Joe and Gayle Mufale of Fayetteville are among my favorite people.  The name might sound familiar.  The Mufales are third generation homebuilders in central New York.

Each year at this time they open their gracious home for a fabulous Christmas soiree with dozens of family members and friends.  The food, the fun, the decor; it’s a feast for all the senses.  But the most unusual feature of the gathering is the Christmas Ornament Exchange. Here is how it works.

Each couple brings a new, wrapped Christmas tree ornament and upon arrival places it under the tree in the family room.  Then the couple forgets about it for a couple of hours while they eat, drink and mingle.

At the appointed time, Gayle summons all the women to the family room to open the packages of ornaments.  The men stay in the basement with the giant TV and the rest of the food to talk business and anything else men talk about when women aren’t around to civilize them.

Each woman draws a number out of a box and one by one, numbers are called out and the women take an ornament.  Sounds pretty basic and at the surface, not particularly interesting, right?  Well there’s a catch.  When your number is called you have the choice between getting an ornament that’s wrapped up under the tree, or “stealing” one that’s already been opened by somebody else.  Ahh, now that’s different, isn’t it?

Halfway through the process last night, one of the women wandered over to say hello and remark this is a fascinating social experiment.  There are a few ornaments so popular that they get stolen again and again, but if they’re stolen three times they get “retired” and they are safe. There are other ornaments that no one seems crazy about, including the person who opened it and will take it home. Maybe we need the men to come up from the basement and civilize us.

Hostess Gayle Mufale, seated in front of the fireplace.

At the beginning of the exchange most women take an ornament from under the tree because the ones that are already opened are in short supply.   By the end though, with most ornaments exposed and sitting in laps, do the higher numbered women select their favorite from those they can see? Or go for broke and risk getting a better one or worse, a clunker from the few that are still wrapped up?  And when I say clunker, I don’t mean to suggest anyone brings an ugly one, but with the variety of tastes present in the room you’re bound to see some ornaments that would suit the theme of your tree at home better than others.

A potential thief checks out the ornaments already opened

I’m happy to report I stole my ornament and managed to selfishly hold onto it so it didn’t get stolen again by someone with a higher number than I.  And I did this because someone first stole from me.  Nothing says Christmas like revenge.

I got a more Christian form of  satisfaction from the fact the ornament I brought, a whimsical fairy replete in a white fur color and glittering blue gown, got stolen twice.  One more time and she would have attained the “retired” status, a sort of popularity contest.  After I brought an ornament that no one wanted to steal two years ago I vowed to do better with my selection the next time, and last night it worked. My sparkling fairy was in demand.

Along the lines of that social experiment I mentioned, you can’t assume the person you’re stealing from doesn’t want to be a victim of theft.  In fact when someone stole my first ornament from me, I was fine with it.  It freed me up to steal an ornament I liked better.

My ornament sits in his box hoping subsequent "thieves" would forget about him, and they did

Though its generally not known who brought which ornament, the fact that some women joke their bauble is “ugly” when a thief is at work is flattering to the person who supplied it and is quietly gauging its popularity.

The ornament exchange takes a while.  We were at it for at least an hour.  When everyone has their ornament the whole affair is deemed a success, the men surface from the basement and everyone goes home.

And now the Christmas tree that I swear I put up every three months because time goes so quickly now, shines brightly with dozens of ornaments I’ve purchased through the years, and in the true spirit of the holidays, one adorable sparkley frog that I stole.

Thanks for all the fun, Gayle and Joe!

When my kitchen looks like this, it only means one thing.  It was a great time. You too?

I”m still hand-washing the heirloom bone china I received this year from my aunt Marion, and the silver flatware I bought on Ebay over the summer.  The Christmas tablecloth remains stained on the dining room table along with a water glass and a single unused cloth napkin that one of my young “gentlemen” must have neglected to place on their lap and use during the meal.

We had the usual high-expectation holiday highs and lows.  On their way home from their dad’s house I asked my three boys to pick up bread at Columbus Bakery on the north side.  Well they called a few times to say they were having trouble finding the place and when I asked them to keep trying you would think I demanded they make the loaves themselves from scratch.  While standing on their heads.  In a prison yard.  Really now.  For all the work I was putting into the rest of the meal…

My forever friend Valerie Navarre whose house Christian and I went to in Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving came for three days of non-stop conversation and cooking.   Valerie used to own a small chain of pastry shops and offered to bake my favorite dessert of all time, her buche de noel which means “Christmas log”; a light, thin rectangular sponge cake soaked in sugar, water and champagne, then topped with chocolate cream, rolled and topped with more chocolate spread.  It is way too delicious and I’ve prepared my taste buds since Valerie made one last year,  but there was a hitch.  My pantry is stocked with great basics for cooking but not for baking, and I lacked the chocolate Valerie needed.

Without a single grocery store open Christmas Day, Valerie went to the gas station and purchased ordinary chocolate bars near the cash register and as the French say, “Voila!”, a buche de noel worthy of the finest Parisian restaurant only for all our laughs I’m certain we will call it a Sunoco buche de noel from now on.

The only other curve was a squirrel that entered the top of one of the bird feeders outdoors and got stuck.  Charlie noticed it first and all activity stopped so I could rescue the darned thing and give him many more years of eating me out of all my bird seed.  I sometimes take an air horn to the backyard when the squirrels get out of hand, but the thought of one of them dying, trapped upside down in the clear plastic cylinder bird feeder right outside my sun room window was more than I could bear.

It was quite an operation as I brought it in through the window and out the kitchen door for extraction.  With fellow animal-lover Valerie watching from the door, and Charlie inquiring about the progress from his comfy spot on the sofa in front of the TV,  I kept shaking the feeder until the squirrel eventually slid out and took off like lightning.  Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a little drama.

What I used to offer up in gifts to little children I now put into the meal for growing boys; braised short ribs, soup, salad, the Columbus bread.  The boys were appreciative and at the table for maybe 30 minutes which is 20 minutes more than an ordinary day.  That was a gift for me and it left the remainder of the evening for Valerie and I to do more talking.  I remember glancing at my watch at 9:15 and the next time I looked at it, it was 12:15. We had not moved from our sun room chairs.

No sooner was the mess cleaned up this morning when the cooking started again.  I made a light breakfast of French toast from the day-old bread and coffee from my French press.  Are you seeing a theme here?

Not all family members were able to be here, but thank goodness our group was happy and healthy and filled with humor, some of it occasionally rising to what is appropriate for the dinner table.  It warms my heart to see my children sacrifice and buy a little something for each other, and even for me which I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to.  There’s something about the way Christmas works in me that senses gifts go from the top down and not the bottom up like a river that shouldn’t flow backward but I am touched more than you know to have my battery-operated massager, my scented candle and my note cards.  I always say my children aren’t perfect but they are perfectly suited to me. I’m one lucky girl.

How was your Christmas?  Please share.

Our loyal reader known as Doc has checked in from his secret military mission overseas.  For more about Doc, scroll down to the article “God-speed Faithful Reader and Friend”.

Merry Christmas Maureen~

In less than 6 hrs it will be Christmas here….
I got to speak to my family for about 25 seconds before holy heck rained down.
The nicest thing I can say is this is a beautiful country.
I have been on 17 missions since my arrival and we are heading out soon.
This will be my last “blog” for a few weeks as we are, well you know what we are about to undertake.
Thank you for your reference to me, it was heartwarming.
I will send you our APO soon so that we can send pictures through the snail mail, it seems that we tend to get in trouble when we post to much as we are censured through the wonderful world of the internet.
I am with a great group of men and women who call me “popz”, but thats ok, if they do what I ask then we will all be home in a yr.
Got to run, we are having a Christmas dinner at midnight, beats the MRE’s!

Doc

Merry Christmas Doc!

You have well-wishers here on the blog who all pray for a safe mission for you.  Do check in when you can.  I’m not sure if you’re in Afghanistan or Iraq or someplace else even, but if you say it’s beautiful, I’m happy for you.  Even war zones have pockets of beauty.

Enjoy that Christmas dinner.  Plenty of MREs await you in the New Year.  Hugs from home,  Maureen and your blog friends.

It sounds dreadful, but statistically the holidays see more heart attacks than any other time of the year.  Beginning with Thanksgiving, rising at Christmas and peaking around New Year’s Day, heart attacks and the holidays sadly go hand in hand.

Courtesy: freefoto.com

Doctors say there are many reasons for this.  First, many people ignore their symptoms which they chalk up to overeating and drinking; and second, they don’t want to interrupt the festivities with a trip to the emergency room.  Stressful family situations, the pressure to spend on gifts and travel, even the particulate from wood burning in the fireplace are all seasonal triggers for heart attack and stroke.  Cardiologists refer to this as the Merry Christmas Coronary.

The New York Times reports on a stunningly simple yet effective exercise that can predict the risk of heart attack in a person and even reverse the course.  It’s the ability to touch your toes.  You sit on the floor with your legs straight ahead of you, point your toes upward, bend from the hips and without bending your knees, touch your toes.  Apparently, a flexible body correlates to flexible arteries and the ease with which blood moves through them.  Rigid arteries require the heart to work harder.  Some older hearts can’t handle that strain.

The researchers did their work in Texas and in Japan and they found a direct link between flexible bodies and flexible arteries in men and women older than 40.  No such link was drawn from younger individuals.

It’s true that flexibility decreases with age, but some older folks maintain flexibility better than others.  The good news is we can all become more bendable with simple stretching.

The doctors don’t say that anyone unable to touch their toes is at sudden risk for a heart attack, but they do want anyone with chest discomfort, especially the next two weeks, to take their symptoms seriously and not postpone getting help.

In the meantime, sit down and see if you can touch your toes.  If you can’t, spend some time each day working on it.  Let’s avoid the Merry Christmas Coronary if we can.

There’s energy and optimism in the air the weekend before Christmas that I find does not exist the weekend after.   The holiday parties, grown children returning to the roost, family photos and news arriving with Christmas cards from childhood friends and college pals of 30 years ago, pretty packages growing slowly in number beneath the tree that hasn’t yet dried out and sagged and dropped ornaments.

This weekend brought me to my friend’s annual holiday gathering at their farm and elegant food shop in Borodino, N.Y. on Rose Hill Road, near the flashing light on Route 41 beside Skaneateles Lake.

Products on display at the Borodino Market, Schoolhouse Farms

Becky's kamut grain salad with vegetables and feta. Yum!

Becky and Richard Malcolm demonstrate the possibilities of the products they sell in a healthy, light, adventurous culinary sampling. Champagne and wine add to the cheer in this novel historic, one-room schoolhouse setting of unusual domestic and imported items.  Superb.

This afternoon I just finished rendering beef suet which I strained and combined with some egg shells I’d been saving and a big spoonful of peanut butter.  It’s all cooling in a loaf pan at the back door so I can slice it, place it in the suet cage outside my kitchen window and await the woodpeckers. I’ve become the crazy bird lady of the University neighborhood and admit to delaying important tasks so I can spy on the birds with binoculars.

I have dozens of plump and satisfied cardinals, chicadees, pygmy nuthatches and red-breasted nuthatches, titmice, junkoes, gold finches, house finches and purple finches.  I’ve seen a hawk out back which I don’t know how to identify because they all look the same in the bird book and I can’t get close enough, even with binoculars, to get a better look at his markings. 

By far my favorite backyard visitors are the woodpeckers.  I have five varieties and one particularly beautiful and bashful one, the red-breasted woodpecker which made a dozen appearances at the suet cage yesterday.  The red-breasted woodpecker doesn’t seem to have a red breast as much as it has a brilliant, orange-red band extending like a mohawk from the beak, up and down the head and ending at a perfect cape of delicate black and white stripes.  Best yet, he announces his arrival at the feeder with a loud cluck so I can stop what I’m doing and admire him.

A chickadee comes in for a landing at the sunflower seed

This weekend I’ve also kept close tabs on my friend Dee who is snowed in with her three boys in northern Virginia.  Dee is a native of Syracuse so she knows snow, but she doesn’t know it well anymore for having relocated to the south after college.  This weekend she got reacquainted real fast with two feet of snow dumped on her yard by the Blizzard of ’09.

Like her old Syracuse days, Dee gets snowed in in Virginia

Don’t you admit to feeling just a little left out of all the fuss?  I know 2 feet will fall on us too eventually, but the scenes of a white White House and gauzy Rockefeller Christmas tree gave folks up and down the coast a little something that we couldn’t have this weekend.

Still to come before darkness descends on this darkest time of the year; my walk with Eika around the neighborhood which is getting soaked in sunshiny vitamin D today, only this time I’ll tape a note to the door advising Otto not be allowed outside until the shepherd and I return.  Scroll to the article before this one and you’ll know why.

It took awhile, but it’s dressed up and done; my annual riot of color and sparkle that is my Christmas tree.  The yarn angel tree topper that Natalie and I made as a mother-daughter craft project when Natalie was a Girl Scout in second grade survives another year.

I’m not a good photographer so the pictures don’t do it justice, but I tried.

I hope your decorating/shopping/cards/baking are going smoothly and you are not too frazzled.  Our first snowstorm of the season tomorrow will really add to the spirit and mood, won’t it?

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Post script 12/10:  Regular reader Don submitted the following comment.

Maureen-
What a beautiful sight…a mixture of color and chaos, and lots of it….the perfect Christmas tree! And the one of a kind topper…that’s the best. My tree top is a 50 cent red plastic star (no lights please) held together with 3 rolls of scotch tape. Oh yeah, it’s old and plain .. and tradition. Sure beats those “theme” trees.
Two questions: who is the distinguished gent on the wall? Ancestor of yours or some famous figure? Almost looks familiar.
And the “Charlie Brown” tree in front of the mirror…what is its story?
Don

Don, thank you for sharing details of your charming tree topper.   You are not the first person to question the identity of the person in the portrait in my living room. My pal, the WSTM news anchor Matt Mulcahy, questioned the same thing on Twitter.  He’s the 19th century British Statesman Sir Walter Scott.  I like his face, and as I told Matt, he adds some class to the joint.

The Charlie Brown Christmas tree sits on my dining room sideboard.  I bought it at the old Kaufman’s Department Store a few years ago and for its austere structure, it’s a little different for me.  I found the snowmen lights at Ace Hardware at Nottingham Plaza and think the two go well together.  Anyway, it adds a certain glow to the room that shouts “It’s Christmas again!”   Thanks for writing Don. M.

When I was growing up our Christmas tree went up exactly 7 days before Christmas and came down precisely 7 days after.   I don’t recall a departure from this pattern ever, until my sisters and I went to college and it became our job to put the thing together when we got home, which seemed closer to the Big Day than kids end the semester these days but I may be wrong about that; it probably only felt we were stuck on campus that long because another Christmas with the family couldn’t come soon enough.

I say we put the thing together because we had an artificial tree that required assembly.  Mom and Dad were afraid fire would strike us one-half mile up the hill off Chandler Street in Worcester with no hydrants along the way.  Plus the hill was steep and in the winter it was slippery.  Fire trucks might not make it to the house that was burning on the top of the hill.  Everything would be lost.   It’s only now when I have a home of my own that I can appreciate that fear.  We could never have a real Christmas tree that would get dried out and burned up with the old jigunda light bulbs that each heated to 600 degrees.

I am amazed at the artificial Christmas trees of the 21st century because the artificial trees of the 1960s and 70s were no bargain.  Each year a small rectangular box got dragged down from the attic and inside were individual shiny plastic tinsel-y things in a color that was sort of green but of a hue not found anywhere in nature, not even in spring when there are thousands of shades of green.  This green was like the night-vision goggles worn by the military but maybe not even that pretty.

Every “twig” had to be painstakingly inserted into the appropriate “branch” which was then inserted into its proper place in the “trunk”.  After that we had a “tree” if you really used your imagination.

For that reason I loved spending Christmas Eve at my cousin’s house in suburban Paxton.  They had a real tree, and a real wood-burning fire in the fireplace.  You can be sure we never even considered having one of those.   The McIntyres had an all-natural Christmas and its the kind of Christmas I wanted for myself.

Because everything skips a generation I am fully aware my children will likely prefer an artificial tree for their own families someday, and maybe a yule log burning on the laptop screen, I don’t know.  Or maybe they will associate Christmas with the scent of a fresh cut tree in our living room with a fire blazing in the fireplace within the dark wood inglenook in our Berkeley Park home.

I get my trees at Goodman’s Tree Farm in Phoenix.  I did not get a free Christmas tree or a discount for writing this, but the trees are beautiful and extraordinarily affordable.  If people in New York City knew you could get an 8 foot tree for $25.00, they might be tempted to drive here just to buy one.  Or maybe even move here.  Trees cost $100.00 there and they’re cut weeks in advance.

Lyle Goodman is pushing 70, yet the retired AT & T electrical engineer prunes every tree on his 65 acre farm on Gilbert Mills Road.  Only recently did he hire some “young guys” to help him part time.  I drove there today and Goodman showed me his special trimmer that looks like a chain saw with the shape and arc of a fishing pole; trims trees up to 9 feet in the quintessential conical Christmas tree shape.

Goodman says he thought about taking up golf when he retired at 55 and golf is just fine, but he chose to open a tree farm to keep him busy.  It gets him outside, he does a lot of walking, and that tree trimmer of his weighs 50 pounds so he gets an upper body workout no swing of a club could provide.  He’s a member of the Christmas Tree Grower’s Association which he credits as vital to the start of his business 15 years ago.  It is there he learned about herbicides and pesticides and other investment-saving advice.

Lyle Goodman is a half generation ahead of the trend of professionals across the country leaving the corporate world to grow something.  Most are doing wineries but he chose Christmas trees.  You take business, marketing or scientific expertise and apply it to a career you really want.  Goodman says when you enjoy the work it’s not work.  He’s made a nice little living for himself with his 65 acres of Christmas trees.

Merry Christmas Mr. Goodman!

My tree this year is a cross-pollinated white and blue spruce, very pretty but smaller than I usually buy.  Once every three or four years I miscalculate the height of the trees in the field and bring home a specimen that’s a little too small.  Oh well, I’ll correct my mistake with boxes of colored lights and ornaments.   I’ll post a photo tomorrow.

I hope you are enjoying these early days of the Holiday season.  The tree in Clinton Square is lit and beautiful.  Soon the city Menorah will shine proud and bright in Hanover Square.   Whatever the observance, this darkest period on the calender gets filled with light.

Driving through my beloved south side of Syracuse where I have never been shot or mugged while doing business at the Post Office on South Salina Street at Colvin, or while borrowing books with my children at the Beauchamp Branch, or when purchasing used furniture from Percy Jones, I saw something that caught my eye tonight; the decorative snowflakes on the light poles that say “It’s Christmas”.

I’m sure some will argue the snowflakes celebrate the upcoming winter season more than a particular holiday but there’s no historical evidence of that and if it were true, they’d be up past Ground Hog day which they’re not.

Decorations like these spell “Christmas” and if you don’t believe me, watch Turner Classic Movies where Christmas music plays in the background of every old movie scene with Christmas trees and municipal decorations.

I don’t know about you, but I’m still celebrating the tenacious varieties of tree that are hanging onto summer.  There’s a small tree in my neighborhood that is still entirely green.  Others have leaves of sunny yellow that winds should have carried away weeks ago but haven’t.   There will be time to fill the living room with the scent of a fresh-cut Christmas tree, but I don’t want to be pushed.

Retailers learned long ago that Christmas decorations in the stores prompt people to spend.  Two full years into this punishing economic recession, if ever there were an argument stores need early Christmas decorations, it is now, but families are pummeled too.  7.2 million jobs have disappeared since December 2007 and the losses are expected to continue until the middle of 2010.  I’m not sure the earliest Christmas decorations on record can fix what’s happening with Americans and their bank accounts right now, nor do unemployed or underemployed people need to be reminded they can’t afford the kind of Christmas they used to have.

We’re conditioned to seeing Christmas decorations in the shopping malls way too early and we can avoid stepping into them if we find it offensive.  Municipal displays are not so easy to escape.  We get them on our ordinary travel on ordinary routes.

Snowflakes add light to the south side business district on South Salina Street

Props to the city of Syracuse for lighting the holiday tree in Clinton Square the day after Thanksgiving every year.  Not the day after Halloween, but the day after Thanksgiving when we’ve had our fill of turkey and Griswold family dysfunction we planned and anticipated all month.  Some things are the way they are because they should be that way.

What do you think?  Are you ready for Santas and snowflakes and reindeer this soon?  Before the first snow has fallen?  The last leaves are raked?  The turkey is stuffed?  Share your thoughts.