PJs, Leftovers, and Holiday Haiku

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I have pulled my kitchen table over in front of the fireplace so I don’t have to choose between being fireside and being online.  Really, I can do it laptop style but I’ve got several things to do online today and it’s easier on my body (given the toll that holidays, age, and motherhood have taken on it) for me to sit up at the table.  The chairs at my kitchen table are unusually high; with my long legs I rarely have trouble having my full foot hit the floor while sitting, but in these chairs I do.  So I’ve grabbed a big game of Scrabble and thrown it on the floor under the table for elevating my feet.  I’m sure there’s a metaphor there somewhere…can’t seem to find it at the moment…would love someone to comment on that and help a sister out here.  My Scottish terrier, Fiona, and I are passing the time together as we often do, she a bit full from the M&M chocolate chip cookies she purloined from atop the coffee table and ripped out of their lovingly wrapped packages, a gift from my stepson’s partner, Julie.  I am regretting my decision this morning to wait until later to eat them since “later” is now here and they now aren’t.  But aside from that loss—and I assure you my body won’t miss the sugar intake, except maybe in terms of withdrawal—I am feeling full, with life and love and family and peace.

My house is quiet and comparatively empty; it’s been neither since mid-week last week.  My drinking days have long been over, by a decade now, so any coming New Year festivities don’t do much for me, except as a time for taking inventory and account, some of which I’ll be sharing with you next week.  This week I’ll just rest and enjoy the stillness around and within me. I feel fortunate to have access to such stillness, to have even been at home, and not in an airport, for example, during this recent blizzard, variously referred to as Snowmageddon and snOMG among other titles.    I didn’t do any travelling and my parents got here before it hit.  My sister and her partner and adult children had a bit of rough travel locally—allegedly taking out a mailbox between her house and mine and nearly ending up in a ditch, but all turned out quite well in the end.  Any of their damage might well have been exacerbated by the fact that all four of them—adults all—were in their pajamas.  You might remember that I am working on simplifying family gatherings, and decided after my summer family reunion this year (which I wrote about here: part 1 and part 2) to simplify the winter holidays.  My plan, which we all brilliantly executed if I do say so myself, was to have leftovers on Christmas day and to never get out of our pajamas.  It was the most leisurely and wonderful and easy holiday of my adult life.  People could arrive whenever they wanted and there was no hassle of everything needing to be hot at the same time, and we ate off of paper plates so there was no big cleanup.  Just a lot of sitting and talking and napping and eating.  It’s a terrific plan, though perhaps slightly less so if you happen to be loading up your leftovers and presents into a car to haul them across town, all while in your PJs and driving into mailboxes and ditches, so it seems that how “wonderful” and “easy” and “leisurely” it felt was relative.  But in any case we did have the leisure to sit around and think up haiku poems, and I have featured them here.  Now we have probably polluted the poetic form in some way, perhaps several ways; we only know of the 5-7-5 rule (as the number of syllables for each of three lines).  And I couldn’t really swear that even that’s unassailably correct, but that’s what we went with and what I’m sharing here.  Someone threw in “boo-yah Christmastime” at one point as their last line and then everyone stole it for their own; I kept calling them copouts as I typed each line they threw out but decided in the end to combine those and make them stanzas in a song. 

Here is the gift of amateur holiday haiku, plus a song written in haiku form, from my house’s PJs and Leftovers holiday, to your house:

Snow comes down lightly
We’re hoping for a storm to
keep us here for days 
(by Grammy and Amber)

Holiday at dads
Presents at mom and Mary’s
Wow how things have changed
(by Ashley)

Think and plan and wrap
Share the gifts and joy then meet
the edge of sadness
(by Patrick)
 
Family shapes change
Loves, splits, college, work, death, birth
People move in, out
(by Ashley & Amber)

It’s the paper waste,
I think, that gets to me most
More than spent money.
(by Amber)

Sister got rain boots
Those boots are made for walkin’
Hope she doesn’t see
(by Tammy)

Hey got a haiku
Write it down before it fades
Whoop there it goes.  Dang.
(by Chelsea)

Smart phones for us all
Grammy has a Blackberry (?!)
Can she text us though?
(by Christopher) 

 The Boo-yah Holiday Song
No more presents now
We opened them this morning
Boo-yah Christmastime  (Ashley)

Special holidays
Jammies are new tradition
Boo-yah Christmastime  (Tammy)

Purple unicorn
Makes the best pillow pet gift
Boo-yah Christmastime (Chelsea)

Made matzoh ball soup
for him, better than his dad’s  
Boo-yah Hanukkah   (Ashley)