Santa: Naughty or Nice?

Yikes.

Well, the blinking lights and blackout sales have made it impossible to ignore; the holiday season is upon us! Get out the ginger snaps to be inhaled whole and the candy canes to be looked at but never eaten because it's time to celebrate! We're getting into the holiday spirit by turning the TV to the Sounds of the Seasons music channel while we arrange assorted creepy Santa heads around the house. (Don't get me wrong, my mom's Christmas decorating is lovely and relatively reserved, but it does include Santa heads. Can't get around that.)

Sounds of the Season plays various holiday songs and flips through Christmas trivia and weird images of snow and presents and stuff. The other day, this little fact popped up:

"Poinsettias are the most popular Christmas plant and the No. 1 potted flowering plant in the U.S."

Like, hold on, are they saying more popular than Christmas trees? Or does that not count as a plant? Do they mean more popular than mistletoe? Either way, I am so happy to have this information. Now I'll be the life of all the ugly Christmas sweater parties in the land, both mock hipster version and authentic old lady version.

But in all seriousness, I did hear a statistic the other day that made me squint a tad more suspiciously yet at the creepy Santa heads that represent the most genius media creation in the history of mass consumerism. Last year, Americans spent a grand total of $450 billion on Christmas. Compare this number to the $10 billion it would take to solve the world's lack of clean water for good. This information comes from the Advent Conspiracy, a Christian group that urges people to spend a little less money on material gifts and a little more to help people in need. Now, I'm not religious, but this is something I can get behind. 

With similar do-goodness in mind, my mom instituted a new rule that all gifts exchanged in our family this year have to be either used, recycled, vintage, or handmade (and not by Indonesian children). In other words, nothing mass produced. With the leftover money, we'll select a charity to contribute to. Just a nice way to mix things up and feel a tad less guilty about all the excess at the same time.

There are also things that can be done to lessen the blow on the environment during all the Christmas cheer. In light of the UN climate conference going on in Copenhagen right now, we ought to do our share as they try to save the world in two short weeks. There are a few tips on how to have a more green Christmas here. As for us, we'll be wrapping our gifts with brown paper grocery bags and perhaps newspaper (with pretty ribbons, of course). We've done it in the past and I can say that it is quite stylin'.

Anyway, I don't want to seem like one of those people who stand outside Target ringing a bell and making you put on your best starting-at-something-really-important-on-the-ground routine. I'm just saying, it wouldn't hurt any of us to be a little less wasteful this year, and a little more in touch with the suffering going on in the world beyond our crackling fires and spiked nog.

...Toes? Or, fun with language.

I'm in Santa Cruz sitting at a coffee house trying to write, but an old white-haired local won't let me. He's here "doin' lap top" today with an iBook G4 that looks like it was buried in mud and then tied to the back of a truck and dragged down the road. One of these Berkeley graduates from the '60s who's lost a few screws and now blurs the line between the derelict and the tax-paying.

He just won't stop talking, and I don't even know what about. In the last 10 minutes he's mentioned, among other things, running for president, "mythic government," Bhutan, hitch-hiking, earthquakes, and smoking his pipe by the river. Luckily, he's now talking to another old man/veteran/vagrant named Jimbo and giving me a break.

I bring him up because he reminded me of how easy it is to mix up two languages when you spend all your time with a bilingual. When I sat down next to this old fellow, he smiled and said, "we'll be neighbors" and I very nearly said "wat gezellig!" Roughly translated, this means something like "how nice!" in Dutch. I caught myself, but here are a few mix-ups and mistakes that have slipped through over the last few months.

Going from English to Dutch to English to Dutch isn't always easy, after all, and especially hard for some. Take my mother, for example, who, on her visit to Amsterdam, raised her beer for a toast and accidentally said "Probst!" for cheers instead of the Dutch, "proost!" Probst, incidentally, is the name of her gynocologist. She also tried to say something was gezellig once and instead said, with great exuberance, "gefilte!" which is a Jewish fish cake.

At a dessert bar in Portland, Jordi politely asked the waitress for an "ice sandwich." Mmm! In Dutch, ijs (pronounced 'ice') is the word for ice cream (and for ice, and popsicles, and frozen yogurt), so naturally he forgot the 'cream' even though he knows ijs from ice.

Dutch prepositions give me a lot of trouble, and as Jordi and I were conversing in his native tongue one day, I was trying to say something like "I was talking to her" but I couldn't think of the word for "to" in that context. I started listing prepositions until I landed on the right one, "Naar? Met?...Tenen?" He laughed. Tenen, it turns out, means toes.

When my siblings visited Amsterdam, they asked Jordi and I how we met, so over Thai food Jordi explained to them how we were at a party and got to talking about the weather in California (what every Dutch person I met wanted to talk about), but we couldn't get very far because neither of us could convert Celsius and Fahrenheit. Some light chuckles around the table. "So then," Jordi went on, "we were talking about my length..." There were a few seconds of confused silence, everyone hoping he didn't mean what it sounded like. What the tall Dutchman meant, of course, was his height. In Dutch, lang (pronounced 'long') means tall. An honest mistake, really.

Luckily, after 6 weeks of essentially spending every waking (and sleeping) moment together, Jordi and I still haven't run out of things to talk about, so as I continue to practice my Dutch, and as Jordi continues to pick up more and more lazy idiomatic American English, we're sure to confuse ourselves and each other countless more times. Wat gefilte!

Double Dutch

Unusual circumstances brought us to the town of Lynden, Washington, a place that we would have otherwise cruised right by. Jordi is applying for a graduate program conducted in English that requires him to take the TOEFL exam to prove his knowledge of the language. The only testing center that roughly coincided with our itinerary was at the Christian high school in this little town situated just south of the Canadian border. So we went.

Arriving at the campground the night before the exam, we checked in with a woman wearing a baggy pastel sweatshirt and matching scrunchy in her stringy hair. As soon as Jordi told her his last name, Scholten, she freaked out and talked us about half to death in her croaky voice. It turns out—get this—that the town of Lynden is filled with Scholtens. Filled! After discussing this fact for at least 10 minutes, she pulled out the local phone book just to make sure we understood the magnitude of the coincidence.

You see, about half the population of Lynden has Dutch heritage. That’s 50 percent. As the story goes, they came here starting in the early 20th century because the climate was similar to that of the Netherlands. It’s true. A similar climate. Wild, huh? And then they just, like, made lots of babies and turned the place into miniature Holland faster than you can count een twee drie!

And here, standing before this woman, like Hans Brinker reincarnate, was a real Scholten. Straight out of Amsterdam. I’ll tell ya, that knocked her silver skates right off. “You wouldn’t believe it!” she said, “You’ll go into town and see signs in English and Dutch!”

We’re thinking, no freaking way. Well, actually, I was thinking that. Jordi was probably thinking, echt waar?

“There are old people here who still speak real Dutch!” she went on. “And it’s not just Scholtens…” She started listing other “Dutch” names, which were either heavily Americanized or just not Dutch at all. The one I remember best, partly because she kept repeating it and partly because it’s obscene, sounded like “Coochie”. Jordi and I couldn’t for the life of us imagine what actual Dutch name she was trying to say, but I was reminded of popular mid-90s slang, and, well, female genitalia.

We couldn’t wait to get into town and see the madness for ourselves. And boy, she wasn’t lyin’. They had a public bulletin board with flyers for piano lessons and lost cats with a sign that said “Dorpsnieuws” (village news). There was the Dutch Mothers restaurant, the Dutch Bakery, the Dutch Village Inn, the Dutch Computer Repair Emporium. (OK, I made that last one up, but you get the idea.) They had a giant windmill and a mural depicting wheels of gouda, tulip fields and people in clogs. The post office said “Postkantoor” over the door with a Dutch flag and, again, tulips and clogs. It was kitschy and artificial, but damn were they proud. The only thing missing was a tribute to van Gogh and stoned tourists crowding the streets.

Jordi felt right at home. But, alas, we had to leave dear Dutch Lynden and head north to British Columbia. It's funny, though, that we were there so Jordi could prove his knowledge of English, but what we found was a little American town trying, with all its might, to prove its knowledge of all things Dutch.

They also, just to freak you out a little bit, apparently had some sort of scarecrow contest under way.

 

Ah! Happy October everyone.

Patience is a virtue. According to most, anyway.

After our night of horror sleeping 30 feet away from the grunting Larry atop a cold mountain, we treated ourselves to coffee and a giant blueberry muffin at a cozy place called Stage Door (that apparently also does cabaret on the weekends). It was warm and friendly and a little quirky (as most of Mount Shasta City is), and the muffin was fluffy as a cotton ball.

The events of that morning wouldn't really be worth sharing with you if it weren't for a particularly strange message I found in the bathroom. Now, it wasn't the kind of bathroom in which one would normally find scribbling on the walls. It was nice, clean, suitable for an old lady. It even smelled delicious. But there, squeezed in rounded letters onto the carved wood toilet paper holder, were the words,

"Patience gave me genital herpes."

What is this? A cry for help, a protest, a warning?

And, my poor, sweet angsty one, I can't help but wonder, what happens when you're in a hurry?

Who wouldn't love a nervous piece of bacon?

Hi all! Just wanted to share something that I can't get enough of. I discovered Dan Goodsell's art last summer at the LA Times festival of books. Explore The World of Mr. Toast and find dozens more delicious little treasures like this one. Mr. Toast, seen here enjoying a rainbow snow cone (what else?), can be found doing all kinds of silly things, along with other characters like Shaky Bacon, Joe the Egg and Clem Lemon. I can't do justice to the subtle humor, so just have a look!