Sylvia's Journal

It is Christmas morning and all through the house not a creature is stirring, no maggot, no mouse. The maggots, of course, appeared in a few poems for Tessa and once in the form of rice grains. With the right sound effects from Sita a little bit of the maggot experience was re-enacted.

As usual our Christerklaas did not start until midnight and ended, as it always does, at about 3 AM. I checked last year’s blog (my first one on WordPress) and we improved about 20 minutes on Axel’s performance. We started exactly at midnight with a reading about Saint Nicholas. While waiting for everyone else to appear, I learned that he was credited with religious precocity, even in babyhood because he did not demand his mother’s breast on fast days (Wednesdays and Fridays) except after sunset. I immediately thought about the mother with her swollen breast and the little baby refusing, what a pain. Somehow he made it from Turkey to the USA via the North Pole and turned into a jolly elf – there is more to read.

Until we started, and after Sita and Jim returned from a Yankee swap at the Blisses, they played a series of ukulele-guitar duets that were a wonderful background to my studies about St. Nick. I marvel about how Sita has mastered all these instruments (this includes my violin that had been languishing in my office for years and her cello which she did not touch for ahwile either). We had no idea there was this latent musical ability until it got activated, we think, by Jim.

Sint’s poems ranged from non-rhyming one liners, via a few non-rhyming stanzas to masterpieces both in rhyme and rhythm, some quite long; most were written in English but a few had some Dutch words sprinkled in when there was no appropriate English word that rhymed. This is the advantage of a multi-lingual household – rhyming gets easier with each additional language.

We left the presents that did not have a poem attached under the tree for American Christmas that will start later today. This year the bulk of the presents came from Sint, not Santa. Sint turned out to be both a patron of the (local) Arts and of the Kitchen in his (and her) choice of presents, with a few Heiffer animals and MSF delivery kits (or bed nets) thrown in because we, collectively, already have everything we need. It’s a good trend, together with the increase in poems. Even our Canadian (Steve) who is relatively new to this family’s Dutch/American Christmas ritual, is learning fast and revealed himself as a gifted rhymer. It’s the staying up so late that is more of a challenge to him; he was the only one who had gotten up early to go to work on Christmas Eve.