Holiday Cheer

Tomorrow is New Year’s Day, and for all intents and purposes, the holidays are over. So is another year. Every year I try to create memories for my kids and with my kids. Sometimes I go through elaborate plans and spend exorbitant amounts of money to accomplish this. I can’t figure out how or why, but usually, in spite of my best efforts, some of my favorite memories happen randomly, spontaneously without any money or effort. Here’s my best example from this year:
We went to our ward Christmas party. It was a Polar Express theme, and Conductor/Bishop handed out a little jingle bell on a ribbon to every person as they walked in the door. Hundreds of kids, thousands of kids, ran here and then, some screaming, some laughing, some hanging on their parent’s arm, some waiting for Santa Claus, some filling their plates with yet another pile brownies/cookies/cakes/pastries from the dessert table. There was one boy—I don’t even know who it was—who made the night for me.
Steve went into the boy’s bathroom during the evening, and came back chuckling. He said in the stall next to him was a little boy, probably no more than three years old, with his pants down around his sneakers, and while he sat, legs dangling, he shook his little bell and sang Jingle Bells at the top of his voice. It was spontaneous celebration, purely without plan or money. It was pure Christmas joy. We laughed about it the rest of the night, and still when it comes to mind I have to stop for a minute and laugh to myself. All season long I kept wishing I could celebrate with that kind of spontaneous joy.
Now Christmas is over, and we turn our minds instead to our New Year’s resolutions. I keep going back to that little boy in the bathroom stall taking a private moment to vocalize his excitement. I realized when I sat down to set my resolutions, that’s what I want out of the new year. I don’t plan to sing in any public bathroom stalls, but I do want to develop the ability to experience spontaneous joy.
May we all be better at becoming like a little child, and let the proverbial bathroom stalls ring with joy.

Remebering the Pearl Harbor Attack

Today is December 7, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Being a writer for a newspaper sometimes allows me really cool opportunities, like this one: interviewing a survivor of the attack.
Dorothy Chenchick’s husband was a tech sergeant in the Marines, and they had been at the Marine base by Pearl Harbor since June of 1941. Dorothy was only 18 years old, and pregnant with her first child. They were living on Ewa Beach where most of the families of the Marines lived.
She and her husband woke up around 7 a.m. with the noise. She looked outside and saw all the black smoke, and they ran out in the yard where they watched the Japanese planes circle and come around again.
The planes came around right around over their house. A plane dived so close she saw the pilot’s face and the fur of his coat around his face. The plane was so close she could have hit it with a rock, but she didn’t wait around to give it a try. She high-tailed it back into the house. Later they found 37 bullet holes in their house.
Dorothy’s husband put on his uniform and ran to the base to see what he could do. She didn’t see him for three days, and didn’t know if he was a live or dead during that time. She heard later that he had climbed inside a bulldozer and had moved burning planes away from those that were still intact, and helped to save lives.
“Everyone was very courageous that day,” she said. “It was bedlam. It’s been 67 years, and I still remember it vividly,” she said.
Dorothy said that the houses being shot up are part of the story that isn’t often told. Women and children were shot inside their houses, and she remembered one Marine that stood on his front lawn and shot at the planes with his pistol. Dorothy was so scared she packed everything she owned.
“I didn’t like it at all! I was leaving!” she said.
Dorothy talked about what a well-planned attack it was.
“The sailors had all been out Saturday night drinking, so many of them were drunk, and then we had maneuvers all the time so people weren’t paying any attention to the planes until they heard the shooting,” she said. “It was just devastating what they did to those ships.”
Dorothy said there were beaches along the front of her house, and there were bunkers built along them where some soldiers had taken refuge. There was no food in the bunkers, and the soldiers hadn’t eaten since Saturday night, so she and some of the other wives made the soldiers sandwiches. She said some of the other women wanted to preserve their food since there was no telling when supplies could be shipped in again, but Dorothy told them, “These soldiers are protecting our freedom, and we’re feeding them!”
The first night after the attack, all of the military families on Ewa beach were called to stay in one of the lieutenant’s homes.
“In that time the officers and the enlisted people were not ever together,” she said. “You never even communicated with them. It was the first time we were ever around officers.”
During the night there was another air raid alarm, and she said they all thought the Japanese were coming back, but it turned out to be American planes.
“Our planes were trying to come in, and they had an air raid alert, and we tried to shoot down our own planes. That was something else,” she said.
When Dorothy returned to her own house the next day, she saw the army had been there and encircled the yard with barbed wire because they expected ground landings. She had to cut the barbed wire before she could get back in. All the civilians were issued gas masks, and the military implemented a curfew. She ended up staying with a friend for a while afterward, and the woman was scared Dorothy would go into labor in the middle of the night. All the roads were blocked. There was no way through.
Even though Dorothy had everything packed up and was pushing to leave, she wasn’t able to leave until February. This was a concern because she was getting closer to delivery, and there were no baby supplies available.
“The stores had nothing,” she said. “Everything that came into Hawaii was shipped in. I didn’t have anything for a baby, and the stores didn’t have a single diaper. They weren’t shipping any of that stuff to Hawaii.”
Finally she went to the chaplain, and told him her cousin was the commandant of the Marine Corps.
“He was a distant cousin,” she said, “but it was enough to get me out of there,” she said.
She told him she was due to have a baby and needed off the island. He put her on the next ship.
The chaplain was Howell Forgy, the man who first said, “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition.”
Dorothy said that the military issued orders before she left that they were to tell no one the extent of the damage the Japanese had done.
“They didn’t want it to get back to Japan how vulnerable America was,” she said.
In 2001, film director Michael Bay invited Dorothy to watch the premier of the movie Pearl Harbor. Bay asked Dorothy to tell him her story.
“He was the only one who really showed how low those planes came in,” she said.
She said Bay gave her “VIP treatment.” She was invited to the reception at his penthouse, and met Faith Hill and other big stars.
“We were aboard a big aircraft carrier, and Ben Affleck gave me a kiss on the cheek. It was really nice that he did that,” she said.
Today I pay tribute to Dorothy Chenchick and her baby boy, who was born in April 1942, small, but healthy, as well as her husband and the other brave soldiers who lived and died that Sunday in 1941.
God bless America

Embarrassing Thanksgiving Memories

It’s been nearly a week since Thanksgiving, and I’ve only just finished digesting.
My favorite thing was the pumpkin pie my sister made from cooking down a real live pumpkin she’d grown from her garden. She gave me one too, so last night I finally cooked it down and made it into two pies. It was all going well until bedtime when midway through my workout, I decided I was hungry (this is often the way my workouts go, which is why they aren’t terribly effective). I went in the kitchen, and cut myself and my husband a big old slice of that pie—which if you haven’t tried pumpkin pie made from the real thing, you need to. It’s in its very own food group. Back to the kitchen.
Steve and I both took the first bite right at the same minute, and we looked at each other, and ran to the sink and spit it out. In sync. It turns out pumpkin pie isn’t very good when you leave the sugar out, which is too bad, since I had to throw both pies into the garbage. It just goes to show you, don’t make pumpkin pies in between driving your children home from school, while you’re doing newspaper articles, driving your children to their friend’s house, and driving your children to the school basketball game. Looking back, I realize it’s a miracle that’s all I left out of the pies.
I was so disappointed about having to dump two whole pies into the garbage, that instead of finishing my workout, I climbed into bed and ate a cookie.
I’ve read many Thanksgiving blogs in the last few days, people sharing their sweet Thanksgiving memories. It got me thinking about some of my own Thanksgiving memories—not so touching perhaps, but in keeping with the no-sugar pie.
The first turkey I cooked after I got married, I didn’t know you were supposed to take out the neck and giblets before you put the bird in the oven. It was a small thing, but a little embarrassing since I was trying to do everything just right. Another year I forgot to turn on the oven, and the turkey was still raw when it came time to eat. Then there was the time we went camping over Thanksgiving, and dumped the entire Dutch oven over into the dirt. Since we were camping, we scooped it up and ate it anyway.
These are the kinds of embarrassing things I hate to admit on the world wide web.
The most awful thing ever happened to an apple pie one year. I’m particularly fond of apple pie, and I don’t mind saying I make a pretty mean one. It just so happened that we had an infestation of mice that year--another embarrassing detail I’d rather not claim. Steve saw the mouse run across the floor, and he had the broom, ready to smack it if it showed it’s little pointy face again. The mouse scampered up the counter and dived for the first cover it could find: the tinfoil covering the fresh apple pie. Whack! There went the broom right onto the mouse shaped lump on the pie.
No, I didn’t lift the tinfoil to see what the pie looked like with smashed mouse all over it. Ick.
Mom never did love Thanksgiving that much. Just a lot a food and a lot of mess. By Christmas she was tired out, and one year she skipped the Christmas dinner altogether. After presents were open, she locked herself into her bedroom with her Sees Candies and we didn’t see her again the whole day. I remember feeling jipped as a child, with no turkey dinner to close the holiday. But last night while I was lying there in my bed with my cookie, mourning my ruined pies, I realized there’s something to be said for that after all.