Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more

Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before!
“Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store.”
“Maybe Christmas…perhaps…means a little bit more!”

And he brought back the toys! And the food for the feast!
And he, HE HIMSELF! The Grinch carved the Yemeni chicken!

After the Thanksgiving turkey jerky incident, my sister was determined to make sure Christmas dinner went smoothly. She bravely ordered another pre-cooked turkey dinner from Longo’s, but this time she sent Ray and I a copy of the instructions ahead of time to make sure she’d interpreted them correctly. She messaged me a couple of days before Christmas to check how long my broccoli casserole would take so she could make an oven schedule. She wasn’t taking any chances!

Around 8:30 on Christmas Eve, my phone rang and I saw that it was Karen. She and I message each other constantly but a phone call is very rare and means either good or bad news. I’d just been chatting with her a few minutes earlier, so I knew she was in the car with Tom on the way home from Christmas Eve celebrations with his family. She kept repeating my name, “um…Lynn…Lynn”. I was getting nervous. Eventually she spat it out. “So, um, I was supposed to pick up the Christmas dinner this afternoon at 1:00 and, um….” She forgot to pick it up. Longo’s was closed until the 27th.

You do have to wonder sometimes how she managed to hold down an executive position in the financial services industry, but I suppose she’d have delegated the picking-up-dinner type of tasks, and saved her brain power for more executive-y things.

After recovering from the initial disbelief that she’d managed to forget to pick up our Christmas dinner, she and Tom came up with a plan and ordered from a Middle Eastern restaurant they frequent that was open Christmas Day. We had roast chicken, aromatic basmati rice, fresh Yemeni bread, broccoli casserole, carrots, peas, lots of appetizers and all the usual Christmas goodies for dessert. No one went hungry.

This is the eighth Christmas since I started writing the blog, and four of those years we haven’t been able to gather with family – the year Nick had his first chemo treatment on Christmas Eve; the year Tom was hospitalized with covid; a second season of covid lockdown; and, a snowstorm that prevented us from traveling. So, even though our Christmas dinner was locked inside a Longo’s store, this year easily makes it into the top half on that list.

On Boxing Day we got together with Ray’s mom and nephew for our now-traditional pizza lunch, and left there vowing never to eat another sweet. So much food crammed into such a short period of time during the holidays.

Counting Birds

I got Ray a pair of binoculars for Christmas to support his latest hobby. He read about the Audubon Christmas Bird Count in a local magazine and decided to participate this year.

The bird count has taken place across North America since 1900, when conservationists proposed replacing the annual Christmas bird hunt with a more humane bird count, and it’s been going on ever since.

Count volunteers follow specified routes through a designated 15-mile (24-km) diameter circle, counting every bird they see or hear all day. It’s not just a species tally—all birds are counted all day, giving an indication of the total number of birds in the circle that day.

Birders of all skill sets are involved in the CBC. If you are a beginning birder, your compiler will pair you with an expert initially.   

If your home is within the boundaries of a CBC circle, then you can stay at home and report the birds that visit your feeder on count day as long as you have made prior arrangement with the count compiler.

Ray spent the day with a local bird expert, who was also the count compiler for our region, and I stayed home and counted the birds in our backyard. We both attended the potluck count-compilation dinner that evening and it’s probably the least comfortable I’ve been at a social gathering in quite a while, mostly because everyone there already knew each other and they all had a shared passion for birding, something I know very little about.

Some of the attendees had been doing this count for over 50 years, and some families had multiple generations involved. After dinner, one person read from a long list of bird species – water fowl, raptors, song birds, most of which I’d never heard of – and then a counter from each of the nine areas would call out how many red-faced warblers, or whatever, that they’d seen that day. Sometimes there’d be an ooh or an aah from the crowd and that’s how I’d know which ones were a big deal.

Despite feeling like a fish out of water, it was an eye-opening experience, a window into a world viewed through a different lens. It’s easy to see how it could become addictive. Ray is drawn to it because he spends a lot of time walking in the woods, and birdwatching will encourage him to be more present. If you slow down, look, and listen, you never know what you’ll find.

There’s also a Great Backyard Bird Count in February for anyone interested in this kind of thing.

60 at 60 List

I was having trouble figuring out where I was on my 60@60 list so I’ve updated the list below. Thirteen to go before the mid-April deadline.

1. January challenge: 30 days of Flow Yoga
2. Memory challenge: Identify all 195 countries in the world on a map (using Seterra app) 
3. Sunbathe on an au naturel island
4. Try pickleball
5. Climb a waterfall
6. February challenge: study Portuguese (use Duolingo daily)
7. Initiate coffee with someone you don’t know
8. Calabogie mini-vacay with Tim & Pamela
9. Get an iPhone
10. Spa afternoon with Joanna
11. Visit Portugal with Karen
12. Sign up for competitive dragon boating (with Josee)
13. Learn to crochet (with Sarah)
14. Experience a total solar eclipse (with Ray, Rick & Josee)
15. Take a dip in an Ontario lake in April (with Nick & Megan)
16. Have a sleep assessment done at a sleep clinic
17. Escape Room birthday celebration with Lorrie & Josee
18. May challenge: Plan and make two or three meals per week
19. Mystery Tour with Susan
20. View the Northern Lights
21. 56 km cycle along L’Estriage in Quebec’s Eastern Townships
22. 50 km cycle along Niagara River Recreational Trail (plus hike into gorge)
23. Reconnect with the Ottawa Gang
24. Visit an Ostrich Ranch
25. Go back to school (Orton-Gillingham training)
26. Win a gold medal
27. Casa Loma Escape Room
28. Reconnect with childhood best friend
29. Visit a primate sanctuary
30. Big Sisters Little Sisters reunion
31. River’s Edge Weekend with friends
32. Alpaca Walk / Alpaca Yoga
33. Jewellery Workshop
34. Walk on the Earth’s Mantle
35. Try new foods: moose meat, ostrich burger, cod’s tongue
36. Visit Newfoundland
37. 10-hour Western Brook Pond day hike
38. See a moose in the wild
39. Reconnect with grad school friend (Bruce)
40. Make a new friend (Hilary)
41. Make a new friend (Joan)
42. Make new friends (Audrey & Jeff)
43. Frisbee Golf with Ric & Susan
44. Sister trip to Montreal for cousin reunion
45. Tandem skydiving with Nick and Megan
46. No social media or news sites for a month
47. Attend a bird count dinner party