The Christmas Cooldown

This was a blog I originally wrote in 2006 and I figured I'd repost it here.

As I have previously mentioned, I love Christmas. The problem, I've discovered, is that I get this amazing Christmas build-up and then I'm supposed to just move on as if nothing ever happened. So I propose that we have the Christmas cool-down - a period of time (the week between Christmas and New Year's) where the Christmas obsessed can slowly purge the Christmas celebration out of their system instead of quitting cold turkey

First step is the radio music. Koast and the Fish have played non-stop Christmas music for one month and then, on December 26th it's back to the same old thing. Maybe we can compromise. For cooldown week perhaps they can play a series of 'winter' songs and New Year's songs. Here is a possible play-list: Baby It's Cold Outside, Winter Wonderland, Let it Snow, What are you doing New Year's, Auld Lang Sayne. For starters. This slow dissipation will take the edge off.

Next, we have the Christmas specials on TV. I love Christmas movies, do they have to end? The answer is simply, NO! There are plenty of movies in which the story takes place over the ENTIRE holiday season. These can be shown during cooldown as well. Here are some examples: Boyfriend for Christmas (my new favorite), When Harry Met Sally, Holiday Inn, that great one I saw on Lifetime about the homeless divorcee who gets her real estate liscence (I'm not kidding, I watched it yesterday and delighted in every delicious minute of it), and I can't think of any more, but they do exist.

Now about decorations. I feel that Christmas decorations can be left up during Cooldown. It's just one week more and I spent all that time putting them up. Maybe I can just put away one decoration a day and then it won't be such a shock.

Spreading Holiday cheer. This is the worst, because people seem to lose that 'true holday spirit' by the 27th. I am not going to let this one go. I'm going to wish people a happy new year and then a happy winter and then a happy Martin Luther King Jr. day, and then a happy President's day and I'll keep finding some holiday to wish people joy. [side note: I was shopping on Dec 23rd and I was so happy because it was almost Christmas, I was done with school, and I was almost done shopping. I was smiling so big and nearly skipping on my way to Barnes and Noble (or 'home', as I like to call it). I was deliciously happy. The best part was people would stare at me and then smile back. One group of people stopped their conversations and said, "Merry Christmas!" "Merry Christmas!" I shouted back and then I really did skip. I love that kind of community joy]

So please support me in my effort to relieve my post-Christmas blues by celebrating the Christmas Cooldown. I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and a wonderful New Year. And for those who celebrate various other holidays (Channukah, Kwanza, Festivus, etc) I hope that you enjoyed those as well.

I am Buddy the Elf

I was watching "Elf" again and I realized that I have so much in common with Buddy (the elf who is actually human, but raised by elves). Here's some ways in which we are similar:

1) I love sugar and I like to put sugar in lots of things (even things that don't usually have sugar)

2) I am usually happy and cheerful.

3) I like to whisper, too.

4) I get distracted by shiny things.

5) I love New York.

6) I don't sleep much (last night I got a full 45 minutes)

7) I love to decorate for Christmas.

8) I like to hug people.

9) I sing in public even when there's no song playing anywhere, even when people are around.

10) I went through the Lincoln Tunnel.

I was not raised by elves, but I do celebrate Christmas in the Reimer family, so that's practically the same thing.

My Love For Christmas Movies Grows Greater With the Hallmark Channel

Yes, Brenda, there is a Santa Claus. Apparently, the cable that comes with our HOA fees for our condo as been upgraded. Julie called me the other day and told me the great news, "Christmas has come early for you, Bren!" "What?" I asked. "We now get the Hallmark Channel!" She giggled into the phone. "Record EVERYTHING!"

To me, there is no better TV than a cheesy Christmas movie. Old or new, poorly made and funded or a beautiful classic; I've seen them all. Julie keeps trying to stump me. She'll name the actors and the title in the latest one she recorded and I can tell her the basic storyline and rate it. Tonight she turned on one and I thought for sure it was one I hadn't seen. But then it started to look familiar, "If there's a lake on the other side of that house, then I've seen this one before. I think it's one of those darker, more serious ones." Sure enough, there was a lake.

Now, I know that not all of them are great, heck, some of them are down right awful. But I love them just the same. I've decided to collect a little list of some of my top Christmas movies. I'm sure I'll leave some off the list out of pure forgetfulness on my part. No slight is intended. They are listed in no particular order.

1) White Christmas - Premise: two WWII veterans meet during the war and form a musical act that leads them to fame and fortune, but sadly also leaves them without much of a personal life. They meet the Haynes sisters and fall for them quickly. They also, unwittingly, follow them to Vermont to ski resort run by their old general who is now retired. The season is slow as the snow has not fallen. The team decided to help the old man out by holding their show at the lodge. Romance, dancing, singing, comedy, misunderstanding, and some of the best costumes in the world follow. How can you beat Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, and that really skinny blond chick? You can't. This is one of my favorite movies, period.

Rating and suggested audience: A+, everyone should see it.

2) Holiday Inn - this is the one that started it all! Premise: Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire are an entertainment team. Fred steals Bing's girl (Fred's dancing partner). Bing decides to leave the entertainment world behind and open an inn. It does poorly until he decides to open it on Holidays with a great show about that Holiday. Fred's partner leaves him and he comes to Bing's place and falls for Bing's new girl.

Best Parts: Singing and dancing for all seasons. This has the songs: Easter Bonnet and White Christmas (this is where it first came out). Bing sings and Fred dances...no more needs to be said.

Rating and suggested audience A-, people who love old movies or anyone who loves musicals.

3) A Boyfriend for Christmas - In my opinion, the best Hallmark has ever made. Premise: A young pre-teen asks Santa for a boyfriend for Christmas. He promises her one, but says she must wait 20 years. Sure enough, she grows up and still has not met mr.right. The same Santa sets her up with a handsome lawyer. All goes as it should in a Christmas movie, but some deceit that lingers and an old ex boyfriend threaten to ruin Christmas romance! No fear, it's a Hallmark movie.

Best parts: "Diane sent you a man for Christmas! Where was she when I was single?"

Rating and suggested audience: A+. any girl and some guys. It's a chick flick for sure, but a really good one.

4) Elf - the best Christmas comedy. Premise: Buddy, a human, was raised by elves in the North Pole. He later discovers that he is, in fact, not an elf and searches out his real father in New York. Christmas may be ruined, but by people believing (in some nebulous thing they must 'believe' in) Christmas is saved.

Best parts: So many quotable lines come from this movie...so many! "I just like smiling, smiling's my favorite."

Rating and suggested audience: A+ everyone

5) Miracle on 34th St. - the real one. Premise: a single mom, who works for Macy's, raises her daughter, Suzie, to be very practical and not believe in fairy tales like Santa. Santa of course comes in and changes their minds and connects the mom to the love of her life.

Best parts: When Santa speaks to the little girl in Dutch, when all the letters get delivered to Santa, when Susie runs into the house and her mother says, "Susie, you know better than to run into strange people's homes."

Rating and suggested audience: A+ everyone

6) If you believe - Premise: a book editor sours over time and alienates herself from all of her family and friends. She is bitter and has become bad at her job. On Thanksgiving, she falls and hits her head and as a result, her inner child comes out and tries to guide her back to a time where she enjoyed life and lived it. She discovers a new writer (who is also, single, charming, and handsome) and he (along with her inner child, played by Hayden Pannitierre from Heroes) bring her back to her former glory.

Best parts: I'm a book nerd, so I love the parts where they are editing the book. I don't think other people would like that part as well.

Rating and suggested audience: B-, girls

7) I'll Be Home for Christmas, A Holiday for Love, and A Holiday to Remember: Why are these three listed together? Because they are the same movie, essentially. Premise: Small town desperately needs something to save it (a new Dr, the town plant to not close, children who need saving). Big town character comes to town (sometimes their hometown) and they clash with the equally single and attractive small town character who is in opposition to them. Through the Christmas time, they grow in love and understanding and Christmas, and the town, are saved!

Best Parts: guessing correctly about what the actors will say next.

Rating and suggested audience: C-, people know what Fa La La La Lifetime is.

8) A Season for Miracles: Premise: a young woman is not allowed to take care of her drug addicted sister's two children and they will be split up for foster care. She kidnaps them and drives in her old bug to escape. Her car breaks down in a small town. The night is very cold and they decide to sleep in a beautiful home that in not currently lived in. The whole town thinks she is the dead owner's niece, come to inherit the property. She goes along with the scheme in the hopes that she can take care of her niece and nephew. She falls for the town sheriff and the town falls for her. The truth is discovered and she is still forgiven. The kids get to stay with her and she and the sheriff are reunited.

Best Parts: the cheese of the whole thing

Rating and suggested audience: B+, chicks only

There are so many more: The Christmas Card, The Christmas Box, Time piece, The Christmas Child, Single Santa Seeks Mrs. Claus and Meet the Clauses (the sequal), Midnight and Mistletoe, Eve's Christmas, A Carol Christmas, Die Hard, The Bishop's Wife (that one's such a great one, A++), The Polar Express, His and Her Christmas, The Perfect Day, The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, The Christmas Angel (creepy, don't see it), The Note and The Note II, Silent Night (about WWII), Joyeux Noel (so wonderful and a true story about WWI and an amazing Christmas Eve), and Mixed Nuts, and too many movies!! Oh, yeah the Christmas Story, A Charlie Brown Christmas, A Muppets Family Christmas, The Muppets' Christmas Carol, Rudolf, man, there isn't enough time to watch them all.

I hope you enjoy your Christmas specials this season. Let me know if you have any great ones and I'll add it to my list.

Finally Figuring Out Some Food Stuff

As many of you know, I've been going to a nutritionist (actually a naturopath) for a couple months now. Many people wondered why I was even going, I asked myself that many times. Since then, many people have asked if it's working, I asked myself that too. Today felt like a huge breakthrough for me.

One reason I decided to go is that food has always been an issue of some kind for me. I love sugar. I mean LOVE sugar. I would eat something sugary (I mean a full blown candy or cookie or dessert item) at least three or four times a day. Besides my love of sugar, there was also the problem of me being starving with hunger and unable to eat simultaneously. I would eat a few bites of something and then feel a sense that if I ate any more I wouldn't be able to swallow it, but then I was feeling famished too. An hour later I'd be starving again and try to eat only to be sick a few bites in. I didn't feel this was with string cheese, yogurt, candy, cookies, soup, or ice cream. This is why I would eat mostly these things all day long.

These past few months, I've stopped eating a lot of things that once made me feel ill. I am now able to finish entire meals. No "Brenda" portions of anything anymore. I eat whole steaks, whole chicken breasts, and all of the sides with it. The only problem is, I'm still starving. Like all the time. The good news is, I don't feel sick when I eat and I can swallow all of my food. The bad news is that despite how much I'm eating, I'm never full and I'm losing too much weight.

During today's visit with the nutritionist, we discovered the missing link that connects it all together. I have a really fast thyroid aka a really fast metabolism. I'm starving for carbs and my thyroid processes it faster than I can eat it. My body craves sugar because I'm not ever keeping any sugar. So my new regimen is to eat every three hours and to mix protein and carbs with each meal/snack. I think it is just a relief to know why my body has been doing what it's doing for all of these years. It also explains how I could eat how I did and not gain weight from it. It also explains why I'm addicted to sugar. It also helps me feel like there are solutions and I can feel full again, without feeling sick.

So no worries. I will be gaining back some of the weight I've lost and I won't be so tired after work and I'll be even happier throughout the day and my heart won't flip like it does. It's all connected and now I feel like we've found the missing piece.

Things that secretly drive teachers crazy

For me, crazy is not a far drive from where I live. So it is quite easy for me to get there. But my kind of crazy is usually a pleasant kind - not the angry kind. But sometimes, in a rare blue moon, I can break. I am patient and can put up with a lot. I was well trained by my brothers to be patient in adversity. Yet there are some things that every teacher goes through that makes them eventually want to scream. Here is a condensed list:

1) Tapping. Tapping pencils, hands, feet or anything else against a desk. This is a classic trademark of an ADD or ADHD kid and when you have a room of 30 of them, man, it gets annoying.

2) Paper torn out of a spiral notebook. It may seem trivial, but when you are stacking papers and that one with the snowy frayed edge won't mesh with the others, it sticks out at angles and drags papers with it. Bother!

3) Inappropriate questions shouted out at inappropriate times. For example: "Ms. Dempsey, why aren't you married?" or "Where did you get your shoes?" shouted out while I am mid-sentence explaining how to solve one step equations.

4)Lies. Arggh, I say. I hate when a kid lies to me and then lies about lying. I once had a kid cheat on a test and then say he didn't copy from his neighbor. The question was to make up a word problem involving d=rt and the kid copied one from his neighbor...it had the neighbor's name in the problem.

I think I'll stop writing this blog, because it's starting to feel very negative and negativity was going to be number 5. I do love my job and I do love the kids that make me go over the edge sometimes. I just wish you could have seen the kid in one of my classes who literally acted like a monkey after he was done with his test. His hands were shaking above his head and he was swinging his head back and forth and tapping his feet. He was acting this way because I asked him to stop tapping at least 5 times in a row that day and he knew that if his hands were down, he would tap again. I wish I had had a camera to tape it. I just stared at him and had to laugh...at least he wasn't tapping.

Year After Year the Kids Seem the Same

The first two weeks of school are always interesting. The kids are getting to know you and you are getting to know them. Each period has a personality that shows itself pretty early on. Some kids seem to show their personalities pretty early too. I realized that after having a total of about 1,600 students, many seem very similar to each other. Here are some kid categories I've noticed:

1) The inappropriate question/timing kid - this is the kid who blurts out questions in the middle of the teacher talking and usually those questions are of a personal nature. This year, I have a couple of those and here are some example questions, "Where did you get your shoes?", "What's your favorite band?", or my favorite, "Will you tell us stories about your ex-boyfriends? Our last teacher did." My response to these kinds of questions is usually, "you can ask me that after school, but this is not the appropriate time." For the last one I just said, "NO!" in a disgusted voice.

2) The eager to pleaser kid - this kid just loves his or her teacher and wants his/her teacher to love him/her back. They will offer to clean the board, pass out papers, give complements and smile a lot.

3) The too cool for school kid - this kid just wants to sit back and be quiet and not be disturbed. They are too cool for anything as babyish as enjoying class or participating.

4) The straight A kid - they have studied the book over the summer, they panic over every test and usually must have everything be known. Any unknowns cause the student to panic and rapid fire questions to their teacher. "What are we learning today? The board says we're learning about equations. Are we solving equations or writing equations? Will we need to know exponents? Are we graphing them?"

5) The blurter - this kid is so excited to know the answer that he must shout it out at any time. Sometimes he'll raise his hand as he is shouting, in an effort to follow the rules.

6) The tapper - Oh, the joys of hearing 30 pencils tapped rhythmically on 30 separate desks to 30 separate beats - simultaneously. This kid is often also the can't sit in your seat kid. They can be found wandering the classroom for who knows what reason. Sometimes it's to sharpen the pencil that they will then use to start tapping again.

There are too many more to list. I can't keep them all straight.

What I love about Jr. High is the diversity of maturity levels. I have kids who speak like adults and have deep thoughts about deep concepts. I have students who are in the middle and one day will be playing with toys and the next discussing who said what about whom. I have students who still tell their teachers they love them and want to hold their hand.

This year my kids are full of love and kindness. I have students who thank me daily for teaching them and not in a kissy way. I have kids who ask great questions and are polite to each other. They seem to be full of kindness for me and for each other. They are also full of energy, so I'm just done at the end of each day. And yet, I have time each day to pause and just be thankful for a job where I can do what I love and meet such interesting people.

Grocery shopping: Day 1 of new foods

So now that I've invested in this whole food adventure, I had to shop for food that I could actually eat. I have three favorite stores in my life. These are places that bring me joy even as I drive past them. In reverse order they are :
3)Barnes and Noble
2)Ann Taylor Loft
1) VONS

That's right. I love VONS more than the LOFT. Really. I love the checkers, especially Doris and Charlie. I love the flowers and produce and seeing people I know. I love that I can buy food and cleaning supplies and deodorant and videos all at the same place. Rick, my favorite neighborhood homeless man, and I have our best interactions there.

But now I cannot go to VONS. I must go to places farther away with checkers who don't know me and with aisles that I don't have memorized. It is Trader Joe's, which is an exceptional store that I do love to go to on Sundays and also Whole Foods which is featured on "Top Chef" so it has to be cool.

One of my favorite shows is "What Not to Wear". It's a show about people who don't dress well who are then given a set of rules by fashion experts which they must follow on their first day of shopping alone. Halfway through the shopping trip I realized that this is what it must feel like to be one of those shoppers. I would pick up a box and ask myself, "does this have wheat? gluten? corn?" and sometimes I would have no idea if it was ok or not.

I was able to come up with alternatives for a couple of my favorite food choices, including the idea for a mac and cheese made out of raw cheese (non-pasteurized). I just needed to find raw cream and some macaroni that was gluten free. Both of which I did not find at Trader Joe's. We did find a lot there and some other benefits included:
1) friendly workers
2) really great and inexspensive flowers
3) lots of options for our newly restricted diet
4) some prices that were comparable to what we were used to

We went to Whole Foods next to pick up some things on our list: a specific brand of lunch meat, raw milk, raw cream, gluten free pasta, and maybe some more cheese. The place is sure beautiful. It is spacious and fancy and has prices to match. I found the prettiest mushrooms I've ever seen that were also $29 a pound (which I did not buy).

We found the raw milk and cream and almost died from shock and the prices. They did come in a glass bottle and the cream was so beautiful looking. I felt like a cow named Bessie, wandering the English countryside, had relinquished this milk to a nice, lanky farmer straight into this jar. So beautiful. And now I can make ice cream and whipped cream and mac and cheese...except that one pint of the stuff is $11.99!!! So I think that the cream needed for ice cream would be basically $36. That would be some ice cream. Maybe I should just buy a cow, does that fit in our housing rules? The milk was good and did taste a little like grass as the surfer dude in front of us in line mentioned...what kind of grass did he mean?



I cooked two meals today from our newly acquired food. The first was a tangerine chicken on a bed of whole brown rice with a side of green beans. The second was steak fajitas with my own fajita seasoning, black beans, two kinds of cheddar cheese, tomatoes, and carmelized onions, on a brown rice tortilla. I did kind of miss the sour cream and the tortilla's should have been heated so they could fold better, but all in all, not too bad.




I did also go to a wedding today where I had to search each little table to try to find things I could eat. I ended up with a plate of berries, snap peas, and a tomato and olive. It was good, but I really wanted one of those little quiches or some sherbet punch! Cake is easy for me to resist, so that wasn't a problem.

So here are the lessons I've learned today:
1) I have a newfound respect for anyone who has dieted. It is stinking hard to do and I've only been doing it for a day!
2) I will not be restricted in my creativity in some ways. Yes, I must read labels now and be more aware of what I'm putting in my body. So although I did think that some sugar in the beans would taste pretty good and I resisted and couldn't try that, I have a whole new field of ingredients to work with and understand.
3) Eating healthy is exspensive.
4) 38 pills a day is a whole lot
5) I'm hungry more often, but maybe that's because my body is actually able to digest the food I'm eating.

I'm excited about breakfast. We'll see how the shakes go tomorrow.