This is a picture of one of my favorite snowflake designs. Snip. Snip. Snip. It's more complicated than it looks and every year I forget how it's done and I have to figure it out all over again. I like the thin delicate points to the snowflake. The little red basket has sausage biscuits in it and toasted pecans and chocolate chip cookies. There's a basket sitting beside me. The contents are back in the freezer and the snowflake is still attached. Hopefully, I'll get to Trezvant Manor later in the week to deliver it.



This is another doorway in Savannah. I don't know exactly what it is about doorways. Frankly, my front door is practically invisible because we have a screen door over it. I need to replace that door with a better looking one. I have to have a screen door, though. There's something in my core that would be lonely in the spring if I couldn't open the door and let the fresh air come in and let Blue (our big dog) stand there and watch squirrels and birds and people passing by. But doorways create mystery and intrigue; you don't get the whole picture when you look at a doorway, you get a taste. It's just enough to make me want to imagine what's inside or what's gone on behind it.

My favorite window in Savannah, maybe in the whole wide world.


I forced Billy to walk up these stairs. You can almost see the joy on his face as he hoists himself upwards.

We got to Savannah at about 6 o'clock pm on Christmas Day. The flight there was awful. I've never been so scared on a plane. I'm telling you, for the record, I just want to "go" fast. No drowning, no suffocating, no free fall from a bridge or tall building; an explosion is ok, as long as I'm instantly blown to bits, never knowing what hit me. So when there's turbulence and I'm in a plane, the thing I'm mainly concerned about is knowing ahead of time it's gonna happen, but not knowing how. Just give me an explosion, that's all I'm saying, fast and fatal.


I had never been to Savannah. Everybody raves about it, justifiably so. It is beautiful. I read the book, of course. I even met a guy when I was waiting tables at Huey's, who knew, personally, the Lady Chablis. The Lady Chablis, for anyone who doesn't remember or hasn't read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
is a character in the book, an African American female impersonator.

Frankly, I was a little disappointed. Savannah seems like a stage set to me. There were tourists everywhere (as if I weren't) and things were really clean and orderly. Nobody but I could complain about a place being too clean. It's just that years ago, I remember, even before the book came out, you'd hear about all the heroin addicts in the squares in Savannah and that it was a rundown, dangerous, spooky place. Now that's the kind of place I like. I only missed it by about 25 years.

Sam, my son, lives there. Sarah, my oldest daughter, came up from New Orleans and stayed with Sam in his apartment. My ex-husband, Jimmy, had spent Christmas with them earlier in the week. He had left Savannah as Billy and I were arriving.

I have a budget for my kids at Christmas. Sarah wanted to buy Sam an "Ipod Touch" for Christmas. It runs about $300.00. So she donated her Christmas present money and I put into Sam's birthday present money (December 18th) and we bought it for him. He was stunned. STUNNED. He's a bit sarcastic. Sometimes, it's difficult for him to be serious about anything; consequently, it's a real thrill to catch him speechless. He was totally surprised because he thought he was getting some kind of Nintendo game, not a state-of-the-art Ipod with internet connection. Sarah told me later he played with his new Ipod the entire day and night after we left.

The first morning we were there we ate at a place on the river called Huey's. After breakfast, Billy went back to the hotel and I called Sam and Sarah. We spent the day together walking around Savannah. I wanted to go to the Telfair Museum but they'd have none of it. Actually, Sam lives there but he doesn't take the time to just spend the day walking around and he had to go to work the next day so we decided that it would be best to do whatever he wanted. That's what we did, just walked around together, the three of us.

Here they are, Sarah and Sam standing in front of the Johnny Mercer house which was the center of the action of the book. The children tolerate my picture-taking only moderately well.


We went to all of these little shops and I bought several Christmas items. I love buying stuff I don't need when it's 50% to 75% off. It was pleasurable to browse. I don't do that much unless I'm on vacation. I'm not a shopper and I'm not being self-righteous, either. In fact, I need to shop for things for my house: a shower curtain, curtains for the bedroom, lamps and other things, but I don't like to do it because I want to spend my time doing other things that are far more useless like reading or walking my dogs or cooking, flitting away the hours.

But,I think shopping has value anthropologically. It's a great way to understand or try to understand the nature of a place. What the shops have reflects what the people who own the shops think they can sell there. Not that I need to give everything I do value or purpose, but I haven't traveled very much in my life. Since Billy and I married it seems that we travel fairly often. One of the joys of going somewhere is buying something on the trip and bringing it home and placing it somewhere in the house. Then everytime you look at it you remember the place and what was unique about it and the good times you had there. Not only that, but if it's unique and draws attention to itself, someone might ask you about it. "Oh, that's really a neat looking whateveritis." And there you have the perfect opening to say, "Oh I got that in Mexico; we went down there for a wedding." All these memories flood into your mind just at the mention of the "whateveritis." It's better than photographs for me, or at least as good.

We walked and walked for hours, 4 hours or more. I had to listen to Sam and Sarah fight just like they were 7-year-olds, "...wahwahwahwahwah, Mama, Sam hit me, mama tell sam to leave me alone I didn't do anything she's always telling on me when I didn't do anything she started it just shut up Sam you shut up Sarah you're always wahwahwahwahwah..." I must confess, it's music to my ears to listen to them. It makes me so happy that they love each other and care enough about each other to beat each other up.

We went into all these really pleasing shops. The colors were white and brown, I mean the memory of the colors of the shops is white and grayish brown. The shelves were bulging with beautiful earth-toned objects and the shops were so pleasant and so filled with beauty and beautiful things it was almost like being in museums. The objects for sale reflected the old Southern seaport eye of the city itself.

Well, this went on, as I said, for hours, and when we were ready to go our separate ways to get ready for supper I realized that I'd lost my camera. It wasn't in my backpack or my purse or in any of the sacks of "objects" I'd bought. My camera was a gift from Billy and I'm really fond of it. Not only that but I had tons of pictures on it that I hadn't downloaded. I really was not looking forward to breaking the news to Billy that we had to shell out more cash to buy a new one.

We had to backtrack. That's just what we did. We went back to every place we'd entered in the prior 4 hours. Whew! And as we paced through the gloomy, gray December streets of Savannah there was a cloud over us. I don't know why exactly, but I was upset and saddened as I went through in my mind what it would be like not to have my camera, especially where my blog is concerned. It just wouldn't be the same without the pictures.

As scatterbrained as I am, I rarely lose things. There's usually someone, some guardian angel following behind me who actually likes to help people like me, people who put the tag down at the back of my sweater or roll their window down at the stoplight to tell me my gas cap is open; you know, "Mam, did you drop this?" or, "Here's your purse, don't forget your purse!" as they chase me out the restaurant door. I have lived a charmed life, but this time, things weren't so charming.

Every store we went into the person behind the counter said, "Camera? Sorry, haven't seen one."

We must have gone into 5 or 6 stores and a museum looking for it and I'd given up. There was one more shop to go.

We walked in and they saw us coming. "Oh, I'm so glad you came back! I saw you all come in and you were all looking around, you went downstairs and when you came back up I noticed that you weren't carrying your camera. You just put it down on a table. I was afraid you wouldn't come back for it!"

This young guardian angel was beaming with pride at having passed his "Who's taking care of Melinda today?" test. He passed with flying colors and somewhere a bell was ringing.

That's how I got a smile out of Sam. He was relieved that I'd found my camera and relieved that I wasn't going to cry and feel really bad about myself. We left the store and I got some stranger to take our picture. See how happy he is?

"Why do I do this to myself every year?" It is a great mystery, why people celebrate. As you may or may not know, I think it's important to celebrate. I look back on the essay I wrote two years ago. I started writing it one morning soon after New Year's Day. I was totally exhausted. I was extremely stressed because we'd just moved into this house a month before and I had to get us all moved in, unpacking boxes, hanging pictures, arranging furniture in a strange house.

It's really hard trying to figure out where your stuff is going to fit into a new space. It was my 6th move in three years. That was probably especially hard on me because I'd only lived in two houses my entire life before that; the house I was born in and the house I moved into right after my first marriage. Gypsy I was not. I am a person of roots and staying. So I was disoriented that year. I was also hurting. I was in pain because of my children and the adjustments they were having to make because of my new marriage. They were angry. They were forced to feel a lot of the pain that they'd been able to keep at a distance before, the pain of imperfect parents who lived imperfectly in an imperfect world.

The children were coming for Christmas and I wanted everything to be as much like their old Christmases as possible. So for 4 weeks, from Thanksgiving when we moved in, until Christmas when they arrived, I was manic -- racing around the house at all hours of the day and night hanging pictures, moving furniture, putting down rugs, buying curtains, trying to make this house look like we'd lived here 20 years instead of 20 days.

Billy watched all of this mania. Frankly, we didn't know each other all that well. We'd only dated 7 weeks before we married and we had a lot of complex relationship issues to deal with that can only be understood as it's unveiled at its own time. So as I was in this frantic mode of behavior and he was watching, he would think, "Her children already love her; why does she do all this stuff?"

I can only say that I felt like I was falling off the planet and making Christmas warm and meaningful for my children was the only thing that was going to keep me from slipping into total darkness. Even I don't understand it, but I do know it's true.

It was after that Christmas that I sat down to write my This I Believe essay. I was trying to explain to myself why I'd gone to such lengths, such extraordinary lengths, to make sure the table was set with the china they'd grown up with, the apricot cresent was hot from the oven on Christmas morning, the house was a place that invited them, welcomed them.



So, as the holiday season draws to a close this year there are a few things that stand out to me. I think one of the biggest contrasts is the way Billy sees me. He's told me over and over, every day since the 1st of December as I've gone about my frantic rush, "I tell you, it's a joy to watch you. You really squeeze more out of this celebration than anybody I have ever seen."

That is a great gift to me. There are negative sides of being known, especially if you're me. But there is that positive side, the side that Billy can only see and understand in the complicated context of my life as a whole, unhidden, unguarded, with the people I love, my children, my neighbors, my friends, my begonias, my dogs, my Fred's Dollar Store Christmas cups.

If I sat down to write that essay today, it would be totally different. It wouldn't have the anger that needed to be toned down. It wouldn't have the "By God, I'm not crazy. I HAVE TO DO THIS SO GET OUT OF MY WAY!!!!; themes that were underneath and hidden in The Designated Celebrator.

I went with the flow. I let some of my dreams die, some of them I kept. All in all, these are happy times for me. These are days of safety and comfort and if you've existed in days and times that weren't that way, you appreciate the difference. I guess that's what I've been writing about. I'm not so afraid any more. I feel loved and cared for. I feel happier than I ever believed possible about my children. They've grown and I've grown. I bask in their love for me. It sustains me. I jump for joy in the way they've grown to love and respect Billy and I am amazed at the way his love has grown toward them.

Enough! Now I'm going to write about what we actually did this Christmas!