Dickens ala Downton Abbey

For the past few years, I always had Downton Abbey in January to help with my post-holiday blahs. But what to do now that it is finished and all of January stretches before me - no Earl of Grantham roaming around his estate, no pithy Lady Violet remarks to chuckle over, no downstairs shenanigans for Mr. Carson to control? Fortunately, my husband had the cure for my DA withdrawal pangs.

For the holidays, I decorated my dining room buffet using the lovely stained glass window in my childhood church as inspiration...

I used my antique kerosene lamp, stained glass panels my sister made me years ago, and a beautiful Johnson Brothers winter plate that I found at Home Goods and couldn't resist.  I also proudly displayed the small ceramic nativity set that a cousin made and gave me years ago and that I have displayed every year in every home that I've decorated for Christmas for over fifty years.  And, of course, my family Bible was open to the nativity story in Luke, the same passages my mother would read to us every Christmas Eve.

But I opened a special gift from my husband on Christmas morning, and honestly, I think he was as excited to watch me open the box as I was to receive such an amazing and thoughtful gift!  Oh, he knows me so well...I fell head over heels in love with this new Dickens Village piece, and this is what is now gracing my dining room buffet...

So even though I no longer can curl up on my couch with a cup of tea and watch Masterpiece Theater on Sunday evenings for further drama and nefarious plots and improbable love stories I can now sit at my dining table and gaze into the lit windows of the Abbey and wonder what the lords and ladies and downstairs servants are up to.  Is Mrs. Patmore still turning out multi-course dinners while bossing Daisy around?  Has Thomas reformed, or is he still a black-hearted nave?  How are Anna and Mr. Bates adjusting to parenthood?  

The lovely white tea pot is from the Downton Abbey collection at World Market last year and I like to think that my Johnson plate depicts the nearby village in winter.  Perhaps Edith and Marigold have strolled down to the village to have tea with Lady Violet, enjoying the feel of soft snowflakes brushing against their cheeks as they stroll the country lanes?

I love this picture from a couple of seasons ago...I was rooting for Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes from the beginning.  And while dreaming of snowy country lanes is all well and good, right now a beach and a water view sounds mighty appealing.  Stay tuned, as I just might have more to say on that subject soon!  In the meantime, English poet Alexander Pope captures how I feel when I gaze on my Downton Abbey tableau and day-dream of strolling along the gravel path that leads up to the Abbey. The Quiet Life- in health of body, peace of mind - sound sleep by night - study and ease...now that is truly my cup of tea!

The Quiet Life

Happy the man whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breath his native air
In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,
Whose flocks supply him with attire,
Whose trees in summer yield him shade,
In winter fire.

Blest who can unconcern'dly find
Hours, days and years slide soft away,
In health of body, peace of mind,
Quiet by day,

Sound sleep by night; study and ease,
Together mixt; sweet recreation;
And innocence, which most does please
With meditation.

Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die,
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.

God Bless Us, Every One!

Back by request, here is this year's Dickens Village!  Each year I arrange the town differently, although I always try to maintain the proper geographical layout of landmarks - The Tower of London must be next to the Thames River, for example...

while the Globe Theatre must be on the other side of the Thames.

If I messed those up, I fear the Ghost of Christmas Past might pay me a visit, instead of Ebenezer Scrooge!  Although, of course, Ebenezer at first had other ideas about the origination of his ghostly visitors...

You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!

~~Ebenezer Scrooge

All three ghosts chase Ebenezer endlessly around his dismal bedroom all night long!

"But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round—apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that—as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time."

~~Fred Holywell (Ebenezer's nephew)

"...the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely."

~~Fred Holywell 

As I arrange my Village, I think about what shops I would enjoy visiting if I could magically shrink myself and roam the snow drifted streets of Dickens' London.  I am pretty sure I would love browsing through the Antiques shop, while Phil would be next door checking out the stringed instruments!

Or perhaps we would stop by a friend's house for a warm cup of tea and a plate of scones and crumpets?

Lily and I curled up on the couch over the weekend and enjoyed watching the Paddington Bear movie.  Of course we were delighted to see one of the palace guards treating Paddington to a hot cup of tea and a marmalade sandwich!  We checked the guards at my Buckingham Palace after the movie, but alas, not a sticky drop of marmalade jam in sight.

Yes, I do know that Fezziwig's Warehouse would not have been next door to Scrooge and Marley's counting house, but I'm running out of room and sometimes have to bend the story line just a little. 

"Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!” 

“For it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child Himself.”

The large house on the right is Gad's Hill, Dickens home.  I imagine Mr. Dickens, resplendent in his top hat, is leaving his home arm in arm with his wife to do a reading of A Christmas Carol, while his children enjoy the ice on the nearby pond.

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!” 

“And it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! 

And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!” 

Reflecting back, looking forward

“Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many..."

~~Charles Dickens

I know everyone is busy packing away their Christmas trees, carefully tucking their special ornaments in protective wrapping, stowing the candles and wreaths and holiday figurines back in their holiday boxes.  But I am feeling a certain reluctance to close out the season and thought before I take down our own tree and store all the decor back downstairs in their tubs that I would share a few holiday memories with you.  And at our house, holiday memories start with our Dickens Village.

Our village has grown to the point where we now have strategically placed geographic locations for a few of the pieces!  In order to accommodate the three extra long table in my family room with the majority of the buildings, we had to move my antique sailor's trunk to the dining room.  I decided it would be a great place to feature a farm house, barn and lobster shack that reminded us of our wonderful trip to Maine a few years ago.  Complete with a vintage sailor's lantern and my lovely annotated edition of Thoreau's Maine Woods, this small tableau reminded us daily of all the fun we had exploring Maine's beautiful ocean coastline.  And, of course, the delicious lobster!!

The top of the bookcase that houses our DVD collection provided just the right spot for highlighting our delightful day spent at Robert Frost's farm in Derry, New Hampshire.  I loved wandering through his meadows and sitting on his rock fence, taking in the beauty of a New England fall day.  This little white house reminded me of his farm house and of course you can't travel through New England without encountering more than a few rustic covered bridges!

Wouldn't you love to be in that sleigh, skimming over fresh fallen snow with a warm blanket tucked around you?  You can see the bewildered horse in the book behind the sleigh wondering why they have stopped deep in the woods when they still have "miles to go before they sleep."  I absolutely love the Susan Jeffers' illustrations in this beautiful book of one of Frost's most beloved and enduring poems.  

And because I love covered bridges I really enjoyed displaying this embroidered picture this year, on loan from my mother.  I made this for her for Christmas when I was 11, and I was so very proud of it!  As an adult I can see the uneven stitches, but even though I made it (gulp) almost fifty years ago, I can still remember the love and care I put into each and every stitch.  

I remember my fourth grade class learning this poem by memory...my lines were "my little horse must think it queer, to stop without a farmhouse near."  Just in case you can't remember the whole poem, here it is for you!  I'm hoping to post more regularly in the new year, so I'll be back on Monday with a tour of Dicken's old London town and a few of my favorite pieces. Until then, have a safe and restful weekend!

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

~~Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

I ran across a poem yesterday that made me laugh out loud, as it brought back all sorts of good memories.  My parents faithfully took our family each year to the South Dakota State Fair - and it goes without saying that a good time was had by all as we perused the 4-H exhibits, picked up all sorts of free souvenirs (Mother stocked up on wooden yardsticks) and finally made our way to the twinkling lights of the midway once we'd admired all the canned pickles and floral displays and quilts.

This summer my husband and I swapped out on of our Door County camping trips for a trip to the Iowa State Fair.  It had been over forty years since I'd attended one, and I was so excited! I may live in a city, but I've always been a farm girl at heart.  Well, a farm girl who still needs Starbucks and Barnes and Noble close by!

We had such fun admiring the 4-H exhibits.  I had always wanted desperately to be in 4-H, like my Indiana cousins, but there wasn't a club in my town when I was a girl.  I think my sisters were in one later, but alas, I never got to learn how to make a braided coffee cake or sew a dress or arrange a floral bouquet and earn a blue ribbon at the fair.

And as we strolled around the large agricultural exhibit building, what do you think we saw?  A butter cow!  Evidently it's famous at the Iowa State Fair, a fact I had not run across before.  And not only a butter cow, but also a butter Captain James Kirk and the crew of the Star Ship Enterprise!  Don't forget - James Kirk is going to be born in Riverside, Iowa in 2228!  

I had to laugh at this sign, remembering how my mother would always instruct me to make sure that I had buttered her toast all the way to the edges.  I tended to be a bit of a skimpy toast butterer when I was younger.  Don't worry, Mom, I've gotten much butter! (I mean better!)

So you can see why today's poem tickled my fancy, so to speak.  And yes, we did line up and file past Mr. Butter Cow as in a wake, although the conversation around us was much more lively and irreverent!

Butter

I’ve never seen the land
of milk and honey, but at

the Iowa State Fair I glimpsed
a cow fashioned of butter.

It lived behind a window
in an icy room, beneath klieg lights.

I filed past as one files
past a casket at a wake.

It was that sad: a butter cow
without a butter calf. Nearby I spied

a butter motorcycle, motorcycle-
sized, a mechanical afterthought

I thought the cow might have liked to ride.
You don’t drive a motorcycle; you ride it.

But not if you’re a butter cow, not
if you’re a butter cow who’s seen, if

not the land of milk and honey, the land
of milk, and dwelled within it.

It had a short life span, the butter cow.
Before it died, I looked

deep into its butter eyes. It saw
my butter soul. I could

have wept, or spread myself,
for nobody, across dry toast.
—Andrea Cohen, from Kentucky Derby

 

Have a wonderful, butter spread to the edge of your toast kind of day!

i carry your heart...

I have never kept secret the fact that I am an autumn girl.  Sweater weather is by far my favorite time of year - hot apple cider, cinnamon rolls, chili and cornbread, and pot roasts for Sunday dinner.  Apple pies, apple kuchen, apple strudel, apple turnovers, apple dumplings (especially apple dumplings!)  Pumpkin lattes, pumpkin bread, pumpkin muffins, and pumpkin pies (you can never have too many pumpkin pies on hand!) 

Fall foliage, crisp air, twinkling stars at night, and a warming fire in the family room if the nip in the air gets a little too nippy.  Books that have been shelved during the summer reappear, and the cultural scene gets underway...concerts, lectures, exhibitions, plays, and all sorts of wonderful art offerings return to delight all the senses.  And in the middle of all this autumn giddiness comes the heart of the season - our annual family fall picnic.

This tradition was started by my parents years ago in South Dakota, and all of us would pick a Sunday where we could caravan up north to a state park called Sica Hollow, which translates from the Lakota language to Trail of Spirits. My parents, as many of my siblings that were around, and car loads of cousins all came together to walk the trails, admire the natural beauty and eat fried chicken and potato salad and peach crisp.  We all looked forward to it every year.  We even captured one year's trip in a Christmas ornament that makes us smile when we unwrap it and hang it on the tree every December.

When my husband and I moved to Wisconsin about sixteen years ago, our kids were homesick that first autumn so we decided to carry on the tradition and found a similar state park in our new state.  It's not quite the same - I wish my mother and siblings and nieces and nephews were all able to join us, but I'm proud that we have kept the tradition and memories alive, and you can imagine how happy I was this past Sunday when ALL of our children gathered together again to hike the trails and admire the fall colors.  Over the years we've outgrown the windsuits...

and have also grown our family from this...

 

 to this!

My beautiful children have grown up surrounded by the family traditions that hold us together, and create a bond that will never break.

Sibling bonds...

And brothers grow up...

 to become fathers...

 

And because everyone wanted every dish that we had ever brought on this picnic over the course of the last thirty years, we dined on homemade fried chicken and potato salad, courtesy of my husband.  I contributed baked beans, rolls, peach crisp and mint chocolate brownies, and my daughter brought birthday cake and fall cupcakes so we could celebrate one of my son's birthday while we were all gathered together.  A perfect day in every respect. It had been at least ten years since all of our children were able to join us on our fall trek, so even though we had to battle hordes of nasty Japanese beetles during our picnic it was perfect in my eyes!  We wore off all the food with a strenuous hike afterwards.

I couldn't help but think of my Dad, and in my heart I knew how proud he must be to know we are carrying on family traditions and making new memories with our granddaughters.  

I know I looked up at the beautiful fall sky several times, whispering his name, but I really didn't need to look up.  I carry him with me, wherever I go.

Dad and I at Sica Hollow, mid-1990s

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

~~e.e. cummings