You Can't Hug Gift Wrap

Low-money, High-meaning

I struggle with gift-giving every year, and as the years go by, I do less and less of it. We all have so much stuff. More just adds to the clutter. All of that clutter comes right out of the earth and then leaves huge carbon and garbage footprints behind. And, do all of those gifts really make you feel happier? If they do, that's great. But if you want to spice up your regular gift-giving or replace it all together, here are some wacky ideas you might want to try.

I developed many of these ideas for my sister's family, with whom I celebrate Hanukkah, which I celebrate better than I spell. I'll give suggestions for adapting these ideas for non-Jews. My sister's family is strung across the United States, so these ideas also focus on how to share experiences via social networks and technologies. However, these, too are adaptable, for low-tech folks. Please post a comment on this post if you try one of these ideas. Let me know how it went.

Please note: Get someone to create a Facebook page for your family's holiday activities if you try any of my suggestions. You'll need a place where you can post and view photos from each other and comment on the activities you choose to do.

Remember, I've already said "wacky." If you are looking for dignity, go somewhere else! Here we go...

Phone Chain. Organize a phone chain by alphabetical order of first names (or age, or location, whatever) for sharing something specific, like something you love about the callee. The first person calls the second person and tells him or her what makes him or her great, the second person calls the third, and so on. At the end, scramble up the names for another round of calls. Scramble the names for every night of Hanukkah (or 12 Nights of Christmas?), using topics like a favorite memory, things that made you jealous, if that person were a tree what kind would he or she be...be creative. Post or Tweet comments to each other if you want.

Sharing a meal. Pick one night of Hanukkah (or other holiday date, like Christmas Eve). Make sure that everyone in your group is eating the exact same food at the exact same time that day no matter what the time zone. Post photos of yourself eating for everyone else to see. Anything from Big Macs to fruit cake would be acceptable, as long as you are all together.

Holiday Collage. Have everyone take a photo of lighting the Menorah (can’t spell this very well either) or doing some other holiday ritual, like hanging a stocking on the mantle. Post the photos for each other. See if someone in your family has the talent to convert the photos into a family collage.

Give a Gift to a Stranger Day. Give something away--a dozen cookies, a pair of gloves, a snow globe--use your imagination--to a stranger. Just tell them it is "Give a Gift to a Stranger Day" to celebrate the holidays. How did it turn out? Any surprises? Share comments on Facebook, Twitter, or by email. (Or tell the next person on your  nightly phone chain about it!)

Random Acts of Kindness Day. This is a variation of giving a gift to a stranger. For a whole day you'll have to keep your radar out for ways to be kind. Have everyone keep track of and share the experience. How much good will can you generate as a family?

Remember When... Have each person write down a few Hanukkah (or Christmas, or Dewali, or Ramadan, or...) memories to make a little booklet. I bet someone in your family can use a graphics program to put a polish on the final product. And surely someone knows how to scan old photos into the mix.

Unity Feast Un-united. This idea is purely for the wackiness of it all. It makes no sense. I love it. Each family member is assigned to make one dish for the feast. But, since you can't be together, you'll only get to eat the one dish you fix. (You can snack later.) Like, one person does latkes, but that’s all that person gets to eat. Other people have dessert or a salad, but that’s all they get to eat. And so on. Eat this meal on the same night. You could try Skyping together as you eat. Post photos.

Wackiness Against the Machines. Call a vending service person to complain that your money won't fit into the money slot. Make the technician pull the fact out of you that you are trying to buy a diet coke with Hanukkah gelt (chocolate money wrapped in gold foil). Share your experiences. I know this is a bit mean, but humor can be ugly. Please don't call a service technician out of bed at midnight on Christmas Eve when there is a blizzard just to do this. Or, OK, go ahead.

Wackiness Against the Machines (a kinder version). Stand at a vending machine till someone comes along and then try to get the Hanukkah gelt to go in the slot and complain about it to the person waiting for you to finish. It's up to you what tack to take--puzzled, angry, surprised. I guess you could try fake (children's) toy money, but that could get you arrested. As usual, chocolate is always a good fallback position.

Three-Way. Get your mind out of the bedroom, I'm talking about phone calls. Do a three-way Skype (or other videophone technology) and try to sing a song together (something a little more complex than the Dreidel song--I recommend the Hallelujah Chorus). I suspect that some laughter might ensue therefrom.

Skype With Puppets. I've just recently had my first Jetsonesque videophone experience and I keep thinking of bizarre things to do. So, make sock puppets, or brown paper bag puppets, or just draw lips with a red pen on your thumb and forefinger. (No, you do not have permission to go to Pinterest for instructions. Use Google like regular people.) At the Skype time, have the puppets talk to each other on camera. I don't know what will happen.

Fright Makeup. Likewise, you have my permission to apply fright makeup before Skyping with your parents, no matter how old you or they are.

Do Good With Money (Real, not Chocolate).  Pick a particular charity and see how many donations your family can generate in a single day using your various networks—email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, phone, knocking on doors, begging at bus stations. Have people donate in honor of a departed loved one or a famous hero like Rosa Parks or Harvey Milk. May I recommend Outreach International (outreach-international.org/) if you don’t have a charity in mind? This is actually a socially responsible suggestion--how did it sneak in here?

Chocolate Money Attack. Go out on purpose to put Hanukkah gelt into Salvation Army bellringers’ buckets. You decide whether to sneak it in or do it for all to see. Share your experiences. Have a handful of (real) coins or a five-dollar bill ready to sooth any bristled feelings and provide plausible deniability. "Oh, that's right, I keep the real money in my other pocket!" Remember, they're not called "army" for nothing'.

Be extravagant. Do a nightly Skype call to discuss anything you’ve been doing. You can even Skype together as you light your Menorahs every night, or as you open a window on your advent calendar.

Rewrite. Change the words of a popular holiday tune or verse to describe your family. For my family, we'd have to find rhymes for outrageous, talkative, and loyal (of course, royal). You are only limited by your personal tolerance for weirdness.

SIDEBAR: THE SOLSTICE

The winter solstice occurs on December 21 or 22. Every year. It's not something to believe in, like a religious faith. It's an event that happens and has happened every year of your life. The darkness is over! The sunshine is returning! This is my favorite event of the winter. Go druid. Affix leaves to your gonads and run around on a hillside. Just have a party. Turn on every light in your house. Put on suntan lotion on spec.

To me, the solstice is also a reminder of the strange coincidence that allows life to exist on earth--if the earth tilted a little more or a little less, or if it orbited a little closer or a little farther from its star, we wouldn't be here. We wouldn't be here to marvel at ourselves, to tremble with outrage, to cry with sorrow, to feel like the most important thing in the whole universe, to gawk, to wonder, to love. We wouldn't be here to be wacky and then recognize our own wackiness, and then laugh uproariously, and then to reflect on it. I'm glad we're here on our little blue marble in space.

SIDEBAR: KINDNESS ECONOMY

Kindness is one of the few things you can give away that actually enriches you--and as you spend kindness, the amount of kindness in the world actually increases. It's not like spending money with its scarcity--if I have more someone else has less. And you count kindness to any living thing or to our planet itself as kindness. I invite you to join me in promoting the giving of kindness. Here's one way to work it.

1. Consciously plan to do one nice thing for someone, do it, and say to yourself, “This kindness is my gift to [recipient’s name here].” The target of the kindness is not the recipient--the recipient is your loved one for whom you normally buy a commercial gift.

2. Then, write down what you did and send it to the recipient you chose. His or her heart will be warmed with the thought that kindness is increasing and that you have good values!

3. Your kindness doesn’t need to be a deprivation or a sacrifice. It doesn’t have to entail great planning or expense. And it doesn’t have to cost anything at all.

Your kindness won’t clutter up or pollute our Earth. I guarantee that it will be just exactly the right style, size and color. It will be a gift of your heart that warms the hearts of others. If you plan to give a gift for the holidays this year, make it a gift from the kindness economy.

SIDEBAR: TOURIST DESTINATION LANDFILL

Yes, you can arrange tours of your local landfill for your family, usually by contacting the solid waste authority in your area or the owner of the landfill if it is private. One year I toured the Franklin County Landfill--the largest artificial structure in the state of Ohio. It is acres and acres of garbage...and not garbagy garbage like banana peels and apple cores and chicken bones. Most of the garbage is stuff, just stuff, or stuff that stuff was sold in, stuff that might have been gifts. And much of it is in perfectly good condition. I saw whole buildings dumped into the landfill, not even chunked up much. I saw a huge amount of recyclables. That's what I saw. Ask what I smelled! Ask about the flock of sea gulls that have adapted to living at the landfill because of the good eats. Next, ask what I didn't see--the thousands or millions of cubic yards of buried garbage.

The landfill was fascinating. Turns out, it's not the giant compost pile we are led to believe, in which garbage will gradually biodegrade into mulch. It's more like a series of gigantic Ziploc bags--pockets of garbage hermetically sealed in plastic. The whole landfill is lined with nonporous clay and other materials that ensure that no leakage occurs. In a poem, I refer to the landfill as a huge pile of MREs (the military's "meals-ready-to-eat" bags of food) for future generations. (Future generations refers to your own children and grandchildren--yes, those kids right there.)

OK, so I ranted. But you'll be glad you went if you go.

Sample Chapters from Joy's Novel

Here are two chapters from my strange novel called Long Arm of Not the Law. The novel ranges across time and space and has many strands--maybe too many. I'm not editing yet, though. I'm just trying to get material out of my head and on to the screen. In the book, these two chapters will be separated from each other. You meet the chapter's main personality in the first one and then later revisit her. Remember that this book is set up as a series of vignettes more than as a traditional narrative. Enjoy.


CONTRABAND
          All was dark but for a single candle flame. The light mainly served to emphasize the darkness. Sounds gave shape to it, set it in motion.
          A rustling, a muffled cry: “Ouch!”
          A rustling, a whisper: “Hush up.”
          The sounds, the words, and now your ears can see the shapes in the dark, though the dark has not lifted. And the skin can see also, see shapes by subtle changes in pressure and the waft of the faintest breath. The dark has people in it.
          A whisper: “Mama, how long we been here?”
          A whisper: “Jonah, count the marks.”
          And Jonah feels with his fingers the marks he has made each time the upstairs woman brought food. Two marks. His stomach tells him that it is almost time for the third.
          A whisper: “I count two, Mama. And we ought to get victuals soon now. That‘s three.”
          The space smelled of sweat, earth, fresh-dug potatoes, human waste. The woman who brought food also replaced the slops bucket.
          A whisper: “Can’t be much longer before we leave, Jonah.”
          A whisper: “The lord knows, Mama.”

          Later, which is how they measured time, you could hear footsteps and the rusty cellar doors screeched open. Light flooded the dug out room, revealing at last to the eyes the room’s inhabitants. Four people rose to their feet, a teen-age girl, skinny as a seedling, trembling like a leaf; a man with an ageless face but grizzled hair whom the girl hid behind; a young man who had not yet grown into his height; and a woman, also ageless, who held a sleeping child in her arms. This was Mama. She stood in front of the others. She was their speaker. She had served in the house, in the main house, and knew how to talk to white people.
          Two white people came into the room instead of just the woman. A man carried an armload of clothes and a lantern. The woman carried a bucket of water in one hand and a bucket of what looked like stew in the other. No one spoke until the doors clanged closed.
          The white woman spoke to the black woman. “Tonight is your night. The arrangements are made.” She set the buckets on a stack of firewood. “Eat up. We’ll tell you what to do while you eat.” The white woman took some clothing off of the man’s pile. “Make sure each of you gets some warm clothing.”
          The four inhabitants of the cellar gathered around the buckets, taking turns dipping individual spoons into the stew and sharing a tin cup dipped over and over again into the water bucket. Behind them, their hosts began shifting a pile of potatoes. It was embarrassing to have these white people serving them food and emptying their slops and now laboring over the potatoes. Only Mama was brave enough to talk to them. She was spooning stew into the little one. They took turns running their fingers around the inside of the bucket, then licking off the stew they gathered in this way. Food was a hope in this underworld, this underworld of escape. They would eat every single drop.

          This word, escape, and the name of the place to which they fled, freedom, thrilled through them, tingled, generated just enough allure to overcome fear. Now they got down to work with the whites--another novelty--and got the potatoes moved, and at the bottom of the wall there were two boards wedged against the wall with rocks. The white man and Jonah pushed the rocks aside and let the boards fall. Now they could all see it--a tunnel.

          “It’s tight,” the white woman said. “But keep going. Keep going and you will be all right. You’ll come out in a corn field.”
          The escapees watched the woman’s face, drew her words deep inside.
          “You should see a string of white diapers hanging on the clothesline. If you don’t see the diapers, come back here.” She spoke directly to Mama. “You must see the diapers.”
          Mama nodded and said, “No diapers, come back here.”
          “Right. Walk as fast as you can to the clothesline and go into the barn.” She looked down at her hands. “That’s all I know. Just go into the barn.”
          Mama nodded again. “Go into the barn. Yes.”

          The white woman said, “Gather up a wrap and get going.” She helped Mama into a hooded cape. “Go with god. We will pray for your safe journey.”

          “Thank you, ma’am. You have been kind to us and you didn’t have to be.”

          “Yes, I did.”

          And thus did four people and one child escaping slavery move under the town of Maple Hills and into the night. Mrs. Buttersby’s husband had already replaced the boards. She stooped and started shifting the potatoes back to where they had been.

LIBERATION SHE’LL BE
          Mama Libby looked around her home and lowered her chin in a satisfied nod. The floor was swept. The cooking things were washed and stowed on hand-hewn oak shelves, firelight throwing the pocked bottoms of cast iron skillets into high relief on the wall by the hearth. It was all clean, but the smell of bacon and toasted bread had not been scrubbed from the room along with the soot and particulates that were the flotsam and jetsam of her rural neighborhood. The families who lived in this row of a dozen frame-built houses were workers--farmhands, drivers, mill workers, cleaners, street sweepers. Her own elderly father was a blacksmith, with Jonah 'prenticing. How different it was now for the fruits of his labors--coins and bills and good will--to come home from work with him instead of being usurped by white people who claimed to own not just the fruits of his labors but him also. He had been a piece of equipment subject to depreciation and resale like any other.
          And the equipment was not invented yet to describe the equipment Mama had been in the white people’s wealth machine (vacuum cleaner, wash machine, sewing machine, dishwasher, Formula 409). And, oh yes, brood mare. Two of Mama’s children had been taken away, sold away from her for good cash money, one to South Carolina and the other in Mississippi, she thought, but she didn’t really know. She still carried the hope that someday maybe they could be together--someday right here in THIS world, right here in Battle Creek, Michigan, not on some shimmery-vague heavenly shore. She wanted to see them while they still had bodies to hug, hair to braid, hands to hold, laughter to share. She wanted to see their earthly selves and make sure they knew they were still a part of her. She sighed and took one more swipe at the dishpan with the hem of her apron.
          As it often did, the sight of her own clean kitchen called out memories of other kitchens, other rooms. She remembered the clay-lined fireplace of her quarters (not home) on the white people’s property, remembered making the rice allotment stretch by cooking in the hulls of the peas she had cleaned for her owner’s dinner and adding in new greens from dandelions her father picked on his way home from the forge.
         She remembered the vaulted plantation house kitchen with its immense brick fireplace, about as much floor space in the fireplace as in her slave quarters and the brick ovens and the water pumped right into the sink basin hewn from solid granite. She remembered rows of wooden buckets, rows of hams hanging from meat hooks, salt-skinned and solid, stacks of plates--everyday stoneware, company china, special event Limoge, and the worn wooden plates reserved for her and the other enslaveds.
          And frequently, she thought of that dug out room with the one candle, smelling of slops and stew, perspiration, potatoes, and earth. The room of the shapes in the dark, the squeaking cellar doors, the narrow tunnel. She thought of the woman who brought food, who thought about the cold wind, who opened herself to the dangerous labor of furthering freedom.
          Mama had renamed herself when she arrived in Battle Creek, into freedom. She introduced herself as Libby now and people thought it stood for Elizabeth, but really it stood for Liberation. And she gave her last name now as Shelby, which stood to her for “she’ll be.” Liberation she’ll be.” It brought a giggle into her throat to say it, a gorgeous feeling of sheer life, full life. Libby Shelby. She had always been called Maddy before freedom, a corruption of the word maid, not the name Madelaine.
          Libby was working now as a teacher. She had taught herself to read by scheduling the cleaning of the nursery during the tutor’s visit. When the room cleared out, Libby would reverently touch the cloth reader, trace the half-erased letters on the slate. Learning to read was Libby’s first radical act, the first heavy door she dragged open for herself. She couldn’t get enough and started to sneak books and newspapers out from the main house--which would have demoted her to field work if she were caught--or to the auction block. Reading was how Libby learned about freedom--not the elusive, reached-only-by-death freedom of the songs and scriptures she knew, but real freedom in a a real place in real time. She started to dream, to have words for her dreams, to have words for her anger and her pain. By the light from a tallow candle, she taught her father to read, and her daughter--the only one of her children left to her--and to Jonah, who became part of their family. Now she was teaching her daughter’s child in the frame schoolhouse in town with the pot-bellied stove that gulped coal and the chalkboard of slate that stretched the whole length of the room.
          They were four generations in that dugout basement room, four generations united in the goal to be free. They were all Shelbys now, Pa, Mara, Jonah, and baby Truth, named after Battle Creek’s famous resident Sojourner Truth.
          Libby had backtracked as best she could to trace the path her family had taken to freedom. Every year on the anniversary of her escape, she trekked south a bit, through Michigan and into Ohio, to find the places and people who had helped her family escape. She had made it as far south as Lancaster, Ohio, but there the trail went cold. No one could tell her about that woman in the earthen basement or the clothesline of bleached diapers glowing in the night, or the horse and wagon that had waited in the barn that carried them onward to where they could be free. And she was scared to go closer to the Ohio river. The South had long arms for escapees. She would not go to the river.