In this issue you’ll find contemporary echoes in Arlene Johnson’s submission, “Imperfectly Perfect.” Royce Holladay’s “The Gift of Patchwork” describes a uniquely beautiful Christmas gift and its bittersweet future. The woman in Carolyn Casas’s “Esferas de Luz” bestows a luminous vision. M. J. Simmerings’s “The Gift” may well be the ultimate statement on fruitcake. And in “What Holiday Friendship and Gifting Means to Me,” a timely and moving meditation on being a Muslim during the Christmas season, Jamilah Ali challenges us to think about the goodness—and the goodwill–common to all religions.

But the musings on gifts in these poems and stories go far beyond the holidays. Nature plays an important role in Linda Culp Holmes’s Confidante,” which confronts the anxieties of aging; and in “Winter’s Gifts” by Rosetta Radke, where the simple task of cleaning out a plant container brings calm. Gifts can be divine, as in Alison Jennings’s “Banishing the Spirit of Fear”; or domestic, as in Susan Connelly’s “Blood Orange Marmalade” and Penny Hackett-Evans’ “Patching,” cooking and mending being not chores but gifts. Presents from family members bring surprising results in “Can’t Stop A Gift Horse From Drinking” by Ellen Notbohm and “Largesse,” by Sue McGovern. In McGovern’s story a mother’s problematic personality results in a valuable independence.

     All the works included in this issue’s Short Takes brim with warmth, humor, and hope, with lovely images and canny insights. They demonstrate how opposite temperaments can make the best of friends. They acknowledge the pain of loss and the sorrowful inevitability of some decline as we grow older. But several of them—Julie Pratt’s inventive “The Gift of Growing Old” for example—understand aging as a gift. For with it, if we are fortunate, comes wisdom and depth of feeling, tolerance and compassion, a storehouse of memories and experiences—and most of all, gratitude. For me as I write this, for you as you read this, it is a gift to be alive.

Red Barns, gouache, by Carrie Stein

Typewriter late in the kitchen with wine, the breakfast butter still on the table, my mother’s fingers come down hard on the black-and-white keys of her portable Underwood, the same one she’d lugged from Minneapolis to college near Boston, and then never took back.

She met a sure bet in New York, married him, had four girls, lived in the suburbs, and worked tirelessly to out-volunteer the other wives and become citizen of the year. I see her at the kitchen table, one light overhead, typing lists, meeting agendas, remarks, schedules, letters to the editor, reports, poems, and song lyrics. The school, church, hospital, Town Meeting, Girl Scouts, ponds, and town parades—they all made her to-do list.

My sisters and I, not so much. Instead, we memorized her friends’ phone numbers so we could track her down after school as needed. The mother at 6688 was the best. She’d say, “Sorry, honey. Haven’t seen your mom. Anything I can do?”

Mom’s calculations that her kids would be OK miraculously panned out. It made no difference if we came home to find her gone, the kitchen a wreck, and the puppies running loose in the cellar. We just turned on the TV, made forts out of the couch cushions, and ate peanut butter and jelly.

As I got older, things changed. Mom implied that my being tall and big with a Deputy Dog face didn’t measure up to the town’s preference for thin blondes who smiled. Even worse, I was the one who walked out of the last class before summer with the seat of my yellow mini skirt covered in blood. I ran to a phone booth, hoping Mom could pick me up, but she was nowhere to be found. I had to walk all the way home through the main streets of town, full of shame. (Eventually, that feeling bubbled into on-fire rage, and I became a two-fisted rebel before being transformed by motherhood at forty.)  When I finally got home, Mom was in the kitchen, wrapped in her phone cord, telling someone how to run a pond clean-up. She was smoking one cigarette and had another one already lit in the ashtray.

It took me decades to see, but my mother was the greatest gift to me, and I was a big gift to her, too. Ours was an unspoken pact. The less she was there for me, the more I had to step up to the plate for myself. The more I made her feel tied down, the more drive she had to wrestle free and win the accolades she craved. Our gifts made a perfect match.

Even before I press the code to enter her lemon-colored Berkeley house, our sixty-year history hits me, our continuous close friendship across 3,000 miles and life’s whims. Now I’m flying from New York to celebrate Peggy’s one hundred years of life.

I picture pushing open her door and being greeted by paintings covering every inch of her beige wall, classical music playing on her old Bose radio, an oak table with a hand-carved wood vase resting on top, my gift of forty years ago. I will take a deep breath. I’ve arrived at my home away from home.

And there she’ll be, wrapped in her thick pink robe, settled into a black cushioned recliner, her slippered feet atop the footrest, her thinning gray hair and big smile, ready. Peggy has been my main listener and I hers for all these decades. Despite her head injury two years ago and subsequent short-term memory loss, she always asks me to repeat when she loses track of our conversation. I don’t mind. She’s still curious, still wants to know. I love her for that.

In contrast, I have friends who are cognitively intact, but who either hold too much inner agitation to pay attention or don’t care enough to listen. My friend Sally informed me she doesn’t do tears, this when we were out to breakfast one day and I was on the verge of crying. I never cried with her again. Carrie can only listen when we’re talking about her. Sarah’s husband is jealous of her friends, restricts her time with me. My friend Bob nods and smiles when I speak, but his anxiety never quiets. Connie is triggered by everything, lets loose by yelling.

Don’t trust anyone outside the family, Dad often said. And don’t confide in friends. They’ll definitely betray you. Toxic advice for any young girl. I understood years later that these words were spoken by a very lonely man, distrustful of others, closed off from himself. It took many more decades for me to learn to trust.  Anyone.

In so many ways, Peggy and I are an unlikely combo, not only because I’m nearly two decades her junior. She’s a reader, I not so much. I write poetry. She’s not into that. She speaks in concrete terms; I often use metaphors that puzzle her. We’re both Jewish, and neither of us is religious; but she, a teenager during WW II, is a Zionist, and I’m not. I’m involved in spiritual pursuits with an Indian guru; she feels that’s nonsense. She believes it’s fine to judge others; that’s anathema to me. And those are just for starters.

What really mattered all these decades was beyond our differing beliefs or even quirks of personality which annoy each other. The glue that has held us together is our commitment to listen to one another, deeply and with respect. I cannot imagine life without her.

Bluejay, photograph by Kim Hanson

Ho, Ho, Ho and a Menorah with lighted candles; sadly, the holiday can be alienating to me as an American Muslim. Are we all friends? Christians and Jews are friends. Christmas and Hanukkah are on every calendar. But Ramadan (our month of fasting) is only included on some. Do calendars explain the whole disconnect? Of course not. But when carols pounding everywhere are irritating, it is not warm and fuzzy for the rest of us.

Did you know Islam and Christianity share a love of Jesus? He is mentioned 25 times in the Quran. We believe Jesus was a Prophet; thus, we agree with Christians about his awesomeness.

Muslims believe in the Immaculate Conception of Jesus. Quran tells us he was able to speak as an infant and did so to defend the reputation of his mother, Mary(am). Some Muslims (including myself) believe Mary was a Prophet, the Divinely guided Feminine.

Muslims acknowledge Jesus, and celebrating Christmas is not forbidden. But we tell our kids early about the Santa Clause myth. Nevertheless, everyone enjoys brilliant holiday lights, including many Muslims.

Back when Prophet Muhammad founded the first Islamic state in Medina, he included rights for Christians and Jews. They were “People of the Book,” meaning the Bible. Our Quran tells us, “There is no compulsion in religion,” (2:256) and Muslims accept the Bible and Torah as the Word of God.

So why is Islamophobia accepted, widely practiced, and even encouraged? Accusations of anti-Semitism are seen as horrible. But to favor justice for Palestine means the person or institution is an anti-Semite? No. A truly neutral approach is to recognize both sides of an issue, advancing free speech.

The U.S. has funded Israel more than any other country in the world for 78 years. Billions are sent for weapons, settlements, stealing water for swimming pools, building walls through towns, checkpoints etc…. Why do they need so much protection money? Could it be because Israel is not a good neighbor, respecting other’s rights?

Since the October 7 attack—the Hamas tactic which no one can, or is, defending—Palestinian children dying have not equaled Israeli children. In fact, children should never be targets or prisoners in a conflict. Killing any child is never justified. Yet more than 20,000 children have been slaughtered and starved the past two years. Consider: Palestinians are Muslim. A peace accord for Christmas? Peace for Palestine can be a right, not a gift.

Ramadan starts on February 17, 2026. Every year it moves up 11 days. So, in four years it will begin on 12/26/2030, the day after Christmas. And in December 2031 we will be fasting while others are sitting down to ham and apple pie (we can eat after sunset).

So, what would be my best gift of friendship during the holidays? Include every one, foster compassion, and all work together, every faith, to stop the genocide in Palestine. Then we will be united and caring. Merry Christmas.

My favorite orange grower at the Farmers Market just made my day.

“The cold snap two weeks ago worked its magic and I’ll have blood oranges for you next week.” she said.

I’d haunted her stand the last few weeks, my heart set on making blood orange marmalade for this Christmas’s Gifts in Glass, envisioning the jewel-colored marmalade in cut glass bowls, adorning the holiday tables of family and friends.

So my wooden cutting board is now stained a lovely rose red. I’ve just sliced two dozen blood oranges on it and wonder if laying these cool half-moon slivers, these beginnings of marmalade, on my cheeks will turn them rosy too. Blood oranges are mysterious. Just looking at their skins, you know they have traveled far. Their tops, protected by leaves, are of an ordinary orange, but their lower skins carry the coppery red of desert dwellers. Each one I slice startles me with its deep wine-colored flesh.

In Morocco, orange groves near Erfoud are the only color besides the river, in an endless terra cotta landscape. They share the river’s winding path, a swath of glossy green leaves. Erfoud is an oasis town near Merzouga where the Sahara sands and its drifting dunes meet Moroccan soil. At Merzouga the ground stops and the sand starts. Huge golden dunes like ocean waves follow one after another. My Aunt Lois wished for years to see and walk in the Sahara’s sand. That is why I was there, with her, my mother, and our friend Dottie. We four spent a morning scrambling over and among these dunes, pretending to be lost in the desert. Later, while my dear ladies were resting, I sat alone in the garden of our hotel and ordered orange juice. It arrived dark red, cool and piquant, a desert taste for a desert thirst. Closing my eyes I listened to the wind combing through the palm fonds sounding like a rain shower. The same breeze carried the incomparable sweet scent of orange blossoms.

One of the joys of cooking something new is the alchemy that occurs. Cutting into a blood orange sent me back to Morocco, and while my mind drifted there among sand dunes, remembering what a special gift it had been sharing the adventure with Lois, Mom, and Dottie, my kitchen lay under another spell. The oranges, so intensely dark before I simmered them and left them to rest, looked a bit anemic. But after adding sugar and bringing them to a boil, they turn a glistening deep garnet. The peel gleams, swirling like eels when I stir the marmalade. What takes me most by surprise is the sudden scent given up by the kettle. My kitchen, smelling wonderfully of oranges since the marmalade began to boil, takes on the scent of pines on a hot summer day. How did these evergreens get into my kitchen? These blood oranges with their disturbing name, they send me.

Fifty years ago, desperate to find a Christmas gift for him that she could afford, she dug the hat out of a pawed-over bargain bin in Macy’s basement. She wrapped it in rumpled, reused white tissue paper, made it festive with red and green plastic curling ribbon that she raked into a clump of bouncy ringlets, and sheepishly presented it: a 100 percent pure acrylic, machine-made, double-knit white beanie with a black-ribbed, fold-over edge, a black and white Nordic design on the crown, and a goofy red ball the size of a marshmallow—not a pom, just a ball—sitting atop it. That same Christmas, also short of cash, he gave her a pyrex measuring cup. They were both delighted. He had the first piece of gear for the ski trip he couldn’t afford, and she had the first item for her non-existent dream kitchen.

That Christmas their love was a revelation, a vast new continent inviting exploration. But all they had was two bus tokens, so they rode the #101 bus the length of Manhattan, from the East Village to the George Washington Bridge. They walked across the soaring, arched spans, laughing and shivering in the frigid gusts that raced from the sea up the Hudson River Gorge. Halfway across, he gallantly yanked the new beanie off his head and tenderly pulled it down over her ears.

In the following years he experimented with other toppers. A black, James Bond-ish toque didn’t suit him, and he shunned a dignified cossack fur as too exotic.  A wool, red-plaid deerstalker with visor and ergonomically designed faux-fur earflaps proved too warm for mid-Atlantic winters. So, too, the purple Peruvian ski cap. He always returned to the preposterous beanie as his go-to hat for shoveling their long driveway at daybreak and protecting his balding pate during weekly ten-mile runs. The beanie accompanied walks to school with his daughters and was witness to years of whooping snowball fights and boisterous broom hockey games at the cabin in the woods that they built in stages as their family grew.

The beanie hangs in a closet most of the time now because she’s forbidden him to wear it in public. “It’s absurd for a man your age to wear a hat like that.” She’s right. It’s old and outmoded. But it embodies too much of their history and durable intimacy to discard. He still wears it to carry out the garbage and, when they go on trips—whether to China, or Greece, or to visit the grandchildren—he sneaks it into the suitcase “just in case we run into a cold snap.”

Elk Herd in Winter, Bethany, OR, photograph by Jennifer Pratt-Walter

The first time I was a bride-to-be I was madly in love with my husband-to-be’s country: Norway. It was also the home country of my mother’s parents. I was American, half Norwegian by blood, and I saw my future: retracing my grandparents’ immigrant footsteps via this marriage and returning to my roots. It was a package deal: the man, the land, and the language.

We were students in France. On our second date we threw off French, spoke English, and I asked him to teach me his language. By birthright, I reasoned, Norwegian was my language, too. He had worked in a daycare with one- and two-year-olds, so we started with nursery rhymes and songs. My goal was to gain the proficiency of a Norwegian one- to two-year-old. My grandmother would be thrilled.

Soon I could talk about plums falling through holes in your pockets and creeks turning into rapids and sailors on the seven seas and the boy tending chickens on the hill who is late home and scared his mother will kick him in the rear so he remains on the hill with the chickens and the man who traded his cow for a fiddle but would never trade his fiddle for a cow and the old shrew in a kerchief who carries a staff and hops over creeks. It was in the second verse of that last song that we first talked about marriage.

Banff River, Canada, photograph by Jennifer Pratt-Walter

Snowy Playground, photograph by Margie Wildblood

Gifting—the thought-that-counts that’s spawned a thousand idioms and ferocious emotion, the likes of which I didn’t fully grasp until I tried to Just Say No.

It’s complicated. I tried to teach my children to be gracious givers. To choose something the recipient would like rather than what they would like. My then-preschooler circumvented this rule with his insistence that “Dad wants the Tonka Trencher-Backhoe for his birthday!”

And I tried to teach that they must be gracious receivers, saying “thank you” even if they don’t like the gift. Again, my four-year-old: “That’s like lying, right?”

But long before my children came along, I’d already been cast into a gift-etiquette faceoff, totally unprepared for a showdown with givers who could not and would not accept that sometimes an intended giftee sincerely doesn’t want a gift.

When my husband and I married back in the Ostentatious ’80s, we did it on the quiet, then followed up with snail-mailed printed announcements to friends and fam, which ended with: “Your love and good wishes would be a special gift. We respectfully request no other.”

We meant no offense. Truly we didn’t.

The calls from my two aunts, a continent away, came immediately.

The first one, a firebrand A-type, began sweetly enough: “We got your announcement, but we’re not sure what this line on the bottom means.” I explained that it meant exactly what it said, that we didn’t need or want anything, and didn’t feel comfortable accepting a round of gifts for what was a second marriage for both of us.

“Oh, I see,” she replied, amiably enough. “Can you hold on a minute?” I heard her calling to my uncle. A muffled, unintelligible conversation followed. It sounded … gruff. When she came back on line, her tone shifted from amiable to affronted: “Your uncle says he doesn’t care how many times you get married, you’re getting a gift every time!” Slam! went the phone (in those days when a satisfying slam of the phone was still part of life). Shortly thereafter, a beautiful blown-glass sculpture arrived in the mail.

On the heels of that exchange came the call from my other aunt, a more easygoing B-type. “Honey, we got your announcement, but we don’t understand this last line.” (Is there an echo in here?) I gave the same explanation I’d given her sister. “Oh, I see,” she said. (There is an echo.) “Then I only have one more question. ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?” Slam! went the phone, and shortly thereafter arrived a lovely crystal bowl.

What could I do but eat my own long-ago precept and be the gracious giftee? I had tried to lead the gift horses to water but I couldn’t make them heed the bottom line. And that became the greater gift—a story that still makes me laugh every time I pass those glass heirlooms and hear their dear voices carrying, priceless and unbreakable, across the land lines of distance and time.

It’s Christmas! I’m wrapping the most beautiful gift I’ve ever given. I hold the hand-sized, drawstring bag I’ve covered in patchworks of tiny beads in most colors of the rainbow. It’s now unrecognizable as one of the simple felt bags Crown Royal liquor comes in.

It’s fully encrusted with patches of blues, greens, reds, pinks, browns, and silver. Tiny seed beads to larger pony beads and blown-glass beads and charms from old jewelry create patches that flow together to form patterns of light and texture. Some charms are sewn tight to the felt, surrounded and held in place by the beads. Other charms dangle from the beaded seams, dancing and floating around the bag.

I secretly wonder if all other Crown Royal bags are jealous of this one. If Crown Royal bags dreamt of their futures, did they imagine themselves this beautiful?

My mother, a gifted storyteller, uses the stage name “Patchwork” because she “stitches her stories together with legend, truth, and humor.” I picture how she’ll respond to this patchwork gift. What will she see in its color—in antique beads from her mother, beads she’s brought me from other countries, bits from broken jewelry, and beads from my ever-growing stash.

As usual, this year’s Christmas-gifting promises to be an all-day affair, with my sisters and their families present. We go around the room, person-by-person, starting with the youngest. Each person unwraps one gift in each round, with everyone else “ooh-ing” and “ah-ing” over each opening. Tension builds for me, waiting for Mother to reach for the package I wrapped.

Several rounds in, she picks that gift and pulls the bag out of its box. The whole room gets suddenly quiet seeing the piece of art I’ve offered. She holds the patchworked bag at arm’s length, turning it, watching beads and fringes capture the light’s magic. I’ll never forget the joy in her face as she discovers individual pieces and memories that make this bag hers. She comments on the bag’s heft from the weight of the beads. Throughout the morning it sits in her lap. She explores the bag’s beauty between her turns. She thinks no one watches—but I can’t keep my eyes away.

All afternoon, she stops to explore the bag. I hear her say, to anyone close enough to hear, “These little charms will catch the light, inviting people into my stories.” She provides potential scenarios for how she’ll use it onstage, acting out how she’ll open it and “draw forth” her stories.

I love seeing her joy that morning and then seeing the bag show up in pictures of her performances. Years later, sorting through things after her passing, my sisters and I decide what to keep and what to sell or give away. I pick up that bag, relishing again her joy on that Christmas morning. Looking inside, I see only the black silk I used as lining, and I ache to hear her tell a story.

Heritage Park House and Barn (Salt Lake City), photograph by Margie Wildblood

Yellow Truck in a White World, photograph by Kim McNealy Sosin

Zack Watches the Snowstorm, photograph by Kim McNealy Sosin

Because He Loved Me

A Story of the Transformative Power of Love

by Margie Crowe Wildblood

    Fairytales, Prince Charming, happily-ever-after filled Margie’s girlhood dreams. Her love story blossomed in college when she met a kind, inspirational—and married—professor who changed her life. But, frightened by their growing attraction, he set boundaries, telling her to find someone her own age. A few years later, she did meet a younger man and fell in love. When their marriage ended, she gave up her fairytale fantasies, accepting that she would be alone for the rest of her life. Then, a letter arrived...
From the Amazon reviews “A beautifully written and honest account of an extraordinary relationship.” “There's nothing I like better than a book that keeps me up past my bedtime. I had a hard time putting down this tender, honest, romantic story. It will restore your faith in true love.” “...It does a great job of capturing the strength and wonder of romantic love and defining it in terms of a lifetime experience. Highly recommended!” Available in paperback and on Kindle from Amazon.

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