Stay Home, Daddy-O

Beth is back from Malawi, to our great delight. She flies to Uganda on Friday, but this trip will be shorter than a week. When she is visiting project sites in the Two-Thirds World, a great deal of my energy is devoted to staving off anxiety — both the girls’ and mine. One personal tactic is diversion, and I’ve spent more time on my other blog than I have on this one. If you prefer this blog to the other, I apologize for my absence.

Given the recent onslaught of her international travel, it is perhaps a bit ironic that “Beth” means “house”. But when she returns, there is never any doubt that her heart and soul and deepest love find their nourishment (and return it in kind) in this particular bricks-and-mortar location. Her family is here; and when she is here too, the house becomes a home.

On one level, we hate to see her go, and she hates to leave us. From this perspective, these trips take a definite toll on everybody. On a different level, we have our deepest convictions challenged, encouraged and enlivened by these trips. My personality and physical make-up do not supply me with the flexibility required of a good traveller , but I would very much like to see with our girls some of the work that is being done among people who are the most destitute in the world, but who also often have an unfathomable depth of spirit. That unfathomable depth of spirit is what I want to cultivate in our family — in myself .

Anyhow, Easter / Passover / early spring is typically a bit morose for me. But I hope it is a joy for you. Thank you for reading, commenting, keeping us in your thoughts and prayers. Shalom.

Has it been a year already?

WP’s Tenets of Parenting, subheading: The Scandalous Bookshelf . If you, as a parent, don’t have a bookshelf devoted to titles that will surely mortify your teenage children, you aren’t doing your job.

I think on this score I may perhaps be a bit overzealous. There are at least a dozen religious books that spring to mind — if you cleared the words from the covers, the graphics alone would be cringe-inducing. Then there’s daddy’s sci-fi shelf. And Batman comics? What’s that all about? Oooh, look: Lou Reed’s Collected Lyrics & Verse — “Hey, I’m still, like, edgy — y’know?”

I can’t resist. The urge to collect and display books that will embarrass my kids — if not now, then later — is just too strong. It was this very principle that explicity informed my recent purchase of Michel Houllebecq’s Elementary Particles (well, that and its remaindered price of $2.99). It’s right there on The Scandalous Bookshelf, just waiting for the day when one or the other child will say, “Eww — what’s this doing here?” And if I don’t get it by the time the youngest turns 15, it disappears.

(Re: Houllebecq, when all is said and done and read, I have to admit I agree with this guy — link from ALD .)

Man, there is a nasty strain of strep making the rounds. I’ve never had it before, so it was quite the revelation to experience just how painful it can be to swallow with full-blow strep-throat. There’s even a “strep aesthetic”: a lovely ring of strep-rash outlining my eyes. Now I look like W.C. Fields, after 30 years of pointed alcohol abuse.

But enough about me — the girls (all three of them) are recovering nicely, after a visit to the doctor confirmed that our usual naturopathic efforts weren’t quite up to the task. Heck, I could have said as much — if I’d been able to use my voice. This is a nasty, nasty viral strain, so keep washing those hands, folks. And while you’re at it, wash your kids’ hands, too.

My daughters’ school encourages the students to come to class with a water bottle. I like that. I have many memories of asking my grade-school teachers if I could visit the water-fountain, and being denied permission. Your tongue gets dry in the mouth, and starts to taste like an old sponge ball you’ve found in the yard after the spring thaw (trust me: I know). Much better to just admit a kid needs water, so bring it with you.

Not that there’s any guarantee the kid will drink from it. My youngest returns with her bottle full at the end of the day. Then she complains: “I’ve got that pee feeling, but there is no pee.” One afternoon I got a call from the teacher, saying my daughter was suffering from a headache. I took her home. She had a glass of water, and a few minutes later was fine.

So public education has improved; now we just need to work on our kids.

Let me state for the record: my decision to become my own chimney-sweep was not inspired by Dick Van Dyke’s madcap hoofing with Julie Andrews. No, I was inspired after watching the last pair I hired to do the job: it took them longer to drive to my place than it took them to clean my chimney. They were professional, yes — the whole procedure was neat and tidy, and left my wallet feeling about $75 lighter. I watched them drive away, then I put on my coat and paid a visit to the hardware store.

For about $50 dollars (assuming you already have a shop-vac) you can outfit yourself with everything the pros use: a chimney brush and several extensions. If you don’t have any elbows in your chimney, the business of sweeping is remarkably straight-forward: you simply climb to your roof, uncap your chimney, slide your brush down the length of it and scour like crazy. The creosote drops into your stove, you clean it out, re-cap your chimney — viola . Oh, and it’s probably a good idea if you wait for spring, when all the snow and ice has melted from your roof, before you tackle this job.

Our chimney is a slightly more complicated affair, because it has two elbows directly above the stove. This means I had to disassemble the chimney length from the stove to the first floor ceiling, and scour the chimney from the bottom up. All you need is a screw-driver to remove the tapping screws, and there’s enough play between the chimney couplings to lift and remove the lengths. Sounds pretty simple, right?

I’m not sure what, exactly, went wrong. It had been some years since this professional pair had visited our house, and I’m guessing all the evenings we’d made cozy by using the woodstove probably “sealed” the lengths and elbows until they were very tight indeed. And so, after removing the screws, my daughters watched with awe as daddy climbed on top of the stove, wrapped both his arms around the stovepipe, then proceeded to push, pull, lift, yank, twist and reef the pipe until it finally gave out in a catastrophic, sooty mess.

I hopped down and examined the pipe lengths. Nothing damaged — so far, so good! I hustled them out to the back yard and brushed them out. They were messier than I thought — the creosote buildup was roughly an eightth of an inch thick — and the scouring left a huge black patch in the snow. I did the same with the elbows, then propped them up and returned to the scene of the grime.

Next was the chimney proper. I explained to my oldest what we were going to do: I was going to feed the brush up the chimney, while she held a garbage bag over the bottom of the pipe. Some creosote was bound to fall between the gap of the bag and chimney, but most of it would find its way to the bottom of the bag. Fortunately, this aspect of the cleaning went pretty much as planned (though the scouring was harder work than I’d anticipated). There was more creosote on the floor than I remembered seeing after the pros had finished, but no matter: the vaccuum cleaner took care of that.

The most difficult aspect of the enterprise was reassembly and cleaning myself . I’d worn a grubby T-shirt for the job, so my hands and arms, as my youngest pointed out, looked “like long black gloves!” Creosote is oily, acidic stuff. The palms of my hands are still a grim sight.

All in all, the learning curve for this trade is not much of an obstacle. There are a few things I’ll do differently next time (late spring, I figure): I’ll wear a long-sleeved shirt and industrial rubber gloves when I brush out the chimney; I’ll also wear a filter mask (I’m still finding soot in my hanky); and finally, I’ll let my daughters off the hook and get my wife or the neighbor across the street to help me disassemble and reassemble the chimney .

Hopefully the chimney will experience fewer dents next time.

My posting here has been sporadic of late (see below). But if you’re curious to see what sort of song gets my lower lip a-trembling, and my eyes a little misty, I’m counting down a Top-Ten List of Heartbreakers on my other site, here .

Our house is cold-ridden at the moment. On Monday I kept the girls home, but yesterday they begged me to let them go to school. I reminded them they were facing a spelling bee. “We don’t care,” I was told. “We want to go!” It was Valentine’s Day, after all, and they had done a lot of preparation: choosing their brand of Valentine, writing all the names and messages, etc.

Against my better judgement, I bundled them up and packed them a lunch. I took a quick survey as we walked to school. It looked a lot like the sanitarium had been unlocked: every little patient was limping toward the school, wheezing and coughing, or simply walking with that thousand-yard stare in their eyes. The parade included more than a few parents, holding pink frosted cakes. It was a done deal.

My oldest’s cough is still pretty tight. And my youngest woke up several times last night, saying she had to puke. Didn’t happen (she has her mother’s stomach), but you can be sure they’ll stay home today.

It doesn’t matter what it says on the calendar: February is the longest month of the year.

An adult friend of mine was responsible for the reading aspect of his high school’s special education program. When I asked him about his strategy, he said, “We devote 30 minutes each day to reading, and we let them read pretty much anything they want to.” Material that was obviously pornographic or hateful was out, but those were just about the only criteria in effect. Kids could read comics, magazines, V.C. Andrews — anything, so long as they could give a recognizable summary of it after half-an-hour.

My wife and I haven’t been quite so libertine about our girls’ reading material, but we do take the “special ed” lead from time to time. About once a month our family bustles into a bookstore, and everyone gets to choose one book to take home (an almost discouraging restraint for me). In the past we’ve occasionally let the girls choose outright trash — usually franchise tie-ins, like Pokemon or Disney, that place a higher value on promoting their mascots than they do on promoting proper linguistic skills.

The girls are still drawn to the picture on the cover (aren’t we all?), but I’m encouraged to see the amount of text between the covers gradually increase, and the number of accompanying illustrations decrease. The Junie B. Jones books were an immediate hit (recommended for kids five and up). On the other hand, a series called The Magic Treehouse that looked extremely promising, never quite caught fire (my oldest daughter quickly lost interest in the stories, but spent hours poring over the research guides).

Recently, my youngest selected a book from the Animal Ark series entitled Kittens in the Kitchen . This choice was based purely on the cover illustration (a portrait of — you guessed it — a basket of kittens in a kitchen). I held my breath and ponied up the dough, expecting this to be one of those “purchased but unread” books that clutter up our shelves ( mea culpa ). My wife graciously took it upon herself to read the book with the girls during our vacation. Last night she finished it, and came down to report that, wonder of wonders, the book was a smash hit. The prose is mostly competent (some clunky grammar, but otherwise very good), and the story gently develops its characters and tension with a well-executed economy. Looks like we’ll be revisiting Animal Ark !

This sort of discovery is always good news to a parent, so if you have any of your own to share, please do.

The morning our flight left for San Diego seemed, from my prone perspective in bed with the blinds drawn, unusually bright. When I lifted the blinds, I saw why: snow storm.

We threw everything into the trunk of the car, then drove — cautiously, painstakingly — to Toronto. Things cleared up a bit when we got to city limits, but when I asked my wife which was the best turn-off for the airport parking lot, we overshot our exit and had to double-back.

We parked and boarded the shuttle to the airport. Recommended check-in time for US flights is now two hours in advance; we had 40 minutes.

The line-up: not too bad. We checked in, hustled toward customs. The line-up there was more substantial. The minutes ticked by, but we got through. Next was security. The lady in uniform thought my wife was a good candidate for a random shakedown, and we of course complied. By the time everything was reassembled, we had seven minutes to lift-off. We headed for the gate at a brisk trot, our daughters co-operating with agreeable cheer. En route we were paged by the flight crew: “This is the final boarding call for the Reimer family. Please report to the gate!” We reported, and were led onto the runway where the plane was ready to go.

When we were finally seated, my wife turned to me, gave me a frazzled but joyous smile and said, “You were right!”

And what garnered my wife’s recognition, approval and praise? My mantra, which I repeated with firm conviction every 20 minutes:

We aren’t late until the flight leaves without us.

San Diego, in fact. I’ll be back February 1 — promise.

I’ve been asked by several readers (and friends, and family members) if I mightn’t try my hand at writing a book on us stay-home-dad-types. For the record, I haven’t just given it thought, I’ve taken several runs at it. In every case, entropy takes over by chapter four, and the whole thing spins apart.

For a guy who has a box full of several finished novel manuscripts, this raises a few red flags: what, exactly, is this all about? Are we talking “writer’s block”? Should I reassess my “calling”? Which one is in most desperate need of reappraisal: my identity as writer, or as stay-home dad? Or are they both up for grabs?

As for the last question, I don’t think I have any real choice in the matter: I’ll be a father long after I’m pushing up daisies, so the issue is how I can be the father I ought to be. Similarly the business of writing. I write. The end.

I can’t quite wrap words around the daily business of being a stay-home father, though. What you see on this blog is what you get, basically: trying to tie that up in some unified field theory is … difficult.

People think of the stay-home parent as having the easier job. In some ways, that’s an indisputable point of view. The expectations of what needs to get done are nearly immutable: the place should be clean, the laundry folded and put away, and the meals should be nutritionally sound, and preferably hot on the table; the children should be attended to and fed, their emotional lives given due consideration, and their imaginations and curiosity stimulated and directed. Strategies come and go on the basics — everything from toilet-training to taking responsibility for homework — but most parents muddle along on a fairly stable course guided by common sense and experience.

I try to envision the book I would like to read on being a stay-home parent. Nothing comes up. I’m not much interested in comparing and contrasting strategies, and I’m guessing most stay-home dads are like me: if a problem comes up that we can’t yet see through to conclusion, we turn on the computer, do a little research, consult with the wife and go to work. Nutrition: if you’ve got The New Joy of Cooking and The Moosewood Cooks at Home , you’ve already got everything you need. Cleaning, laundry, hygiene …. well, c’mon already.

And there are so many worthy stay-home dad-blogs out there: more than I’ve bothered to tag. Just look at the sidebar of DadTalk or Clare’s Dad , for starters. Lots of good, good stuff to be clicked on — men who consider who they are and what they do, and do a good job of articulating their concerns.

The overall mood of this, the first significant generation of stay-home dads, is optimism and enthusiasm. Hey — me, too! This is a good thing, this willingness to change our social expectations and commit to our family’s welfare. Lou Reed had a nasty little song on New York that detailed his consideration of giving birth to and raising children in the current North America. He called it Beginning of a Great Adventure , but his irony is my sincerity: this is the beginning of a great adventure. Kids are growing up with their fathers at home, doing the cleaning and cooking and caring. Those kids will grow up and face most of the complexities and challenges we did, and a few more besides, but the fact that their dads kept the home fires burning for them will have been a good thing, because stability and paying attention and taking care are good things.

The book that’s waiting to be written encourages dads to stick with it. And it’s honest about all the crappy stuff, too: the boredom, the drudgery, the disappointment at your kids’ selfish behavior — the disappointment at your own selfish behavior. The fear that the next job you’ll hold will require you to wear a paper hat and ask your daughters’ friends, “Do you want fries with that?” The fear that this society of ours is getting crazier and angrier, when what we need more than anything is to heed the call, “Come, let us reason.”

That’s the book I want to read. If I can think of some way to write it, I’ll let you know.

The thrust of my last post (now deleted, due to my emotional flailing about) is:

1) Our public education system is strategically biased against boys, to the detriment of us all.

2) French Immersion, especially so.

3) I can’t help wondering if gender based classes mightn’t address some of our system’s most crucial deficiencies.

You’ll be hearing more, later (oh, yes you will…)

I originally posted this on “Whisky Prajer”; my wife insisted this was worthy of “Daddy-O” as well.

Two years ago, my wife had this conversation with our youngest daughter (5 at the time), in the back of my parents’ car as we were driving to Santa Cruz:

Daughter: Mom, did you ever tell lies when you were a little girl?

Mother: Oh, sure.

Daughter: Did you tell a lot of lies?

Mother: No, I don’t think I told a lot of lies. I mostly told the truth. I didn’t want to get in trouble.

Daughter: I tell lies. I’ve told hundreds of lies. But don’t tell Grandma.

This turned out to be a bit of a watershed moment for my daughter. We knew what was going on, of course. She wasn’t much of a liar, actually, because she was less interested in the art of deceit than she was in persuasively conveying the sensational. i.e. She told whoppers . If our older daughter said she’d seen a video in class, our younger daughter inevitably crowed, “Oh, we saw that one too! Only, did you see the part where the chicken chased the farmer into the pond, and when he came out he had poo on his head?” No, she hadn’t. What else had she missed? “Oh! There was this part where the farmer got tooken up by a balloon, and he….”

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, of course. As a kid in grade-school I was also prone to telling whoppers. Here’s a typical scene: my mates and I in the playground, discussing television shows (most of which I had no access to). I’d listen to the general plot, pay close attention to the wrap-up, then when everyone said, “Cool!” I’d say, “You mean that’s when you got commercials?! Oh, man: not us! You missed the whole part where Pa Cartwright takes this big knife and cuts off the head of the bad guy, and just hucks it into the burning barn!!”

I could probably chart a few seminal moments when I realized that admitting to the actual truth generated a more desireable grade of friendship with my peers. This is the general path of maturity: doing your best to avoid putting on airs, speaking the truth about the things that matter most, speaking plainly and resorting to hyperbole only when you are desirous of an extreme response in your listener.

On the other hand, we don’t want to dampen our children’s creative spirit. We took great delight in our youngest’s fabulist tales; her older sister couldn’t get enough of them. What we tried to encourage in our youngest was introducing “the wink” early in the game: be very conscious about admitting at the outset that this is a game, and you will invite the sort of participation that keeps your friends and family coming back for more. This is how you earn people’s respect.

This is what I’d most dearly like to believe, of course: the general mill of humanity makes me wonder if I’m not horribly mistaken. A self-aggrandizing yahoo like James Frey peddles 400 pages of whoppers with the tacit approval of his publisher . He forgets to wink, until he’s confronted — then he winks so much, it’s hard to tell when he’s blinking from nervousness. Meanwhile Oprah holds his hand and tells everyone it’s okay because he’s written “emotional truth”.

I find the spectacle entirely demoralizing. At this rate, Oprah could give her seal of approval to Mike Warnke — not just a self-proclaimed one-time violent drug-addict, but a former senior Satanist who sacrificed kittens and a baby before he came to know the Lord (wink wink wink, everybody — “emotional truth”, here!).

But maybe there’s a bright side to this whole thing. Maybe the “memoir bubble” is finally going to burst, and people will shun reality TV and shocking tell-all memoirs (and church testimonies). A new day will dawn, one in which people will see and acknowledge “the wink” at the outset, and consume fiction and poetry by the bushel, grateful for the motherlode of emotional truth that was silently waiting for them all this time; a day when readers will cheerfully reward the purveyors of this craft for so openly inviting them to come and participate in the art of story.

In the meantime, we’ll just have to settle for the emotional truths of our politicians…. (Hat tip to Bookninja for all of the links, except Mike Warnke: that one’s mine, and I’ll expect gratuities from both Warnke and Oprah when he’s booked on her show.)

If you’ve never tried to make Pad Thai before, you need to know three things before you start: 1) you’re in for just over an hour’s worth of preparation; 2) the larger your wok or frying pan, the better; 3) even if you use an enormous wok, your kitchen floor will most certainly be a mess when you’re finished. If you have a sense of humour, though, this is a lot of fun to prepare in front of guests.

Get a pot of water boiling (you’ll be cooking 6 ounces of dried rice noodles in this, but not just yet).

Sharpen your knife, prep the following, and ready them in saucers:
6-8 scallions, in 1 1/2 inch pieces (white part only)
1 tablespoon minced fresh red chiles (chopped) *or* 1 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
2 heaping tablespoons finely minced garlic
2 cups grated carrots
4 ounces firm or medium tofu, cut into 1/2 inch cubes

I like shrimp in mine, usually 8 ounces or so, large (of course). To prep the shrimp (beyond the obvious peeling and deveining, etc.) I get a medium bowl and stir together 1 teaspoon of cornstarch with 1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil . Toss the shrimp into the mixture and marinate them for at least 20 minutes.

In another bowl, beat 3 large eggs .

Prepare the following, and put together in a medium bowl:
1/2 cup (3/4 pound) mung bean sprouts
1/3 cup roasted chopped unsalted peanuts
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

Start cooking your noodle s — this won’t take longer than five minutes , so be careful.

Prepare the Thai Sauce . Combine:
3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
3 tablespoons catsup
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1/4 cup soy sauce

Alright: drain the noodles and fire up the wok! (high heat, so keep the kids from under foot)

Swirl in some peanut oil (anywhere from a few tablespoons to 1/3 cup, depending on your sensibilities)
Add the shrimp and cook, stirring vigorously until they start looking clear (probably just short of a minute). Remove to a plate.

Add another tablespoon or two of peanut oil ; swirl and coat the wok.
Cook the eggs . Remove to a plate.
Again with the peanut oil . (You’re working fast now!)
Add scallions, garlic, chile pepper .
When the garlic is slightly brown, add the tofu and carrots .
Add the noodles . Stir until coated.
Add the sauce , and stir.
Add the shrimp and the eggs . Stir some more!
Now dump in your bowl of ingredients , and stir, dammit! Stir!!

Shut off your stove, and serve this stuff up pronto. And make sure there is plenty to drink! Everyone should be very happy, (even the poor sod who will be cleaning your floor).

Sleeping Queens : the girls are crazy about this game ( Thanks, BD! ), grown-ups enjoy playing it with ‘em (as opposed to fiddly kids’ games like Ker-plunk! ), and every one of the girls’ friends who plays it, wants to bring it home. It’s best suited for girls ages 6 to 9, but anyone can have fun with it and it painlessly sharpens basic addition skills. Guess which card game we’re buying in bulk, for future birthday parties?

Be sure to check out the rest of the Gamewright website — these guys clearly have a good thing on the go!

Nothing depresses me more than going out to a restaurant and eating a dish I could have done better at home. There are some dishes I refuse to order just because the odds are so overwhelmingly against them. Putenesca is an obvious example — for a dish that’s laughably easy to prepare, it’s astonishing how few restaurants do well with it. Steamed mussels in a wine & garlic sauce is another such dish.

On the other hand, there are dishes that are almost always a revelation when prepared by other hands. Almost anyone’s risotto will impart a few delightful secrets of its own (unless it’s been prepared with broth from a can). Poutine is an inexhaustible fount of delight (so long as you stay away from the chains — your best bet is to skate down the Ottawa canal and sample wares from every other poutine stand).

Seven years ago, I had my first plate of Spaghetti Caruso — a zesty tomato sauce with chicken livers that I have been unable to duplicate to my satisfaction, despite every effort. (This dish is particularly desirable because of the circumstances surrounding my encounter: my wife and I had a rare night on the town. I ordered the dish on a whim, while she went with what she thought was a “safer” bet — a seafood pasta. Two bites into her dish, she realized she’d made a mistake, and asked if we could trade. Oh, the things we do for love…). I haven’t given up hope, yet, thanks chiefly to the fact that my failures have all been acceptibly delicious.

But getting back to the other hand, Pad Thai is another dish I no longer order at restaurants. I have had some delightful restaurant Pad Thai over the years, but in the last eight years I’ve mastered it (thanks in no small part to an enormous cast-iron wok my sister-in-law gave me). Pad Thai is our New Year’s Eve dish of choice, something we like to share with close friends or family. It’s a bit tricky, but if you work on your co-ordination, you too will be able to wow guests as they imbibe within sight of your culinary showmanship.

Tomorrow: the recipe.

My wife and I were comparing Christmas memories last night. I said that mine fell into two categories: physical activity, and minute exploration.

The first was something of a surprise. For the last 20 years, I’ve tended to associate Christmas with the pants getting tighter. That simply wasn’t an option when I was a kid. My metabolism was too high to allow me to get sleepy after a turkey dinner, so we played with our toys or (more likely) were shooed outside.

One Christmas my youngest uncle (12 years my senior … I think) gave me Super Slider Snow Skates, and bought a pair for himself as well. They were bright red, shovel-shaped plastic canoes that you stepped into with your booted foot, then tied on. They were lightly grooved on the bottom, so that you could “skate” over packed snow (which Manitoba usually has in spades). He and I skated around town for a bit, then retrieved the old aluminum toboggan, and did some night-time sledding on a large sand-pile in the lot of the town’s construction supply centre.

The other family gathering was no different. My grandfather took pride in an annual toboggan-haul, when he’d don his insulated overalls and drag the youngest grandkids and great-grandkids around his acreage. There were also intergenerational hockey games on frozen ponds.

Other times the adults left me to my own devices, so I snooped around my grandparents’ house, checking obscure corners for undiscovered books and magazines. I retrieved a few original Hardy Boys adventures this way. I also located an “Uncle Wiggily” book when I was eight or so, and read through a bunch of his misadventures that very afternoon. There were old Popular Mechanics magazines that considered the bright future of automated cars and rocket packs, or took the brand-new M-14 to the firing range and described its superior technology in blunt, masculine prose (”I would not want to be a North Vietnamese foot-soldier!”). One Christmas I retrieved an old pulp catalogue from “The World’s Largest Model Store”, located in Detroit. Page after page of model cars: TV & Movie cars, antique cars, hot-rods, future proto-types, slot-cars — you name it. The catalogue was over 15-years-old, and I had no trouble devoting an afternoon to investigating its minutiae — Herman Munster’s “Dragula” and James Bond’s Aston Martin were of particular interest.

The adult imperative, however, is to converse. Exploration is closed to me: I don’t get to leave the table and snoop around another family member’s house until I’m too senile to remember what I’m looking for. Physical activity is still possible, and we try to push the kids to the arena for an hour’s skate. And we’ll do what we can to toboggan, even though the temperature that brings us snow is in the habit of slipping back into rain. The run will either be suicidally slick, or discouragingly slow. Either way, our outdoor clothes will be soaking wet before we get back inside.

Other than that, it’s crokinole or video games. And fists-full of caramel popcorn . Lots of fibre and roughage, there — I’m sure my waistline will be secure this Christmas.

We decided early not to play the “Santa Claus” game with our kids. Neither of our families “did” SC — my wife and I were both inclined to make up our own stories, so missing Santa never occurred to us.

We’ve also given the girls clear instructions not to piss in other people’s punch-bowls. “Remember that little boy in your class last year — the one who bugged you because he was always talking about how he didn’t believe there was a God? Well ….”

Years ago, when I was still a single guy, I went directly from a harried Christmas Eve at the bookstore to the children’s Christmas Eve program in my church. I had imbibed a bit; my boss also gave me some strange-looking tablets for my headache. I popped one of those before I stepped into church, then sat down to enjoy the show.

I don’t remember much after that. A tingling set in where my neck connects to my shoulders, then this tidal wave of electricity swept over my scalp and settled in my eyes. I sat in my pew, happily drooling on my shirt while the proceedings took place.

Two hours later, enough of my senses had returned for me to make reasonable conversation. I spoke with a friend who had two little girls. He told me they’d just seen Miracle on 34th Street the other night. When it was over, he couldn’t help noticing how irritable they both were. They settled for bed, and he asked them: Do you believe there’s a Santa Claus? They both grew quiet. The youngest said, Yes. The oldest thought for a bit, then said, “I think there is. But it’s alright if there isn’t.”

I nodded. My face was still numb and witless. “Sounds like she’s become Ag- Clause -tic,” I announced. My friend looked like he was trying to decide whether to hit me or simply settle for shaking his head in mock sorrow.

The no-Santa clause has its benefits. Our girls usually queue up for at least one department store Santa every year. We don’t do the Santa picture, either: the girls sit and visit. My wife has noticed that whenever a Santa hears the words, “These girls are just here to talk to you,” the bearded man can’t help but sigh with relief.

I don’t blame him. It boggles my mind, the lengths some parents go to getting that yearly Santa picture. They’ve gone and dressed their kids to the nines; queued up in a hot store, sometimes for the better part of an hour; propped the kids on a stranger’s lap, while an “elf” in late adolescence shakes a rattle or squeezes a rubber duck to get the kids to look anything but disappointed or shell-shocked. What do they pay for these pictures: $20, maybe? That’s too much for what the parents are getting, and too little for what Santa and his elves have to do.

After all that, I’m faced with a strange turnabout in circumstance. Yesterday my oldest asked if we’d have a fire in the woodstove this Christmas Eve. I said, “Almost certainly. Why?”

“Well, I don’t want Santa to burn himself.”

Whenceforth this? Is it peer pressure? Has someone been keeping them up late, and malnourishing them to get their point across? Whatever the case, I’m getting some small notion of what it must be like for atheist parents to hear a child announce they’ve joined the Church. Like them, I’m telling myself this too shall pass….

Or, if you don’t speak Italian: Butter and Tomato Sauce . This is the trusty stand-by we resort to after a busy day of Christmas shopping . Melt a 1/4 cup of butter in your large “pasta sauce” pan. Halve one medium onion , and place both flat-side down in the butter. Add one 28 oz can of plum tomatoes (chop or squish tomatoes through your fingers). While that simmers, boil water for the pasta, then cook the pasta (I usually go with spaghetti or penne, but this is a good sauce if you’ve got some tasty spinach totelloni on hand). When the pasta is ready, discard the onion, then toss the sauce with the pasta. Grate some parmesan over it all, uncork the wine, and you’re ready to consume!