Christmas tips

To tip or not to tip? Who do you tip at Christmas?

This year, we tipped the mailman. He made it kind of obvious, by leaving us a card explaining that routes were being rearranged, so that he would no longer be our mailman in 2010, and saying how much he’d enjoyed working our patch over the past however many years. I felt a bit obliged, but I didn’t mind, as he’s always been a fantastic mailman. He’s gone out of his way to make life easy – arranging to stop mail if we’re away (you usually have to go to the post office and fill in a form), and doing his best to deliver parcels that need signatures at convenient times.

I remember when I was a child, our paper boy adopted a similar strategy. He left a Christmas card wishing his customers a merry Christmas, and detailing the number of hours he spent on the round, the amount he was paid, and the amount he estimated it cost him to do the job (mostly wear and tear on his bike). The newsagent made the poor lad go round to each house and apologise in person. I suppose England in the 1970’s had less stomach for blatant tip solicitation than America in the 2000’s.

My worst Christmas tipping moment happened in Scotland a few years ago. The window cleaners had come round, and I was doing that thing of lurking around the house trying to avoid the rooms they were working on, but also trying to make it look as if I was totally relaxed and not doing that at all, just getting on with my normal business, which - as usual - was taking me from room to room every few minutes. On this occasion, not only was I lurking and roaming, but I was also cogitating the appropriateness of a tip.

I decided I would give them a Christmas extra. I imagined that being a window cleaner in Scotland in December didn’t have much warmth and cosiness about it, and that a Christmas tip might just provide a rare warm and cosy moment. So I went out the back door in search of the head window man. As I rounded the corner of the house, there he was, with his back to me, standing close to the house, doing up his flies.

Now, if this scenario took place today, a bit of American assertiveness having rubbed off on me in the 3 years we’ve been here, I think I’d say,

“Excuse me. I’d prefer it if you didn’t urinate against the wall of my house. You are very welcome to come inside at any time and use the bathroom. If you don’t want to do that, I’d appreciate it if you urinated at the far end of the garden, and not right next to the window of our guest bedroom, spotless though that window is – on the outside at any rate.”

But this was a few years ago, and I was far too British for that kind of approach. What I did was to fix my eyes on a spot somewhere to the north west of his face, and certainly far north of his fingers fumbling with the zip, and say,

“Um... er... um... this is for you” (thrusting the wad of notes towards him, the usual amount and the tip),

“and... um... er... um... Happy Christmas. Yes, um... Happy Christmas!”

He in turn looked at a point significantly to one side of me, and replied,

“Oh... er... um... thank you very much.”

It’s great being British, isn’t it?

.

Sidewalk chalks

Sidewahk chahks. One of the staples of American childhood, and I don’t think we have them at all in Britain. Perhaps we do, and I just never came across them. I wish I had done – they’re a very useful arrow in the mother’s quiver of outdoor toys for small children. Happy hours are spent doodling on the steps, the path or the patio, and then when the rain comes, it’s all washed clean and you can start all over again.

If you have a front drive, or a front porch, a front path, or even just a front doorstep, you can display your work for passers-by. Most will miss it, of course, cocooned in their cars from such neighbourhood detail, but the occasional walker, in trainers, sports gear and headphones, will glance over, and I like to think we make the mailman’s job more interesting.

Earlier in the year, 7-yo wrote a lovely message of welcome for visitors. “The Manhattans live here - this is our house - hello” it read, in a spidering melee of capitals and lower case, some letters twice the size of others, and no one the same colour as its neighbour. If you’d passed by that day, before the rain came, I’m sure you’d have enjoyed the message, and perhaps you would have wondered about the blur of colour underneath. That was where the open-hearted child had written “Our garage code is ####”, to be extra welcoming, and the more security-conscious mother had scuffed it out, sad to have to explain a little more of the world to him as she did so.

Three weeks ago, on the day of our return from Britain, some friends came by and covered our drive and porch in “Welcome Home” messages: a huge red heart and big flowers, and personalized exclamations. “Hi, 11-yo, can’t wait to see you!” “We missed you, 7-yo!” It was wonderful, and made me promise myself that I would do the same for others in the future. Perhaps I could bring the custom back to repressed Britain, where such a gesture would be embarrassing. Heavens, other people would see it! And children’s names, their own NAMES, outside for all to read! Embarrassing, but enjoyed too, I think. I will take the risk one day (but maybe not use the children’s names).

Now, if you walk by our house, you will see a four-letter word carefully inscribed three times in different colours. Hurry though, before the rain comes. “OLAY OLAY OLAY”. Intrigued, I asked 4-yo why she had fetched the bottle of body moisturiser from the bathroom, and taken it outside to copy. “I wanted everyone to know that I can do that letter now”, she replied, pointing to the Y, somewhat larger than the other letters and a little more wobbly, but absolutely recognisable. She learns so fast these days, in that engaging 4 year old way, and often teaching herself. I wouldn’t even have known that she can do all the other three letters. I wonder why she picked the letter Y as the next one to master. I wonder why that word on that bottle caught her interest. I wonder if she feels, as I do still, that letters have their own personalities. I wonder which ones she will like best. I have always liked Y.

Anyway, I felt her achievement and her desire for recognition deserved a wider audience than our - no doubt rather puzzled - mailman.

The dangers of blogging

You think this is going to be about addiction. You have spotted the fact that I am technically on blogging sabbatical, but seemingly can’t actually stop. But ha! It’s not. I can walk away any time. I can. No, this is a little story that I hope will act as a New Year cautionary tale about the interface between real life and the life of the blog. This is an area that bloggers give much thought to, especially as they start out. What if I’m rude about my next door neighbor, and I’m not quite as anonymous as I believe? What if I tell a hilarious story about the school principal’s pants falling down (trousers to you, although pants would be funnier), and he turns out to be a secret lurker on my site? Should I tell my family and friends about the blog, and then have to be polite about them for ever more? What if I use my artistic licence and make up a few things, and get caught out? Is a blog fact or fiction? What if I say it was a grey and miserable Saturday afternoon on the beach, and people use the comments box to say “no it wasn’t, I was there and the sun was shining brightly all day long”? You know the kind of thing. But for all the care and caution with which the blogger attends to such issues, there is always the wild card out there waiting to be played. This is my wild card story.

I have a friend - let’s call her Josephine. We were at school together. In recent years, we have had pregnancy, motherhood and an email addiction as shared experiences. Our paths have run slightly less closely since I moved here, since she has been lured from email by Facebook and I by blogging. I do log on to see how her virtual Renault Twingo is doing and how many people have given her little pictures of chocolate cake (I’m sorry, but I can’t really get into Facebook, I know this is my loss because clearly so many other people love it, but there we are …), and she reads my blog. And we do still email a bit regarding essential matters such as how to go about buying girl clothes when you’ve only had boys so far, the latest trends in baby names, whether the grass is really greener over the other side of the fence and what can be done about it, and the teasing of a mutual friend who has a crush on her GP.

Anyway, Josephine had a baby in September. He’s called Joshua. He looks lovely in the pictures. Not long after he was born, Josephine emailed me saying “we think you should be Joshua’s blogmother”. I was thrilled. I emailed back at great wittering length. Several times. You may find this hard to believe... or you may not... but when I get going, I am something of a witterer. I’ve never sought treatment as, personally, I don’t see it as a medical condition, and I know several fellow witterers (leading politicians among them) who share my opinion. I can witter on at impressive length about pretty much nothing at all, so wittering on about being asked to be godmother turned me into Mrs Wittering of No 1, Witter Avenue, Great Wittering, Wittershire. Believe me. I wittered on about how I love having godchildren. I made jokes about furry godmothers. I mentioned that baby Joshua almost shares a birthday with another of my godsons (clearly a fact of huge interest to a mother in the throes of managing a new baby). I reminisced about how she had lent me a pretty white Vertbaudet summer dress (puffed sleeves, Peter Pan collar) for my daughter’s christening that had been her daughter’s, but how I didn’t think it would do for Joshua. I wrote volumes about how we always regretted not having asked her to be godmother to one of ours (always a tricky area), and that I’d once suggested to Husband that we should have a fourth child so that we could rectify the situation, but had had to concur with his opinion that that wasn’t a very strong reason for further procreation. Wittering, much wittering.

And then there was silence. I heard nothing, which didn’t really surprise me. New babies don’t allow much email time, Josephine’s husband has to be away for work for weeks at a time, no allowances made for a new arrival, her daughter had just started school… But then, after two weeks, with all that witter in the Sent Items folder looking lonely and increasingly uneasy, like the woman under the clock with a red carnation in her hand, I sent an email saying “Feeling a bit shifty here. You didn’t really mean it about the godmother thing did you? It was just a pun wasn’t it? Um. Don’t know what else to say.”

Josephine came clean. “Truth will out”, she said. “We hadn’t really got round to thinking about godparents. But we really really really like the idea, so please do be Josh’s godmother. Or blogmother.”

If you reach out and touch your computer screen at this point, you can still feel the warmth generated by my embarrassment, even after 3 months and all those miles between us. Try it.

The story ends well, though. There was a bit more emailing between us. I said I was resigning and they could reconsider at leisure, and I wouldn’t be at all offended. Josephine said no, don’t resign, we do really want you to do this.

Husband is always very good in these over-wittering situations, and he suggested that really, we should all start operating a new system for appointing godparents. Henceforward it should always be done, following my excellent lead, on a volunteer basis. That way, you’d guarantee motivated godparents, and save parents a whole lot of angst about the choice. He pointed out that it was a win-win situation. I love being a godmother and can go and choose little baby clothes in the shops; Baby Joshua gets an additional Christmas and birthday present every year, and extra prayers offered up for his well-being. Can’t be bad. And Josephine? Well, she gets a laugh every time she thinks of my woeful over-enthusaism (I tell you, I’ve been in America too long), and hey, we’re still mates. In fact, she is such a good mate that she doesn’t use the comments box to accuse me of plagiarism every time I say ‘hey’ followed by a comma, or ‘as eny ful no’ or ‘aaaaargh!’ or ‘it’s not easy being me’ or any of her other trademark expressions that I have shamelessly nicked. And speaking of the comments box, I want you all to tread softly in it (as if you ever do anything other…). Remember this is a real life story you’re dealing with. And in case you were wondering, yes, she is happy for it to be a blog post – in fact, she suggested it.

Oh, and on the question of my blogging sabbatical, of course I'm still on it. I'm looking on the last half dozen posts as an extended one-off Christmas special. What do you mean, it’s January 20th...?

Enthusiasm: Part II

Where was I? Ah yes. Lost and alone on a sea of unembarrassed enthusiasm, without the raft of irony to cling onto... Doesn't sound good - I'd better not leave me there too long.

When one is shipwrecked, one has to make use of the scarce resources to hand, and thus it was that I began to investigate enthusiasm, to see if I could put it to any useful purpose. I noticed that my children came home from school with teachers’ comments reading “woo-hoo, 10-yo, this is AWESOME work!”, or “6-yo, I am so PROUD of how hard you tried on this - way to go!”, and seeing their faces light up with pride. I began to wonder how they would cope with a return to the “good effort” or “nice work” crumbs that they would be thrown by British teachers.

Then I noticed that even adults dealing with adults feel able to say things about themselves and each other that are affirming and positive and, well, rather, um, uncomfortable and embarrassing and, let’s face it, jolly unBritish. Then after a while, since you can get used to pretty much anything, I began to feel that this is actually quite nice (in a reserved kind of repressed way). The zenith came when I got together with 3 other women to form a book club. We had a great evening, partly discussing the book, mostly discussing life, and the next morning, there was a little flurry of emailing. It was effusive. There were superlatives. I was told I was “adorable”. Email, of course, is very forgiving, and in the privacy of my own home, I was able to shuffle about in my chair, look at the ceiling, breathe deeply and recite the words of God save the Queen to restore my equilibrium. I wrote a reply, matching their effusive excitement: “Thanks so much for your emails. It wasn’t a bad evening at all, was it?”

Maybe I’ve just been here too long, but you know, I can’t help feeling that the Americans might have got hold of something. I wonder what it is like in the other direction. How on earth does it feel to an American moving to England? Dour, cynical, repressed, gloomy? To them I say, you should try living in Scotland. No, no, I'm only joking.

You see, here in Home on the Range, there's a line that goes 'seldom is heard a discouraging word'. You get to Britain, and it's the brutal opposite. The newspapers are discouraging, the discussion in the office is discouraging, the chat at the school gate is discouraging. We don’t see it like that. We see it as self-consciously amusing, wittily detached. We think Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Ross, Private Eye. We look on the Americans as a nation of adults who’ve never quite grown out of childhood, but I’m beginning to wonder if the British are a nation of adults who haven’t entirely left their teenage years behind. We’re so keen (in a totally uninterested way, of course) to be cool, to be unimpressed. Perhaps it’s not as clever as we think.

I find myself in the uncomfortable position of sitting on the fence with a foot in each camp. Fundamentally I am a Brit. My Brit foot is a size 6, and it’s a laconic foot in a painfully elegant cashmere sock, draped languidly over the fence in a self-deprecating gesture, an ironic reference to post-modernist foothood.

But my Yank foot, a size 8½, is learning to wiggle its toes in an unembarrassed manner. I dread to look, as I think it might be clad in one of those socks with individual toes, in bright stripes or spots. It might even be in team colours. It's enjoying itself, and it isn't going to apologise for that. It's pursuing happiness, and that's its right. Nothing to be ashamed of there. I’ve just thought of something else. Oh no. It probably understands the offside rule, and if not held in check, will soon start offering to explain it to other feet.

Hm. Time to do the patent Iota litmus test of enthusiasm. Close my eyes, picture an old friend of mine who used to render a roomful of the rest of us helpless with laughter by his description of an 'enthyoosiast'. Re-run in my memory that perfectly honed timing and pronounciation. Yup. Still has me rolling around in my imaginary seat. Phew. Still on the right side of the fence then. That’s a relief. Though nothing to get too excited about, of course.