Holiday Baking 2018

Hey All!!

Long time no post, I know! It's been a month and I have been so caught up in holiday fun and, of course, holiday shipping. :)

OK, if anyone would like the recipe for any of these, just leave me that request in the comments below and I will post them for you. ;)

But I HAVE been baking like CRAZY and wanted to share some of the results with you...

It began in November with St Martin's Day croissants.

St. Martin's day falls on November 11th and is still well-celebrated worldwide. There are many wonderful traditions across the globe that vary from one country to the next and I won't even attempt to cover anything here except for the croissants.

I found these in a book about the old traditions of the season and that led to finding out about Poznan, the Polish village known best for the croissants that they produce for this day. The town has a museum dedicated to the history of the croissants. . . and there is a legal protection on the recipe. Only croissants that fit the size, wight and ingredients can call themselves the official St Martin's croissant. Maybe most amazing of all is that the people of Poznan (with a city population of just over 500,000)  manage to eat a lot of them – as in 700,000 of them on St Martin’s Day alone!

Mine were a little less extravagant (the dough for the "official" ones requires 81 layers of dough!) and smaller to allow for us to keep them fresher.  Apricot jam and a ground almond filling are wonderful together in these.

St Martin's Day croissants

Next were Catern cakes, made for St Catherine's day, November 25th.

Again, celebrations take place the world over but this excerpt from the French description of the day there, made me smile.

On St Catherine's Day, it is customary for unmarried women to pray for husbands, and to honour women who have reached 25 years of age but have not married—called "Catherinettes". Catherinettes send postcards to each other, and friends of the Catherinettes make hats for them—traditionally using the colours yellow (faith) and green (wisdom), often outrageous—and crown them for the day. Pilgrimage is made to St Catherine's statue, and she is asked to intercede in finding husbands for the unmarried lest they "don St. Catherine's bonnet" and become spinsters. The Catherinettes are supposed to wear the hat all day long, and they are usually feted with a meal among friends. Because of this hat-wearing custom, French milliners have big parades to show off their wares on this day.

And these are Cattern cakes:

There is nothing like this cookie/cake.

First, the dough incorporates caraway seed and currants and, second, the dough, when rolled out, is so soft and crumbly that it takes patience to actually get a good roll from them, let alone slice them and get them on the tray. But they come out so well and they'll hold for a week, only getting better and stronger in flavor as they sit!

Then December came. . .


When I was a child, one of my favorite holiday events was the annual bake-good fest that my great Aunts (five of them!) and my grandmother embarked upon. Basically, for the first three weeks of December, our house was inundated in many classic Slovak, Hungarian, Russian and Polish baked goods.

Two of my great aunts, Help and Agnes, who lived together, would call my mother and say "Come pick them up Doll!" Sh'ed corral me and off we'd go, just a few blocks, but the anticipation was off the hook! Walking into their house and seeing the dining room table (which sat 8) completely covered with trays and plates filled with all the traditional goodies!

We'd pack up the few tins we brought and hand them the box of nut roll and poppyseed roll that my grandmother made.

It has been years since I tasted those treats and though, after they passed, some of their daughters and grandkids tried to keep up the traditions, many of the recipes have been lost.

Strangely enough, though I bake very regularly, I never tried finding any of them myself.

This year I decided to give it a try. Thus far I've focused on three in particular, trying to perfect them as I've gone along.

These are Kolaches (spelling varies on ALL of these over different cookbooks) Kiffle and Potitca.


First, both the Kiffle and Kolaches use the same basic dough which is equal parts cream cheese and unsalted butter, flour and salt.

These are the Kolaches

There is NO sugar in the dough but, once the dough has sat in the fridge for at least a few hours, you roll it out on the counter into a dusting of sugar. This caramelizes on the bottom when they cook and is just the right amount of sweetness. The dough which seems like puff pastry when you remove the cookies, puffed and flaky, cools to. a cookie consistency and there is nothing like it in my own recipe box.

The filling is just dried apricots, rehydrated and then cooked down with sugar and water until the reduced liquid is thick like a syrup and then it is all pureed.

And The Kiffle is just rolled instead of pinched and uses a sweetened ground walnut filling with scalded milk, butter and sugar.

These are amazing. The walnut filling almost crystalizes. Both the Kolaches and Kiffle can be made with poppyseed, apricot, nut, cherry or prune filling. These are the two I remember the best though.

And finally, today, I made the Potica. It's essentially a nut roll but with thinner flakier layers and, in many homes, instead of long rolls it was made into bundt shaped cakes, the rolls stacked on top of each other before baking! I was not brave enough to try that but maybe for the new year?

This is Potica: Mine was more like traditional nut roll than I was hoping for  and came up a little short in the layer department and I'll try again but, hey, it was DELICIOUS! :)

So, that is where I am in my holiday bake-fest. When we made the Kolaches and Kiffle, we decided there was no need to look any further this year. We are making a few dozen every other day and giving them away and eating wayyyyy too many ourselves!

I hope you are enjoying the season wherever you are. I'll be around to drop in soon again!

Thank you and happy solstice/holidays until the next time!

XO
nicolas

Ghost Stories - Go Play Elsewhere - The Apartment #3

Go Play Elsewhere


My mother, in her eighties, does not have a very good memory of late but the things she recalls from the past are crystal clear and, by my own experience as a reference point for them, very accurate.

So, when I told her I was writing about the myriad of odd occurrences I've had in my life, and those of the apartment we lived in until I was 11, she raised an occurrence that I had completely forgotten about but, upon hearing it, it had come rushing back to me so clearly.

It wasn't going to be one of the tales I told but may truly be one of the oddest.

The apartment was complex of 8 buildings lettered A through H. Our building, F, formed a corner, a perfect right angle, with building E and the resulting square yard they created was the only flat, grassy area around the complex. It was perfect size for waffle ball and so it became our field by default.  Hitting the wall above the first story was a home run and I can still, with clarity, recall the three times someone hit a plastic ball on top of the third story roof.  I remember these more for the fact that it was out only ball on two of the occasions and ended our game. . .

As you might expect, we were kids and we were loud. The result, with the noise bouncing off the brick facades of the large buildings was, I am sure, rattling to those who's windows faced the grassy diamond.

The management of the complex, due I am sure to the complaints of the noise,  eventually built a play area on a grassy lot behind the buildings but it was habit to play on this field and we returned to it often. I mean, the buildings DID make for the perfect diamond shade and the height of the walls made for a true "stadium feel".  And some summer nights people actually watched us from itheir windows.

Eventually we took to the new play area but it was an adjustment.

So I must have been eight or nine at most at the time this happened.

Very few people complained to us when we played or shooed us away but there was an elderly woman who lived in the very first apartment in F building on the ground floor.  I never knew her name nor can I or my mother recall it now but I will refer to her as Mrs. Smith for the purpose of the story.

Mrs. Smith's living room window overlooked the outfield, left field to be precise, and in the summer, when the heat set in, the window was usually open. These were the old wind-out windows, not the sliding kind with a screen.

Once we had been given the new play area and were not supposed to disturb the neighbors by playing on our old field, she made a habit of yelling at us out her window. Aways the same three words and nothing more:

"Go play elsewhere."

She wouldn't come outside or to the front door ( as I believe she used a walker), but instead would just wait for one of us to be close enough to the window to shout it at us as loud as she was able which was, not very loud. That lucky kid then had to relay the message to the rest of the group and we would, of course, pick up and go around the back.

There were times when she wasn't home for weeks at a time though. Maybe visiting family or in the hospital. Those times we fell back into the habit of playing on the diamond again. We did this because one of the kids had a parent who worked in the office of the complex and she had been told it was mostly Mrs Adams who had done the complaining about us being there. So if she wasn't home, we went right back.

So,  it must have been a few months since we had played on the old diamond field at all and, for some reason,  perhaps the new field had too many small kids on the new swingset, we decided to play a quick game on the diamond between buildings.

It was getting dark earlier then, nearer to Autumn, and as the game was winding down, I was put out in left field. . .Nearest to Mrs Smiths windows.

Later in the inning, as it was almost too dark to see anymore, I had my back to the window but heard Mrs Smith, as usual, calling out to me. . .

"Go Play Elsewhere."

We must have woken her, I thought, because she had not said a word for the hour or so that we had been there up to this point.

Well the game was ending anyway and I told everyone we needed to go. With that, I went inside the building and into our apartment. Soon after, when I was having dinner, mom asked about the game and I told her it had been fine but how mean old Mrs Smith had told us to go play elsewhere as always.

"What?" she asked, her face puzzled.

"She told us to go play elsewhere." I repeated, probably doing a bad impression of her voice.

"Nicolas."

I looked up mid bite and met her eyes.

"Who told you to go away?"

"Mrs Smith — out of her window like she always does. I was the one who was out there and heard her." I said, the last of my Spaghetti O's heaped on my spoon.

She sat down across from me, seeming confused.

"Honey," she said, "Don't lie to me."

"I'm not mom!" I protested unable to understand why she thought I was.

"Look," she said, " you all know that you're not supposed to play there anymore, so don't. And I don't know who yelled at you to be quiet but it wasn't Mrs. Smith.  Honey, the poor soul passed away a week ago. There's no one in her apartment."

I do not remember what my reaction to that was. I don't think I had any notion of it being odd or strange and I wasn't going to push it with my mother, to whom lying was the worst offense I could commit.  I DO recall now that, though we barely played on the grass diamond afterwards, I refused to play left field when we did. :)

Was it Mrs. Smith? Was it my own self consciousness about us playing there when we were not supposed to? ( I always protested it, knowing it was against the rules, but was often overruled by the Lord of the Flies majority)  was it someone else a floor above who probably heard Mrs Smith call out a dozen times or more over the previous summers?

I cannot say. I am amazed that my mother remembered after all these years and though it had slipped my own set of memories, it came back as soon as she mentioned Mrs. Smith.

Eventually an old man moved into Mrs Smith's old apartment and I had a year long battle with him which I will tell you about some other time. It wasn't supernatural in any way,  but it was a war of stubborn pre teen and old man attrition. . . lol

Nostalgia #1

Hello Everyone!!

I know I missed my usual posting on Friday. I am less than two weeks away from my train trip across the country to visit my mom and I just couldn't fit in a post before the weekend with all the encroaching deadlines.

Instead, today I am going to put up the first post of a series I have been thinking about for some time, which will be called, simply, "Nostalgia".

It's been inspired by my childhood days and experiences, of course.

While I have already detailed a good bit  of the inspiration that came thru those years, all of which are part of my creative life now, there remains a lot that I do not often talk about.  Maybe because they are smaller events that seem less important or just negative things I would rather just leave behind but as I get older i realize that they all have played their part. All need to be honored for how they've shaped me. And some are just little pieces, glimpses and fragments of the whole that I never want to lose. . .

As you might expect, a trip home is fraught with memories, old patterns and sights and sounds. Being in the house/yard/woods/neighborhood where so much of who I am was formed is both a joy and also a melancholy time

So at random times, often between  Fridays,  I will post little bits and bobs of those days. I'll try to warn you when it is going to deal with the dark times, not that there were that many, This will, I suppose, be a selfish record of things I never want to forget and many that I have never before written down.

Nostalgia #1

My Winter Olympics

In the years between 10 and 16 I really only had two friends who I played with on a regular basis. I'll talk about them another time. One of them still lives down the street from my mother and seeing him each year is a chance to revisit some of those good times we shared from the past.

But much of my time then, even with two good friends, was spent alone.

In truth, it was preferred. There were so many ideas. games, stories in my head that I knew no-one else would understand or add anything to if I tried to include them.

One of those exploits was my love of the winter olympics. I could not get enough of the wonder of nations from all over the world coming together and competing in events that were so wonderfully strange to me. Luge, bobsled, biathlon, speed skating, etc We all knew about ice hockey and downhill skiing of course. I was 10 the year the olympics were held in Lake Placid, NY. The US hockey team's "Miracle on Ice" is, of course, the prevalent memory of those games for most of us in this country. But what the entire olympic spectacle inspired was a series of years, snow days permitting, where I recreated the Olympics in my back yard. I won't go into too much detail but it was one of those things that I just had to do alone.

What I remember most of about it to this day is that I took an entire day as the snow fell to make small, paper flags of all the countries for my "luge" event. I drew them with markers I think.  I had an old encyclopedia that had all the flags of the world (one of my favorite things to look at as a child!) and I meticulously tried to do them justice with my paper and markers. Then they got wrapped around craft sticks. I made medals out gold and silver foil.  I was ready.

The "luge" was just on an old red flyer wood sled. The "track" was hardly dangerous or Olympian by any standards. . . a gently sloping hill, maybe 60 or 70 yards in total length from the back porch of our home, down across a concrete lot and then a final dip down a hill past the neighbors house.

Instead of timing the sled runs for speed, I was trying to see how far I could get the sled to go.
The last ten yards or so the sled would slow to a crawl, the weight of my body the only thing pushing it forward until it came to a crunching stop in the snow.

The little flag representing the country I had just pretended to be representing would be stuck in the ground where the front of the sled ended up. Then I'd get up off the sled, haul it back up the gentle slope and do it all over again. Dozens upon dozens of times. With the exception of a rare misstep out of the "starting gate" most of the trips ended up in a very small area, within two feet of each other. Mere inches separating the best from the worst of the runs.

I can still recall, vividly, the feeling of the falling snow in my face as I went along and the internal "broadcast" of the announcers that I ad libbed in silence.

I made dozens of runs and, as the track iced over, it DID become little faster and more fun.

When it ended, I would go inside have a medal ceremony and return the next day for "ice" hockey or biathlon (FYI, plastic bb's are NOT going to be accurate in 20mph whipping, winter winds!) and some events, downhill skiing and speed skating, I had an old Atari Game system to play those out on when it got too dark outside.

The feeling I get when I think of those days is both precious and bittersweet.

I played so many games like that and I'll talk about them more in future Nostalgia posts. I just preferred those solo hours.

I still do in many ways.

When I created the "My Antarctica" photo series a few years back, those memories of cherished events and a few stark turning points from childhood were the impetus for a number of the images.

Most of those, I have never shown, including this one below which was inspired by those childhood Winter Olympics. . .

And while there were many bad moments as well, I never hesitate to say that, given the offer, I would not hesitate to forfeit up a year of my life to go back and live one day in that time (minus the negatives of school, family arguments etc) :)

When I go home, I try. A little at least. So much of it has changed, especially the outdoor landscape. But I still find that if I am very quiet and open. . . it comes back to me.

Thank you for reading!

nicolas

Small Magic - In the Details

My dear blog friend Andrea, at Falling Ladies, has begun a monthly collection of stories and experiences of what she has termed as "Small Magic". You can find this month's post by Andrea by clicking HERE

And the original "Finding Small Magic" Post on her Falling Ladies blog is HERE:

I hope you will take a moment and check them out, add your own (even just a link to a picture or a sentence or two is PLENTY! It need not be as wordy as I tend to be. :)

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Hi all!

I am just a day from leaving on my cross country train excursion to visit mom, and "home", though I sometimes struggle to call it such. I struggle because I have not lived there in over 20 years. Not in the state and not in the house I mostly grew up in.

And I can write this because I know that my mother understands what I am about to tell you.

Home is not just found in the place or the time spent. It is in the details.

The house remains the same, mostly. The rooms, the lot size etc. But all of the details. . . the small magic. . . is mostly gone. The small magic that I now know, made it "home" for all those formative years. Made it a place that, no matter what life in the outside world brought, I could retreat and get lost in the small magic that abounded there.

Small magic that was found in:

The bird feeder my grandmother stocked daily for her assorted feathered friends.
The hand-laid cobblestone road, now paved over with black, ugly asphalt.
The old recliners my grandparents sat in.
The little decorations and extra touches they had added all through the house over the years
The trees: Peach, apricot, plum, blue spruces lining the driveway. . . all gone.
The flowers I planted and tended to for my grandmother or, as my grandfather and I called her, "The Boss", year in and year out.
The stone birdbath which was a joy to watch all year long, even when it froze in winter and we'd poke a hole in it to allow the birds to find water!
The old toolbox in the "junk room", which was my great grandfather's, and had been hand-built.
The gravel lot (the neighbor's property actually) where epic stickball, nerf football and street hockey games were played and where a lot of skin got left behind over the years.
The old TV shows, the old tv (with rabbit ears when you had to actually GET UP to change a channel!!)
The flagstones out the back door that moles found their way beneath and dug their maze of tunnels each year.
The tree house
The ivy covered hillsides along the driveway.
Worn patches of grass in the uneven back yard from wiffle ball
The old red wooden sled in the garage
The old stereo
The simple feeling of timelessness and possibility and love that you can't define, but know it when you feel it.
All the smells of my grandparents cooking, old family recipes, 7 day candles burning, chocolate making and canning all summer and fall.

Maybe most of all, the possibilities of endless days of discovery. All those little trinkets and treausres tucked away over the years in the basement, in the sewing room, in the garage or that junk room, in the piles of boxes, that I would unearth in my childhood adventures and marvel at.

All of it gone. . .

Now, I do still find a lot of little things here and there. And I have, I know,  a keen imagination that allows me to suspend time even in the absence of such things and transport myself back there again and again. But, in truth, it is easier with physical distance. I actively seek the spirits of the past out when I am there. I open myself to that little boy and invite him in and, he DOES show up here and there. But it is often fleeting. My mother, you see, is very much a "here and now" type person, and understandably in her 80's, there is much to worry about I suppose. But I have never been a worrier to any great degree. Life drops what it will in our laps and reality is, as I have learned and proven time and again, very much a creation of choice, circumstance and attitude.And worrying never seemed to be successful at staving those incidents off or prepared one for them to any great degree.

Don't misunderstand. . . I adore seeing my mother and the fact that my coming there, cooking for her and connecting again makes her whole year is enough, truly, to say that it is worth going back. . . but it just is not the same for me. I'm just being honest.

So I will take those moments as I can find them over the next two weeks and try to fill them with whatever magic remains there. I'll try to find the small details, even if they are only in imagination and memory now. . .and I try to create new ones too or rediscover old ones that even I may have forgotten. . . and those are treasures, to be sure.

Since it is February, I am hoping for a real honest to goodness snowfall.
Maybe a few moments of that magical "time travel."
A little childhood inspiration. . . and most of all, just a touch of the innocence from that time.

Mostly though, I suppose I will be counting the hours til I can return to the reality we have created here. Where magic is the rule and not the exception 7 days a week. Where the outside world rarely encroaches or is allowed in. Where my heart soars with every new turn of the page, even the messy ones. . . and where that little boy finds small magic in every thing he creates, day in and day out. :)

See you all in a few weeks.

nicolas

PS, since I will not be able to post a new work post on the first, below is something I just completed for a custom request. A statue of Ereshkigal, a Sumerian deity that I had never made before. With all the details left to me, I pulled from several of her ancient incarnations including her association with having inspired Hecate (thus the owls) and her role in the underworld.

This work I do, I realize, is a perfect blend of adult/little boy. I "play" often and in turn, am fortunate enough to be able to navigate the adult world of expenses/bills from the work I do as well.

It's a far cry from legos and play dough eh? But the root inspiration, interest and exploration are very much the same as they were all those years ago.

A Little Bit of Christmas Past

Hello all! Hoping the season has been magical thus far wherever you are whether snowed in or hoping for a white Christmas!

Just thought I'd share a bit of our holiday world today.

Since we've added a full size floor loom and another work table to our set up we had to downsize the tree a bit this year to fit it in but it is still a lively 5' Nobel Fir.

The Santa is from the first tree I can recall as a child. I looked forward to seeing this "old friend" every year and I still do.

And these glass ornaments must be at least 50 years old now.  I've managed to keep nine of them in tact.

Danish Christmas Snowflakes Sofie got at a Christmas market when she was in school abroad. 

One of my favorite Etsy finds of all time. Originally I wanted to make little winter scenes for them but decided we should keep most of them for ourselves to hang on the tree. 

Sofie's Grandmother's tree topper! I love this bird and look forward to placing it on the top bough every year!

And the last few years, when we had much larger trees, we needed ornaments so we made dozens of these origami bows.   I am hoping to take a day next week and make a few dozen small ones to go on this year's tree.

And one last thing. . . last year we watched what is one of my favorite, nostalgic, Christmas movies which is "An American Christmas Carol" starring Henry Winkler, (yes, that's right, THE FONZ !) as the Scrooge based character. Now, I will admit, it is not as good a movie as I recalled (acting wise) from 25 years before, but I still reveled in seeing it again. It's hard to find but Netflix had it last year and it was a delight to watch.  Of course, Nothing beats "A Charlie Brown Christmas"  for me, the sad little tree, the monologue from Linus about what Christmas is all about and of course, Pigpen's endless dust clouds even when skating or exhaling while singing! Classic. . . 

Any favorites you'd like to share? LOVE to hear about them!

Happy holidays!

nicolas 

Small Magic - Nostalgia

My dear blog friend Andrea, at Falling Ladies, has begun a monthly collection of stories and experiences of what she has termed as "Small Magic". You can find this month's post by Andrea by clicking HERE

And the original "Finding Small Magic" Post on her Falling Ladies blog is HERE:

I hope you will take a moment and check them out, add your own (even just a link to a picture or a sentence or two is PLENTY! It need not be as wordy as I tend to be. :)

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If you've been following my blog or visiting my shoppes on Etsy over the years, you probably are aware that i am a huge fan, and a fierce protector, of the notion of nostalgia. While my childhood was far from perfect and we all tend to gloss over some of the not-so-great aspects of  our lives, I think many people have a tendency to drift, for one reason or another, back to the past. Especially as we get older. 

For some it's childhood, for others it's college or the early years of their own children's lives. But it seems that, in one way or another, we all tend to find those spaces in the past where we can safely dwell for whatever personal reasons. 

Now, when that nostalgia revolves around childhood. . . well, many adults seem to leave it completely behind or, at the very least, rarely speak about it in and among their adult lives. You may see signs of it in someone's doll collection or Teddy bear Hug. Or in the way they interact with their own children during playtime or in creative endeavors. 

I never let go of that past and I am thankful, every day, that I didn't lose sight of it. 

To be completely honest, most of my life I lived with a foot in two worlds. That of the adult world around me and that of the world of my imagination and childhood. The struggle to maintain both led to a lot of frustration and misunderstandings among friends and family who could not see that I just was not cut out for the "adult" world. I needed every spare hour for my imagination and it was a very solitary pursuit for the most part. I made bad decisions. I tried to reconcile the two worlds in so many ways but, in the end, I always felt that the magical/childhood part of me was suffocating in the adult world. 

Then, after an accumulative series of events, I decided that it was time for a leap of faith. I was going to have to open myself up to the possibilities and ask for guidance as I threw myself and my world completely into the pot. All or nothing. Sink or swim. Betting on childhood, imagination and nostalgia over the adult world I had come to loathe.  Now, don't get me wrong, please, there are people who thrive in the adult world and I am  ever so grateful for them because someone has to keep our world running. . . it just couldn't be me anymore. 

I could tell you a dozen stories of what now seem like moments and instances when "angels" appeared, all within months, to be my guiding lights along the way. I also met Sofie who, without fail, has been the only person I have known in my adult life who didn't ask me to balance the two worlds or question my draw to the past, even though hers was a different experience. Despite that, she reveled in my memories , stories and dreams and explored them WITH me. With complete acceptance. We made the break together. And we changed our entire lives from top to bottom to suit the new life we wanted to have. We didn't expect that the world would accommodate our dreams without being willing to change along with it.

Around that same time as I was in the midst of creating what would become the building blocks of the reclusive, creative world we dwell in now, and of the work you see here that I create, the ghosts of Christmas past came to call. I stumbled upon something that I have held to as being a source of inspiration and light ever since.

During a random internet search laced with nostalgic ideas I found that, not far from where I grew up, there was man in his late 60's who had created a website for the history of little Christmas Putz Houses. Those glittery, magical, cardboard houses many of us remember form under our family trees in childhood. The history of them is fascinating but what I was taken by was that this man, and his love for these houses, was a clear channel to and from his childhood. That he REVERED that time and those memories and that he had found a way to keep it close and invest himself within his passion for it so late in life. 

It was a deeply appreciated thread for me to reach out and hold to.  

And the first thing I read from that web site was this:

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"There is but a very brief window in early childhood for many of us, a period of time that lasts from birth until we are cast from the nest and into school. A time when all about the world is new and good. A time when we are open. A time when we take things in so deeply that they will form us ever after. So we imprint upon the Christmas of that time, and what that was is what it will be for us always. 

I think that is what collecting is all about, especially for those who collect for LOVE and not for sterile speculation. 

This is true of most of the toys and trappings of the holidays. 

Artifacts. 

Actual tangible contact with our own past.

It is true that we forget nothing. The power that an object unseen in decades can have to transport us in mind and spirit back to a specific period or moment of our lives - to unlock long-closed doors in the mansion of our memory - is the true value that it has. We can hold such an object in our hands and know those times were real and welcome back whole parts of who we were into who we are - and let the inner child in each of us out once again to play - to live as part of us and and help us see again through our own "Magic Window"  

You will find that those old objects will take you back in time, but NEVER listen to those sad fools who say that you are "living in the past." We are what we are because of our pasts. Would that we could live in the past at will or at least visit from time to time. But we can bring  those things forward, to live within us as we face the uncertainty of the present and the future. 

Those pasts informed everything that we know so never be ashamed of your nostalgia . . .it was, and is, your reverence for the life you had, the path that you have traveled. -T.H. "Papa Ted" Althof

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Sadly, as a second wake-up call, I soon discovered that Ted Althof was dying, having been diagnosed with cancer just as I was diving in to his website in 2009. I'd never really put ityself in mortality's shoes before that. I always had time. Lots of time I thought. Angels, and small magic, really do come in many, many complex forms. 

What I am left to say is this: I wouldn't dream of asking anyone to be anything other than what and who they are. BUT if  this holiday/yule/solstice season you find yourself feeling silly for daydreaming of the best of your memories as a child, or your best memories WITH a child, please embrace it fully instead. We can't actually go back, I know, but allow yourself that time, that place and those memories to come back in a quiet hour. Indulge them fully. I can't say they'll lead you to a life path like mine but they WILL fill you with a bit of small magic and wonder again. And you might just find that today does not have to be so far from that wonderful memory of yesterday.

Have a wonderful and magical season wherever you are and find that SMALL MAGIC always and in all ways!

And  a special thank you to all of you for coming along on MY nostalgic road-trip, offering your kind words, support and patronage as I built this world I thrive in now. 

nicolas

PS:

If you are interested in Christmas Putz houses and their history, there is an archive of the original Papa Ted's Place website, maintained by fans and friends of Mr Althof after he passed in 2012. They kept it just as it was with only a note stating his passing as an addition. It's a relic of a site. Not slick and "squarespaced". . . but that only adds to it's charm and beauty I think. Great old photos, collections, stories, memories. 

The site is here: Papa Ted's

It Was 20 Years Ago Today. . .

Give or take. . .

It was 1995. I was in my early 20's and I had, about 4 months earlier, moved my entire life across the country to the West Coast.

Though not the first, it was, easily, the largest reinvention I had ever undergone.

I brought little with me in that cross country trek in the old Chevy Corsica. My musical equipment, my basic necessities and just enough of everything else to get by til I got settled. But, as with any reinvention, I left so much behind for good.

Somewhere, tucked among the boxes, was at least one of the Calvin and Hobbes book of comics collections.

In November of 95, the strips creator, Bill Watterson, announced he was ending the daily. I remember being quite sad hearing that. Calvin and Hobbes had been the strip that I felt most connected to in my life. The often solitary boy and his stuffed tiger in his wonderful imaginary world. 

During the next 20 years, those comics would be a beacon to me. The more I tried to find my place in the adult world and struggled with my reluctance to let go of the threads of my own childhood that were such lifelines. . .

Recently I have read a few articles about Bill Watterson. One  a graduation commencement speech he had given years back and, another, a recent Washington Post article/interview about the Calvin and Hobbes strip.

This is from the commencement speech:

“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential — as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them. 

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.”

Can I just say I adore Bill Watterson!

And there are two other things I'd like to say here and now.

Calvin and Hobbes continues to be that lifeline. Though now, after shedding that desire for an "important adult life" years back and fully embracing and returning to the imagination and paracosms of my youth,  it is an easy line to grasp. One of gratitude and simple acknowledgment.

A "thank you" of grand proportions from my beautiful world.

And two, that the Calvin and Hobbes strip, when I do indulge in it, is not a mere nostalgia trip. I still feel it's tug of emotion and possibility. I still believe that many people would look at my world as the "stuffed tiger". . . appearing still and lifeless on the outside. . . because you'd have to be inside to really understand the vibrant world within. That used to feel odd at times but, now, all these years later, I wouldn't trade it for anything. Ever. It's meant to be this way, if only to protect and preserve it.

And like other things I recall so clearly from childhood and throughout my life, I still see that final panel of that final strip. Calvin and Hobbes going off on their sled, heading down the hill, and the final words. . . "Let's go exploring."

It's winter many places. Maybe snowing. When it does, get out and see that world in it's newness and as the blank white page waiting to be written upon.

And explore!

(It's good to be back)

xo
nicolas

Creating the World We Live In

Last night I was discussing the town I grew up in with my mother who is now 80 years old and who lives in the house my grandparents built back in 1950. This was, as many Midwest US towns were in the early part of the 20th century, a factory town. Steel and glass to be precise.

The entire neighborhood I grew up in existed only because of the mill and, by the time I was a kid, the steel industry was already taking it's leave from our town. Jobs had been outsourced and builders were placing orders overseas. Clean air and clean waterways were also now a priority and the combination of many factors led to the reduction of jobs and eventual closing of the mills.

My grandfather worked in those mills for 45 years. My brother had been working in them for a dozen. The town, once thriving with four pharmacies, three grocery stores, over a dozen and a half churches and a hundred or so small shops, slowly began to disappear too. The public was being drawn out of the cities to the suburbs and for the neighborhoods built along the rivers close in to the city, the tide had turned.

So, in talking with mom about the old days, I realized that we had totally different ideas of what the town was like.

In her day, when she was just out of school she worked walking distance from their house at a flower shop, a dress shop and a diner. She shopped every weekend after the matinee movies and spent many Saturday nights at the soda fountains in those pharmacies. The five and dime was a must see each week to catch new, inexpensive imports and clothing and the ethnic flair in the food, born of the community consisting of German, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Irish, Greek and Italian families that lived there, must have been a treasure for the taste buds.

In my day, what was a fractured but still close knit community was, to her, a crumbling shadow of it's former self. I grew up with one pharmacy. One grocery store and every other building along the 10 blocks or so of the main street closed and boarded up.

It was only in the last few years, in looking on line for old photos of the neighborhood and in talking more and more with my mother about the history of that place, that I came to know it in her day.  In the images of the town from the 40's and 50's I find bits and pieces of my childhood too. Some of the businesses that remained when I was a teenager were there even back then. Harder to spot in the pictures of busy streets, lively foot traffic and every door and window filled with life.

But I never knew that thriving town. It never existed in my life. And when I got to the age of making adult decisions, I did not see much in the way of reasons to stay.

I have been back the last few years to visit her and have taken several drives around the town with her. It is going through a mini-revitalization. A new library, a summer farmers stand, community projects to beautify the area. Though it comes too late for many of the lovely buildings that fell into disrepair all those years being empty.  Now there are single and sometimes double and triple gaps between all the buildings where others once stood.

It's hard to believe I lived there at all. It's no longer "home" in some ways but still every bit as much so in others.

So this is my point.

The world I have created with my miniatures and artwork, and with my life in total, is very much like life in the town I grew up in. Wherever we live, to some extent, you tailor your life to fit the location. To fit what is at your disposal. And many choose living in places where they have every possibility and convenience around them. . . though often at the expense of having to drive, commute, speed up, do more and more, schedule, compromise and somehow find the time to fit it all in and the money to pay for it.

If I showed you images of the town I grew up in, you might think, never having lived there, "No wonder you got out!"It wasn't pretty and it had, in the end, nothing to make it an "easy" place to live.

But it is what I knew. All I knew. And I think, one of the keys to being able to create THIS world I have built around me here, in this beautiful and affordable place I live now, comes from what I found in those days long ago.

You see, the very small town I live in now is also somewhat aged and, in the sense of the beauty of urban-ness, not much to look at.  Though being at the very edge of a massive ocean bay and set in among lush tree covered hills makes up for a lot and I always will prefer the beauty and abundance of nature, as well as a general lack of humans to the hum and rattle of any thriving urban environment.

But coming here and building a life that could support our art, that would allow us to not worry about money so much (we cut our expenses drastically when we left the city four years ago and it made ALL the difference in allowing us to focus on our creative work 24/7)  and giving me the freedom to stroll to the grocery store, post office and bakery, to a beautiful waterfront or to the library, city hall and fish markets. . . all withing 5 minutes walk, it's as close as I could hope to get.

And somehow, in some way that I am sure I am far from being able to articulate, the lost town I grew up in is a huge part of the work I create too. I was always inside my imagination as a child. Always creating worlds of escape and possibility. There was really nowhere else to go in those years. It just took me a few decades to realize that to live in a world built on that imagination as an adult meant leaving much of this modern but no less self-created one behind.

For my mother, today,  "creating" means talking about the old times and living in the very fond memory of what was all those years ago. And I get it now. I am the same. All I have done is create that world in my work. In the fairy realms and miniature worlds of my choosing. I bring it to life every day. I create, quite literally, the world that I live in.

And in that, I have to give credit to the town I grew up in. . . even the one from my Mother's childhood years that I never knew. To the place where perhaps the ghosts of what once was lingered just long enough to speak to me of possibilities and map-making and imagination. . . and to tell me that I, in my own way, could live there too.

I believe that we, ultimately, create the world we live in.
Everywhere.
Every day.

We choose.


xo
nicolas

This was the main street in my Mom's day during the 1950's the wonderful brick architecture of these early 1900's buildings. The Five and Dime, the cobblestone roads and the trolley tracks. and that's the flower shop she used to work at on the left.

Returning Home

So, not even a week into November and the holiday rush is here. . . I am inundated with custom orders already and it's still pretty early. . . . to make things seem even more off track this comes on the heels of a week long trip back to my childhood home.

This always stirs so many things inside.

I am, of course, thrilled to see my mother who, in her 80's is not going to be traveling across the country to see me any time soon. And, those of you who have read my blog probably know that I had a magical and very inspired childhood. . . so that should be a wonderful thing to return to, right?

Well, not always.

Here's the thing. . . there is, undoubtedly, a very strong pull to the landscape of my youth but, every time I return, I am reminded how lucky I was to have traveled and explored the larger world before settling into myself in my 20's. I imagine this is a fact of growing up in any strong cultural area but, when I return, more than the nostalgia of my childhood, there is the reminding of the angst of my teen years and the fact that often haunts me is this.

If I had not "gotten out" all those years ago, I would likely never have found my way to the work or the life I have now. So for all of the wonder of immersion back into those fields of imagined wonder, I struggle with the painful reminders of how limiting life there might have been if I had stayed. While most kids in their late teens and early 20's in that neighborhood were partying on the slag heaps of the abandoned steel mills or sitting on the train trestle, feet dangling 50 feet above the river, with liquor bottle in hand, I was working double shifts at an Italian restaurant saving money like mad for my first trip to Europe. A trip that changed my view on life forever. A trip that set me aside from that neighborhood and left me on the outside looking in forever more.

For the few friends of that childhood who I visit with when I return, when we see each other it is like no time has passed. They exclaim time and again  "nicolas, you never change" and that, when I am home, they FEEL as if they are 12 again too. Funny to me because I am the one who really changed. .. . yet those times, when I return, are still as they were and not muddied with another 30 years of adulthood in the same landscape. Perhaps that is why, when I go home, I am able to pick up those days right where I left them? 

I imagine there WILL come a day when I will be too old to throw that Nerf football around or chase wiffle balls and fireflies. When an excursion through the woods will be best left to manicured paths and level ground. When the lure of those earliest creations and indulgences in imagination will fade to the background. . .  but it's hard to fathom now.

The hardest part of those trips back is that, in the time I have alone there, I find myself craving to also return to the games of my days spent in solitude. Which were many and more than those spent with friends.

In my youth,  I and my imagination were always best on our own. That's changed too of course, and for the better, but in those days I looked forward to nothing more than the hours undisturbed to dive into the creations and games and worlds that lived only in my own head.

And those, as an adult, in that landscape, are harder to recapture. Maybe it's adult self consciousness or just a reverence for something I know can never be relived?

So I return to the here and now and the myriad of new worlds I have created and share with like souls out there. That I share here with you.

It's every bit as good as those days and, for the adult in me, it's better for the soul.

But the child is there too, neve changing, never far away.
Smiling and dreaming
At home
Eternally and blessedly unchanged
and always
young. . .