The Art of Christmas Giving

 

Up until I was thirteen, Christmas was an amazing time of the year.  My brothers and I helped my mother clean house, bake cookies, and decorate.  Christmas carols played non-stop, and my mother sang along in her uneven voice that always cracked on the high notes.  In the doorway to the kitchen, a red velvet bell was hung. The bell was special, because in a time of hardship and poverty, one of the older children had scraped up enough money to give it to my mother for Christmas.   It was tradition to pull the clapper as you walked under it, and it would play a music box version of Silent Night.  To me, it was the embodiment of Christmas giving: a small, thoughtful sacrifice that her son used to say to my mother, “I see you.  I love you.  I think about how to make you happy.”

Christmas broke for me the year I turned thirteen.  It was 1983, and the recession was hitting my family hard.  Several members of my family were either unemployed or underemployed, so it was decreed that we would stop exchanging presents with the extended family and only exchange presents within households. You might think that I was upset because I would be getting fewer gifts that year, but that wasn’t my problem at all.  My sadness came from the realization that many members of the family resented having to go through the effort of giving outside their households.  Before that time, I had thought of the family as one cohesive unit, albeit a scattered unit.  I thought of us as a puzzle that came together to make a complete picture at special times of the year.  It didn’t wound me to realize that people didn’t have the resources to buy gifts for each other.  It wounded me to realize that gift giving in general was seen as an exchange of money instead of an exchange of heart.  I became aware that when my brothers and sisters shopped for Christmas, they did not uphold the value that my mother tried to instill in us all.  They did not look for ways to say, “I see you. I love you.  I think about how to make you happy.”

When I was very small, there were times when I received gifts that made no sense to me, and my mother would say, “It’s the thought that counts.”  I had faith in that idea: it was the thought that counted.  It was the thought in my mother’s handmade gifts that made me love them.  It was knowing that she took the time to see me, to love me, and to try to make me happy that made me hold on to those gifts for decades.  The year I turned thirteen, I was excited because I was finally old enough to take part in that tradition and to look for ways to say to my family members, “I see you.  I love you.  I think about how to make you happy.”  And that was the year that my brothers and sisters openly complained about what a hassle it was to give gifts to one another.

As an adult, I try to carry on my mother’s tradition.  I try to think about what I can give at Christmas that has meaning and value beyond being the best buy for the best money.  I think about when I was ten, and my older sister gave me a beautiful red dress with velvet trim and giant golden roses.  I loved that dress and wore it for years, squeezing into it long after I had outgrown it.   I still have it in a box.  I used to take it out occasionally and think about what a wonderful thing it was that my sister knew that was the perfect dress for me.  I was in my thirties when I got the full story of the dress.  As she grew older and less careful with her tongue, my mother would sometimes reveal the understory of my memories.  When she saw that I had kept the rose dress, she sighed and said, “I bought three dresses for you that Christmas, but your sister was sad because she didn’t have money to buy you a gift. I let her choose one to give you.  I was a little upset that she chose the prettiest one, but such is life.”  I have to admit it hurt when my mother told me that.  For years, I had held on to the dress because it was the nicest, most thoughtful gift my sister had ever given me.  It took me a few years to piece together the real gift I had been given, that my mother understood that I needed my sister to say, “I see you. I love you.  I think about ways to make you happy,” and so that was what my mother gave me for Christmas.

Christmas is a hard time for me.  Every year I try to think about what will most tell my loved ones that I see them, I love them, and I think about ways to make them happy. It is not about the most expensive gift or the most rare gift or the greatest number of gifts.  It is about giving something that comes from the heart.  In my sons’ lives, it is their grandfather who is the master at giving the boys the truest gifts.  Ever since they were born, he has made them a Christmas ornament that symbolizes that year of their life.  When the boys were smaller, these ornaments were not very challenging for him.  He got to spend a lot of time with them, and their interests tended to be intense and easily expressed.  He crafted a tiny red broom for the year my older son carried a dollar store plastic broom everywhere he went.  He made an intricate rabbit popping out of a magician’s hat for the year my younger son wanted to be Greg Wiggle.  As the years go by, the ornaments are less connected to the boys’ lives.  They don’t spend as much time with their grandparents, and their dreams are more complicated and difficult to embody in a simple ornament.  Their grandfather has taken to making tiny picture frames as ornaments with a nod to milestones like middle school graduation instead of the highly personalized ornaments of the past.  It doesn’t matter.  Every year, my sons spread out their ornaments on the floor before putting them on the tree, and together, the collection clearly says, “I see you. I love you. I think about how to make you happy.”

This is what truly should be at the heart of not just Christmas giving, but all giving.  Whether you are giving to a stranger who asks you for a dollar to get a meal or you are making something for the greatest love of your life, the greatest gift is not just what you give, but how you give.  If you give expensive things out of obligation with a tinge of resentment, you are not giving.  You are simply following form.  To give meaningfully, you must give thoughtfully.  You must take the time to say, “I see you.  I love you.  I think about how to make you happy.”

The Real Boogeyman in the Schools

 

Every day I am deluged with discussions about education and how to make it effective.  I know many people who are absolutely enraged at the public schools and how they treat kids.  Almost all of these people have some kind of solution, running the gambit from advocating for extremely rigid institutional models with set curriculums and standardized goals to homeschooling and unschooling.  I think there are merits to all of these systems, so I don’t see any one as the ultimate threat or the magic pill.  Rather than seeing any one ideology as the solution or the ruination of education, I tend to think that the real problem is absolutism.  So many educators, politicians, and parents want to believe that their ideas about education are the only worthwhile ones.  For the most part, I see this as the real problem with education in the United States.

In the 1990s, I spent a few years as a teacher in a daycare that was working to get NAEYC accreditation. At the time, NAEYC (National Association for the Education of Young Children) was the Grand Poobah in charge of regulating wisdom regarding in the education of preschoolers.  I suppose you could say they were the champions of Special Snowflake ideology.  In the infant room, we were no longer allowed to give the kids coloring book pictures to color in, because kids should not have their creativity stunted by result-oriented artwork.  All artwork was to focus on the process.  We completely purged hundreds of carefully collected templates and coloring sheets from our cabinets.  All projects that even suggested some kind of “teacher input” were stripped from the room.  Did it matter that some of the kids preferred to do result-oriented artwork? No.  The assumption was that kids who wanted coloring pages needed to be freed from inappropriate conditioning. 

Honestly, I liked many of the elements of NAEYC’s program.  I had no problem with allowing for a focus on freeform art and giving the kids more options instead of constantly trying to get a room full of children ages 4 months to 15 months to produce snowman ornaments to decorate the room.  I loved the emphasis on cultural diversity and the standards for classroom equipment that focused on the developmental needs of the age groups.  What I disliked was the absolutism of the program: the idea that anything that didn’t fit within in their philosophical goals was automatically deemed inappropriate. 

There is a value in coloring in images and doing result-oriented work.  While no infant should be forced to engage in any project, the attitude that these kinds of projects have no benefit for any infant ignores the fact that many infants like these kinds of projects and do benefit from them.  As an education professional and a parent, I’ve encountered this kind of absolutism over and over again: an insistence that a particular method is the best way to intellectually empower children while ignoring the reality that no way is the best way for every child.

While I was a daycare teacher, I repeatedly saw a scenario that I vowed not to repeat as a parent.  Bluntly put, there are many small children who do not do well in daycare settings. Unfortunately, there’s a horrible stigma attached to having a child who doesn’t belong in daycare.  That and the fact that most schools try to keep their classrooms at maximum capacity means that few parents are told that daycare is not a productive environment for their child. 

Two children in particular still stand out in my mind even though it’s been almost twenty years since I’ve been their teacher.  One was a child who was absolutely terrified to be “abandoned” at the daycare.  The child literally shrieked and cried non-stop for two months straight the entire time she was in the classroom.  Most children stop a few minutes after their parents leave.  This child never did.  Nothing could distract her.  Nothing could comfort her.  She wasn’t just angry or upset.  She was paralyzed with fear.  The only time she was quiet was when she had screamed herself to sleep.  Typically a child adjusts to being in daycare within a few days.  She never did.  The day her mother gave up and decided to keep her home, I cried with relief mostly because I felt I was participating in the torture of the child merely by being the person who had to hold her flailing body while her mother walked out every day.

The second child was aggressive.  There are lots of children under the age of five who are not good at playing nice.  When they mostly engage with adult caregivers who can stop them from doing too much harm, they can gradually be guided to develop self-control and find more acceptable ways of expressing and/or entertaining themselves.  When they are in a group setting with two adults and seven to eleven other small children, they become a real physical threat.  This is not their fault.  They’re not consciously deciding to inflict pain and suffering on all around them.  They simply have not developed enough emotionally or intellectually to be able to stop themselves.

 One little boy in particular was so constant and so intense in his attacks that we sat down to document his behavior in an effort to get the administration and the parents to recognize that we were not exaggerating his behavior.  In a half an hour, we counted 60 acts of aggression.  He would grab a toy from one child, hit another child over the head with the toy, throw the toy into a third child’s face and then run and belly flop onto a fourth child all in one minute’s time.  Our choices were to assign one teacher the full time task of keeping him from attacking the other children (not a completely feasible option when there were nine other potty training children in the classroom who needed care as well) or accept that he was going to occasionally hurt another child.  The third option, asking his parents to withdraw him from the program, was not something the administration was willing to support.  Eventually he ended up dislocating another child’s arm when he moved up to the Twos.  In the meantime, it was abundantly clear that not only did he terrorize the other children, but he wasn’t happy or thriving in the daycare environment himself.  The program didn’t have the resources to guide his aggression: instead, it inadvertently helped accentuate his aggressive tendencies and provided him with endless opportunity to exhibit this behavior.  No behavior modification strategies we used had any effect on him.  The truth was that he needed to be in an environment where he had plenty of focused attention and less access to people who were smaller than him and unable to defend themselves or ward off his attacks.

Although the daycare stated that they treated each child like a special snowflake, the ideology manifested itself as something just as rigid as “every child must follow these rules”.  Ideologies strip away the ability of teachers to look at the individual needs of their students and sometimes admit things like “I am not the right teacher for this child”, “This school does not have the resources to deal with this child” OR “This method is a completely inappropriate tool for this child”.  Whether the idea is that every child is a special snowflake or that every child is a mental soldier in training, the ideology is allowed to override the teacher and convert education from a means of enlightenment to a brutal trap that almost everyone complains about.

The Imaginary Perils of Princess Costumes

When my son was four, he drew a picture of the nativity with Mary hovering protectively over the baby Jesus.  Baffled by the series of red lines extending from Mary’s face, I asked my son, “Is that supposed to be a halo?”  My son looked at me like I was nuts.  Greatly offended by my stupidity, he yelled, “No! Those are lasers shooting out of her eyes, BECAUSE NOBODY BETTER TOUCH THE BABY JESUS!”  I used to wonder where my son got that interpretation of Mary.  Today, the day after Halloween, I see many parents saying sadly, “We promised no Disney princesses, but this is what she really wanted to wear.”  That’s when I remembered what being a princess meant to me when I was a little girl.

Like many girls, I loved princesses.  I incessantly drew princesses.  I wrote stories about princesses.  I read every book about princesses that I could find.  I tore all the pictures of Disney princesses out of my coloring book and hung them up on the wall.  And most of my weekends revolved around dressing up as a princess and roaming our farm looking for adventure.  None of those adventures were about finding a prince and getting married.

My favorite princess was Rapunzel*.  I had incredibly long hair as a kid that I could weave into two very thick, potentially lethal braids.  Much to my little brother’s dismay, my Rapunzel did not spend much time in towers crying for someone to save her.  My Rapunzel had BRAIDS OF DOOM.  (In my defense, I didn’t realize how much being hit with a five pound braid actually hurts.)  Twirling my head like the blade of a table saw, I would charge at my brother and smack him with my braids because he was the evil wizard or dragon or vampire or whatever he had the misfortune to be cast as upon that particular day.*

It’s a given that my princesses certainly could have used some lessons in civility.  My princesses were filthy from climbing trees to look for enemy armies or wading through the marsh to journey to the Island.  My princesses ate mud, swam creeks, and knew how to survive in the wilderness without weeping for their warm beds and soft bread that wasn’t hard to chew.  My princesses found the treasure, charmed the fairies, and fought the orcs.  My princesses sang stupid songs and wore pretty dresses, but they did not giggle or cry or wait to be saved.  My princesses were two parts bravery and one part sheer cussedness.

Most adults thought I was a sweet little girl.  My favorite color was pink.  I adored dolls.  I read constantly. I drew lots of hearts and flowers. I insisted on long hair and I refused to wear pants.  I didn’t do this to fool anyone or to mask my identity as the hellion my poor little brother knew me to be.  I did this because adult signifiers were irrelevant to me.  In my head, being a princess did not in any way connect to accepting the traditional girl code.  It meant that I was going to be what I wanted to be and how I wanted to be, damn the consequences.

My son didn’t think there was anything incongruent about Mary shooting lasers out of her eyes.  He also didn’t see anything irregular about putting on his Batman costume and taking his baby doll for a walk in the stroller.  He played tea party with his superhero “action figures”.*  He liked to walk around in my shoes and play beautician (I learned the hard way that those little plastic Play-doh scissors can’t cut hair, but they can sure as heck pull plenty of hair out).

Gender codes aren’t taught by giving kids gendered toys or gendered clothes.  Gender codes are taught by making kids believe that in order to play with certain toys or clothes, they must accept the gender rules.  My guess is your little girl isn’t going to see her gender as having a bunch of rules just because she likes playing princess.  That comes with constantly reminding her that in order to wear a princess costume, she has to follow the rules of being a princess.  Let her wear the costume.  Just don’t tell her that she shouldn’t climb a tree in it because “that’s not what princesses do.”

 

 

*Technically Rapunzel isn’t a princess.  Disney makes her into one, but my Grimm version just had her as the daughter of some peasants who stole rampion from the witch’s garden. I still played her as a princess when I was a kid.

*My brother rarely agreed to play princess with me and usually ran for the house as soon as the battle started.  It frustrated me that I had to play against imaginary monsters when I had a perfectly good brother to play this part, but my mother had a rule against me “forcing” my brother to play my games.

*They’re still dolls even if the toy industry did invent a special name for them to make it okay for boys to play with dolls.

Five Reasons Halloween Was My Favorite Holiday When I was a Kid

1)    NO FAMILY DRAMA

 

Halloween was the one holiday that my family did not celebrate collectively.  This meant there was no three day housecleaning before or after the holiday.  There was no huge meal to prepare, and consequently no sniping about who was lazy and just brought a jello salad, who made the wrong kind of potato salad, who put too much salt in everything, or who needed to learn that not every holiday needed a cake baked in a mold.  The most food prep that occurred on Halloween was the roasting of pumpkin seeds, and if they burned we ate them anyway.  In addition, there was no one deliberately showing up late, no cousins messing with the order of my toys, and no confusing references to feuds that had started twenty years before I was born but were still potent enough for someone to end up storming off and sitting in a corner.

 

2)    Costumes

 

On a regular school day, my mother stopped me at the door and asked, “Is that really what you’re wearing to school today?”  Halloween was the one day I could cut up whatever old clothes I wanted.  I could wear favorite clothes that were too small.  I could put pussywillows in my hair.  I could draw on myself, not brush my hair, and completely ignore the dreaded concept of “color coordination”. I could even wear dirty clothes to school on Halloween. The only interference I would get was the coat argument, which I’m pretty sure my mother knew she never actually won.  As soon as she drove off, I took off my coat( I did that every day, but on Halloween the neighbor didn’t rat me out.)

 

3)     Freaking Real Candy!

 

Unlike some of my classmates whose parents told them sugar was POISON, my parents weren’t anti-sugar advocates.  They were anti-buying-things-that-are-unnecessary advocates.  I got lots of sweets when I was a kid, but they were mainly homemade.  Pies, cakes, cookies, puddings, canned pears with whipped cream and graham crackers(yeah, I didn’t quite get what that was about either), jellies, fruit breads, cream puffs, soufflés, we had those kinds of sweets three or four times a week as dessert.  Candy, however, was a waste of money.  Since we could get candy for free on Halloween, my parents actively encouraged my brothers and I to haul in as big a stash as we possibly could. We each got a pillowcase and were told to fill that sucker up. Halloween and Easter were the two times a year I was guaranteed to get candy.  Even though my mother was an excellent cook, I was completely jealous of my friends who were occasionally allowed to have REAL candy in their lunches.  No one ever begged for a bite of one of my deflated and leaky cream puffs.  That all changed for a week after Halloween.

 

4)    Being allowed to Run Around in the Dark

 

Honestly, I was the kind of creepy kid who ran around at night anyway, especially if there was a full moon.  On Halloween, though, I got to do it with other kids without being seen as creepy.  Since we lived out in the country, my mother would drive my brothers and me to town, drop us off at a street corner, and tell us to be back there by nine o’ clock.  My older brother would usually ditch me and my little brother and end up frantically racing through the streets searching for us fifteen minutes before the pick up time.  Then he’d charge us a percentage of our candy for taking us trick-or-treating.  Still, there was something completely cool about roaming the dark streets with masses of other children that trumped my usual skulks in the dark.  Even though I was never one to throw eggs, leave flaming bags of dog poop on doorsteps, or drape toilet paper on people’s trees, there was nothing more magical than standing in the midst of that kind of chaos while everyone accepted it as normal.

 

5)    Candy Leverage!!!!!

 

Having a huge stash of candy gave me bargaining power with my brothers, my friends, and even my parents.  My younger brother was always reluctant to play the games I invented.  I don’t know why things like jumping off the cattle barn, drinking polluted creek water, rolling in marsh mud from head to toe, and swimming through the seaweed section of the pond didn’t appeal to him, but he quickly decided to give them a try if I pulled out a piece of stale, six month old Hubba Bubba gum as a bribe.  My older brother could actually be persuaded to let me sit in his room and stare at him while he worked on one of his projects if I suggested that a strawberry flavored Charleston Chew might miraculously slide under his door sometime after supper.  My dad was easy: I’d say, “Here’s some candy corn. Can we go on a nature hike today?”  My mother was the most challenging: she had too much integrity to be outright bribed, but offering her the black licorice went in her notebook of “evidence my child is not completely selfish and possibly deserves something when she asks for it”.  This kind of leverage could last all year if I got the right types of candy and carefully hid them to be used at the most advantageous time.  Candy leverage was the one thing that made growing up in a candy-frugal home worth it: you can’t bribe people with things that they get all the time.

 

Jack Frost Stops by for a Chat

Jack Frost is sitting on the stoop when I come out in the morning.

“I killed your ferns,” he says with a smirk, and points to a clump of fronds outlined with delicate white crystals.

“You know those are perennial, right?  You didn’t kill them.  They’re just dormant now. Frankly, I think you improved their appearance,” I say.

“I was hoping they were tropical,” he says mournfully.

“We go through this every year, Jack. How can you be a manifestation of Nature if you can’t even remember what the basic laws of Nature are?  I don’t grow things that can’t survive your frost,” I scold.

“Jenny Letham down the street usually swears at me when I frost her plants,” Jack replies.

“That’s because Jenny grows scented geraniums and always waits too long to bring them in.  She’s the garden nursery’s best customer.  I seriously don’t understand why you don’t spend more time mocking her instead of coming here every first frost and trying to get a rise out of me,” I sigh.

“She cries.  It makes me feel bad…well, you make me feel bad too, but it’s a different kind of bad.  You just make me feel stupid.  Jenny makes me feel mean.” Jack fiddles with a leaf, slowly tracing its veins with a light coating of frost.

I have to think for a while before I answer him on this.  Jenny is the one who is stupid, and Jack isn’t being mean when he frosts plants that can’t survive our climate.  My plants need the cold period  to live, which is just one reason why I’m not a fan of Jenny’s efforts to defy the laws of our winters.  Jenny’s delusional anger at Jack for frosting her tropical plants is not something that I want Jack to pander to.  At the same time, I like this side of Jack and I’m inclined  to encourage these signs of a conscience.  I decide not to directly respond to his concerns about Jenny.

“I really like what you did to the pine,” I eventually say.  “Your work really stands out on the dark green needles and the pine cones on that branch there.”

Jack looks up. “It is pretty good,” he says with a real smile.  “I spent extra time on those pine cones because I knew you would appreciate it.”

“I do.  I always love when you come back in for the winter.  You make the whole world look like it’s wearing a beautiful ball gown.” I grin at him.

“I could come earlier if you miss me,” he says.

I know he’s testing.  “No, no, Jack.  The best thing about you is that you always come for a visit at just the right time.  You’re so wise for that,” I add.

“Hmm.”  Jack puts the finishing touches on the ironwork around my door.  “I guess it’s a good thing to only visit just when people are starting to miss you.”

“Absolutely, Jack. Absolutely.  This is why we are such good friends,” I say.

“Yes, that’s exactly so. By the way, I just frosted your coffee.  Hope you like it that way,” he says.  He flies off before I can reply.

Author: Beth Avery @violetgrendel
Word Count: 530 words
Genre: Speculative Fiction
E-book: Yes

The Town Beneath the Lake

The cold is so sharp I can feel it outlining my sinuses when I breathe in. It’s an exceptionally clear night, and the dark mountains on the horizon provide a welcome boundary between the blackness of the immense expanse of ice and the blackness of the star-interrupted sky. Before I slide onto the ice, I test my laces one last time. I’m too old to take a hard fall without risking a broken bone, and I have no intention of being found frozen like a popsicle on Christmas morning. This is the first time I will be making this trip alone. For sixty years, Etta and I met on Christmas Eve to make this journey.

We were only 12 for that initial midnight skate. Back then, we were still smarting from the loss of our town in the valley. When the final petition for the big dam went through, our families lost. The year the lake was filled and froze, we arranged to sneak out the night before Christmas to lie on the ice above our old homes and talk about the beautiful Christmas light competitions our community used to have. Our old neighbors had scattered when the town was condemned. Some found homes along the sides of the lake, but many simply moved far away from the little town in the valley.

My mother kept saying it wasn’t so bad, but Etta and I were heartbroken. All the secret hiding places and play areas of our childhood rested beneath fifty feet of water. That first midnight skate, we were mournful. We silently slid over the ice using the radio tower and the new wharf as markers to help us find the part of the lake that covered our old homes. Once there, we stretched out with our cheeks against the ice, peering down and trying to believe we could make out the shapes of the buildings we knew had to be down there.

We weren’t really expecting to see anything. We were just two maudlin girls creating ritual to deal with the first big loss of our lives. We probably squinted at the lights shining from the depths for several minutes before Etta whispered, “Do you see that, Jane?” “The lights?” I whispered. “Are they ghosts?” Etta quavered. We stared for a long time before I answered. “I think…I think it’s the Walden house,” I said. “Look, see how it makes a square of green with a square of red and then a star in white? That’s just how the Waldens always did their lights.” We were quiet then, half frozen fear and wonder, acutely aware that we were two small bodies out on a great field of ice above a tiny drowned town that appeared to still be living.  We finally summoned up the courage to stand up, and then we skated furiously and frantically for the shore. I fell a few times, but Etta did not stop until she was back on solid ground.

We had a whole year to think about what had happened that night before Christmas came around again. In that year, my mother received news that Grandfather Walden had died a few weeks before our first skate. We had been a close knit community, so it grieved her that she did not learn of his death until after his funeral. When another elderly member of our old town died that year, she made sure we went to pay our respects. We were afraid to go, but our parents reminded us that Mr. Stark had been a kind librarian who had always given the children gifts on Christmas and take special care to decorate the library for the holidays.

Etta and I argued long and hard about whether we were going back out the next Christmas Eve. A year older, we had decided that we had imagined the lights. It became a rite of passage to prove we were not babies and we could bravely go out above the ice and look down again. It was harder to go the second time. I was so scared I thought I was going to be sick. Etta clutched my hand as we glided out to the center of the lake. We didn’t lie down this time. We both stared down, poised to flee if any ghostly faces floated up to greet us. I almost bolted when I saw the familiar pattern of the Walden Christmas lights, but Etta grabbed my arm. “Look,” she said, and when I peered I saw another set of lights a goodly distance from the Walden house. “It’s where the library would be,” I said. She nodded. We didn’t run this time. We watched peacefully, and suddenly our love for our lost home didn’t seem so childish. We were not the only ones who thought it had been heaven on Earth.

The skate was less scary after that. Some years there weren’t any new homes lit up; some years there were three or four. This year I skate out alone, but Etta promised she would put up a blue star for me on her house. If she keeps her promise, it won’t feel so bad to be the last person alive who once lived in Ruhetal.

Author: Beth Avery @violetgrendel
Word Count: 874 words
Genre: Speculative Fiction
E-book: Yes

The Dryad and Her Tree

 
It is true that the dryad was sleeping deeply when they cut her tree down.  She awoke in a foggy panic and groggily tried to make sense of things as her tree was dragged through the snow across the field and into the house.  By the time she fully shook herself out of hibernation, her tree was already clamped into standing position inside a pot of cold water, bound with constricting ropes of lights, its branches painfully pinched with dozens of dangling weights.

For a day, she sat warily watching as people came and stared at her tree without touching it.  The cat was the only one that attempted to touch the tree, sending the people in the room into gales of laughter when it ran away yowling after she viciously shoved a pine cone in its ear.  They mocked it for getting an electric shock from clawing one of the strings.

The second day, a young child in a long gown crawled on its hands and knees with a pitcher of water.  The dryad let it approach because its posture of obeisance suggested it had proper respect for the tree.  She was relieved when it filled the pot with a sweet, tangy water that the tree gratefully sucked up through its trunk.  The child crept out backward and in doing so knocked free two of the torturous weights on the tree’s lowest branches.  It stared glumly at the broken glass while an adult came racing into the room. 

“Did you break some of the ornaments?” The adult screeched.  The child sadly lifted the pitcher. “I thought I was helping,” it said tremulously.  “Don’t help!” the adult snapped, and the child hurried from the room.  The dryad winced and decided this human was not allowed near her tree anymore.  When the adult returned with a broom and a dustpan, the dryad waited for the adult to bend over and then swatted the human’s head hard enough to break three more ornaments.  The adult leaped back even faster than the cat and stood staring dumbly at the tree before shaking itself.

“Okay,” the adult whispered, “That was clearly my imagination. I must have stood up a little faster than I thought” even though the adult had not been in the process of standing up when the dryad hit it.  The adult faced the tree and cautiously slid the broom under the branches to pull the glass shards toward it.  The dryad waited for her chance.  Eventually the adult relaxed enough to stop avoiding the branches.  The dryad flung a spray of needles in its face.  The adult covered its eyes and ran swearing from the room.

It took several of these bouts for the humans to respect the tree’s space.  They seemed to have trouble learning that they truly weren’t allowed to touch the tree.  The dryad was amazed at their tenacity.  Scratched hands, stabbed backsides, debris-filled eyes, smashed ornaments, they attributed it all to their own clumsiness, refusing to believe the tree was fighting back.  It was the night they tried to slide brightly wrapped packages under the tree that finally convinced them.  There was no pretending clumsiness when several adults saw the tree angrily bash and fling the packages back at them.

They retreated to the doorway of the room and whispered at each other.  “Is it possessed?”  “Where did you get that tree?” “What do we do about this?” “Maybe we could burn it.”  “You can’t burn it without burning down the house, idiot.”  “I told you it hit me deliberately.” “You did not.  You laughed at me when I said I thought it had something against me.”  They grumbled like this for hours before they gave up and trudged away.

The child woke up early and crept into the dawn grey room to find the room in disarray.  It seemed sad, and the dryad motioned it to come closer.  It tentatively reached for a package wedged deep beneath the branches when one of the adults appeared in the doorway and began to shriek.  “Help, help, the tree is eating Jenny!” “No, it’s not,” the child called. “Jenny, get out of there,” the adult screamed hysterically. The child sighed, “I’m fine.  The Christmas Angel likes me.  Have you guys been naughty?  She doesn’t seem to like any of you.”

 

Year after year, the tree stood in the corner of the room.  Its needles dropped and branch after branch became brittle and snapped under the weight of the ornaments, but the dryad held on.  She guarded her tree with a guilt-laden ferocity, determined to never let anyone do it harm again.  She extended that same protection to the child, who learned to crawl under the tree’s branches whenever one of the adults or even one of the other children was chasing it with malicious intent.  The adults would just shrug when the child hid under the tree.  There wasn’t a single one of them willing to get close enough for the tree to touch them.

Author: Beth Avery @violetgrendel
Word Count: 836 words
Genre: Speculative Fiction
E-book: Yes

 

 

Waiting for the 1812 Overture to Go Somewhere

That fall was the first fall in almost two decades that my brother did not attend school. For the first few weeks, he went into the basement and lay on the cement floor for hours listening to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. We could feel the violins sweeping like a river of sound while he waited with closed eyes for the solution to his involuntary inertia. Some mornings my father would try to give him a list of tasks, but my mother would just hold up one hand and slightly shake her head. It was a brief caesura no one expected to last: my father’s will was like a cannon that catapulted its demands through our hearts once he had reached enough momentum.

After school I would go downstairs and listen to the music with him, suspending myself in the same cacophony of trying to move forward but always repeating a variation of intractable pattern. I was small, but I understood what it felt to be lost in a rhythm of circumstances that left a person with no clear path to follow.

You can only listen to the 1812 Overture so long before it convinces you that laying low is not an option. One day my brother borrowed the car and came back with the news that he had joined the army. It was the only way he could think of to finish college. My mother instantly regretted her policy of silent compassion. Where else could the 1812 Overture lead your child but to war? My father faked approval, but even I knew he was disappointed to lose the resources that my brother embodied.

Throughout his teen years, my brother had “earned his keep”(as my father called it) by doing the hardest and dirtiest work on the farm. He shoveled knee high manure out of the cow stalls and loaded the heavy hay bales into the troughs. He chased escaped sheep in the bitterest cold when the snowdrifts made bridges over the fences. He helped build the house, the barn, and the chicken coop. He strung two miles of barbed wire fence using the wire stretcher that could build up enough tension to slash three inches into the skin if the wire broke.

When my brother was sixteen, my father said he hadn’t earned the right to use the car to drive to a paying job. My brother balked. He applied to the nearest Osco and walked the five miles to the mall for his shifts. He didn’t save up his money for a car, though. He put every dime into a savings account for college. In two years, he saved up $1500 with his two dollar and thirty-five cent an hour job. With his learning disabilities, he had no hope for scholarships. He squeaked into a public school with his hard-won mediocre GPA. It was a victory for him. A chance to prove himself worthy and my father wrong.

It took two years for him to exhaust his funds. The fall that Tchaikovsky rumbled through our house, my father spent $250,000 on a new farm…and refused to spend a single nickel on my brother’s education. There was $500,000 in the stock market and not an ounce of hope for my brother. In the short term, my brother outmaneuvered my father: he joined the army instead of coming back to the farm. But my brother was forever carried along on that symphony of desperation: too proud to tell my mother he’d run out of money, too determined to give up completely, too stymied by his own challenges to get where he really wanted to go. This crescendo of years of stifled aspirations became the major movement that reverberated through my brother’s life: for his entire life he’s been caught up in a revolution that goes nowhere.

Author: Beth Avery
Word Count: 635

Sometimes you have writer's block because there are things you want to be done with but they won't let you go

The letter came when I was thirteen. It was just an ordinary white envelope with a crosshatched blue interior…and seven pages of tightly written words. I suppose if it hadn’t been my job to get the mail, I would have never even seen it. As it was I only got to read it once, and then my grandmother took it away. She said she might need it for the lawyers.

You know in the news how a kidnapped child will be found years after she’s disappeared and the media will rejoice in how she’s finally being reunited with her legal guardians? I’m thankful every day that I was not that child. The letter from my father came, and I read it before my grandmother knew about it.

In the letter, my father said that he was going to be released from prison, and he knew that my grandmother had probably told me a lot of lies. The letter itself was a weird flailing of mismatched rhetoric. It wasn’t disorganized: it flowed smoothly from “you haven’t been told the truth about me” to “here is the father I really was” to “look, I am an intelligent and thoughtful man and I will prove it by explaining Aristotle’s ideas of love to you”. Method One: shove a sliver of doubt into the heart of the stolen child. Method Two: Demonstrate that you deserve a place in said child’s heart. Method Three: assume the child is intelligent: intellectually distract her from her heart with philosophical treaties. Seven pages of carefully structured words, and yet there was only one message I heard when I read it, “As soon as I am free, I am coming to get you.”

You know how people talk about needing to forgive because it’s good for you to let go and not let yourself be consumed by grudges? I’m thankful every day that at thirteen, forgiveness was irrelevant to me. I read the letter, and I knew before I even spoke to my grandmother that my father was a ghost and I wanted him to remain that way.

I was thirteen and consumed by my own struggles with existence, so I did not think about how my grandmother would react to the letter. I gave it to her because I was scared. My father was coming to get me, and there was no greater champion, no more magnificent angel with a flaming sword, no martyr more willing to stand between me and hell than my scarecrow thin, patient and fragile grandmother. I shouldn’t have put it in her hand with a dramatic flourish. I should have laid it gently on the table a suitable distance from her the way I had been taught to hand her sharp scissors or a bottle of caustic fluids. Instead, I silently sailed it through the air into her open palm and watched her flinch when she realized the letter had finally come. She took a moment to pull her pain inward, and then she settled her reading glasses on her nose and quietly sat down to read the letter.

Look, people will tell you that children need fathers, and I’m not going to argue that. Fathers are probably wonderful things. It’s a terrifying thing to look in the mirror and wonder, “How much of who I am comes from a man I do not want to know?” Maybe I would have grown to love my father. I am thankful every day that this was a conflict I refused to inflict upon myself when I was thirteen.

I wrote my own letter and I told my father that I did not care who he was or who he thought my grandmother was or who he thought I was. I told him there is no coming back from killing your child’s mother. I told him to leave me alone. My grandmother let me send the letter, but she did not give me back his words. She did not let me spend years pouring over them, dissecting them and worrying myself over the consequences of my choices. My father thought she spent years whispering poison about him to her. She did not. She barely spoke about him at all, and when she did, we mostly discussed one thing: how foolish she was to believe that he would not really come to her house and kill her daughter.

History and Folk Heroes

Many of the educated people I know who have read or watched Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter seem stunned by its lack of reverence for both history and the life of Abraham Lincoln.  At the core of it seems to be two ideas: one is that Civil War history and the story of slavery is not something to mock by converting it into a horror story(as if it isn’t a horror story already).  The other idea seems to be that Grahame-Smith isn’t getting Abraham Lincoln “right” by depicting him as a vampire hunting hero of the mid-nineteenth century.  To both of these criticisms I say this: there is Abraham Lincoln the historical figure, and Abraham Lincoln the folk hero.  We need both of them to deal with the horrors of slavery and the Civil War.

The Lincoln image we seem to be most comfortable with is Spielberg’s Lincoln: a besieged statesman who simply plugs away at a fight he didn’t pick but is forced to finish.  He’s an inspiring model of the principle of doing right even if it is inconvenient or challenging.  This Lincoln sacrifices his health, his son, his wife’s sanity and eventually his life in the name of doggedly pursuing justice.  I don’t just like him, I love him, which is why more than anything else, I’d like to see him win.

The sad Lincoln is not the only Lincoln in American lore, but his image has completely overrun another image of Lincoln: the folk hero.  Lincoln the folk hero isn’t just about made-up stories, although certainly some elements of Lincoln’s humble beginnings are exaggerated to appeal to an idea of America that modern American see as quaint, silly, and bothersome.  That discarded idea is the myth trope of Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Daniel Boone, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Johnny Appleseed: the physically strong, incredibly clever, barely educated poor man who does good deeds and paves the way for a newer, brighter tomorrow.  He is the rugged individualist with a social conscience.  This is the Lincoln Grahame-Smith is summoning up. 

It’s tempting to be intellectually above needing the folk hero Lincoln now that we’re in a post-Howard Zinn era of historical reckoning.  Certainly we do need to be honest about racism among the abolitionists and the problem with some of their solutions for slavery; muddling that leaves us no hope for ever making any progress toward healing the wound that never heals.  But for me, there is something painfully honest in the Grahame-Smith version of Lincoln that is lacking in the Spielberg version: slave owners needed a good ass-kicking. 

That’s right: I need to see Lincoln kick ass.  I need to see slave owners depicted as monsters instead of frustrated and misguided businessman who are merely trying to hold on to their financial solvency and their social status.  I need to see Lincoln as the manifestation of American justice, a nineteenth century Superman in a stovepipe hat with a twirling ax confronting evil as evil with no sugar coating or sympathy for the wrongdoers.  I don’t need to see it in real life, but occasionally I need the catharsis of watching something other than a Lincoln who is prey to jackals and critics and assassins.  I need Lincoln the folk hero, a man who is physically stronger than his peers, a man who is smarter than his more educated colleagues, a man who is more righteous than his world, a man who cannot be beaten down, kicked around, and undermined.  I need the Lincoln who makes me believe there are people who will make the promises of the Declaration of Independence come true.  Frankly, Spielberg’s Lincoln makes me hate America.  Grahame-Smith’s Lincoln makes me feel like I did when I was ten years old and I said the Pledge of Allegiance.  Even if that feeling doesn’t last because I now know the real history, it’s still a nice respite to feel it again once in a while

The Last New School

It was Graham’s first day at his new school and he was determined to make this time different. It wasn’t just because he liked the new campus, which featured peaceful courtyards, classrooms with skylights, and a historical mural that decorated the entry hall from the main office all the way to the cafeteria. Even if this hadn’t been a place he wanted to stay, the truth was that he was tired.

Living up to expectations was too much work. He had to figure out a way to do just enough to qualify for staying here without excelling enough for his mother to be able to move him to a more “challenging” school. Since he excelled without intending to do so, this was going to be the most difficult project he had tackled, and he didn’t want to cheat. How does one manage to be above average without being so spectacular that nothing seems beyond his abilities? Graham wasn’t sure, but he was going to try to find out.

He had a plan, of course. On the first day, he would just observe. He wouldn’t talk or volunteer or even look too interested. Looking interested encouraged teachers to ask questions, and answering questions is where Graham always sabotaged himself. Even when he was trying to be dull, he accidentally bungled into being profound. Words he thought were just a papercut observation on the surface of the topic made his teachers stare at him in awe. So today, he would be silent.

Graham knew there was an easy way to do this. He could completely screw up, go silent and uncooperative like his sister Drew had done. But going silent and uncooperative hadn’t gotten Drew the life she had wanted. She hadn’t been allowed to study what she wanted where she wanted at the pace she wanted. No, she had been turned over to experimental psychologists who plied her with drugs, read her diaries(until she stopped writing them), and videotaped her every move in order to crack the mystery of her intellectual demise. Now she spent all of her time in a hospital gown just because she had longed to attend a school that had a prom.

Graham wasn’t as ambitious as Drew. He only wanted to slow down and stop being his mother’s pet monkey. He didn’t care if he couldn’t be “normal”, but he wanted to stop feeling abnormal. He found it so ironic that adults hung on his every word, but somehow never managed to hear what he was actually saying to him. It made him feel like he was losing his mind. Yes, it was definitely going to be a challenge to figure out how to fail while still succeeding, but there was no other choice.

The Specimen

 

The assistant George knew as soon as he identified that the deer was not Pudu puda OR Pudu mephistopheles that Dr. Buckland was going to take credit for the discovery.  It had been that way for years: George did the field work and Dr. Buckland would fearlessly display the specimen to the Royal Academy as his own work. 

Even though it probably meant the end of his partnership with one of Britain’s premier naturalists, George couldn’t feel an ounce of regret for replacing the exhibit animal with an entirely different specimen.

The Ruin of AX520

The Ruin of AX520

She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, but at the Academy she was called “The Beast.”  You’d think a name like that would be tacked on to someone with a nasty temper, but that’s not how it started at all.  It started when she discovered that the AX520 was dangerous.

The AX520 was the big money maker.  The University had been receiving substantial grants for the mutated gene for two decades.  While the geneticists were always a bit vague on what AX520 was supposed to do, Dr. Kern was very good at convincing donors that it was going to do something spectacular.  It wouldn’t cure cancer, but it might just end world hunger…or something like that.  His brilliance was so reknowned that anyone who accused his data of being nebulous and poorly documented was scathingly dismissed as either too dense or too jealous to acknowledge the great man’s success.  He was untouchable for two decades.

The Beast(she doesn’t get called by her real name anymore because everyone refuses to see her as human now) was the one who broke the rules.  She ran the tests that Dr. Kern had stalled.  He was constantly claiming that the gene was still being studied and wasn’t ready yet.  What was being studied wasn’t clearly stated.  The University left him be because the man could charm 6 million dollars out of his marks in just a few clandestine luncheons.  The University didn’t want to know what went on in those meetings. No one questioned the man who got the Kern Laboratory Complex built.

 The Beast didn’t care about that, and apparently she didn’t care about ruining her career either.  She created a shadow identity for her study until she was sure. When it was clear that AX520 was a monster, she released her data in the one journal that would run it.  Only a few geneticists were willing to stand by her until competitors from the Academy smelled blood. Within a year, the University was facing a lawsuit.  Dr. Kern talked his way through the scandal, but AX520 and its grants were finished.  The Beast had ruined it all.

Kern’s supporters couldn’t keep her from talking, and the University couldn’t outright dismiss her, so they did the next best thing: they made her into the Beast, a bumbling, ugly-minded creature who callously destroyed the best thing the University had going for it.  She was the traitor in the lab, and no one would work with her.  They cut off her access to the labs and invented classes like Scientific Inventory Practices for her to teach.  Students took her class simply to harass her for trying to bring down the great man.

When I was writing my doctorate, I stumbled across her study.  It was more than science.  It was art. It was sublime and perfect and honest.  She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.  Everyone else deliberately blinded themselves to avoid looking at her.

A-Z BOOK SURVEY

Author you’ve read the most books from:
L.M. Montomery; I probably read everything she wrote when I was a teenager.

Best Sequel Ever:

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Mark Twain took Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a beloved children's book, and converted his audience's favorite characters into a scathing criticism of American society. It was probably one of the most subversive acts in American literature

Currently Reading:

Under the Sea-Wind by Rachel Carson and Glen Cook's Black Company series



Drink of Choice While Reading:

Diet cola

E-reader or Physical Book?

I prefer physical books, but recently I've caved to the convenience of e-books.

Fictional Character You Probably Would Have Actually Dated In High School:

I don't think I thought much about which characters I wanted to date. I've always been more focused on which ones I wanted to be. In high school, I wanted to be Emily of New Moon, but in reality I probably was more like Judy Blume's Sheila the Great.


Glad You Gave This Book A Chance:

Moby-Dick When you major in American Literature, you're supposed to pretend to be excited to read this massive book about whaling, but the reality is that many students freak out and try to skim their way through it. I did that the first time it was assigned to me, but the second time I made myself seriously read it, and it is one of the most profound, beautiful books ever written, and yes, the whaling chapters do have a purpose.




Hidden Gem Book:

The Family Nobody Wanted by Helen Doss; this was the autobiography of a woman who adopted 12 children



Important Moment in your Reading Life:

When I realized that The Giving Tree was not an insult to my reading skills. Someone gave it to me when I was 11 and I initially refused to read it because I thought it was a baby book. That book taught me that simplicity in writing does not mean simplicity in writing skill.



Just Finished:

She Is the Darkness by Glen Cook



Kinds of Books You Won’t Read: There isn't much I won't at least try to read, but I try to stay away from political propaganda books.



Longest Book You’ve Read: Since it depends on the edition and I don't want to spend six hours trying to figure this out, I'm going to say that I'm pretty sure it was probably Atlas Shrugged.





Major book hangover because of: I'm not sure I understand this question. Team of Rivals had me pretty muddled.



Number of Bookcases You Own: Eight, but most of the books are in boxes right now.


One Book You Have Read Multiple Times:
Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck; maybe I should have called this my hidden gem. It's my favorite of Steinbeck's books, and yet it doesn't get discussed nearly as much as GoW or OM&M.


Preferred Place To Read:
In bed.


Quote that inspires you/gives you all the feels from a book you’ve read:

"He who troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind." from the play, "Inherit the Wind" (and also the bible, I guess)



Reading Regret:

The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski There are descriptions in there that still give me shudders, and I read the book twenty years ago.

Series You Started And Need To Finish(all books are out in series):

The Black Company



Three of your All-Time Favorite Books:

Other than books I've already mentioned, three of my favorite books are The Poisonwood Bible by Kingsolver, O Pioneers by Willa Cather, and Beloved by Morrison.


Unapologetic Fangirl For:

Mark Twain, Zora Neal Hurston and American literature from 1835-1950 in general



Very Excited For This Release More Than All The Others:

Dan Swenson's Orision I've been waiting years for this book to come out. Literally. And yes, I am using literally the way it's supposed to be used.

Worst Bookish Habit:
Overanalyzing the books to the point were I ruin them for other readers.


X Marks The Spot: Start at the top left of your shelf and pick the 27th book:

Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention

Your latest book purchase:

Waiting for the Barbarians and Water Sleeps

ZZZ-snatcher book (last book that kept you up WAY late):

She Is Darkness

The Haunting of Anna

Leaf cannot let Anna catch her watching. The room in which Anna performs is above street level, but Anna stops if she feels eyes on her, and then she quietly moves into the private space of the house.

Anna’s porch has long windows that act as walls. It is clearly an addition; one small window on the main frame of the house still remains and Anna does not pull down the shade when she stands at the sink. Leaf could easily see all the details of Anna’s house, but she only looks into the kitchen and the porch room. There are limits to how much one can invade another’s privacy, even if the object of one’s interest is an exhibitionist with some anti-social tendencies.

Anna’s performances are many and varied. Sometimes at night, she dances on the porch in the dark. If the weather is nice, she leaves the windows open and her music wafts across the street into Leaf’s sitting room. The street lamps provide enough illumination for Leaf to see Anna gliding around in the exposed space. Anna also paces in the dark if she is restless, her feet rumbling on the floor as she performs her precise square over and over again in the early hours of the morning. This is how Leaf knows that Anna is an insomniac.

The only night activities that Anna performs in light are reading and writing. Leaf especially likes how Anna presses her finger over certain passages as she reads, as if she is trying to absorb the ideas through her skin and let them travel up her bloodstream to the brain.

Leaf is Anna’s friend, but Anna is not Leaf’s friend. They never speak to one another. Leaf leaves presents on Anna’s top step: an old book, a slice of cake, a piece of beach glass. Anna takes these presents inside, but Leaf never sees what happens to them. Leaf worries that Anna throws away these things: the book was never read and the kitchen did not light up when Anna took the cake from stoop.

Leaf doesn’t know everything about Anna, and she’s constantly surprised by the things she learns. At each window, Anna has hung little bottles upside down. Most of them are rubbed hard with age and have a pale green. Some are cobalt or purple. Leaf did not realize one detail of the bottles until she overheard a conversation between Anna and a passerby.

A woman stood outside Anna’s house and stared up at the bottles twirling violently in the breeze. The stranger’s back said that something bothered her about the bottles. When Anna came out to watch the approaching storm, the woman called up to her.

“Those look a bit like spirit bottles. My grandmother used to hang them in a tree,” the woman said without introducing herself or properly greeting Anna.

Anna’s face lit up. “Yes, that’s the idea I had when I hung them.” She leaned over the rail to talk to the stranger. The woman turned and Leaf could see her disapproving face.

“Spirit bottles don’t have their bottoms cut off. They lure the evil spirits through the necks and trap them there,” the woman said smugly.

Anna smiled the falsely apologetic smile of someone who does not wish to validate criticism.
“Yes, I know. I don’t want to trap spirits. Who wants bottles of nastiness hanging where they live? Letting spirits know that I can trap them if I want to is enough to make them respect me.” The woman glanced sharply at Anna and shuddered before clipping off down the street as if escaping an insane person.

Anna adjusted the bottles that had become entangled in the wind before going into the house and out of Leaf’s sight.

On her darkest days, when Leaf struggles the most with being without being, she remembers that the bottles in Anna’s window are a warning to spirits. Leaf uses this to anchor herself to the land of the living: Anna is relatively tolerant of her still-human audiences. Leaf holds on to this life even though her passing is long overdue. She cannot bear to lose this last thing that she has without having.

A Fairy Garden Wedding

Anna Meade of Yearning for Wonderland fame just got married, and it seems only appropriate that a self-proclaimed dark fairy deserves a fairy garden to celebrate her wedding. After all, every dark fairy needs a realm to rule over.  This realm is lacking any truly fearsome creatures: one of the advantages of making your own fairy world is you don't have to include any unwelcome guests.  Choosing a bride and groom, however, is nearly as challenging in fairy garden design as it is in mundane life.  I eventually ended up with Cicely Mary Barker's Bluebell fairy as the groom and the CMB Poppy fairy as the bride. (She's not wearing a white dress, but fairies often break rules that humans are loathe to discard.)

                            
                               The Fairy Bride and Groom were sheltered by a white double impatien
                                and stood on a carpet of Irish moss while a robin oversaw their vows.


Obviously no fairy wedding is complete with a fairy party, and fairy guests tend to get huffy if you don't feed them.  Guests who preferred a little more peace and quiet were placed on the second tier of a three tier planter so that they weren't in danger of getting trampled or overwhelmed by the more raucous party taking place on the bottom tier.

                                       A talking fish and a snail stay out of harm's way at
                                    a small table for two made from an antique doorknob
                                                 set on a cushion of corsican mint.

 

                               The Larch Fairy would probably rather be downstairs dancing;
                               he's waving his arms to the beat.  The Marigold Fairy, however,
                                  is more interested in watching the bride and groom above her.
                              She's perfectly content with the brass button fern beneath her feet,
                            a mound of Blue Star Creeper beside her and a fountain of  delicate
                                          Diamond Frost Euphorbia graminea behind her.

 

                                    Attending this kind of event is always awkward for mermaids. 
                             She's like a fish out of water. Fortunately the Frog Prince, a Wise Owl,
                             and one of the more serious gnomes are all willing to keep her company.
                                  She can breathe in the sweet alyssum and rest on her comfortable seat
                                                            of sphagnum sheet moss.


Far below the bride and groom, the dancing has already started.  Even in fairyland, getting a band can be a challenge.  The horn player dropped out at the last minute, but luckily one of the trumpeters from Wonderland was able to step in and help out the band. 

                         
                                A bit of Dichondra argentea 'Silver Falls' swirls around the band's
                   mushroom stage while a mound of Grape-O-Licious torenia serves as their backdrop.

 

                         Three fairies, one determined gnome, two butterflies, and a merry little bee
                    dance in a fairy ring of mushrooms with a dance floor of light green reindeer moss
                                                          to keep them light on their feet.

                             Next to the dancers, three charming guests crafted by Etsy's Songandbranch
                                enjoy the music while they have a bit of strong tea at a tree stump bar.
                         The rupturewort grows wild here, but these creatures prefer the cover it provides,
                            and the 'Blue Zephyr' swan river daisy is close enough for them to scurry  
                                                       into if the dancers get too rowdy.


From high atop their perch, the fairy wedding king and queen can see their entire realm blessing their union. Soon they will come down to join the festivities, but for now they are taking a moment to smile upon all of their loved ones.

 

                   A pear tree above the realm has scattered small petals over the wedding party;
                              the silvery fronds of a lotus vine dangle down from the top tier.

                                      May can be a challenging month for growing things.
                                   While the fairy queen can make her whole realm bloom,
                                    a few artificial flowers were needed to pretty up the land
                                                             just beyond her borders.

Every fairy wedding comes with signs of an auspicious beginning to let the realm know that peace and happiness shall bless the marriage of their king and queen. 

 

                       A suspended moon and a white flower float above the wedding couple
                                             to show the magical strength of their love.

 

                        Two true blue butterflies take flight as the king and queen finalize their vows.


I'm pleased enough with how this came out that I'm entering it in The Magic Onions Fairy Garden Contest. http://www.themagiconions.com/2013/04/fairy-garden-contest-2013.html