you your annual glimpse of the Lillywhite family.

I have just finished a command performance reading of "There's a Smurf in my Soup" for Jensen. She is going to sleep tonight wearing her Halloween costume. She was a skeleton. The outfit was made of a black tee-shirt and pants made of jersey material with a skeleton painted on using glow-in-the-dark paints. She is a bit theatrical and loves to put the costume on and stalk around the house making grimaces and trying to scare us. She also likes to put on the Indian headdress that Ailsa made for her kindergarten Thanksgiving pageant and ride the rocking horse ("bunking bronto") with a maniacal determination that sometimes lifts the front or back end of the platform off of the ground. At times I feel that if they needed someone to play the leading role in "The Ransom of Red-Chief" Jensen would do just fine.

Now she is asking for one of her dinosaur toys. Part of this is accomplished by participating in a simplified version of charades. She places her feet wide apart and squats very low, similar to a sumo wrestler. I ask, "what is that?" It is a "wacky". That is Jensenese for velociraptor. Since we put up our Christmas tree and the decorations around the house she has been singing "Jingle Bells". But, for her it is "crashing through a now in a one-horse open leigh". We will have to take special pains to ensure she sleeps through the entire Santa visit. our friend Mel Mascherino came to visit this fall. She was quite enamored with his Santa Clausian girth and made several comments to that effect.

Ailsa has just finished her Sunday evening required viewing of "Seaquest". She says she wants to be a cowgirl and a dolphin trainer when she grows up. She asked me to make sure they were not mutually exclusive careers. Her sixth birthday was 10 December. We took her to the Utah Opera production of Hansel and Gretel. During her birthday week Ailsa was the special student in her kindergarten class. This honor afforded her extraordinary show and tell privileges. So, at her behest, I gathered up the two kitties and took them over to show to her class. The teacher said it was the first time she had ever had two full grown cats for show and tell.

At the top of her Christmas list is a "my size" Barbie, which in her case really isn't her size. (She is nearly four feet tall. This won't surprise those of you who consider her father to be a giant.) Have you checked the price on a "my size" Barbie? About $120. It seems ridiculous to spend more than the per capita income of Burkina Faso on something that would get played with a couple of times and then would be relegated to lying around the house in a permanent state of overexposure. I hope they are at least made of recyclable plastic. The Santa Claus myth is starting to wear thin for her. She is concerned about the logistics of his visit, ie. how such a large person fits down the chimney (to be truthful I doubt the cats would be able to fit down our chimney), and how he possibly visits everyone in the world during one night. I told her he travels with the rotation of the earth and thereby gains a little on the time zones.

Someone told us the other day that the difference between little boys and little girls is boys are rambunctious and girls are emotional. I've been wanting a boy for sometime. When I heard the foregoing explanation I realized that we actually have two boys and two girls. They are little boys when they are rambunctious and they are little girls when they are emotional.

Lenore's brother Dan came to live with us earlier this year. He realized that he would get no parental prodding from us and he could comfortably continue in his care-free bachelor ways. Besides his regular job he has been making very clever bird feeders and selling them through a local craft store. He is handy to have around and does some baby sitting for us and keeps our "grounds" looking presentable during the gardening season.

Lenore and I are both staying busy. I have gotten involved in a community choir and am enjoying it greatly. We just finished our spate of Christmas concerts and received rave reviews. Earlier in the Spring I managed to finish hanging the drywall in our slowly-but-surely-getting-closer-all-the-time-to-being-finished basement. I am now considering hiring a fellow to do the taping. Those of you who have been monitoring the progress of our basement can see that at our present rate the whole thing should be finished by early 1997. Actually, it is livable and on very short notice (we would need to clean up the kids' toys and Dan's workroom) is available as a crash pad for visiting friends and family.

Lenore has stayed very busy with the kids and has become a frequent helper with Ailsa'a kindergarten class. I've visited a couple of times myself and it seems like teaching kindergarten could be very enjoyable. She gets spread pretty thin between shuttling kids to and from school, watching a neighbor girl, maintaining a household, and keeping up with her demanding church responsibilities. However, she occasionally manages to escape by watching Get a Life 90210 (Beverly Hills 90210) and Melrose Place. We have just endured another of her annual sewing fests/sartorial orgies. The interesting thing is she hates sewing. Her sister is getting married this weekend in Oakland and the girls needed new dresses for that as well as a couple of new Christmas dresses. She does excellent work despite her grumbling. And after spending 147 hours sewing she managed to save 83 cents over the cost of buying dresses from the store. We will now likely not see the sewing machine again until next year.

Please keep us in your thoughts from time to time as we do you. We wish you all the best and most of all, the peace and happiness that is the product of, and the reason for our celebration during this time of year.

Todd, Lenore, Ailsa, and Jensen Lillywhite