the best things in life are free

Happy Black Friday. Or Buy Nothing Day, if you prefer. It's just another day to me this year, which hopefully does end up being a happy one...we'll see how it unfolds.

The most amazing thing has happened for us this year. We have been assaulted with so few Black Friday advertisements I could count them on one hand. This is a stark contrast from years past, where the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving were filled with a growing frenzy of marketing so that as we got closer and closer to Thanksgiving we were Thankful, sure, but we were more aware of the deals to be had the next morning and more aware of the things we did not have than of the things we did. What a lovely way to undermine a holiday that - despite its sordid roots - should be a celebration of what we do have and the bountiful harvest that has been provided to us yet another year.

See, we ditched our TV when we moved here. I never realized just how much the TV was infiltrating our lives until we actually escaped the Black Friday assault without it. We also don't subscribe to the local paper, so we don't receive advertisements in the mail. And to top it off, we're in the middle of the country, and the nearest chain stores are 30+ miles away, so we don't even drive by a store nine days out of ten.

I can't explain how much happier this Thanksgiving has felt without knowing which widgets were on sale at which Super Widget Store. Last year at this time, I was almost 8 months pregnant, and I don't know about everyone else, but when I'm pregnant and I hear a terrible story about some other pregnant woman, it really sticks with me. Last year, I was horrified by the Wal-Mart trampling of 2008. One Wal-Mart worker died when shoppers busted down the doors at 4:55 a.m. The shoppers trampled the worker to death, and trampled a woman who was 8 months pregnant. Can you imagine? Can you even imagine wanting a widget at a Low Price so badly that you don't stop to help up a woman about to give birth?

The story got worse. Apparently, Wal-Mart locked the doors again while they waited for the police and a coroner to come, but they let the shoppers already inside finish their shopping, wait in line, and pay. Can you imagine being the cashier ringing these people out while your co-worker they just killed lays dead on the floor by the entrance?

Then, after the last shopper bought the last Low Low Price widget, they finally shut the store. For a couple hours. To clean up the blood. And they made the workers stand around waiting until they could open again.

I have never heard a more disgusting story of greed in my entire life. And the thing is, this greed? This greed was created. This frenzy was engineered, day by day, building, shoving anticipation higher higher until the tension was so tight, you could shove down glass doors with it.

It was then that I officially banned Wal-Mart, though I'd been unofficially banning them for years.

But without Wal-Mart, there's still Target, still Kohl's, still Macy's. There's lots of opportunities to bemoan our have-nots and forget our blessings. There's tons of chances to turn a day of thanksgiving into a day of preparation for getting more.

So as I was heading to sleep last night, I was thinking about the difference between this year and last year. And I then realized that the best things in life really are free. You don't have to stand in line for them, don't have to pay interest on them, and you don't have to put them under a tree to focus that holiday on buying too.

What are the best things in life?

A baby's first word - "Mama"



The growth that happens in 7 years of marriage, after the expensive wedding



Grandma's china set, just my style



Grandpa's hand-carved animals becoming the nativity scene
Mary and Baby Jesus in clothespins



Handmade ornaments, and the Mommy-Sassy time spent creating them



Daddy's handmade gnome house



An apron worn by a six year old whenever she makes cookies with Mommy



A handmade pie plate that "made me think of you"



Friends' heartily recommended movies lent, not rented



Pottery given by the potter himself



Art



Why are these things the best things in life? Besides the obvious, there's the fact that yes, they are free, but they can't be replaced. They can't be bought. You can buy all the Low Low Price widgets you want, but you can't buy a baby's fierce love for her mama and you can't buy a big girl's true smile when you ask her if she'd like to do a project together. You can't buy love, so they say, and you can't buy creativity or family or security or contentment.

But you can work for it. Not by letting more of the world - our profit-driven world - in, but by keeping more out.

a mother's intuition

When I was three years old, I almost drowned. My mother and I were in Hawaii, where she was visiting her sister whose Marine husband had been stationed there. My mom and dad were having marital problems at the time - they separated shortly after we returned - so my dad wasn't with us.

I don't remember a lot of what happened, though I remember more than I ever thought a three-year-old could recall. Most of the memories are surely memories of memories though, since I think of the incident several times a year.

We had all gone out for a boat ride off the coast of Oahu. My uncle drove the boat, along with my mom, me, my aunt, and my grandparents. When we came back, we had to walk several hundred feet down a small bridge about the width of a sidewalk from the boat to the pier. I was given the job of carrying towels back to the pier.

My mom went to use the restroom. I think she must have had reason to believe someone else was watching me at the time, while that other person probably had reason to believe my mom was watching me. I'm not sure.

I do remember walking back to the boat by myself at some point. I remember leaning over off the little bridge to try to see a shark in the water. I remember falling into the water and trying to breathe, looking around, and being scared a shark would get me.

As the story goes, my mom was in the bathroom when a little voice inside her head panicked and said, "Where's Julie?"

She hurried out of the bathroom and called for me. She started to get more frantic, and then someone...her? my uncle?...saw my bathing suit bobbing up and down in the water. My uncle pulled me out, and being a trained Marine, gave me resuscitation and, well, saved my life.

I heard this story many times growing up, and I mixed it around with what I remembered, and learned it as a fact. It's part of my history, part of my family's history, like a folk tale you'd tell round the campfire on a fall night. My mom had an actual moment of mother's intuition. Pretty cool.

But then when I became a mother myself, I started to logic that moment away. She didn't have an a-ha moment so much as she realized she hadn't seen me in awhile. Her internal alarm clock rang because she had taken too long in the bathroom without me.

This is what my left brain decided. Until yesterday.

I put Maggie down on the floor yesterday after her nap. I did a quick floor scan to be sure nothing chokable was lying in her reach, then I went to load the washing machine in the next room.

As I was loading in the clothes, a little voice in my head said, "She has one of Sassy's dollhouse bowls in her mouth." What a specific thought! I tried to chuck it up as OCD and told myself if I did not get this laundry in, I would never be caught up.

I continued to load and the little voice said, "Stop it. Forget the laundry. Go make sure she doesn't have a little bowl in her mouth."

Fine. I put down the laundry. I figured I'd get everything done more quickly if I put the OCD to rest first.

I walked over to her, squeezed her little cheeks to look in her mouth, and darn it if she wasn't sucking on a little dollhouse bowl. A little wooden bowl about the diameter of a dime, but three times as thick. A little wooden bowl just asking to be a choke hazard.

The little dollhouse bowls went with Sassy today to live out the rest of their lives at Nana's house. And I got my childhood folktale back.

Hawaii, 1976







Aunt Jo



Mama