I hope your Thanksgiving was a pleasant one and that you are reinvigorated to indulge in Yuletide festivity.

Before sauntering off into my own Christmas musings, I wish to first highlight a few of the latest promotional developments for Journey Between Two Worlds:

• A podcast interview with me and Lynn McLaughlin, host of “Taking the Helm,” aired on December 8. It is now available on audio and video on Lynn’s website lynnmclaughlin.com, Spotify, and the full interview is accessible on YouTube.

• An Honorable Mention Award was bestowed on Karola’s memoir, Journey Between Two Worlds, on December 1, by Royal Dragonfly Book Awards, in the category of Biography/Autobiography/Memoir.

• As a panel member with other authors, I was selected to participate in the 5^th annual Indie Author Day celebration, sponsored by The Norwalk Public Library, CT, on November 12. 

• A window display of Journey Between Two Worlds at the independent bookstore, Westsider Books, on Broadway between 81^st St. and 80^th St., NYC, remained over one month prior to their current holiday display.
  
• An excerpt of the “Christmas 1946” chapter of the memoir is currently being circulated in select newsletters, in honor of the 75 years since that life-altering Christmas.

As the holidays permeate our schedules and psyches, many of us may experience a heady rush of colliding memories from long ago and more recently. For me they interlace as an ephemeral, fluid collage. Please join me as I meander through some random snippets.

Lit candles have always brought luster to my everyday being…to daily dinner, to an occasion or none, to tranquility, to seeing and feeling light in the world. One of Mom’s only possessions she brought to America from Germany, along with two tinted lead crystal Austrian wine goblets, was a ceramic candle holder in the likeness of a little black choirboy. I remember being transfixed as a young girl watching the flame flickering from the tall candle he held aloft, his face looking angelically upward, beholding the magnificence of light in motion. It represented to me the magic of wonder, belief, hope, and possibility, all in that quiet containment of living luminescence that, in my mind, brought the choirboy’s dreams to life.

Miraculously, that treasured ceramic candle remains in my possession to this day. And, yes, he still works his magic on me.

True, he’s lost his head during earlier years of multiple moves, packing and unpacking, but Mom came to his rescue a long time ago with remedial reattachment and he’s held his own since.

As children, advent calendars were a big deal for us. Starting at the beginning of December, opening those daily windows was a kid’s delight. We could barely wait each day to see what was behind the next numbered window. Now, I see that consumerism has cavalierly attempted to usurp the simple childhood enterprise, first with the enticement of chocolates behind windows, for starters. In entrepreneurial desperation, a more recent ploy is to appeal to a certain adult contingent with perfumes and other invasions unrelated to the true spirit of the season. Though many businesses thrive on commercial savvy and promotional assault, it’s sad to see an earlier innocence tainted in the name of profit shares. I’ll stick with the wonder and joy of glittered images of paper fantasy, thank you.

And oh, the tastes of Christmas! As kids, it was a special treat to have Lebkuchen cookies, marzipan “fruits” or marzipan anything! For New Year’s, pigs were a sign of good luck so pink marzipan pigs with little 4-leaf clovers around their necks were a coveted delicacy. Mom made Christmas butter cookies, which we gleefully decorated with sugary syrup swirls and accents. A special Christmas dinner would be Rouladen, thinly pounded strips of steak, layered with mustard, bacon, onion, pickle, and rolled up, secured with toothpicks, then browned and simmered in its own gravy, and served with red cabbage and potatoes. For New Year’s Eve, the German tradition of herring salad was never one I cared to eat, or even look at, but it appeared, nonetheless, in its gross melange of marinated herring, onions, beets, pickles, and apple slices, predominantly. It presented as a red, slaughtered abomination of food items, normally acceptable on their own.

A more egregious horror was when my father once wished to celebrate the new year in a most archaic, Germanic way…with a raw, genuine pig’s head, normally symbolizing good luck! I’ll never forget seeing that hapless and disembodied soul perched solo as a centerpiece in the middle of our Formica kitchen table. Its resolute countenance remained in pre-prep mode for heaven-knows-what. It is still a mystery to me if it was intended ultimately as a culinary creation or simply a science phenomenon to educate the Kinder. That pig’s woeful eyes seared through me and left me totally traumatized. Needless to say, that was the last time any of us saw any unadulterated swine remnant in our midst, other than bacon.

Coming upon a letter from Karola dated 12/16/97 brings me straight to sentiment. In it she refers to a Christmas present slated to arrive for me in a couple weeks, a present in the making, and waiting, for 23 years, unbeknownst to me. It was an item enriched with a storied past. The gift was an embroidered “Spinning Wheel and Wild Roses” pillow, completed from a kit rescued from a local thrift shop and given to Karola from a former bank customer, whose daughter later became her best friend, Catherine.

There were always, however, various impediments to furthering the embroidery process to a finished product. That has a familiar ring. As she said in her letter, “Any time I got back to it my mind was saying: you should finish this soon – but there was always an afghan or sweater screaming, ME FIRST!” In addition, frequent moving, the passing of Bill, and work further stalled efforts toward the finish line.

Once I actually received the pillow, complete with professional piping, I was astounded to hear of its surprisingly long history. If the pillow could talk it would sound like a major travelogue of the northeast corridor, espousing a cavalcade of colorful life events, amid long periods of closet ennui. Embedded in the decorative pillow is an amalgamation of time, love, and determination. This is a timeless gift from the heart. I treasure it not so much for what it is but for what it represents. The sentiment of love is forever stitched in, now for 24 years as a finished pillow, added to its 23 years as an unfinished pillow.

As you gather with family and friends during the holidays, be kind to one another, enjoy the moments and make new memories. May they add buoyancy to the fabric of your own life’s collage.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS, MERRY CHRISTMAS, and HAPPY NEW YEAR to each of you!

And above all, stay well. 

Cheers and love, 
Margaret

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