It's Complicated

Dear Blog Reader.

I hope that this finds you doing well. I am fine. Thank you for all of the positive feedback about the 2016 Christmas Letter. It is always fun to collaborate with the lovely Miss Beverly. Usually, I write with very little revision (laziness). Thankfully, the lovely Miss Beverly didn't want the Christmas letter to go out the door without our best efforts. She did such a great job polishing and adding a great amount of sizzle to the initial words and ideas first spewed onto the screen.

Two weeks down 50 more to go. We finally took down the Christmas tree last week. Thankfully, we had not made a resolution to get it down on New Years day. That would have been a complete fail. We started. We took all of the ornaments off, wrapped them up and banished them behind the cold, but soon to be stifling hot, knee wall space in the attic. Christmas ornaments are long suffering. They wait patiently behind that knee wall freezing in winter and sweltering from April through October. Then in December we take them out and bring them into the environmentally controlled space of our life. They take center stage. They reveal the phases of our lives.

The first round, those wooden, poorly glued, lead painted, creepy ones, are nearly gone. They entered our married life first. Newly married in a town with a new Sam's club, they were an impulse buy when we realized how empty our first tree would be. Only a couple of that 24 pack remain. The freezing and thawing cycles loosened most of their glue joints and they have been replaced by better made ornaments from children and various handy people in our lives.

We have the macaroni on a cardboard, spray painted gold, preschool projects. They take  prominent places near the bottom of the tree where stronger branches can hold their one pound of glue. There will be no glue failure here. Every year the school picture, being transformed with glitter and a bit of string into a guilded pathway thru childhood into the teen age years, has added to our ornament arsenal. There are the painted Santa spindles made by a friend who had gotten a lathe and turned dozens of spindles a little fat in the middle and of various lengths. They are some of my favorites.

There are chickens of various shapes and sizes; a testament to an incorrectly identified hobby of collecting chicken figurines. It was an honest mistake. We lived on a farm. We raised chickens. All of the Christmas letters has chicken stories in them. The lovely Miss Beverly finding a vintage chicken target game, to replace the one she had growing up, was the kicker. Yes, the chicken figurine fever burned hot and for many years. Dare I call it the chicken pox phase of our life. We have all kinds of chickens; glass chickens, skiing chickens, chickens with funny glasses and stars on springs shooting out everywhere. We even have a miniature version of the classic rubber chicken. Can you imagine that at one time in America, dressing our own chickens was so ubiquitous that it could become a gag that would be universally recognized?

All of the chickens, Santas, pictures, macaroni collages, commemorative college bulbs were put away (the IU bulb a bit roughly) on January 1. The memories going back in the box were as strong as when they came out of the box three weeks earlier. That said, we did not take down the tree. No, the lovely Miss Beverly and I have an affinity for a plain lit unadorned tree. It is very simple. The white lights on a fragrant green tree does try to push back the long cold darkness of December and January. In fact a couple of years ago, we became a couple of a certain age (read the Christmas letter for a more complete explanation) that lost the will to decorate the tree after getting the lights on that first weekend of December. It stood there ablaze in white light without a single decoration. Even the angel on top was banished to the decoration box that stood ready at the bottom of the tree for two weeks while Bev and I marveled at how much we liked our unadorned tree. It was all fine and good until Grace got home from school and thankfully decorated the tree. I write thankfully because I am thankful that she didn't get out the retirement home brochures or call her brother and start planning our incarceration in the old folks home because: "They are obviously losing their marbles. They aren't even decorating the tree for God's sake." I would have been okay with just the lights (at least for that year.)

Isn't it funny? We are all experts at our perfect tree. The entire time that the tree was going up and coming down this year I was thinking artificial vs real. The lovely Miss Beverly and I grew up in live tree families. Is that a question on the premarital counseling survey? Do you believe in real or artificial trees? I believe that real trees are about the real Christmas spirit. Artificial trees? Well artificial trees are the spawn of Satan. Yes, I think that maybe this question should be answered in pre-marital counseling.

I certainly grew up during a time when it was an annual debate. I grew up in a divided family. My mom and dad were both big live tree advocates. However, both of dad's sisters were artificial adherents. Both sets of grandparents were artificial tree people. My maternal side being converted over time and my dad's mom opting for the aluminum foil tree with the rotating red, green, and yellow light. Each year it would make its way downstairs from the attic fully decorated, set up and lit by that ridiculous light whose motor, that turned the tri-color disk slowly, made a remarkable amount of noise for its size and lightness of load.

I once asked Nanny, why she didn't put the lights on that aluminum tree like everyone else. She said that people learned the hard way that aluminum "trees" are fantastic conductors of electricity. So if you put electric lights on an aluminum tree and it develops a short over time someone is going to be electrocuted. I think that by saying 'the hard way" she had read a story of said person's electrocution. Anyway in order to maintain that UL seal of approval, the Reynold aluminum foil company took the lights off of the aluminum tree and gave us the three disk light.

Yes it was an annual debate. The newspapers would be filled with opinion pieces from the realists; the trees smell better and the artificialists; you are being a poor steward of the world's natural resources by cutting down a live tree every year for 3 weeks of decorations and an artificial tree won't catch on fire with those hot bulbs that we used to have. Yes all of you millennia's out there, we used to put 200 lights, each about the size of a spot light, on our live drying out trees. They generated enough heat that natural gas suppliers around the US would notice a sizable decrease in amount of gas used to heat homes. That much heat on a tinder dry tree in a house with a relative humidity of 20%, it is going to cause a few fires. Each year we would read about this or that family who had their Christmas ruined because their tree caught fire. We would all come together and help out the family. But I could hear my aunts mutter, "it wouldn't have happened if they had an artificial tree."

The debate hung in the balance at the Sharritt house year after year. For us, it was sticking a white pine needle into our big toe in July every year. To be fair, we had 4 inch green shag carpet through out the 70's. Those needles would burrow down in there lurking until we were sure that we had dodged the bullet. Then "CRAPPPPPP! MOM I HAVE A TEN INCH NEEDLE IN MY FOOT. WHY CAN'T WE GET AN ARTIFICIAL TREE NEXT YEAR." She would answer, "take it easy. It isn't that deep. Rub some dirt on it." She would go on. "We are not getting a fake tree this year. Have you ever smelled a fake tree? Of course not, artificial trees don't smell. I love that pine smell in the house every December."

It is hard to believe that I lived during a time when real or fake trees as the great question of our time. We have certainly managed to make the world a much more complicated place.

Take care.

Roger

Sharritt's Annual Christmas Letter

Dear Sharritt friends and family,

The gifts have been unwrapped and our belts have been let out a notch or two to relieve the pressure from the great cooking and baking in an expanding assembly of family foodies.
In discussing a theme for the Christmas Letter,
the lovely Miss Beverly's mind went to three
trees that were cut down on the farm this year.

All were brought low because of things to which trees of a certain age succumb. Two of the trees were 40 foot ash trees planted by Bev and Roger the year of their engagement in 1984. Sigh. For Miss Beverly, read a sigh of melancholy, and for Roger read a sigh of contentment by the ash-stoked fire. We know, after 31 years together, how our paradox of love works. These ash fell to the Emerald Ash Borer, a shiny green beetle, that found our trees of a certain age, and found them delicious.

The other tree was a 50 year old maple that was in our yard. I mean no disrespect to my Great Aunt Mid when I write this. This tree reminds me of her. She was of a certain age where years of crossing her legs, one ankle over the other, had caused her sciatic nerve to flare and "no end of aggravation" late in life. She would shift from one hip to the other trying to get comfortable and suddenly realize that 80 years of muscle memory had crossed her ankles once again. The maple tree suffered from the same aggravation. Early in its life it got in the habit of crossing one root over another root. There were no problems early on but 40 years later that habit had robbed itself of the nutrients needed to survive on its eastern side.

The lovely Miss Beverly had tried to will it back to health. We would pull into the drive, and both look at the tree, and the conversation would go something like,
Roger: We need to cut that down.
Bev: Half of it is still green. It must be coming out of the root girdling thing. Couldn't we just cut the dead half?
Roger: No. Too dangerous.
Bev: Let's wait, I think it's greener this year than last year. Don't you think so? Roger: No.
Bev: Maybe in the fall.
But it was of a certain age also, and Bev, after taking some photos of it over the season to try to document its comeback, yielded to Roger's pragmatism.


I know what you are thinking. Are they really writing a Christmas letter about being of a certain age? Dead trees? How depressing is that? I have those concerns myself. In reading Face Book the past few days, the mood is not good. For some the election results have depressed you and then the double whammy of Princess Leia and her mom Queen Leia has really taken the wind out of your sails. And now the Sharritt's want to write about being of a certain age. Before you reach for your favorite antide- pressant, please hear us out. We aren't in denial about getting older, but we are choosing to think of if like a tomato that is just getting ripe. Things have really gotten interesting now that we have become a couple of a certain age.
The lovely Miss Beverly, becoming a person of a certain age, embarked on a job search in the spring to see what other things a teacher for the blind with 20 years experience might do in the big wide world. She found that PATINS, a statewide service supporting technology and inclusion for all learners was looking for a teacher for the blind with 20 years experience and a creative mindset to be a specialist/ advocate for students with blindness, and their teachers. This has allowed her to travel the state teach- ing about electronic Braille displays, while scouring the countryside for diners with good pie.

Becoming people of a certain age, Roger and Bev's excursion into having nine and ten year old sisters live with us through the Safe Families program ended by be- coming the lovely Aunt Beverly and Uncle Roger, as we are still involved in Vaeh and Viki's life. That grouping has expanding now that their father, Jeff has been re- united with the girls. We have them over and find ways to influence the trajectory of their lives even if it is just a little bit. They nudge us out of our own trajectory too, making sure we don't keep our legs crossed any certain way for too long.

Ben and Grace are doing great. Or rather Ben and Lisa and Grace and Chris are doing great. Becoming people of a certain age, our
family continues to expand. Ben and Lisa will be married next July under the same oak
tree where Chris and Grace were married. Roger has been challenged (in his own garden-of-mythic-proportions mind) to grow a myriad of flowers for the wedding and
stands ready to put his green thumb, and collection of professional equipment to the
test. As he says, with a gleam in his eye, "dirt will be thrown in the air." Grace is raising
oodles of money for the American Cancer Society, and Chris is just a few months away
from having to endure a lifetime of lawyer jokes. Our time together during the holiday
season was a blessing. There is a Psalm (133) that speaks to the blessing of people coming together in unity. I don't know what Hermon Dew flowing down upon the mountain is like but if it is anything like playing exploding kittens with your highly competitive children or sitting around the breakfast table with everyone sharing the experiences of their families of origin, I say let it flow.


Roger has suddenly decided to pursue all of the hobbies from all of the certain ages he's ever been. At the same time. He has a worm composting unit, taking him back to the toddler years of grubbing in the dirt. He continues to garden like the 12-year-old with the legendary cucumber harvest of 1974. A re- newed passion for woodworking takes him back to his 20's and 30's and the tools that have gathered dust in the back of the barn are buzzing again. Also buzzing, he has added bee-keeping to his evenings with two hives this past summer. It's fun to hear him talk about the personalities of each hive (one mean and feisty, the other comparatively laid back). The Kozak's introduced him and the lovely Miss Beverly to Pickle Ball to add another fitness regimen to his enduring passion for riding his bike. He loves writing
the blog and writing Ben and Grace a weekly snail mail letter. Also becoming a person of a
certain age, Roger may have figured out that it is okay to stop. During the RAIN ride with his lovely

daughter Grace, he was able to figure out that you can have a fun 100 mile ride with your daughter or a miserable 160 mile ride to Richmond and chose the fun 100 mile ride. After a delightful first 50 day of riding with Bev and Ben on the Hilly Hundred, he and Bev both woke up feeling like 50 was enough, so he put the bikes on the back of the car and headed home rather than tough it out. Yes, on becoming people of a certain age, I close my eyes and see that perfect tomato on a late July morning. It hasn't warmed up yet and dew is still in the garden. It is a tomato that has been eyed for the past week and a half. It was the first bloom to set fruit and it has been coming with great anticipation. Today it is fully ripe. I have walked to the garden with my salt shaker. The toma- to is carefully picked and salted. I bite in and ahhh . . . joy in this moment of this certain age.

Merry Christmas and all the Blessings of a New Year.

Roger and Bev.