dual personalities

Christmas draws nigh and if we aren’t ready now, we’ll never be. Relax. Everything will be fine.

Today would have been our  Aunt Susanne’s 97th birthday. She was our mother’s older sister and the Grand Dame of the family. 

She was very different from our mother…

…as you can see in this picture taken in about 1930 (with their older cousin Marjorie). But they loved each other very much. When she was dying, it was Susanne who “understood” her best. After all, they had the most history together. 

Of the three sisters, I think I am the most like Susanne, who also was a timid child. She played no varsity sports and she was not an intellectual like our mother. But she liked poetry and was a devoted church lady who endeavored to cultivate the fruits of the spirit (love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control). She also liked a glass of spirits at the end of the day. When she died, her house was in order. As her son wrote me a few years after her death in 2000:

My mother saved everything (well, almost everything), and when the time came to settle her estate and move her belongings, I thought, “Maybe it’s important to save the things she thought were important to save.” So, I packed almost every item I came across.

Our attic and my workshop are stacked full of identical boxes that are just the right size for moving–not too big, not too small. Each one is labeled with its contents.

Periodically, I open one and try to make a decision to keep, or pass on, the items inside.

He is still working on it, all these years later…So tonight I will toast these devoted sisters and also our dear Aunt Donna, the remaining Cameron girl, who is 88.

In other news, I finally watched the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol, the one with Reginald Owen. Some people actually think this is the best version. I can’t imagine why. It was not good, especially when compared with the close-to-perfect 1951 Alistair Sim version. I could go into detail explaining why it is not good, but suffice it to say, do not waste your time watching it. Indeed, the Muppet version is much better.

To recap, besides the three versions of A Christmas Carol I have viewed this month, I have watched White Christmas (1951), Miracle on 34th Street (1947), The Bishop’s Wife (1947), The Santa Clause (1994). And I confess that I jumped the gun and watched 3 Godfathers (1946). I just couldn’t wait until Epiphany–mea culpa.

Can you blame me? I am holding off on a few Christmas favorites at the request of daughter #1 who will arrive home later today.

Speaking of movies, this was an interesting article about movies that were filmed in our flyover hometown. I found Harold Ramis’s back-pedaling about the scene he filmed in East St. Louis to be hilarious.

Merry Christmas!

O God, take me in spirit to the watchful shepherds, and enlarge my mind;

let me hear good tidings of great joy, and hearing, believe, rejoice, praise, adore, my conscience bathed in an ocean of repose, place me with ox, ass, camel, goat, to look with them upon my Redeemer’s face, and in him account myself delivered from sin;

let me with Simeon clasp the new-born child to my heart, embrace him with undying faith, exulting that he is mine and I am his.

In him thou hast given me so much that heaven can give no more.

From The Valley of Vision