Number four child was TRYING to whisper in Jolly Old St. Nick’s ear at the Santa Village when she was interrupted.

Elf: “WHICH PHOTO PACKAGE DID YOU BUY?!” the elf barked at us.

Me: “We haven’t chosen one yet,” I said. “We wanted to get in line before it got too long.”

Elf: “WHAT?! Well, you each sat on his lap so you want FOUR photo packages, right?”

Colin:  ”Uh, actually we were going to have them all sit together–”

Elf: “So, what, you WANT to buy FIVE photo packages?”

Us: “Well, er, uh, um –”

Elf (tapping foot): “I can SEE Daddy over here being all SNEAKY with his iPhone when he’s not supposed to be. Why don’t one of you get over here and pick one of of the photo packages. Because Santa’s got a LONG line of people and only 25 minutes until lunch.”

Beat. I exchange glances with Santa. Number 4 is smiling like crazy and whispering in his ear.

Me: “Excuse me. Can my daughter please just talk to Santa for a minute?”
–

Dear Stamford Town Center Mall and Snapfish,

You are on the Naughty List. For sure.

–

This post is part of the December BIG QUESTION Series, “If Only in My Dreams.”

What’s your dream of the holidays? Or how has that dream gone horribly wrong?? Tell us in the comments!

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At the post office, the hated post office, where lines greet me
and awful racks of greeting cards
Line walls, ignored.
The post office and its
Perfume of desperation.
The place where scales and stamps sit in dusty corners
Like aristocrats awaiting their bloody fate.
The post office, doomed, because
It is about
PLACE
and we have no
PLACE anymore. We are no longer
PHYSICAL beings
we are no longer
ACTUAL.

We are
e-people, shoving our lives and our
words
(same thing)
around in
Formless
cyber worlds.

The mailbox
Has no shape
Anymore. It’s
A percentage
Full or
empty.
P.O. stands for
Pissed off, that the
WiFi doesn’t work.

Now’s the time to
Collect the actual.
Postcards from
A storied past.
It will be memorabilia
Hot on the auction block
Soon.

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Guest Post by Writer-Runner-Teacher Tricia Dowcett

Whenever my mother asks me what we would like for Christmas, I always reply that I would prefer to do rather than to have.  A show, a day in Boston, a trip to a museum.  She will usually frown and insist that at Christmas, the kids should be able to “open something.”  “They’re not going to get excited when they open Lion King tickets,” she worries.

Admittedly, a gift that is essentially a promise of a gift is a difficult concept for a young kid to wrap his tiny, Target-warped brain around.  But, should that stop us from trying to shift expectations?  Sure, the look of joyous satisfaction on a kid’s face when he gets that Razor scooter or battery-powered Jeep is a pretty rich reward, but who is really more satisfied—the kid, or the parent?  The battery will die and the Jeep will collect mud and spider eggs, and the kid will count the days until the next big holiday so he can get more stuff.

A Walk in the Dark

Tonight, Lexi and I took a walk after dinner, and she asked me if I might point out Orion.  We found the brightest star on his belt, but the clouds prevented us from seeing the rest of his “body.”

“I’ve never seen Orion,” she said, and that surprised me, because I look for him just about every night.

But it’s true: we don’t really go out into the dark and look at the stars.  When we walk in the evening, I’m usually trying to stop the dog from pulling, or the kids from running (we have no sidewalks, so nighttime strolls with the kids can be a little unnerving), so my attention is forward rather than upward.

I told Lexi that on our next camping trip, we’d lie down and look at the stars.  “We can even camp in the backyard again,” she said.

“Yep.  … Hey!” I said, an idea taking shape, “maybe we can go camping on Christmas!”

She laughed.  “Mom!  You don’t go camping on Christmas.”

Too Small for Presents

One of my favorite Christmas Eves, I told her, was spent under the stars, in a natural hot spring in Colorado.  The pool was full of snow-drunk revelers— families, older folks, young couples —all joyously creating an alternative Christmas.  I slept in a cabin about the size of Thoreau’s hut, too small for presents, but large enough to fit a little wood stove, our wet hiking boots, and a bottle of champagne.

I’ve celebrated 39 Christmases, and this is the one I still hold close to me, in a little sachet under my sweater.

Why not, Lexi?  Why not go camping on Christmas?

–

This post is part of the December Series “If Only in My Dreams.” Click here to read more.

Feel free to tweet (#BigQDreams), comment, or if you have more to say, click here to submit.

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This is a guest post by author Jennifer Wilson in the BIG QUESTION series “What Does America Want?“
Her book “Running Away to Home” is released today. 

–

To begin, a caveat:

I’ve gotten around as a professional travel writer for the past 14 years, and I don’t have a solid blanket characterization of all Americans. It’s that way with people, right? I mean, I could say talkative, enthusiastic, overzealous, tan. But I could say that about Puerto Ricans, too.

But if E. Howard asked me for a generalization here, I’ll give it the old college try. Literally. We went to college together. About five years ago. Or so.

So here’s this: Americans want everything.

In some ways, that’s good. In others, well, you’ve seen Hoarders.

More than our fair share

For most of us, wanting it all means the desire for traditional comforts, as we’ve come to know them in the past few generations. Nice house with a security system. Plenty of stuff to fill it. Money tucked away in the bank. Assurance that nothing bad will ever happen to ourselves and our loved ones—and if it does, that we can buy our way back to health and safety.

For some, it’s about general accumulation: power, property, money, titles, awards, whatever floats the boat.

Trouble is, it’s easy to fall into the habit of taking more than your fair share, and when that happens, you’re probably ripping off somebody else. And that’s not going to work out so well for us in the end. (See: Oil wars.)

I was thinking a lot about that a few years back. For some reason, I had rolled my family right into the steep wheel ruts of this new American Dream, the one where you drive around to practice and playdates all the time, and spend ample hours in SuperTarget buying stuff you don’t need.

The kids were still pretty young then, and though my husband Jim and I weren’t the most egregious offenders in the bloated consumer category, we were closer than we wanted to get. He had like three grills at one point. I blush at the number of shoes in my closet. Zadie wasn’t much into toys, but back then if I piled up Sam’s Thomas the Train collection, Transformers, Legos and general flotsam from the McDonald’s Happy Meals, he wouldn’t have been able to see over the top even if he was standing on my car, and he was tall for his age.

It wasn’t really how I envisioned family life to be like.

The Great Re-Grouping

I’m not going to say that my reaction to this concern was rational, but here it is:

In 2009, I sold all our stuff and hauled all four of us back to the land of my immigrant great-grandparents to start over.

Jim, the kids, and I, lived in the ancient mountain village of Mrkopalj, Croatia, for about four months, then moved about Croatia and Europe for several more. We lived in one-room pensions. We shopped daily for fresh food (dorm fridge!). We spent a lot of time just hanging out in the wide-open meadows of Mrkopalj (pronounced MER-koe-pie). We traveled in a compact Peugeot (yes, a family of four … it got a little tight sometimes). By the time we left Europe, our collective belongings totaled five suitcases.

Lots of amazing and awful things happened during that time. But I can tell you one thing: Missing an over accumulation of stuff was not one of them.

And we learned a few things about wanting everything:

• Life’s less stressful when you live moderately. Managing belongings take a lot of time. When you’ve got four shirts and two pairs of jeans, you’ve got a lot more time to linger over breakfast with the kids instead of fretting over your outfit. Though I still fretted about my hair a lot.

• Downsizing felt good. I was so surprised at how great it felt to power through my house and remove all the toys and clothes and junk that meant absolutely nothing to us. We took things to the second-hand store, and held a big name-your-own-price garage sale. What remained were treasures that we were really happy to see when we came home. Nothing more.

• It’s hard to maintain a low-stuff lifestyle in America. Everywhere you turn, somebody’s waving something in your face to buy. Being particularly susceptible to shoes and sweaters, I find this difficult. My son would say the same about vids and Pokemon cards. (Daughter and Husband could care less.) I’m still far from perfect when it comes to accumulation, but I try to keep in mind that supporting the culture of Way Too Much is just encouraging the opposite effect somewhere in the world: someone else is gonna have Way Too Little. I don’t have empirical evidence of this, but it seems about right.

• Focusing on the things you want takes away from focusing on the things that really matter. My son is a good example of this. When he’s clinging to the notion of needing just one more Pokemon pack, we talk of nothing else. And I can feel, in every conversation, his desire to just come right back around to that same topic again. It’s distracting, and it’s a bummer. He’s nine and he’s awesome and I want to remain connected to him in a meaningful way. (Of course, sometimes when I’m talking to my husband, I am thinking about the cute fall boots I just saw in a catalog, so I’m pretty sure I know where he gets this.) Without fail, every time I offer my kids a chance to pick something from the toy aisle, it ends in bad behavior and tears somehow. You’d think I’d learn.

When is enough?

Now, Americans wanting everything has resulted in some great things that we benefit from every day. Americans want better health, and so we make these crazy great strides in the health care field all the time. (Fingers crossed for a cancer cure here soon.) Americans want all the entertainment, all the time, and so we have iEverything. What kind of amazing is it that you can store five days worth of music on the same device that you use to call your dad? Really goddamned amazing, that’s what kind.

Americans wanted this country, too, and though I get super depressed every time I drive past a clear-cut timber or an Indian casino, this is about the most beautiful place I can imagine. I just wish we weren’t so clumsy with it, wanting too much electricity or fuel or what have you, and ruining what we’ve got just to have more, more, more.

Listen, I’m no philosopher; I tell stories for a living, and this was a pretty deep question. But having lived in the land that seems to want everything, and having traveled to those that have so much less, I hope I can break my American habit of trying to hog it all up, leaving so little for the rest of the planet.

Because as far as I can tell, it doesn’t bring more happiness, and eventually, it brings exactly the opposite.

Now if I could just stop thinking about those cute black leather oxford shoes in the fall J. Jill collection, I will have achieved inner peace.

–

Jennifer Wilson’s first book, RUNNING AWAY TO HOME, about that time her family ditched the comfortable life for the mountain village of her ancestors, is available at jennifer-wilson.com. If you don’t want to accumulate too much stuff, you can get the electronic version instead.

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Today on “House Hunters International,” a family of four from near-Toledo were seeking a vacation home in St. Croix. They were a nice family: he an ER doc. She a nurse (now SAHM of a 9 and 14 y.o). They needed an escape from their designer, 5400 sq ft. home in the most wealthy (ish) nation in the world.

What does America Want?

Less.

It doesn’t actually know this.

It doesn’t actually believe this when told.

But it is true. America wants less.

It Desires More. 

But that Desire for “something more” is a bottomless pit of dissatisfaction.

Less.

Less: work, stuff, noise.

(The family from Ohio wants that too. They have everything in the U.S. they could dream of, but now that they’ve fulfilled their desires, they still hear the siren call of less: to something quieter. Simpler. Where they can hear the waves, they can walk to the market, and where their sons can share a room. And with a few less throw pillows.)

Question: What would you like less of?

–
This post is From September’s BIG QUESTION series, asking: “What does America want?” Please feel free to answer at will, here, there and anywhere!

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August retreats.
It hands us back the year.

Summer isn’t truth, but it is
(as Harris Telemacher recites)
“What we wish were true.”

So many of us
Shove out this
Season of perspiration, lazily
Forgetting how it
Slows us
Beguiles us
Presses us to hold still
Find the windy spaces
With a friend
In the lustre of the
Earth as it
Rots away
Happily. On comes the
Harvest and the rush of
Putting it all away.

Yet one more hour won’t you
Come and sit with me
In the shade before it
Cools. Time is
Hot berries
Unwilling
Yet ready to burst.

—

Hey, be sure to come back tomorrow for the beginning of the “Big Question” series, asking “What does America Want?” — a series of post, ponderings, guest podcasts, and thoughts on one Big Question, in the month of September. See you…

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Here’s what keeps happening… I keep getting self-conscious and don’t want to say anything so I stay quiet.

Then something like a week passes and I think: what happened to that time? Oh my goodness, if I am just quiet, if I don’t say anything, what meaning does it all have?!

How can I remember the beautiful moments, the hilarious things said (“Mom, look. I have bird poop on my finger! How did it get there?“) if I am so quiet?

I am looking up, very busy, and I don’t have time to stop and scribble, to note the sound of the cicadas in the maple on this cool, breezy Saturday.

I don’t have time to remind myself how much I love living at the break in the esplanade, because it means hearing the cars slow, pause, wheels resist the ground, and break apart the rubber, sighing as they U-turn.

I am slicing this watermelon and chunking it and putting its body in a plastic box for later. I don’t have time to note the feel of the knife resisting the thick rind, wondering how the rind was imagined first, and the artist’s eye who made the flesh bright red.

Those trees have something to say to me, but I am very very busy sweeping white sand from Dubai off my screen porch!

How can I leave a week go by and bear to do all this laundry?

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… we don’t know
Anything about each other.
Curving leaves
Hidden roots
One long dead
Stem.
How much
Attention
Does she need?

Day 25, A River of Stones

No related posts.

Google+ is now a part of my life. I am mostly thrilled to add it to my collection of ways to communicate with people I know and don’t know online. These also include:

• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Picasa
• Flickr
• WordPress
• Blogger
• Facebook
• Gmail
• Digg

No related posts.

Eyes fixed on mine,
Nearly.
Chin cupped into
Palm.
Furrowed brow,
“Huh.”
Call and response.
You listen.
You don’t agree.

Day 12, July A River of Stones

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