Ring Out, Wild Bells

There's so much more to Tennyson's Christmas poem than the line we use for toasts on New Year's Eve. I've highlighted the stanza that appeals to me most this year. It seems to capture all that's wrong with our world today, and all that might set it right.



Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.



What are your thoughts? Do you have a favorite stanza in this poem?

Ertyl the Elf Gets Down to It

Okay, definitely a little odd, but I'm here in Orlando, the Sunday after Christmas, just back from visiting "the Happiest Place on Earth" with my family, and Ertyl seems to be right at home. Piece of advice: If it's below 60 degrees in Florida, bundle up like you're planning for an Alaskan winter. Oh, my gosh. we were so cold last night, my ears are still frozen.

So here's Ertyl, and here's a cheer for the New Year, a year full of mystery and magic and more Killer Hobby blog posts!

There once was an elf they called Ertyl,
He dressed all in green like a turtle,
A lover of holly and all things quite jolly
He found the day after Xmas a hurtle.
"What do I do now? Alas, holy cow,
No presents or gifts,
We're done with our lists,
No halls needing decking,
No mistletoe necking,
No more frantic shopping,
No global roof hopping,
No chimney slip-slopping,
No house-by-house stopping,
No more green and red,
No reindeer need fed,
No polishing the sleigh,
No wisking away
In the frosty winter air,
The coursers harnessed by pair,
So much time on my hands,
Without any plans,
What shall I do?
So I don't feel blue?

I know...I'll write a mystery!"

And he did.

So shall I.

News and Appearances

All the Killer Hobbies Blog Sisters hope you are enjoying the holiday season!

Monday’s author, Joanna Campbell Slan, is staring at the record snowfall in the Washington DC area. She's glad that she'll be spending Christmas Day with her family at Disney World in Florida. (That is if they can clear the runways in time!) On Monday, you can read an excerpt from Photo, Snap, Shot, the 3rd book in the Kiki Lowenstein Mystery Series, which will be released May, 2010.

You can always follow Joanna's appearances by logging onto http://www.booktour.com/ Put "Joanna Slan" in the SEARCH box.

Tuesday’s author, Camille Minichino (Margaret Grace) has published a short story on smashwords.com. "The Fluorine Murder" is the 9th in the periodic table mysteries. Yes, the elements are back! You can read a free sample by going to the site href="http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/6876">http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/6876, OR you can buy it there for $1!


Wednesday’s author, Monica Ferris, will be at the big International Quilt Show in Rosemont, IL on the second weekend in February. The following weekend, watch for her at the Nashville Needlework Market.

Thursday's author, Linda O. Johnston is busy being ordered around by her dogs, but reports these special appearances: On Saturday, October 17, Linda will be on a panel at the Bonita Branch of the San Diego Library on Chick Lit, at 2 PM

On Sunday, October 18, she'll be at the Los Angeles Romance Authors Book Fair at noon, at the Barnes & Noble at the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Hayvenhurst in the San Fernando Valley.Please go see her!

Friday's author, Terri Thayer, is busy finishing up last minute Christmas gifts.

Saturday's author, Betty Hechtman, is crocheting holiday presents, baking Christmas cookies and reading this week.

Visit us every Sunday for updates and news. For specifics or to contact any individual author, click on our personal websites listed in the sidebar. Thanks for stopping by--and be sure to sign up to follow us as we have all sorts of fun adventures planned for the future!

The Last Christmas Blog

My favorite holiday moving isn’t really a Christmas movie, but it has my favorite Christmas song. Meet Me in St. Louis covers a year in the life of a family just preceding the St. Louis World’s Fair.

Toward the end of the movie, there is a whole section about the family’s Christmas. The father has accepted a job promotion which requires them to move to New York, so the holiday is very bittersweet since it is there last in their familiar setting.

Judy Garland sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Every time I hear the song whether it is the Judy Garland version or someone else’s I always feel a flood of emotion. It reminds me of holidays when I was a kid and how you think that’s how it will be forever, but then things change. Circumstances change. People go out of your life. Traditions change.

Growing up, my family always had a party on Christmas eve. I got married and moved to L.A., my brother spent his holidays elsewhere, my father died and the tradition went dormant for years, only to be picked up again when my son was born. My mother and brother came for the holidays and I threw the party on Christmas eve. Now my mother is gone and my brother doesn’t want to fight the crowd to come cross country.

But new traditions start. For a while we had Christmas dinner at the beach, then at a Japanese teppan restaurant. Last year and this, it was Chinese food and a movie. Just me, my husband, my son and his fiancé.

It’s pointless to fret over change. You can’t hang onto things anymore than you can keep a snowflake.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, if today is your day to celebrate. Happy holidays otherwise.

The roads have been treacherous around here for the past week or so. Not because of snow or ice like much of the country. We are spared that. Not because of the rain that can result in tricky driving conditions.

Because of Christmas. The freeways are clogged with out-of-towners making abrupt stops underneath signage and crazy last minute lane changes. The surface streets are full of savvy shoppers avoiding the freeways. Every parking lot has become a test of driving skills, full of avoidance tactics and requiring oodles of patience. How that woman didn’t know she was blocking the entire lane at the library the other day was beyond me.

So my favorite thing about Christmas is the quiet that it brings to the streets around me. Silicon Valley is a place that doesn't stop for ,much. People work all the time, and busy is the byword. Stores are open 24/7 and the McDonalds down the street cranks out burgers and fries non stop.

Today I will revel in the closed stores, the shuttered businesses, the empty streets. Everyone, it seems, is home. Taking a well deserved break.

Enjoy your day.

Holidays' Best

It’s Christmas Eve! My older son and daughter-in-law will arrive tomorrow to celebrate the holidays--for our second time. We already had one celebration with other family members who were passing through L.A. earlier.

That’s a fact of life for me. My family has always celebrated both Hanukkah and Christmas by gift-giving, so our holiday season lasts for a while.

My favorite gift, especially these days, is the ability to spend the holidays with as many beloved family members as possible. My mother-in-law is giving us the special gift of staying with us for a month. Our younger son pops in and out, since he lives in San Diego, only a two hour drive away from L.A. And of course our pups Lexie and Mystie are around to help us celebrate.

I also get a kick out of store-bought gifts. I’ve always liked collecting wristwatches, which is a bit of an anachronism in these days when people tell time by glancing at their Blackberries or cell phones. The gift I loved best as a child was a watch that had interchangeable bands and frames for the face. I begged for it, and wound up getting a band and a face for each day of Hanukkah.

The only Christmas story I’ve had published so far was a romance story in an anthology called WINTER WONDERLAND, published by Dorchester as a Love Spell book. All of the authors based their stories on a Christmas carol they chose. Mine was “Up On The Housetop.” This year is the ten-year anniversary of its publication, but it reappears on store shelves every once in a while near Christmastime.

Who is spending the holidays with you? I wish you all a wonderful Christmas!

Christmas 2009

My mother passed peacefully away December 17. We wanted to put death notices in newspapers from the city where she was born and grew up and again in the city where she spent most of her adult life and again in the city she was living in when she died, but discovered newspapers charge by the line as if these notices are trying to sell something. The Philadelphia paper was the most expensive -- $900 for three short paragraphs! My sister, who is in charge of the burial funds, said to cancel the notices and I replied that we didn’t have to because the papers want proof of death and the hospice she died in wouldn’t tell anyone, even at my direction, that she had, in fact, died and so the papers refused to accept the notice. Well, except the Fort Myers paper; for some reason they decided I wasn’t a prankster and published a notice. The hospice cited patient privacy laws as the reason they wouldn’t give out the information. We didn’t go through a mortuary but had Mom taken directly to a crematorium, so we didn’t have their expertise in handling this. Life is too weird to be believed, sometimes.

Meanwhile, Christmas approaches and thank God I’m finding it a comfort rather than a painful contrast. Favorite ways of celebrating:

A showing of “Scrooge,” the movie I find that comes closest to Dickens’ version of “A Christmas Carol.” It’s the one starring Alistair Sim, made in England in 1951. I’m also looking forward to “A Christmas Story,” based on the short story by Jean Shepherd from his anthology, In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, which I read long before the movie came out. It’s not Christmas until I see those two movies. (Fortunately, I have them on CDs, so if television fails me, or shows them at a time I can’t watch, I’ll still get to see them.)

For close to thirty years I collected the Fontanini Christmas Creche pieces, which is not just Mary, Joseph, the Infant, the Three Kings and a few shepherds, but Bethelem: the rug seller with the spinner and weaver; the priest, rabbi, and temple; the carpenter in his shop with an apprentice; the baker and his dough-kneading wife and basket-wielding son; the innkeeper with his apologetically-spread arms (confronting Mary on a tired donkey and a worried Joseph); the stable in the form of a ruined pagan temple; the potter painting a pot in front of his kiln; a big cluster of angels suspended on fine fishing line over six shepherds, three dogs and a large flock of sheep; and so on and so on and so on. I used to put them out on the long raised hearth of our living room and allowed them to spread onto the coffee table -- but then we moved into a much smaller place. I no longer have room to put them out, and didn’t want to leave them jammed into their glass-fronted bookcase so I began to think, sadly, of selling them. Then I got a better idea: I donated the whole set to my church. And they, very kindly, have named me the informal Curator of the Creche. I still get to play with them, they provided a big table in the narthex, and I went over yesterday to move the Three Kings on camelback from a table that holds announcements to the big table, where I turned most of the figures to gape at their striding into town. Christmas Eve after the Children’s Service at four, the Baby Jesus will be brought by one lucky child to the manger. January 6 the Kings will dismount and will appear on foot presenting their gifts in a brief appearance at the stable before the whole set gets put away until next year. So far the members of St. George’s seem pleased at having this display. I am not inclined to preen because I’m genuinely humbled at this public evidence of my lack of self control when it comes to collecting.

Among my earliest published books is one called Original Sin, set at Christmas time. I loved writing it -- it’s a locked-room mystery that takes place in a big Victorian mansion cut off from the world by a blizzard, with a body in the library -- and while it’s long gone out of print it remains one of my favorite Christmas reads. Another is The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy Sayers which, while not explicitly a Christmas book, has Christmas happen in it.

This year my sister-in-law’s Christmas gift to me was to take me to a play, “Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol,” which was really good. It’s a tour de force for the one actor who tells the story in two and a half hours, playing all the characters without the aid of sets or costumes. I hope I can think of something half as good for her next year.

I also like to bake a wonderful Austrian Christmas bread called “Vanocka” in honor of the season. It’s a yeast bread with orange peel, blanched almonds and two kinds of raisins in it. I will send the recipe to anyone who asks for it. Write to MaryPulver@aol.com.