My wife has been acting strangely of late. Periodically, and especially on Sundays she becomes distracted, dreamy, hard-to-reach. By evening she is shepherding the kids through supper- and bath-time with unusual urgency. Pity the child that procrastinates at bedtime on a Sunday. Even more unusual: by about 7:30 pm she’s begun speaking in strange, florid constructions. “Prithee,” she said late one chilly Sunday afternoon recently, laying her hand lightly on my arm, “Would that thou might add to the commodiousness of the drawing room by tending to the fire before drawing bathwater for the children?”
“Er, right … the drawing room,” I said uncertainly. “The one with the TV in it?”
That’s the clue, of course. Because recently, my wife has preferred to spend her Sunday evenings in the company of a tall, swarthy, rather conceited-looking fellow with a starched collar and riding boots than with me, and if he wasn’t 230 years old I’d be jealous. Ever since Louisiana Public Broadcasting launched its Masterpiece: The Complete Jane Austen series of English television adaptations of Jane Austen novels back in January, I have pretty much had to give up on any spousal interaction on Sunday evenings, while Ashley abandons the twenty-first century altogether and runs off with Mr. Darcy.
It’s been particularly hopeless during Pride and Prejudice, but honestly I can’t really expect to welcome my wife all the way back to the present day until the series ends in April. Never has there been a more enthusiastic fan of the period drama genre than Ashley. Elizabeth, Gosford Park, Jane Ayre, Mrs. Brown; if the characters are swaddled to the earlobes with top hats and kid gloves and corsets and lace, clattering around side-saddle, being bowed to, danced with and speaking as if they’ve got a mouthful of marbles, she’s going to love them.
But this is all fine. In fact, the timing couldn’t be better. If ever there was a place where an affinity for the dress and customs of the early nineteenth century serves one well, it’s St. Francisville during March, when a large percentage of the population abandons the present day altogether and leaps with unapologetic gusto into full-blown anachronism. We’re talking about the Audubon Pilgrimage of course and, primed by Pride & Prejudice, Ashley is looking forward to the experience more than ever. Why? Because that’s the weekend when she’ll be able to get gussied up in an honest-to-god Empire-waisted, 1820s-style dress complete with bonnet, gown, petticoats and other palaver and float about Afton Villa Gardens looking for all the world like Jane Bennett on her way to a garden party. So she’s on the prowl right now for an outfit of suitable style for the occasion. To date I’ve not been assigned any Pilgrimage responsibilities so perhaps I’ll be at home, entertaining the kids and hoping that no-one bearing a passing resemblance to Mr. Darcy happens upon Afton Villa this year.
Of course the Jane Austen Effect (which should probably be on the syllabus as required viewing for all Pilgrimage reenactors), won’t last forever. I think the series comes to an end in April. But even in its aftermath I suspect its shade might live on in a future generation of Pilgrimage damsels. A couple of Sundays ago our small daughter, Mathilde, somehow wangled her way into staying up well past bedtime and watching the Jane Austen episode Mansfield Park (Funny how you never notice how much ribaldry, sexual innuendo and assorted naughtiness the Victorians engaged in until there’s a rapt four-year-old perched on the couch between you). As far as she was concerned the flowing dresses, flowery speech, horse-drawn carriages and enormous, castle-like manor houses had “Princess” written all over them and she wasn’t about to miss a moment. Now Mathilde, who is not keen on bedtime at the best of times, has developed a large arsenal of ruses for escaping bed when there’s the slightest hint of Austen in the airwaves, so if we want to watch it without repeated appearances by an imploring moppet requesting water or reporting the presence of a ladybug in her room or complaining of a sore finger—all while gazing raptly at the TV—we have to avoid all mention of the series, get her to bed early, and watch it with the sound so low even the dog can’t hear it. But there’s one benefit of Mathilde’s new-found obsession with Victoriana and it’s this: when the West Feliciana Historical Society powers-that-be come looking for little girls to dress in high-waisted dresses and ribbons, to dance the traditional Maypole on Pilgrimage weekend, they’ll find no more enthusiastic volunteer than our daughter. Yes; I think they might have this one for life.
Audubon Pilgrimage, incidentally, will be celebrated March 14—16 this year. See the calendar entry on page 34 for all the details.
—James Fox-Smith, editor
james@countryroadsmag.com
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
February 2008
Moving Forward.
The fact that I am writing this Reflections in one corner of an office that looks as if a bomb has burst in it is not necessarily an eyebrow-raising event. The talent for workplace tidiness is not one with which I was born, nor have I been able to train myself for it despite half-hearted efforts over the years. But even regular observers of my working environment might note a greater than usual dishevelment today. Stacks of paper teeter improbably on every flat surface. Books and magazines litter the floor. Tangled to redundancy, a nest of computer cables that looks like the work of some electronic buzzard spews from an open closet. In short, the room looks as if the Dance Institute of the Society of Clumsy Oafs (DISCO for short) has held a Breakdancing for Beginners class in here. It’s a disaster, and it can only mean one thing: Country Roads is finally moving.
I say “finally” because fully eleven months have elapsed since we bought the quaint but somewhat down-at-the-heel century-old raised cottage in Baton Rouge’s Beauregard Town with the intention of converting it into the high-tech nerve center of digital-age convergence that we were seeing in our mind’s eye. Sure: it needed a coat of paint, a bit of wiring and a spot of work here and there. But, beneath its twelve-foot-ceilings, bathed in the sunlight streaming through tall windows to play across its hardwood floors, we hummed the tune to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and signed on the dotted line. A year later, I can report that I know a heck of a lot more about rezoning requests, city/parish parking requirements, plan reviews, and commercial occupancy code than a Medieval European history major has any business knowing, and am beginning to suspect that the subject isn’t really my strong suit.
No matter; ‘tis done and at least we’ve learned one thing: To engage a professional moving company to aid in this relocation. When we moved into our current place five-and-a-half years ago, we threw on some old clothes and took on the task of moving an office for ten people from St. Francisville to Baton Rouge ourselves. This, it turned out, was not a terribly good idea, and had it not been for last-minute assistance by two teenage members of St. Francisville’s Benton clan, I believe we might still be trying to get the conference table up the stairs. On its side we could get the thing through the front door, but a central table leg made turning the corner into the hallway a physical impossibility. Back on the front porch and all sitting on said table, someone had the ingenious idea that we could tie a rope to the thing and hoist it up over the balcony, the railing of which was about ten feet higher off the ground than the conference table was long. I pushed from the ground floor. William and Michael Benton were upstairs, and guys, I’m not sure whether you ever told your mother the exact details, but to this day I’m convinced that if you hadn’t been on the wrong side of the balcony railing and clutching that table as tightly as you were when the rope came untied, Country Roads’ editorial staff might well have been smaller to the tune of one executive editor.
That wasn’t the only nerve-wracking incident. Backing in with too much exuberance, we got the rented moving truck stuck with its rear wheels off the ground half way up the driveway. Another volunteer representing the baby-boomer generation had some sort of minor cardiac incident after charging the stairs carrying a roll-top desk, and had to spend the rest of the day lying on the floor with a wet towel on his head. Suffice it to say that we learned there are some things best left to experts, and they will be here in a little over twelve hours to get started on moving this mess I’ve made.
So come Monday and by the time you read this, Country Roads should be open for business in a new home. It’s a new beginning of sorts, one that seems a suitable way to mark a magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary. While we’re on the subject, I’ve got a couple of other new beginnings I’m excited to share: last week longtime Country Roads account executive Alison Rodrigue brought her first child, Ruffin Adam Rodrigue, into the world. Both Mama and little one are doing brilliantly. And another new arrival: look for the launch of an updated, reworked Country Roads Web site later this month. The new site is our production designer, Mike’s, baby. And unlike Alison’s pregnancy, the site has had a long and complicated gestation that I’m sure Mike will be glad to see the back of. The new www.countryroadsmag.com arrives packed with new features: search functions for accessing past articles and recipes, ways to leave reader feedback on stories and calendar events, and lots of clever devices for getting more out of each issue of Country Roads. We hope to launch it in early February and hope that it doesn’t need to be induced. So please! Have a look; sign up for our Milepost weekly e-newsletter, and tell us what you like, or don’t like, about what you see. We’d love to hear from you.
James Fox-Smith, editor
james@countryroadsmag.com
The fact that I am writing this Reflections in one corner of an office that looks as if a bomb has burst in it is not necessarily an eyebrow-raising event. The talent for workplace tidiness is not one with which I was born, nor have I been able to train myself for it despite half-hearted efforts over the years. But even regular observers of my working environment might note a greater than usual dishevelment today. Stacks of paper teeter improbably on every flat surface. Books and magazines litter the floor. Tangled to redundancy, a nest of computer cables that looks like the work of some electronic buzzard spews from an open closet. In short, the room looks as if the Dance Institute of the Society of Clumsy Oafs (DISCO for short) has held a Breakdancing for Beginners class in here. It’s a disaster, and it can only mean one thing: Country Roads is finally moving.
I say “finally” because fully eleven months have elapsed since we bought the quaint but somewhat down-at-the-heel century-old raised cottage in Baton Rouge’s Beauregard Town with the intention of converting it into the high-tech nerve center of digital-age convergence that we were seeing in our mind’s eye. Sure: it needed a coat of paint, a bit of wiring and a spot of work here and there. But, beneath its twelve-foot-ceilings, bathed in the sunlight streaming through tall windows to play across its hardwood floors, we hummed the tune to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and signed on the dotted line. A year later, I can report that I know a heck of a lot more about rezoning requests, city/parish parking requirements, plan reviews, and commercial occupancy code than a Medieval European history major has any business knowing, and am beginning to suspect that the subject isn’t really my strong suit.
No matter; ‘tis done and at least we’ve learned one thing: To engage a professional moving company to aid in this relocation. When we moved into our current place five-and-a-half years ago, we threw on some old clothes and took on the task of moving an office for ten people from St. Francisville to Baton Rouge ourselves. This, it turned out, was not a terribly good idea, and had it not been for last-minute assistance by two teenage members of St. Francisville’s Benton clan, I believe we might still be trying to get the conference table up the stairs. On its side we could get the thing through the front door, but a central table leg made turning the corner into the hallway a physical impossibility. Back on the front porch and all sitting on said table, someone had the ingenious idea that we could tie a rope to the thing and hoist it up over the balcony, the railing of which was about ten feet higher off the ground than the conference table was long. I pushed from the ground floor. William and Michael Benton were upstairs, and guys, I’m not sure whether you ever told your mother the exact details, but to this day I’m convinced that if you hadn’t been on the wrong side of the balcony railing and clutching that table as tightly as you were when the rope came untied, Country Roads’ editorial staff might well have been smaller to the tune of one executive editor.
That wasn’t the only nerve-wracking incident. Backing in with too much exuberance, we got the rented moving truck stuck with its rear wheels off the ground half way up the driveway. Another volunteer representing the baby-boomer generation had some sort of minor cardiac incident after charging the stairs carrying a roll-top desk, and had to spend the rest of the day lying on the floor with a wet towel on his head. Suffice it to say that we learned there are some things best left to experts, and they will be here in a little over twelve hours to get started on moving this mess I’ve made.
So come Monday and by the time you read this, Country Roads should be open for business in a new home. It’s a new beginning of sorts, one that seems a suitable way to mark a magazine’s twenty-fifth anniversary. While we’re on the subject, I’ve got a couple of other new beginnings I’m excited to share: last week longtime Country Roads account executive Alison Rodrigue brought her first child, Ruffin Adam Rodrigue, into the world. Both Mama and little one are doing brilliantly. And another new arrival: look for the launch of an updated, reworked Country Roads Web site later this month. The new site is our production designer, Mike’s, baby. And unlike Alison’s pregnancy, the site has had a long and complicated gestation that I’m sure Mike will be glad to see the back of. The new www.countryroadsmag.com arrives packed with new features: search functions for accessing past articles and recipes, ways to leave reader feedback on stories and calendar events, and lots of clever devices for getting more out of each issue of Country Roads. We hope to launch it in early February and hope that it doesn’t need to be induced. So please! Have a look; sign up for our Milepost weekly e-newsletter, and tell us what you like, or don’t like, about what you see. We’d love to hear from you.
James Fox-Smith, editor
james@countryroadsmag.com
Monday, January 7, 2008
Reflections, January 2008
Time flies.
This is the thirteenth January for which I have written an editor’s column for Country Roads. By extension, this points to the fact that one hundred and forty-four “Reflections” have preceded this one onto the pages of the magazine. This is good, as it suggests that I will ultimately succeed in getting the thing written before our absolute drop-dead deadline to send the magazine to the printer’s arrives about two hours from now. When it comes to jumpstarting the creative impulse, I have always found two things to be vital: a period of procrastination—useful for doing important work like color-coding the paper clips in my desk drawer—and a deadline so close that you can smell its terrible breath. As a result, this editor’s column is the perpetual missing link when our press time rolls around. It’s the bane of our production manager, Mike’s existence. Highly organized, Mike always has everything finished by now and is probably sitting in the next room drumming his fingers while I feverishly try to think of something clever to say. You might think that after thirteen years of doing this every month, my time management skills would have evolved to the point at which I could get the thing written earlier. But alas, that is not the case. It’s supposed to be a reflection, after all.
What’s more, careful observation of the work habits of other Country Roads creative personnel (besides Mike) leads me to the conclusion that things are not likely to change with the passage of time. With mere minutes to go before the inaugural issue of Country Roads’ twenty-fifth anniversary year goes to press, mine isn’t the only thing missing. So I’d like to take a moment to recognize the most luminous last-minuter of them all: our art director, cover designer, Baton Rouge artist elder-stateswoman and wellspring of all things creative and terminally behind schedule, Anna Macedo.
Without Anna there would not be—and never would have been—a Country Roads. Twenty-five years ago it was to Anna that CR founder Dorcas turned to come up with a look and a feel for the magazine she had in her mind’s eye. At the time, Anna was a Baton Rouge advertising titan with an agency of her own. She was also longtime buddies with Susan Lindsey, Michael Hesse, and Kenwood Kennon, all of whom happened to be hanging out on the porch of The Shade Tree in St. Francisville one afternoon in 1982 when Dorcas was expounding on this magazine idea of hers. So Dorcas went to see Anna, and participated in the first in a series of slight misunderstandings that have come to shape Country Roads as much as any other thing.
“Anna, do you think we can do a magazine called Country Roads?” asked Dorcas, meaning to test the project’s economic viability by leveraging Anna’s knowledge of reader and advertiser demand, niche marketing, and regional demographics.
“Oh, surrrre!” replied Anna, with visions of a walking horse logo, meadows of wildflowers, and chapbook butterfly art floating before her eyes.
No matter, each participant left the conversation with their optimism for the magazine intact, and Anna was soon at work on a layout.
Thirteen years ago, when my wife Ashley and I became Country Roads’ second and third employees, we went back to Anna to redesign the magazine to its current size. As I recall, we worked on it (no computers—still hot wax and rollers and cut-and-paste at that point) for about three months. With forty-five minutes to go until press time, we realized we’d forgotten to consider the cover. Anna chopped up a chapbook of old-fashioned clip art with a huge pair of scissors, and glued the bits back together in a sort of mosaic that somehow came to define the magazine’s art cover approach from that day forward.
So, with the dawn of our twenty-fifth year brightening the horizon, with our press deadline ticking inexorably to a conclusion, and with me homing in on the closing sentence of my 145th editor’s reflections, it seems almost serendipitous that there should still be another unfilled page in our January issue—the one slated for Anna’s Countrypolitans article. But I’m not scared. After thirteen … or twenty-five … years of doing this, I’d hardly have it any other way.
Happy New Year, one and all. And happy reading.
James Fox-Smith, editor
This is the thirteenth January for which I have written an editor’s column for Country Roads. By extension, this points to the fact that one hundred and forty-four “Reflections” have preceded this one onto the pages of the magazine. This is good, as it suggests that I will ultimately succeed in getting the thing written before our absolute drop-dead deadline to send the magazine to the printer’s arrives about two hours from now. When it comes to jumpstarting the creative impulse, I have always found two things to be vital: a period of procrastination—useful for doing important work like color-coding the paper clips in my desk drawer—and a deadline so close that you can smell its terrible breath. As a result, this editor’s column is the perpetual missing link when our press time rolls around. It’s the bane of our production manager, Mike’s existence. Highly organized, Mike always has everything finished by now and is probably sitting in the next room drumming his fingers while I feverishly try to think of something clever to say. You might think that after thirteen years of doing this every month, my time management skills would have evolved to the point at which I could get the thing written earlier. But alas, that is not the case. It’s supposed to be a reflection, after all.
What’s more, careful observation of the work habits of other Country Roads creative personnel (besides Mike) leads me to the conclusion that things are not likely to change with the passage of time. With mere minutes to go before the inaugural issue of Country Roads’ twenty-fifth anniversary year goes to press, mine isn’t the only thing missing. So I’d like to take a moment to recognize the most luminous last-minuter of them all: our art director, cover designer, Baton Rouge artist elder-stateswoman and wellspring of all things creative and terminally behind schedule, Anna Macedo.
Without Anna there would not be—and never would have been—a Country Roads. Twenty-five years ago it was to Anna that CR founder Dorcas turned to come up with a look and a feel for the magazine she had in her mind’s eye. At the time, Anna was a Baton Rouge advertising titan with an agency of her own. She was also longtime buddies with Susan Lindsey, Michael Hesse, and Kenwood Kennon, all of whom happened to be hanging out on the porch of The Shade Tree in St. Francisville one afternoon in 1982 when Dorcas was expounding on this magazine idea of hers. So Dorcas went to see Anna, and participated in the first in a series of slight misunderstandings that have come to shape Country Roads as much as any other thing.
“Anna, do you think we can do a magazine called Country Roads?” asked Dorcas, meaning to test the project’s economic viability by leveraging Anna’s knowledge of reader and advertiser demand, niche marketing, and regional demographics.
“Oh, surrrre!” replied Anna, with visions of a walking horse logo, meadows of wildflowers, and chapbook butterfly art floating before her eyes.
No matter, each participant left the conversation with their optimism for the magazine intact, and Anna was soon at work on a layout.
Thirteen years ago, when my wife Ashley and I became Country Roads’ second and third employees, we went back to Anna to redesign the magazine to its current size. As I recall, we worked on it (no computers—still hot wax and rollers and cut-and-paste at that point) for about three months. With forty-five minutes to go until press time, we realized we’d forgotten to consider the cover. Anna chopped up a chapbook of old-fashioned clip art with a huge pair of scissors, and glued the bits back together in a sort of mosaic that somehow came to define the magazine’s art cover approach from that day forward.
So, with the dawn of our twenty-fifth year brightening the horizon, with our press deadline ticking inexorably to a conclusion, and with me homing in on the closing sentence of my 145th editor’s reflections, it seems almost serendipitous that there should still be another unfilled page in our January issue—the one slated for Anna’s Countrypolitans article. But I’m not scared. After thirteen … or twenty-five … years of doing this, I’d hardly have it any other way.
Happy New Year, one and all. And happy reading.
James Fox-Smith, editor
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Holiday Reflections
By the time you read this, the season to be jolly will be well and truly upon us. Everything unlikely to get up and leave will have been decked with sprays of holly and plastic snow. Public places will be thick with ring-ding-dingalinging and pa-rum-pum-pum-pumming. There seems to have been more talk about how early the holiday shopping season is getting started this year, but at the time of writing, a day or two prior to Thanksgiving, the sights and sounds of Christmas cheer still seem a bit muted, mostly drowned out by talk of turkey. Sure; go to the mall in search of a basting brush or a new twenty-pound-gobbler-sized roasting pan and you’ll make your way to it past the first glitterings of Christmas decorations. The sight of them mystified our daughter. Like most other red-blooded American children, Mathilde has a highly evolved internal clock that enables her to keep track of the time remaining until the next birthday, Easter, Christmas or other occasion that might involve presents or chocolate with atomic precision. Of course when you’re four, and you’ve been schooled by your parents not to go on and on about what you want for Christmas, a month is an eternity. So Mathilde greeted the presence of Christmas trees and tinsel and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer at the mall with the deep suspicion of a child from whom something has been withheld. “Why is the Christmas tree here now?!” she inquired, querulously, of every authority figure she encountered—the Queen Bee shop lady, her music teacher, the Salvation Army bell-ringing person. Apparently a good question. No-one, in her opinion, returned a satisfactory response.
Still, I admit that Christmas commerce is in full swing at our house. This is not because we’re inherently well-organized or convinced that an earlier Christmas is a better Christmas. It’s because if most of our gifts aren’t selected, wrapped, cocooned in peanuts, boxed, taped, labeled and handed across the post office counter before Thanksgiving, they’re not going to make it to their Australian recipients in time. American retailers who have their holiday decorations up and are already torturing their store personnel with the Barbara Streisand Christmas album in mid-November have finally gotten into step with the amount of time it takes for a package to make it from Louisiana to Melbourne. I’m not complaining; the fact that a parcel handed to the cheerful lady at the St. Francisville post office can possibly make it across the country, across the Pacific, and across Melbourne, to be precariously stuffed into the saddlebag of a little red motorbike that an Australian postman will then ride through my mother’s flowerbeds to deposit on her doorstep, still astonishes me. It’s just that, by the time the impossible journey has been made, our carefully wrapped offerings generally arrive three weeks into January, squashed into interesting new shapes, aand occasionally bearing signs of close scrutiny—sometimes involving scissors—by customs people. There’re few things as heartwarming as unwrapping the sweater from your mother to find a ragged hole cut in the front of it, the mangled wrapping re-secured by the reassuring label, “Your package was opened for inspection and found not to contain any prohibited items.” Well, thank goodness.
Inter-hemispheric gift exchange presents other challenges. Given that the Australian Christmas falls in the middle of summer, sweaters and woolly hats aren’t good choices, even if they slip by the scissor-wielding customs guy. Fragile, delicate things are out for obvious reasons. Heavy stuff isn’t good either. We try to abide by a rule of thumb that the cost to mail a gift should not exceed the purchase price of the actual gift. Which rules out ceramic garden gnomes, handmade paperweights, sugar kettles, decorative boat anchors, and Chef Folse’s exceptional Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine. There is a way around this restriction, which is to procure, parcel and post our Australian Christmas gifts by early July, in time for them to make the journey by sea mail. But whenever I consider this option I am reminded of that Tom Hanks movie Castaway, and feel compelled to buy gifts that would be useful to survivors of a South Pacific shipwreck (fishing gear, compass, floatation aid, waterproof matches); and in any case, we’ve never managed to time it right.
So what’s left? Tea towels are good. Weird hot sauce is good if properly cocooned. The other day I found a traveler’s sun hat, the main selling point of which was its ability to be comprehensively squashed, then returned to its original shape. We bought a couple of beautifully carved (lightweight) wooden hummingbirds at Covington’s Three Rivers Art Festival last week. It would be nice to send more locally made arts and crafts to a place where they will be truly unique. But most of them present a fragility challenge. Our daughter said it well. After a couple of high-strung hours spent inspecting the exquisite, mostly breakable handmade objects in artists’ booths at the Three Rivers festival, Mathilde’s mother asked her the question, “What is art?”
“Mama, art is something you’d better not touch,” she replied firmly. Tell that to the customs people.
There’s another thing that, sadly, won’t be getting air-mailed to Australia this Christmas on account of its impressive dimensions. But for everyone not required to ship their gifts half way around the world, I’d like to draw your attention to the latest book by regular contributer and original Country Roads editor, Anne Butler. Her book The Spirit of St. Francisville marries Anne’s clear-eyed grasp of the Felicianas’ past and present with atmospherically beautiful photography by Darryl Chitty. It’s an especially handsome coffee-table-worthy tribute to what makes St. Francisville special. Easy to wrap, too.
So happy holiday shopping, everyone. And more to the point, Happy Holidays.
Still, I admit that Christmas commerce is in full swing at our house. This is not because we’re inherently well-organized or convinced that an earlier Christmas is a better Christmas. It’s because if most of our gifts aren’t selected, wrapped, cocooned in peanuts, boxed, taped, labeled and handed across the post office counter before Thanksgiving, they’re not going to make it to their Australian recipients in time. American retailers who have their holiday decorations up and are already torturing their store personnel with the Barbara Streisand Christmas album in mid-November have finally gotten into step with the amount of time it takes for a package to make it from Louisiana to Melbourne. I’m not complaining; the fact that a parcel handed to the cheerful lady at the St. Francisville post office can possibly make it across the country, across the Pacific, and across Melbourne, to be precariously stuffed into the saddlebag of a little red motorbike that an Australian postman will then ride through my mother’s flowerbeds to deposit on her doorstep, still astonishes me. It’s just that, by the time the impossible journey has been made, our carefully wrapped offerings generally arrive three weeks into January, squashed into interesting new shapes, aand occasionally bearing signs of close scrutiny—sometimes involving scissors—by customs people. There’re few things as heartwarming as unwrapping the sweater from your mother to find a ragged hole cut in the front of it, the mangled wrapping re-secured by the reassuring label, “Your package was opened for inspection and found not to contain any prohibited items.” Well, thank goodness.
Inter-hemispheric gift exchange presents other challenges. Given that the Australian Christmas falls in the middle of summer, sweaters and woolly hats aren’t good choices, even if they slip by the scissor-wielding customs guy. Fragile, delicate things are out for obvious reasons. Heavy stuff isn’t good either. We try to abide by a rule of thumb that the cost to mail a gift should not exceed the purchase price of the actual gift. Which rules out ceramic garden gnomes, handmade paperweights, sugar kettles, decorative boat anchors, and Chef Folse’s exceptional Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine. There is a way around this restriction, which is to procure, parcel and post our Australian Christmas gifts by early July, in time for them to make the journey by sea mail. But whenever I consider this option I am reminded of that Tom Hanks movie Castaway, and feel compelled to buy gifts that would be useful to survivors of a South Pacific shipwreck (fishing gear, compass, floatation aid, waterproof matches); and in any case, we’ve never managed to time it right.
So what’s left? Tea towels are good. Weird hot sauce is good if properly cocooned. The other day I found a traveler’s sun hat, the main selling point of which was its ability to be comprehensively squashed, then returned to its original shape. We bought a couple of beautifully carved (lightweight) wooden hummingbirds at Covington’s Three Rivers Art Festival last week. It would be nice to send more locally made arts and crafts to a place where they will be truly unique. But most of them present a fragility challenge. Our daughter said it well. After a couple of high-strung hours spent inspecting the exquisite, mostly breakable handmade objects in artists’ booths at the Three Rivers festival, Mathilde’s mother asked her the question, “What is art?”
“Mama, art is something you’d better not touch,” she replied firmly. Tell that to the customs people.
There’s another thing that, sadly, won’t be getting air-mailed to Australia this Christmas on account of its impressive dimensions. But for everyone not required to ship their gifts half way around the world, I’d like to draw your attention to the latest book by regular contributer and original Country Roads editor, Anne Butler. Her book The Spirit of St. Francisville marries Anne’s clear-eyed grasp of the Felicianas’ past and present with atmospherically beautiful photography by Darryl Chitty. It’s an especially handsome coffee-table-worthy tribute to what makes St. Francisville special. Easy to wrap, too.
So happy holiday shopping, everyone. And more to the point, Happy Holidays.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
