I NEVER KNEW SANTA CLAUS

I was never taught that Santa Claus was a real person who rode in a sled bearing gifts for good children, sliding down the chimney at night.  For one thing, we didn't have a man-sized chimney.  Even an elf would have wound up in our wood stove instead of an open fireplace, so that part of the story fell through even if my parents were inclined to tell me this lie.  I was a child of dual cultures, although it is seldom expressed this way.  I lived in a community off Highway 211 where my mother's people were Seventh-Day Adventists.  Some of them barely tolerated Christmas because its traditions were a mishmash of several religion's festivals and, therefore, not considered purely Christian.

Most of my mother's community did tolerate Christmas.  We had a Christmas tree in the foyer of our church/school house, we drew names at school for gifts, and we always had a Christmas play where every year I hoped to be chosen for the part of Mary and never was.  When I was very small, I was one of the adorable line of angels in paper halos covered with gold glitter who paraded down the aisle with candles dripping on paper candleholders. Later, due to the shortage of boys at the small country school (grades 1-8 in one room, one teacher), I was drafted to serve as a shepherd.  I rather got into the role, proudly stomping around, carrying a crooked staff (or a close approximation.)

We always had a Christmas tree in our house, beautifully decorated by my mother, and always Christmas gifts although there was no hanging the stocking by the chimney with care.  (no chimney, no money to fill a sock with extras.)  One of my favorite Christmas eve memories is of spinning merrily with my arms outstretched in pure glee -- right into the Christmas tree.  My mother didn't scold me since I didn't break anything and tipped the tree only a little bit.

My father's people, across the marsh near Delco, weren't Adventist, and they embraced all aspects of Christmas.  Nativity scenes melded with Santa Clauses and I was aware that my little cousins on that side of the family actually seemed to believe that Santa Claus was not only comin' to town, but that he was coming way out into the woods where we all lived, none of us with a working fireplace, but comin' just the same.  My mother turned up her nose at such silliness.  She made it clear from the minute I heard the name Santa Claus that he was just another fairy tale, same as Mother Goose.  My mother wasn't an especially religious Adventist, so I don't think her objection to Mr. Claus was religiously based.  Her reasoning was simple and practical:

Every gift under that tree was acquired through hard work, scrimping, and sacrifice, and the idea that some bozo in a red suit would get all the credit was outrageous.  Children should know, said my mother, that their parents were the givers. 

Despite the fact that Santa Claus was nobody in our house, Christmas was still exciting.  My parents concealed larger parcels until Christmas morning, and one Christmas when we were house-sitting a friends' hotel (long story there), I was banned from going upstairs for several weeks while my parents merrily and secretly rode my new English Racer down the long upstairs hallway.  We didn't need Santa, and I never missed him, although there turned out to be a downside to this for my mother one December day in downtown Wilmington. That was the day that she suddenly got it into her head that it would be cute to have a photo made of me sitting in a storefront Santa's lap.  I knew his visage from drawings and wrapping paper, but Santa in the flesh was an alien concept to me.  Mother pushed me toward his bearded form before I knew what was what.  "It's just Santa!" urged my mother when I balked.  "Santa Claus!"

But Santa had no reality for me, and certainly no appeal. I was causing such a scene that she had to give up the idea.  Later, I recall that she patiently explained to me all about costumed Santas, and that it was just a cute way to take Christmas photo.  So the next year, I willingly approached the bearded man and had my picture taken although I was perplexed when he asked me what I wanted for Christmas.  That wasn't a question that adults usually asked me, although my mother would give me a fair hearing on the matter, usually explaining to me why we couldn't afford a swing set or a dollhouse. 

One year, though, they got me the Jumping Shoes I craved.  They were bright red strap-ons with springs, and I eagerly tried them out, expecting to fly over the roof.  But alas, the shoes wouldn't budge because I didn't have enough weight to make an impression on the springs.  Still, I'll never forget the wonder of the illustration of an airborne kid, and the thrill of opening the package and realizing that my parents had somehow managed to purchase my dream.

I never felt that our Christmases lacked something by not having Santa central to the secular side of it.  For me, it was every bit as wonderful to have gifts from my parents, family, and friends as it would have been to have gifts hauled in from the North Pole.  In fact, I have always wondered about the breach of trust involved when children learn that their parents lied.  There are enough lies floating around in families that we surely don't need a Santa Claus lie on top of it all.

However, from my observation of families who lie about Santa, no one seems to suffer permanent damage from that particular lie.  It appears that it is a sort of rite of passage when a child realizes that Santa is a fairy tale.  Along with the disillusionment comes the privilege of stepping into the knowing circle of older people, and the merry mischief of fooling the little kids.
     I get that, I really do, I think...

THE JESUS, JESUS PICTURE and Other Stories

THE JESUS, JESUS PICTURE and Other Stories is now available on amazon.com. 

I had fun with this cover.  Since most of the stories were taken from my teenage years, I did a drawing from a photo of me at about the age I was when I wrote "The Shell" (which is included among the stories.)  I always felt so cool in that hat!

WHY I BECAME AN INDIE WRITER

People always ask, when you say you are a writer, "Have you ever been published?"

This is especially true when you are an "Indie" writer, independently producing your own books.  The idea behind the question, I think, is two fold.  1) Okay, you're a writer, but how serious are you?  And 2) Are you any good?  Being good at something, in our society, is measured by how much people are willing to pay you. Or if they are willing to pay you at all.

My personal opinion about becoming an indie writer is that it is wise for the writer to have proven herself by at least having sold something to a publisher.  One doesn't have to be famous, one doesn't even have to have sold enough to give up the day job.  But one should at least once have submitted some sort of writing to a publisher who paid for the privilege.  One must prove oneself worthy.

That is my prejudice, and it may be a cruel one because getting published isn't easy.  It isn't easy even to get a response from a publisher.

It is trial by fire, as is acting or creating art.  You tear off a piece of your soul and offer it to people who don't want it, and usually you get ignored for the effort.  There is a reason that there is such a high suicide rate among creative people.  It isn't because you have to be crazy to be creative (although that helps).  It's that you have to be very tough indeed to endure the amount of rejection that comes with plying the trade.

I am very tough.

I have been rejected many times.

I have continued to ply the trade.

And I did get published.

And then, despite the notion that it's easier to get published once someone has slipped up and published your work once, it is not easier, not really.  But I eventually did it again.  And again.

It is good if one can find one's nitch.  If you find your nitch, it does get easier.

And it is good to take the advice of writing what you know.  This helps you find your nitch.

I was published in several genres, but the one with which I was most familiar was the Seventh-Day Adventist youth market, because I had been a Seventh-Day Adventist youth, and boy did I have stories to tell!

The Jesus, Jesus Picture and Other Stories is a collection of the stories I sold to SDA publishers.  Several of my stories won prizes, two of them were published in a book.  

I proved myself to myself.

But when it came to publishing my books, I have chosen to bypass publishers because it takes so long to get through the process, because some of the process strikes me as unfairly biased against writers, and because I simply love to design and illustrate my own books.  What I have given up is publicity.  My fame is spreading slowly because I don't have a publisher behind me.  Maybe in time, after I have satisfied my urge to produce full blown books all by myself, I will submit again to a book publisher.  But for now, I'm happy being an Indie writer.

So in case I failed to mention this clearly before, my soon to be released new book is The Jesus, Jesus Picture and Other Stories.

I'll let you know when it is available.

A Sense of Humanity

This is how I write.

Often, I have to draw in order to write.  Church School Blues would still be struggling to become a book if I couldn't draw.  This is partly because I didn't want to go back to that awful time in my life.  Drawing helped me see it in color even though my drawings were mostly black and white.

Drawing helped me see the ridiculous clothes of the seventies, Drawing helped me get on my bike in my 11-year-old body and FLY!  Drawing helped me see Willie Swan even though I didn't have a photograph of him and never saw him again after I was twelve and the scandal blew all over our community.

I didn't have photographs of many of people in my story, but my hands remembered.  Like a crime sketch artist, I kept tracing and re-tracing my memory until I got a fair likeness in my mind.

My getting-in-touch sketches were face-on, but the sketches in the finished book are all in profile.  I did this partly in honor of my younger self who was fascinated by Egyptian wall murals where everyone is in profile.  Partly, I did it because profiled faces flattened the look of the scenes.  When one is abused, the world goes sort of two-dimensional.  You don't look out of your eyes in a normal fashion.  You lose all sense of eye-contact as you lose touch with other human beings.  When one is abused, life becomes a cartoon where one seems to be the indestructible wabbit whose wounds don't bleed from the outside.

In about half of the illustration panels my character, Jade, seems to be trying to walk or project herself out of the scene.  In one of my favorite panels, Jade has turned into a sphinx which has also positioned itself looking away from the action in the school room toward whatever alternative is beyond the edge of panel.

Through drawing, I was able to get in touch with my sense of humor about those times.  There is nothing funny about being bullied and isolated, but the world itself and people's quirky personalities contain unexpected gifts of humor that can make hard times bearable.  I had a well developed sense of humor as well as a sense of the absurd as a child, and I think that this aspect of my character helped me retain a measure of perspective.   The worst outcome of being bullied is that both the bullied and the bullies tend to lose their sense of humanity -- their own and that of other people.  But humor keeps one in touch so that one can survive with a spark of self intact.

A sense of humor, and the ability to draw, took me back to those haunted days without turning me inside out, and allowed me to see past the flat panels of pain to the color and the humor that accompanied me on my difficult journey, so that there were times as I wrote and as I drew, that I laughed out loud.

PRECIOUS JEWELS CHARACTER DIES

John Thomas "Jack" Wagner

1935-2013

Jack had a walk-on part in Chapter Fifteen "The Old Homestead", but it was an important part because his preference for the wistful youngest daughter Faith over her man-stealing sisters changed her life.

Passage from PRECIOUS JEWELS about Jack.

In addition to glads in the summer and teaching in the winter, Ralph continued to work in pulp wood. His son was his constant companion at his labor, and Lester was cheerful and industrious, not given to the rebellion of his sisters. What Ralph didn't expect was that one of his daughters would turn her hand to pulp wooding as well. Faith, still casting around for a sense of place within her family, chose to position herself alongside her brother.

Ralph let her come along because her presence allowed him to innovate on how to load the wood. They needed a team of three for Ralph's strategy to work. Most people loaded each 5-1/2 foot log by hand, but Ralph had mounted a boom behind the cab with a cable running through it with a hook. Ralph stood on the truck, Faith attached the hook to the log, and Lester backed up the tractor, pulling cable and hooked log up to Ralph. Ralph placed and unhooked the log, and Faith was ready to take the hook back to the next log.

Ralph's "hookman" was a crucial member of the team, but it didn't occur to him that she needed to be told so. He might slap his son on the back in satisfied camaraderie, but he didn't slap his daughters on the back, and when her brother strolled along with his father's arm draped across his shoulders, the hookman watched them wistfully.

Faith might be able to keep up with a logging crew, but when she dressed up, she was every bit as pretty as her sisters. She looked older than her age, so the young men who dated her sisters paid her attention also, unaware that she was six years younger than Joy. Even Joy didn't take into account the age difference. She was making a great game of breaking up other people's relationships. It was a rare fellow who could withstand Joy's charm when she turned it on. "He's cute," she might say upon spying one of her sisters with a new fellow. "I think I'll take him away from her!"

Both of her sisters had fallen victim to Joy's game playing. Joy was now in the process of taking over the correspondence that Garnet had going with Mason Malpass who was now a sailor on his tour of duty. "They always liked each other," Joy said to Faith. "He's liable to come back home and marry her once she comes to her senses and leaves that old Bill. Let's see if I can get him before that happens!"

Increasingly the red, white and blue airmail envelopes from oversees were addressed to Joy instead of Garnet. Even Grace wasn't pleased about this. It had always seemed to her that there was something special between Garnet and Mason with their shared musical abilities and the way they sparred. Despite the fact that Garnet had proven that she was not likely to languish away her life as a spinster, her mother still felt protective of her.

But there was one young man who seemed immune to Joy's games. Jack was tall, muscular, with a handsome baby face. He had taken Joy out a time or two, and he had also gone out with Garnet. But he made Joy edgy the way he seemed to look right through her little wiles, while Garnet tended to have long, serious relationships. Jack wasn't ready to get serious. At least, not until he noticed Faith. She resembled Joy in her looks, but she didn't have her careless banter. Faith saw him eyeing her and she glowered back at him. He was smitten.

Faith would never forget the day of their first date. She had gone out in the woods as usual with Ralph and Lester and they had worked until the weather turned. A tropical storm was blowing in when they got home, and the willow fronds were blowing sideways in the gale.

"Tell Mother to come home," said Ralph to Faith, and his daughter obediently hopped out of the cab and dashed up the dirt drive toward the Babcock house where Grace had spent the day with her mother who wasn't feeling well.

Ralph and Lester went into the Denton house, and Lester was standing at the window of his attic bedroom peeling off his dirty shirt as Faith reached the pine tree at the curve of the driveway across from the Babcock house. Just as his sister reached the tree, a bolt of lightning hurled out of the sky and struck it. He heard the ripping crash and saw the searing flash — and he saw it reach out to Faith.

"No!" he cried, already in motion. He thundered down the steps past his Dad, who called after him, saw that his son wasn't stopping, and followed. Faith lay face down in a mud puddle as the tree beside her burned. Lester scooped her up in his arms and kept running. Grace had the door open and she stepped back as her son staggered past her and laid his sister down on the bed.

"Oh my soul!" cried Grace, as Pearl pushed her way past them to examine her granddaughter. Faith was already struggling to sit up. "I'm f-f-f-f-f-f-f-ine." she stammered, but she couldn't stop shaking.

"Give me my robe!" snapped Pearl, and Grace grabbed the terrycloth wrap from its hook.

They got the girl out of her wet dirty clothes and swaddled her in Pearl's robe. It was too bad that Faith was in shock and wouldn't remember much of the next few hours because she was, for once, the center of her family's attention.

"Dear Jesus, my poor baby," said Grace, her arms around her, rocking her, nearly as stunned as Faith. Her prayers were garbled, an illogical plea to save her from what had just happened and a prayer of thanksgiving that she wasn't hurt badly.

Lester tried to lighten the mood. "Hey, maybe you'll have a scar like mine!"

Faith glared at him through the cradle of her mother's arms. "I d-d-d-d-d-d-don't w-w-w-w-w-w-want it."

"Sssssh," said Grace, sternly, "You're upsetting her. Poor baby, we'll take you home and tuck you into bed for the night and I'll bring you some supper in bed.

But this had the opposite of its intended effect. "N-n-n-n-ooo! I have a d-d-d-date with J-J-ack!"

"You can't go anywhere until you stop shaking like a leaf." proclaimed Pearl.

"All of you stop making her talk," said Grace. "Let her rest and if she feels like seeing him tonight, then she may."

By evening, Faith's nerves were still jangled but she was determined to keep the date. By the time Jack arrived, she was ready to go. Ever after, when she told the story of how she had been struck by lightning and had gone out on that date anyway, she would say, "And I am so glad that I did!"

For Jack turned out to be Faith's future husband, and with him she would find where she belonged.

----

In Memory of Uncle Jack from his "Favorite Niece." *

*Rumor has it that he told each of his nieces that she was his favorite, but I know the truth!  

A Paper Doll Legacy

I'm the first!  At least I think I am the first to design a Seventh-Day Adventist paper doll.  I can remember playing paper dolls as a child and thinking, as with most books and television characters, that paper dolls are secular.  They don't go to Sabbath School, they don't have Bibles.  And, of course, you don't play with them from Sunday Friday to Sundown Saturday because that is the Sabbath when we leave off the activities that we enjoy and toil over during the week.

With the paper dolls from Precious Jewels, A Seventh-Day Adventist Family Saga, one might possibly play with them on Sabbath, since Pearl and her girls, Ruby and Grace, spent a lot of time with Bible studies and various forms of ministry.  When and how they are enjoyed is up to you.

If you have read Precious Jewels, you will know that some of the characters in the book played with paper dolls.  My mother and her sisters cut their dolls out of old catalogs.  My mother told me that when they were small, they floated the paper dolls in paper boats down the canal.  The launching was a lovely image, but Mother was vague about what happened when the paper soaked through!  I imagine that the bottom of the canal is strewn with ancient paper doll Titanics.

When they were older, my mother and her sisters still played paper dolls, creating elaborate soap operas around them.  My Aunt Garnet was so much into the stories that she even enjoyed them after she was grown, and I confess that one reason I became a writer was because I was told that I was too old for pretend games!

As a child, I was fascinated with the old photographs of my great-grandmother Pearl and her family, so it was inevitable that sooner or later they got new lives as paper dolls.  I just completed the set of clothes for the young Pearl, and her daughters Ruby and Grace are now on my drawing board.  To learn more about them, visit the paper doll section of my website.