Step out

It's a weird time of the year.
Idealised memories of Christmas spent with cousins cluster like grapes around the realities of the non-season here. In one we are all at my grandmother's first house, the one with the patio above the garage (above some other room?) where one had a startling view of the sea. My aunt asked someone to play Santa Claus and to a pack of preschoolers the man in the red suit arriving at our doorstep was everything.

In another memory we are again at the beach, always at the beach, and my grandmother has tossed the traditional idea of a Christmas tree by using the long branch-bloom that extends from the middle of some type of succulent. She has made little packets for each grandchild containing a host of tiny 'onbenullighede', things she has picked up at farm stalls and convenience stores during the past year in her pursuit to be fair to us all. The families are all there, the aunts and uncles and my mother and sister.

A different year sees my grandmother, always my grandmother, with us in 2000, the first one without my father. I remember him gifting me a Celine Dion CD, a sign that he had not noticed I had moved away from 'My Heart Will Go On' to falling for my sister's Backstreet Boys collection.

Then there was the one year my sister and I spent Christmas alone. The sad year, the bad year, the one where we fought and ended up in our separate rooms.

But it is the Christmases of my 20s that I yearn for now. I miss planning how to get my grandmother to wherever the celebration will be; coordinating a menu with everyone doing different dishes; thinking up cool presents; bickering and fighting and the feeling of needing distance from the overdose of family; having everyone unpack each present individually, stretching the time spent with one another; hanging out with cousins that are so very different from me and still so relatable; sitting outside in the sun with whomever is there at the moment, sipping on a glass of wine and catching up; and lastly, more than the event that is Christmas I miss the sense that blood is thicker than water.

This Christmas will surely be its own shrewd kind of miracle, and I look forward to spending it with people close to my heart. And last year was experiencing Christmas as an observer more than as a participant, by no fault of the kind family that hosted me. It was still a lot of fun and I enjoyed getting to know the little rituals of a family quite different from mine.

Nevertheless, none of this is Christmas. Forget about the religious aspect of the season, dismiss the name and the particular date all together, and center on what it is that makes the time spent together on those few days so memorable: the people. Sometimes, it is as simple as this - I long for my people.

That's what's up

Last year for Christmas, my bright-spark-idea was not to buy anyone a gift, but rather to make them something. Well, I bought one gift, but it was from this lady that sells woven bags on the street, so I figured I was supporting the community. Anyways.

I found this tutorial on how to make a clay mobile, and because I have too much time one little string of geometric shapes would not suffice. Also because it had to look supercool and impress all the family when it came to opening gifts. As a result I shaped lots of little owls for my grandmother's mobile because she collects owls; lots of little geometric shapes for my sister because she is an interior architect and it kind of works; and, lastly, lots of little hearts for my friend. 

The whole mobile-thing is not that hard, and rather fun to do:

First, follow Creature Comforts' post (the link above) on how to create all the little clay ornaments. Basically it is buying the clay, rolling it out and cutting it into shapes. Then you let it dry and paint it. Easy as pie.  

I bought some old frames at the hospice, spray-painted them and sanded them a little. 

Then either attach some netting, or various round hook-things, or hammer some nails into the frame. 

From there on in it is just a matter of combining your clay ornaments with different beads or shells and stringing them up on an assortment of colourful yarns and ribbons. 

Wham bam. There you go. Something to do when you have nothing to do. I have clay left, so this is all anyone is getting as a present in the foreseeable future. He he he. 

No. 1 : The Owls

No. 2: The Diamonds 

                  

No. 3: The Hearts (well, and stars)

Es ist ein Ros entsprungen

While waiting to leave the city for our annual pilgrimage to the coast, I am leaving everything theoretical in the recycling bin and doing stuff with my hands. Last week a friend and I were invited to a Christmas party at the house of Voer. Riette from Confessions of a Pretoria Chique (click here for her post on a Voer Christmas celebration) brought along templates for making paper ornaments, and whilst some spent the afternoon gluing and painting, others were baking cookies. Nom nom nom. Granted, I am not very precise and gluing tiny tiny Christmas ornaments together makes me say "ag fok" more than once, but the end result is quite cool. Riette gave me some sheets to try at home, and this is what came out.

The templates are all via Mini Eco, which you can find here:

Christmas ornaments
Paper gems
Platonic solids
and for the most adventurous of crafters, the 3D paper diamonds.

Leisure Suite

Wrapping madness. 

I am going a bit crazy with my gift wrapping this year, but it is too much fun. Also, I recently went through all the stuff I own, and before throwing things away I am using them to decorate the gifts. As mentioned in a previous post, many of the readings that we had to read for class are being recycled as wrapping paper. How very eco, haha.

Staying with the whole recycle, save-the-planet, local-is-lekker aspect of this post, I found a few different local designers that offer semi-affordable gifts.

Wren design recycles flour bags, cement bags, corn starch bags, desiccated coconut bags, coffee sacks and antique linen grain sacks. Yes, if you were sensing a theme, basically they take bags and make them into more hipster-approved bags.

Then there are these cool notebooks by inspired by our country. In keeping with good hipster behaviour, I suggest writing your thoughts down in one of these whilst sipping something ending in -chino at Seattle Coffee Company and while your MacBook Air makes use of the free WiFi to download TED talks (coincidentally, brandchannel has an interesting article on SA brands mimicking overseas brands):

batch sells these cool bookends by Fanie van Zyl, as well as other designery-looking lights.

A time for giving

Since returning to Pretoria on Friday after driving for three days ( we had to fetch our grandmother in Jeffrey's Bay and then stop over on the farm in the Free State where she grew up to see my cousin) the focus has been on preparing for the Christmas celebration. We celebrate on the 24th where the family will go to church, have dinner together and then spend the rest of the evening opening the presents. This year, just my family celebrated on Christmas Eve, and then we had guests for the 25th. 

Today was the first day of rest. But because my grandmother likes to keep busy, she was rearranging my mother's cupboards and therefore my sister and I did the same with our rooms. When cleaning up our closets we also clean them out and decide what can be given away and what we will still wear. I have a lot of clothes and shoes and bags and scarves. I have a lot of stuff. Even if I gave half of it away, I would still have more than enough. We take our old clothes to the farm or my mom will donate it to people she has met while on the road as a tour guide who can use it. 

It is very difficult for me to grasp what it means to be poor. We are not rich, but we have all that we need and are privileged to have received an excellent education. But seeing people on the streets begging or the farm workers who have not had the same opportunities, I wonder if South Africa will ever be able to establish its society as mostly middle-class with only a small margin of poverty and excessive wealth. Perhaps the greatest sin of Apartheid is depriving the majority of the population of a decent education. Thereby, there are entire generations who have not expanded their knowledge and their view on the world, and they can also not instil a desire for improvement in social standing. No one wants to be poor, but it seems that most people also don't have the means or the knowledge to escape it. 

I read a German article about a social experiment where the journalist and an actress went to the town where the richest people in Germany have settled and disguised themselves as beggars in order to see if the rich will give to the poor. In the article it is cited that testing by the american psychologist Dacher Keltner, professor at the University of California, showed that the expectation by the poor to be helped by the rich is in fact misconstrued. The richer a person is, the less likely they are of donating. 

Charity is fine if the press is present and the charity on a different continent, preferably in a third-world country like Pakistan or Uganda or Colombia. Also, it seems that poorer people are more inclined to giving because there is a better understanding of the situation and a greater sense of "helping one another". 

I wonder if we are desensitized by being confronted by poverty every time we stop at a traffic light or if it makes us more aware of our own privileged status. Whilst in a township, one of my mother'S tourists turned to her and asked how long they still had to endure being there. Do we at some point see the poor as less deserving, as not hard-working, as lazy, as not deserving of what we have? If rich people instil their children with the same values where money and power trump empathy and compassion, it is no wonder that the world is in a state of chaos. I believe we have lost a sense of being interconnected, of caring for one another. We live in a selfish world and it is no use denying that I am selfish, too. In some way, I could probably be helping all the beggars on the streets or the people that ring our doorbell. 

Perhaps that is a resolution for 2012. Helping more. 

Re-tuned

To spice up the standard Christmas carols that you will probably be hearing in every mall and elevator, here is the link to a free (!!!) download of re-mixed Christmas carols. The originals were sung by Fulka and the remix done right here in Pretoria by Jacob Israel.

Done done done

I wrote my last exam today. Now it is just waiting for the results and then whambam, I have my BA. It feels unrealistic, because I have always thought that I would never stop studying. I'm continuing next year, but it is not real to me that others will go out and find jobs and lead adult lives. The whole idea of a job and an little apartment and working 9-5 and living, separate, it does not appeal to me. I like studying. The whole being-without-money part of it is not ideal, but if I had to choose between studying for ever or working for ever, I choose the former.

I am too exhausted from all the exams and marking and people wanting something to write anything that sounds intelligent.

So here is a Christmas-related song. This is Smith & Burrows with When the Thames froze. ( Tom Smith from Editors and Andy Burrows from Razorlight/I am Arrows/We are Scientists.