Scout Moves

As is our family tradition, we spent Christmas in the Atlanta suburbs with my sisters and mother—we’ve been doing this for years, with everyone making an effort to spend at least two days together over Christmas Eve and Christmas day, and most years it’s the only time all four of the Wells Girls are together. This year, Melanie from Chicago, the other Yankee, was absent, but we still had a great time. We kept a wary eye on the weather forecast for Ohio, though, because a big storm was predicted with lots of snow and wind, and this storm was due to hit on the day we were scheduled to fly home. On Tuesday evening, we decided to reschedule our flight for Thursday morning to avoid spending hours in the airport, and it turned out to be a good call. Our original flight was canceled, and the Thursday flight took off and landed like clockwork. So, what to do with the extra day, we asked ourselves, with the presents exchanged and the food eaten and the movie seen—as my mother’s gift to us al

Low-carb be damned—I just had one of the last pieces of a yule log, or Bûche de Noël. It’s a French dessert that’s basically a roll cake made to look like a log for the Christmas fire. I started making these for my family for Christmas several years ago, but I haven’t had an occasion in recent years. Then I remembered the orchestra board’s December meeting is a Christmas party with food, so I got to work making food art. You start by baking a large, thin sponge cake. After it cools, you cover it with an espresso cream filling and roll it up. You cut off one end at a diagonal for a stubby branch and decorate it all with chocolate frosting. You can apply the frosting roughly to look like bark, or you can apply it smoothly and use a knife or fork to carve in wood grain. In past years, I have melted chocolate, chilled it, and broken it into bark shavings to layer on top of the frosting for added effect. This year, I followed the part of the recipe I have always ignored and made the

Christmas time is here. Happiness and cheer. Time for all that children call… I could go on. I know people who firmly believe Christmas is just one day or that Christmas is a series of days following a strict Christian tradition of festival observances that have been made up and modified over the centuries. But to me, it’s Christmas Time. It lasts for weeks, and it begins and ends when I feel like it. I’ve been feeling like it for a couple of weeks, with a tree and cookies and Charles Shultz characters swirling on ice and singing “Snowflakes in the air. Carols everywhere. Olden times and ancient rhymes of love and dreams to share.” With all of this nostalgic tradition I have collected, though, I must say the highlight so far has been last night’s orchestra concert, our annual Christmas concert we call “Yuletide Celebration.” We have created our own tradition for this thing—a community children’s chorus and the Tom Paxton song, “The Marvelous Toy.” Last night, we also performed some

It’s early morning, and I’m sitting in the quiet of my living room with a restful puppy (read 68-pound dog) at my feet, and I’m gazing wistfully at my Christmas tree. When I was a kid, my sisters and I called this Tree Time. It’s like meditation but with no spiritual significance or even Zen benefit. It’s just a matter of admiring the lights, the drape of the garland, the shadows reflected on the ceiling, the placement of favorite ornaments and rolling all of that into a sense of peace and calm. Well, I guess there is a little Zen to it after all. As kids, we would turn off all the lights but the tree lights, lie on the floor and concentrate on the shadows, fixing our gaze so that the tree would be blurred, and the shapes it reflected on the walls and ceiling would be in focus. Or we would look through the tree from the ground up and let our imaginations soar with the world we could dream up—what miniature realities go on in those branches when we aren’t looking, we’d wonder. I

Everybody loves a parade. Right? Isn’t that what they say? They say that because they haven’t been in the one I was in this past weekend. If they had been, they’d say something else, like “Everybody loves to be out of the rain,” or “Everybody loves things to work according to plan.” Everybody loves not being bombarded with a series of unfortunate events. Small Town and the like have these lovely Christmas parades, with lighted floats and the town squares full of happy people, hot chocolate, tree lighting ceremonies. You get the idea. Last year, I thought it would be great if the orchestra were to participate in these parades. We’re always talking about how to get the attention of the community, so I say get involved in the community outside of the hall. Make yourself be seen in a way that doesn’t necessarily mean people have to buy tickets to see you, and then maybe that will translate into people actually buying tickets to see you. I suspect they forget we’re here because we only p

A new experience—a first—I joined a community chorus yesterday to perform selections from Handel’s Messiah . The Tuscarawas Philharmonic performs this every other year or so using a community chorus, and because demand for the Messiah is smaller than for other music, and since it’s specifically religious, the orchestra performs it in a local church. This year, it was free as a gift to the community, thanks to corporate sponsors who pitched in to cover the cost. Handel didn’t write horn parts for Messiah , so I have only experienced it from the audience, but this year, a few friends from the chorus encouragement me to join them. I grew up singing with my sisters and in church, and I used to sing in the church choir back in my previous life, so singing isn’t new to me. Singing what you might call “formal” music with parts more complicated than chord harmonies is new, and I was out of my element. Everyone knows the key phrases from Messiah , like you know the opening notes from Bee