A Bushel of Thanks

I’ve written on this page before about a cherished tradition my family once had of putting up a Thanksgiving Tree on our living room wall in mid-November each year. My wife is uniquely gifted when it comes to creative handicrafts (and cooking, too, but if I follow that train of thought we'll be here for a week!).

Every year, she would somehow transform a stack of brown paper grocery bags into a whimsical tree trunk and branches. Then, using yellow, orange and red construction paper, she’d cut out dozens upon dozens of autumn leaves about the size of your hand. We would put those blank leaves into a basket on the dining room table. As Thanksgiving approached, any family member with something to be thankful for would take a blank construction paper leaf from the basket, write their name and that particular sentiment on the leaf with a marker and tape the leaf to one of the brown paper branches on the Thanksgiving tree.

By the time Thanksgiving Thursday rolled around each year, our “tree” was in full Autumnal bloom with yellow and orange leaves of thanks from every member of our family and relatives or friends who may have stopped by to visit. The tree was always a thing of beauty – each year similar to others, yet with distinctively different thanks given from each of us.

Today, our “kids” are scattered from Kailua to Missoula and from San Diego to Santa Clarita. That, plus the reality that two of them have their own young families, in-laws who not-surprisingly also want time with them, the miles between us all, our busy lives (and throw in a shaky economy to really mess things up) – it all combines to create a situation that simply doesn’t allow us to gather together for Thanksgiving these days. Life happens, right?

I miss those days. But while our wall may not have had a tree on it on recent Thanksgivings, I’d like to take the opportunity to express my thankfulness in a slightly more public way. And so, with your indulgence, I’ll pull out just a few of my “leaves” from this year’s bushel, namely:

I’m profoundly thankful for the privilege this year of celebrating 25 years of marriage to my beautiful, patient, talented and devoted (among her many other qualities!) bride. In a rapidly changing culture that increasingly discounts the foundational importance of strong marriages, I don’t take our cherished union for granted and pray that I never give my wife a reason to think that I do. I am a blessed and grateful man, indeed.

I’m thankful that our four kids have grown into responsible, thriving persons who love God, love life and love this country.

I’m thankful for four beautiful, healthy, happy and growing grandkids. God willing, we’ll be blessed with many more in the coming years (along with the time, energy and resources to visit them all often!)

I’m thankful for cold and rainy days, dry firewood, a good roof and a sleepy old dog.

I’m thankful for contemporary technology like Facebook, Skype, IM’s, emails and smartphones. With the airline industry and Homeland Security teaming up to make travel costlier than ever (in terms of both finances, time and personal dignity), today’s technology has been a godsend for staying in touch.

I’m thankful that the nearby bucolic burg of Montrose, CA is still the same sleepy, home-town place it was when my mom would drop me off in front of the old, long-gone single-screen movie theater on Honolulu to catch the latest double-feature with my best-buds.   

I’m thankful for Robin Goldsworthy (Publisher/Editor) and her tireless CV Weekly staff, its loyal and growing multitudes of subscribers, advertisers and supporters who have made the publication of this paper possible each week for well over two years now.

I have many more leaves, but no more space. So I’ll close by wishing you and yours a day to surround yourselves with the warmth of food, friends, family and faith.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: This is a post of my column first published yesterday, 11.24.11, in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper (cvweekly.com).

© 2011 WordChaser, Inc.

Discounts for Dessert

So are you ready for the big day? Can you believe it’s only one week away? Are you feeling the excitement? Made all your preparations? Ready to consume as much as you possibly can?

If you think I’m writing about the Thanksgiving feast, you are so-o-o-o-o old school. No, I’m referring to the official kickoff of the annual shop-a-palooza extravaganza known as the retail holiday shopping season.

That’s really the point of the season, isn’t it? I mean, it’s bad enough that we no longer blink at the sight of Christmas decorations on sale across the aisle from Halloween displays. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as restraint at the altar of commerce. I did see one notable exception, however. One of my Facebook friends posted a photo recently of a sign posted in the window at an unnamed Nordstrom location. The sign said, “We won’t be decking our halls until Friday, Nov. 27. Why? Because we just like the idea of celebrating one holiday at a time.” Now, how refreshing is that? I hope Nordstrom is swamped with cash-carrying customers. If I had any, I’d definitely support them.

Few people know better than I do that this economy has devastated businesses across the country. But this relentless push to lengthen the end-of-year retail ritual has gotten out of hand. For years, as Halloween has grown in popularity and profitability and as Christmas has been turned into little more than a secular spending spree, I’ve wondered how long it would take the combined worlds of media and commerce to figure out a way to make something more lucrative out of Thanksgiving. New Years is big business. Valentine’s Day makes retailers swoon. Easter and Fourth of July make cash registers ring-a-ding-ding. But Thanksgiving has been relatively untouched by commerce, with the exception of the shopper stampede to grocery stores and the availability of some lame greeting cards that nobody ever actually buys.

But this year it’s finally happened. They’ve figured out what to do with Thanksgiving. The answer? Ignore it. Rather than tolerate the spending speed bump that this holiday has been, this year Thanksgiving day itself has officially become a starting gate for the Christmas season – oops, sorry – for the Happy Holidays season of super sales. More than ever before, the overwhelming, non-stop message is: why wait until the Black Friday or Cyber Monday to begin racking up more credit card debt? Drop that drumstick and get out there and shop, people!

Last year the big news was that some stores would open their doors at 4 a.m. on Black Friday. This year, many stores have already announced that they’ll open at midnight on Thursday hoping to draw shoppers in like moths to a deeply discounted flame. Wal Mart has even announced they will open up for business on Thanksgiving night itself at 10 p.m. I’m sure others will follow. What a shame.

Even if you don’t succumb to the incessant push to buy, buy, BUY! – one can’t escape the onslaught of “holiday” mania.

I’ve written before how I steadfastly refuse to listen to our family’s extensive collection of Christmas music until the Friday after Thanksgiving. The season is so special to me in both meaning and tradition I don’t want to lessen its significance by rushing things.

And yet, more than a week before Thanksgiving, my wife and I ended an evening walk at a local Starbucks and found ourselves listening to – you guessed it – Christmas (dang!) holiday music. Good old Lou Rawls was singing of glad tidings as the baristas merrily went about decking the halls with trappings of politically correct comfort and joy. Sigh.

Ever one to put a positive spin on things (stop snickering) I suppose the dearth of folks around Thanksgiving tables this year could ultimately be a good thing. After all, it means more leftover pumpkin pie for yours truly.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

PostScript: Days after writing and submitting this column to my editor, I read a blog post from a national marketing writer that mentioned the same Nordstrom window poster I reference here. According to the piece in TalentZoo.com,  “ … this photo first appeared in a follow up to a story that originally appeared on the Consumerist blog back in 2007 and has been widely circulated around the Internet every November since. Almost without exception it is followed by comments praising Nordstrom and vows of Holiday patronage.”

Unfortunately, the writer went on to explain, since 2007 Nordstrom has “caved on its promise.” It seems that shoppers at the company’s flagship store in Seattle early this October were treated to Christmas/Holiday/Seasonal decorations of red ribbons, pine boughs and golden bells hung over signage printed in off-red and off-green fonts. According to the Seattle-Post Intelligencer,  however, Nordstrom’s PR spokesperson rejected accusations the department store had reversed its policy claiming, “The window décor downtown is commemorating the upcoming social season – not the Holidays.”

Right. And I saw Mommy kissing Santa Claus while the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy looked on. 

Note: This is a post is a longer version of my column first published yesterday, 11.17.11, in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper (cvweekly.com).

© 2011 WordChaser, Inc.

Cycles of Life

So how did I find myself before the sun came up last Saturday morning, sitting on a hard, painfully narrow bicycle seat, waiting with my wife and thousands of other cyclists for the start of a 50-plus mile “fun ride” through the Santa Inez Valley, in 38-degree, fog-laden air with nothing more than a micro-thin layer of stretchy polyester fabric between the near-freezing morning air and my pasty white, goose-bumpy skin? Glad you asked.

It began with the first bike I can remember owning – a beautiful, candy apple metal-flake green Schwinn Stingray with a white faux leather banana seat and sissy bar in the back and often-waxed, chrome “ape hanger” handle bars up front. My radical, 60s-vintage ride had a smaller front wheel to make it look more dragster-like and big, fat, “cheater slick” tire on the rear wheel. My other grade school biker buds and I would ride our bikes as fast as we could down the street, then stand hard on the pedals to lock up the coaster brake and see who could leave the longest skid mark.

Granted, riding a bike in the Crescenta Valley is no easy task at any age. Our unavoidable hillsides quickly build up one’s leg muscles and fondness for a good set of brakes. Nevertheless, my childhood home was within a few pedal strokes of Two-Strike Park with its racetrack-like layout of smooth, mostly flat concrete sidewalks, quick turns and endless loops of bike-riding fun. When someone (I won’t say who and you can’t make me) would scoop piles of sand from the swing set area up onto the sidewalk, the resulting skid pad effect made for hours and hours of thrills, spills and skinned up appendages. Good times, indeed – and we didn’t even have to wear helmets in those wild frontier days. Imagine that. 

Until I learned that it would ultimately loosen my spokes, I would clothespin stiff playing cards to the forks of my Stingray to get that cool “revving motor” noise. The faster I rode, the louder and more motor-like the cards slapping against the spokes would sound. I was a Harley rider wannabe even then, I guess. And as it so happened, from my early teenage years until well into middle age, I temporarily traded my love of bikes for motorcycles of all different kinds, including torquey off-road 4-strokers, snarly 2-stroke motocross-racers and eventually a massive, rumbling V-twin cruiser that I rode like Dennis Hopper for many years.

Then, some ten years ago, a good friend from church introduced me to the wonderful world of road biking and I was hopelessly hooked on pedal power once again.

There are some things you have to get used to when taking up the sport of road biking; like the seemingly silly and oh-so-stretchy clothing that serious cyclists wear. Or the “ram’s horns” handlebars and bent over, low-center-of-gravity position you assume in order to achieve optimal wind-resistance. Or feeling like a kid learning to ride all over again as you learn to use the bizarre clipless pedals (or “scary pedals” as I heard one cyclist call them) that lock your feet to the pedal and make you fall over at stop lights. I did say this was great fun, right?

It’s all been more than worth it, however, as my wife and I have enjoyed unforgettable rides together from Azusa to Seal Beach and back, or on a deserted stretch of blacktop skirting Crowley Lake in the Sierras where it’s hard to tell if it’s the altitude or the views that so quickly take your breath away. Or on the annual Solvang Prelude ride (our third time riding this 50-plus-mile event) last weekend.

Yes, it was freezing cold. Yes, it was one of our most exhausting rides ever. And yes, it was as much fun as sticking playing cards in your spokes or laying a big honkin’ skid mark down the middle of Harmony Place.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: This is a post of my column first published yesterday, 11.10.11, in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper (cvweekly.com).

© 2011 WordChaser, Inc.

Home Is Where the Office Is

Last week I “celebrated” 15 years of self-employment. That word is in quotes because, frankly, the economic freefall of the past few years has hit my industry even harder than most. In the ad biz, it’s common knowledge that when the economy goes south, advertising budgets are the first to get cut and the last to be reinstated. And today’s U.S. economy is further south than a penguin’s patootie in Antarctica.

For the last few years, at least, there hasn’t been too very much to celebrate. My friendly neighborhood bankers no longer bother to make happy talk with me when I come in for my regular juggling of rapidly diminishing funds. They know better. Like too many other folks, we’re holding on by our financial fingernails. (Or circling the debt drain, is probably the more appropriate alliteration.)

As a money manager I spoke with recently told me, “If you have a job, you’re okay. If you’re out of work or underemployed (that would be me), you’re hurting big time.” To which I can only say, ouch.

That said, I also have much for which I am grateful. Not the least of which is that – for 15 years now – I have not had to make the daily commute to the mid-Wilshire area where I was on the creative staff at various large ad agencies. I used to have drive from our La Crescenta home through an hour-long gauntlet of traffic jams, stop lights and side-street detours five or six days a week. The ride home (usually well past sundown) was even longer, by as much as 30 or 40 minutes more. My dear, long-suffering wife used to worry endlessly (and often silently I found out later) about the immense stress that my morning and evening commute would add to an already demanding day. After all, the ad world is fueled by stress even in the best of times. One well-known agency with headquarters in Santa Monica used to tout their company slogan that warned employees, “if you don’t come to work on Saturday, don’t bother showing up on Sunday.” Nice, right?

By working from my hillside home office here in Southern California’s Crescenta Valley, however, my daily commute was reduced to a whopping 10 or 15 seconds, from either my bedroom or the kitchen. Traffic consists of stepping over a sleeping dog or two. That’s it. “Honey, I’m home!”

Needless to say, my stress levels are much lower – at least from the commuting portion of any given day. Yes, my work still piles on the pressure of ridiculous deadlines, difficult and demanding clients who often don’t know what they want until after they’ve seen days worth of work that turns out isn’t quite what they didn’t know they didn’t want and now they remember some important details they probably should have told me in the first place and oh by the way the due date for this project has been pushed up by a few days! (Deep breaths, Jim. Look out your balcony office window at the Verdugo mountains and relax. Thanks, that’s better.)

Having your office only steps away from your living room, bedroom or kitchen also means you’re never really not working. No matter where in the house I am, if my office phone rings, I hear it and make an NFL-worthy blitz to answer the thing before it goes to voicemail. (That’s another downside to self-employment; never, ever, under any circumstances, let a job or client get away from you. Ever.) There are no starting or stopping times in a self-employed person’s day. No paid sick days, vacations or holidays. I don’t work, I don’t make money. Period. End of funds.

That said, the biggest, most priceless benefit of fifteen years of self-employment has been the ability to simply be here as “Dad” – present and accounted for – 24 hours a day (mostly) as my kids grew from crumb crunchers, house monkeys and curtain climbers into the amazing young adults they are today. While actually working more hours during any given week (because you’re never really NOT working when your office is at home), I’ve been able to shift time as needed to late into the evening. working all night if need be – or long before the morning sun comes up – in order to have spent precious, irretrievable time at school events, field trips, ceremonies, helping with homework and other important times in our kids’ lives.

Frankly, I wouldn’t have traded those opportunities for any title on a business card, corner office, regular paycheck or benefits package. I don’t care if building security knows my name. My kids know me and I know them. I am well-compensated.  

Now, if only I could figure out a way to deposit some of that karmic-currency into my checking account.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: This is a longer version of a column first published yesterday, 11.3.11, in the Crescenta Valley Weekly newspaper (cvweekly.com).

© 2011 WordChaser, Inc.