So This is Christmas

Last year, my sister woke me up on Christmas morning and told me not to get up yet because the dog had had diarrhea in the kitchen.

Even though the dog was on antibiotics this year, I was a little nervous when I woke up on Christmas morning to my mom opening the window blinds. “You don’t have to get up,” she said. “But you should see this.”

Outside, it was snowing. The snowflakes were huge and came down in a flurry. I watched for a while from my warm bed, trying to remember how many years it’d been since we had a white Christmas or since I’d seen it snow like this.

It continued to snow while we opened our stockings and while dad made his famous pancakes. But by the afternoon, the snow had turned to rain and mostly washed away.

It Wasn’t Like Christmas at All

Most years, I delight in Christmas. I love the smell of the tree. I enjoy selecting and wrapping gifts. And I appreciate the focus on family, friends, warmth and light in the darkest days of the year.

But this year, that delight hasn’t really shown up. I waited for it the first few weeks, but at this stage (only 3 days until Christmas! announces the snowman countdown clock on the house down the street),  I have to accept that the season is passing me by this year.

“It’s the economy, ” a co-worker said. “No one is really in the spirit this year.” And that could be part of it, I suppose. With the economy in mind, my family decided to have a more low key holiday. We cut down our gift lists and we’re buying less, selecting more practical gifts for each other.

The smaller shopping list could have meant more time for all the things that I love about the holidays, but so many other things demanded my attention this year. At times, the holiday has felt like just one more thing on our to-do list.

“Do you think the wedding stuff is getting in the way of Christmas?”, I asked Mr. WholeHog recently.  “Of course,” he answered. Instead of sending Christmas cards this year, we’re designing wedding invitations.  I haven’t wanted to be in the stores, thanks in part to a wretched experience we had when we attempted to register for gifts.

But the other night, appropriately at yoga, I thought, what if this is enough? What if the gifts I’ve bought — even if they’ve simply been ordered online and not lovingly hand-chosen — were enough? What if my sole baking project — the lone batch of molasses cookies, oh wasn’t I optimistic! — is enough?  What if those rare moments when I felt cheered by Christmas lights, or a decked out tree, or a park full of Santas were enough?

I’d planned to post a gift guide here, but perhaps what we need more than a push to buy more is the reminder that all the wishes for peace this time of year are not just for world peace, they’re also for peace of mind.

Whether the economy has taken your job or your home or just your sense of security, or whether you have too many projects cluttering up your life at the moment, I hope you’ll consider doing something that brings you peace of mind. For me, that meant finally finishing that book I started last July, and spending an evening watching Young @ Heart — a movie guaranteed to make you laugh and feel grateful simply for life.

A Time for Gifts & Giving

I’ve been slow to warm up to Christmas this year. But I’ve found that one sure-fire way to catch a little holiday spirit is to give to those who truly need assistance. Charitable organizations especially need our help this year given the economic decline.

This year, I gave to many of the same organizations that I’d supported in 2007, but there are others that also deserve your consideration, such as:

San Francisco/Bay Area

La Cocina -  La Cocina is Spanish for “the kitchen”, and that’s exactly what this organization provides: access to a commercial kitchen space so that low-income people can turn cooking skills into a business. La Cocina cranks out everything from empanadas to brownies to chai. It was behind Kika’s Treats, one of my favorite desserts and a great stocking stuffer. (In fact, much of what La Cocina cooks up can be excellent gifts. Stop by their booth at  at the Saturday Ferry Building Farmers Market, right next to Fatted Calf, to sample.)

Glide – Glide lives the Christmas spirit every day of the year, providing free meals to needy people in San Francisco. And not just one free meal a day, three meals a day.  This year, Glide is feeding more hungry people (this Thanksgiving, nearly 7,000 people showed up) and paying higher food costs.

The Family Giving Tree – Every year, with a little help from The Family Giving Tree, I get to play Santa. FGT gives people like me (and you?) the ability to make a child’s Christmas wish come true with the ease of online shopping: FGT posts  a child’s wish online, you enter payment information and they take care of getting the gift to the child.

Nationwide

NothingButNets.net – I admit that I first heard of this on The Colbert Report. A $10 donation provides a net to help those in poor areas of the world protect themselves from malaria-ridden mosquitos.

The Humane Society – The Humane Society is leading the fight against factory farming. Thanks to The Humane Society’s, Prop 2 passed in California, and the Humane Society also exposed abuses by a California feedlot earlier this year — ultimately leading the USDA to ban “downer cows” from the food supply.

Note: Be aware that donating often puts you on the organization’s mailing list. I try to get as little junk mail as possible, but my normal notes of “do not mail to this address” have generally been ignored.

It’s Christmas Time in the City

On our usual trip to the Saturday farmers market, we noticed a number of people downtown were sporting Santa suits.

Later that day, I was in Lower Haight where there were even more Santas (and one random penguin). Their destination appeared to be Duboce Park where the wanna-be Santas could play in a bounce house, or just network with the other Santas.

I was told that they were taking part in Santarchy, an annual bar hopping trip by Santa-impersonators.

It’s Not The Herb But The Spice

I’m not ready for the holidays yet. Maybe I’m still carrying a grudge against the early onslaught of Christmas music in the stores and holiday ice rinks in San Francisco. (I don’t mean to be a Grinch, but I can’t help but think of the energy used to keep the ice rinks frozen on those 70 degree days we had last month.)

Although I’m not quite ready to pull out the holiday decor or put up a Christmas tree, I am solidly ready for cookies. My friend Natalie smartly sugested that it was time for work step aside in favor of “cookie baking and consumption”. I couldn’t agree more.

My go-to holiday cookies are molasses crinkles. The recipe I use was culled from the old Craigslist food forum, back in the days when the forum was full of great cooks and recipes. (It’s now unfortunately troll-infested). They’re dead simple to make and really fast to make, too. You can go from thinking about cookies to eating freshly baked cookies in about 20 minutes. A welcome gift during this often-hectic time of year.

The cookies themselves are soft, spicy and go perfectly with a cup of tea. What better way to ease into the season?

Note: I don’t think I’ll devote all December to the holidays as I did last year, but I’m sure I won’t be able to resist a few Christmas-related posts.

I’ve Seen Better Nights Than This One

4th of July is the one time of year that I miss Sacramento.

Sacramento doesn’t get much respect — and for good reason: it’s a poster child for all that’s wrong with unlimited growth. It’s become a mass of surburban sprawl, the little boxes full of ticky tacky that all look just the same.

But on the 4th of July I’m reminded of all that was good about Sacramento, at least in the Curtis Park area of Sacramento where I lived from 1976 to 1984.

Our neighborhood was full of young families, almost all with kids my age. As kids, we felt like we owned the whole block. We knew every square of sidewalk. We knew where fallen bits of tree bark made for a bumpy ride on our roller skates. We knew that the third house from the corner had the smoothest driveway — the best surface for our skates and Big Wheels.

I knew my friend’s backyards as well as my own. Deena’s backyard was wild and in my memory, it looks like a jungle. A swimming pool took up almost all of Matt’s backyard. Amy and I tried to dig our own swimming pool in her backyard, behind the playhouse. We lined our bath-tub sized hole with garbage bags, but it still didn’t hold water.

On the 4th of July, it felt like the whole neighborhood was outside, adults and kids alike enjoying those warm Sacramento nights and watching the colorful little explosions in the street.

At the time, fireworks were sold in grocery store parking lots. Ground flowers turned colors and spun across the pavement in a blur. We plugged our ears in anticipation of the screaming Piccolo Petes. My favorite was the pagoda. It looked flat initially, but once lit, it expanded into the familiar house-shape and blew a small fountain of fire out the top. I saved one once, months after 4th of July. I thought it was beautiful, even though the cheap (likely lead-ridden) paper was singed at the edges.

Eventually, the families started to move out of Curtis Park and my family joined the exodus. We moved to the foothills, where to my dismay, there were no sidewalks on our block and the streets were so gravelly that my teeth chattered when I roller skated.

We tried to recreate our Sacramento 4th of July in our new home. We bought ground flowers but they didn’t as move smoothly on the gravel as they did on pavement. One hit a piece of the gravel and launched into the air, landing in a shed on our new one-acre property. My dad ran to put it out before the building caught fire.

We adapted to the 4th of July traditions in the foothills — the local parade, the fireworks display at the fairgrounds — but I was getting older and it didn’t feel the same.

In San Francisco, the fog rolls in most years on the 4th of July. Tonight, although we can hear the popping sounds of the City’s fireworks, all we can see from our deck is pastel-colored clouds and I can’t help but wonder what sort of memories San Francisco kids will have of this day.

There are certain neighborhoods in San Francisco, though, that still put on their own fireworks show in the street, the kind I remember from my childhood. While I’m sure it’s illegal, I can’t help but smile when I hear the shriek of a Piccolo Pete.

As We Dream by the Fire

There are times when the holidays just get to be too much, even for me. It’s easy to run ourselves ragged with the shopping, the parties, the decorating. Even seeing family and friends can start to feel like a chore. There’s too many people to catch up with, too many places to be.

This month, I was overscheduled, running late to everything and still trying to fit it all in. Take it from me: trying to do too much is not a recipe for holiday cheer. There were moments I felt like an absolute Scrooge.

Last Saturday, I went from the farmers market to the East Bay to babysit our friend’s hilarious 2 year old and then came back into the City for a friend’s cookie-baking party. I hadn’t had time to make cookies for the party. I hadn’t even had time to shower. But I hoped in a cab even though I felt tired and crabby.

I sat in silence in the dark backseat of the cab. I looked out the windows into the lit-windows of other people’s apartments and houses, all decorated in some small way. Some had lavish light displays and ornate trees, but my favorite places were those that had done just one simple decoration, like stringing colored lights over a houseplant.

It was a good reminder that celebrating doesn’t have to be anything big. Some times, the most meaningful moments are the quiet spaces in between work parties and family visits.

Driving to the airport to pick up my sister last weekend after yet another busy day, I turned on the radio and spent an unexpectedly blissful 15 minutes listening to the soothing tone of Ira Glass’s voice on NPR’s This American Life.

I’m trying to hang on to these random moments of solitude and quiet, especially in these last few day before December 25^th and remember that it’s perfectly festive — in fact, it’s about time — to let go of the shopping, the baking, the decorating, and start spending some quality time sitting in front of the tree. Maybe sipping a warm cup of tea, maybe listening to holiday music, or catching up with friends and family, or maybe just sitting in the glow of the lights, in silence.

Now Bring Us Some Piggy Pudding

It’s getting a little late to order a gift and have it arrive in time for the holidays, and we’re all sick of stores by now. So why not treat yourself to a visit to the farmers market? You deserve a terrific breakfast at Primavera and while you’re there, you might as well get some locally-produced food and drink to give as gifts.

First stop: The Fatted Calf for salami (they’ll have wild boar salame this weekend), their NY Times-touted beef jerky or any of their tasty sausages. Since Fatted doesn’t ship any of their products, they make particularly good gifts for people who live out of town.

If salami alone doesn’t seem gift-worthy, wrap it up with a copy of the book Heat. Heat is a great read, especially for the description of famed Tuscan butcher Dario Cecchini, and Taylor, owner/meat-maker at the Fatted Calf, is Dario-trained.

Vegetarians getting you down? I feel you. Turn to Rancho Gordo for a sack of heirloom beans or posole. Or just load them up with chocolate and coffee (and get a little Fatted Calf bacon for yourself!).

To the left of The Fatted Calf is La Cocina where you can find Kika’s Treats. Kika’s milk chocolate-covered graham crackers are one of my very favorite food discoveries this year.

To the right of The Fatted Calf is Blue Bottle Coffee, and who couldn’t use an especially delicious cup of coffee?! Oakland-based Blue Bottle coffee sells fair trade beans that are super freshly roasted. It brings joy to my world every day.

If you can’t make it to the Saturday farmers market, head to their handy little kiosk in Hayes Valley (a stone’s throw from Miette Confiserie). Boulette’s Larder at the ferry building also sells Blue Bottle beans.

Do you know one of the insane people who don’t drink coffee? Buy them some herbal tea. Juniper Ridge’s tea is definitely worth seeking out (and the tea is hard to find anywhere but the market or their web store). The Douglas Fir Tip tea is like no other tea I’ve ever had. It literally tastes of the forest floor. If tree tea is too out-there for you, there’s always White Sage and Mint instead. (If tree tea isn’t out-there enough for you, Juniper Ridge also sells sage “smudgesticks”, for the Julia Butterfly’s on your list.)

Nuts are healthy, right? The nut people (in front of the market under a purple awning) offer roasted, salted, plain, or candied nuts. They also sell a remarkable brittle — which they insist you try, and then try again — and a great trail mix. If you are traveling this year to see family or friends by all means pack this trail mix.

Inside the Ferry Building, Stonehouse has olive oils, vinegars or a bottle of dirty martini mix (a martini is guaranteed to make the season bright). Just next door is Rechuitti. A jar of the delicious burnt caramel sauce fits just perfectly in a stocking.

You might as well buy a handful of Miette’s waxed paper wrapped caramels, although you’ll probably eat them all before the holidays (perhaps even before you leave the market). The gingerbread caramels are particularly delicious, and I believe they are only available this time of year.

Of course, California is perhaps best known for wine and there’s plenty of good wine shops. We joined the Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant wine club this summer. It’s a reasonably priced monthly wine club (the two bottles — of red, white or one of each — costs a maximum of $40 month). If you’re local, you can pick up your wine at the store and avoid shipping charges.

Come on Y’All, It’s Time to Get Nice

It’s up to us to take back the holidays from the marketers and make it about something bigger. The whole idea of the holiday is to give. While most of us are pretty good in giving gifts to friends and family, don’t forget that this is also a great time to give to charitable organizations.

Last year, I set a personal goal to give 1% of my salary to charity. (If you are looking for a New Year’s Resolution, I highly recommend it, providing you can afford to live without 1% of your salary). I’m not Bill Gates so I simply gave little bits to a lot of different organizations throughout the year. It surprised me that it was so easy and so much fun to decide what organizations to support.

I kept a list so I’d remember who I’d given to and how close I was to my 1% goal. Here are some of the organizations that I choose to support and why.

Food-Related

Heifer International – You know the phrase “Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime”? Heifer aims to put this into practice.

You can give a needy family in a developing country a flock of geese that will provide eggs for the family to eat or sell. Or you can give a goat (or a goat “share”). A goat thrives on dry land where crops don’t grow, and a goat’s milk can provide needed protein to hungry people. Needless to say, this is probably the most fun shopping possible because you are buying farm animals online.

Chez Panisse Foundation – I love the restaurant’s philosophy of celebrating food that is produced locally with care and eaten seasonally, and their foundation brings the same food-focus to schools, supporting better school lunch programs and edible schoolyards.

Food Runners – In SF, when restaurants have extra food, they can call Food Runners to get their food delivered to those in need.

Writing-Related

InsideOUT Writers – Read True Notebooks and see if you don’t end up donating to this writing program for those in Juvenile Hall.

826Valencia – 826 connects students who need help with writing with actual writers. Some volunteers even go into local schools to help out. 826 began in San Francisco but there are now 826 programs in many major cities. They all operate out of incredible storefronts. 826 San Francisco is a pirate supply store, for example, while 826NYC is a superhero supply store.

Human Rights

Valentino Achak Deng Foundation – After reading What is the What, I was ready to move Valentino, a Sudan survivor, into my apartment. Instead, I found he had a foundation which contributes funds to war-torn communities in Southern Sudan.

Political/Legal

Midnight Law Collective – An amazing group who provides free legal assistance for those who are, say wrongly arrested for simply standing up for what they believe in.

Education

DonorsChoose – This is one of the best ideas: teachers post what they need for their classrooms and donors can choose (hence the name) what they want to support. You can choose fund as much or as little of a teacher’s request. I tend to support reading and food-related curriculum.

I received a package a week or so ago from the teacher of a 4th grade class in a very poor school in Richmond, CA. I had helped buy copies of Sadako & the Thousand Paper Cranes for her classroom through Donors Choose. In return, the teacher sent me photos of the class with the book and handwritten letters from the students thanking me and telling me how they liked the book. This was SO rewarding.

Time for Living, Time for Giving

I’m always surprised at how many people loathe Christmas shopping. And those that hate the shopping tend to be the people who put it off to the last minute and thus making the experience infinitely worse than it has to be. They end up in stores crowded with other crabby, panicked shoppers.

Although I resent the call to shop this time of year, as if buying things is all the season is about, I do like holiday shopping because it gives me an excuse to walk the City’s neighborhoods and visit my favorite local stores. By shopping this way, I get a little exercise, I get to take some time for myself, and I get my shopping done.

Local stores provide a lot of gift-giving inspiration. There are gift ideas in even the most unlikely places: we went to Miette Confiserie recently to pick up a few treats for ourselves (bergamot caramels for him; nougat for me) and realized that exquisite candies would be a good gift – especially for people who seem to have everything.

Local stores are also particularly great sources for gifts that are made in in the Bay Area. These are my favorite gifts to give because it gives me the chance to introduce someone to something I happen to love and something that they may not have in their area.

Here are some of my favorites SF-made items (or Bay Area-made items). I’ve also noted if there is a local store that carries them but you can, of course, always order online.

Heath Ceramics
Heath is a legendary Bay Area operation. They’ve been in Sausalito for over 50 years, and their stuff is beyond classic. Their most affordable item happens to be my favorite: a $20 bud vase. Available at Heath, The Gardener (in the ferry building), and I spotted the bud vases at Spring.

J. Mendicino
These vases are easily one of my favorite made-in-SF gifts, and I even received one for my birthday this year! They’re sweet but still modern. And vases are something that everyone needs at some point and few people bother to purchase for themselves. (Picture from Three Potato Four). Available at Doe, Lavish and the ArtistXchange.

FluffyCo
FluffyCo is my go-to for gifts lately — whether they are gifts for myself or others, I can’t get enough of their printed hoodies, nighties and t-shirts. There’s more than just clothing here though. Every traveller could use one of their bright colored luggage tags. No one really wants to use those silly luggage belts to find their bag after a flight. Fluffy’s painted bottle openers (perfect for the beer-drinker in your life) and printed throw pillows also make useful and unique housewarming gifts.

FluffyCo has their own tiny little store on 14th St that is open Thurs – Sat, 12pm-7pm only during the holiday season. Also available at CandyStore, Curiosity Shoppe, and Rare Device.

Jill Bliss – For the nature jerks on your shopping list. This local artist’s work is great on so many levels: it’s is ecologically sound. She uses recycled papers and vegetable-based inks. Her work is botantical and her focus is local. Her illustrated posters are of local herbs and flowers. And for someone like me who grew up in a house full of nature posters, the color and vibrancy of her work is particularly exciting. Herb posters, journals and cards available at Doe.

DutchDoor Press – Letterpress is such a great art form, and happily, one of my favorite letterpress sources is located in SF. One of my favorite purchases this season is Dutch Door’s calendar ($15) — it’s girlier than I usually go for, but I found it completely irresistible. Available at Etsy.com.

Dutchdoor also made the latest 60/40 print for Rose and Radish. When you buy a 60/40 print, the proceeds are split between the artist and a charity of the artists choice. Dutchdoor’s 60/40 print makes for a gorgeous locally produced gift and you’ll be donating to a good cause, too!

Lastly, these are not made in SF but they are all about San Francisco. Ork’s poster of SF neighborhoods (available only online as far as I know) and the SF maptote (available locally at CandyStore. I’ve bought at least three so far!) both confirm my belief that the City is only as strong as its neighborhoods.

Look for a future post on local foods that make for particularly delicious gifts.