Archive for December, 2012

Finding Fantasy in Reality

Wednesday, December 26th, 2012

Some where in the back of my mind I have always known I lived in an exceptional place, it just wasn’t often that I cared to appreciate it. I used to make up stories about adventures in far away lands and imagine myself in a thousand places, anywhere but home. The exciting and the extraordinary was always beyond that next mountain or underneath the crashing waves of the sea, but never did I look at the mountains or the ocean right in front of me.

This is not to say that I didn’t love growing up in Santa Cruz, because I did and still do, it just simply means I never saw the fantastical qualities that I dreamed of in the place where I lived my everyday life. I never realized the fairy circles in the redwoods, or the glint of the sun on the sea, the way the wind swept across grassy hillside like a fingers running through feather soft hair. The world I felt I had to create when I was younger, was the world I was already residing in, I just didn’t know it yet.

Maybe it was when I left for college, or maybe it has been a building wave that has been gathering for some time within me, all I know now is the overwhelming appreciation and awe I have for my home in Santa Cruz.

There is so much I love about Santa Cruz; I realize that I do not have to escape this place to find adventure or fantastical things, I just need to step out of my front door. That is why for Christmas we stuck around town and for our Christmas Day we went hiking along the Davenport Bluffs and then took in the stormy skies from the Santa Cruz Wharf. It is nice to take a vacation in your own town, to make the everyday new again in the most exciting of ways.

Look upon your world with new eyes and see what there is to find. You may just be surprised to behold the imaginary world you spent your whole life searching for.

 

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The Spirit of Christmas and Santa Claus Strawberries

Tuesday, December 25th, 2012

My family spent a lot of time this holiday season thinking about memories of holidays past. What made things memorable, what things did we hold on to so many years later, was it happiness? Was it disappointment? And if so, why? I have been thinking a lot about this lately and one thing my mother said to me that she remembered from Christmas in her childhood very fondly was when she made things for her entire family. How the act of sitting down and applying oneself entirely to doing something that you just want to do because it would make your family happy. I think that is a good reason to look back on Christmas or whatever holiday is being celebrated during this cold winter season where family keeps us warm and happy; to celebrate not because we feel obligated and tied to disappointment or the gratification of materialistic desires, but the  celebration of loving for the sake of loving. Because they are family, because they are not perfect, and because they are our blood, our flesh, and from them we find meaning.

I realized I do not often give without reason and I really would like to change that about myself. I thought it would be fun to start small, kind of like my mother did in her memory of her early Christmas, by making something for my family to enjoy. What better way to make something they would enjoy than by starting where everyone ends on Christmas? With desserts. I found a nifty little picture on the internet of a little strawberry Santa and decided that would be a great little present to make for Christmas Eve dinner. The website, Operation Santa Claus, had a bunch of fun little Christmasy things to do, but I decided on these cute little bite sized desserts to share with my family.

I took these Santa strawberries to be easier than they actually were at first sight and my adventure in making these began as most attempts to re-create something found on the internet do, with failure. I tried to use just whipped cream as the filling for the strawberries and very quickly realized the error of my ways as they began to deflate, melt, and deform into little haphazard Santas, slightly off kilter and very unappetizing to behold.

The ones on the left side of the photograph are the initial attempts and the right are the later more successful attempts. I realized that the filling had to be sturdier so we made a cheesecake like filling made simply from cream cheese, powder sugar, and a dash of half and half to thin the mixture enough to be piped. Now, with the successful mixture (in a plastic bag used for piping) the strawberries were cut and filled and dressed to look like Santa Claus. The final touch being the sprinkles for little eyes on the cute little bite sized desserts.

They were cute, small, tasty, and a sweet way to end Christmas Eve. It was a good way to give back to my family in a very tiny way that built up our family instead of building materialistic gratification. I wonder if I will look back years from now and remember this fondly as my Christmas memory…

 

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Reading Places

Friday, December 21st, 2012

I spent a lot of time this semester sitting in a library, neck craned, eyes strained, and brain drained. Even though these places are beautiful in their own majestic academic ways, with towering columns that have held up the burdening weight of university, I can’t help but feel closed in by four walls. There is so much outside those tall grandiose windows that let light drift gently in to illuminate the library walls.

I always sit and watch as the library is lit by the dazzling color of sunset as I sat with my textbooks splayed out in front of me like the casualties of war, thinking of the beauty outside the rows and rows of books that lined the world around me. Yet, even as the colors began to fade to a darker shade and slip farther and farther away, I would remain. Instead of taking a breath and leaving behind my books for a moment, I would dive right back in, but my air never lasted sufficiently. It felt like drowning because it was. Diving back down without a replenishing breath of air is a scary thing, yet almost everyone in that library with me was doing it. Gasping like a fish out of water, watching with wide glassy eyes the cast off colors of a sunset sitting right out side, but like the shadows in Plato’s Cave, we tried to draw real light from only the shadows of reality.

I am tired of the shadows of reality, and I have been growing tired because I have drained these shadows dry and am ready, craving for more. So I have abandoned my beautiful little box for the outside world. I have been drinking in the color of every sunset, and finding every place that one can fit themselves only to sit down and read. The familiar is full of fascinating places to explore that function just as well as a library seat for a place to rest my book. Whether it means climbing rooftops or climbing mountains just for a nice place to cross my legs and lay open a book infront of me, I have been exploring in the name of reading. Even if but for a short while to crack open the spine of a book while over looking the Golden Gate Bridge, or just sitting underneath the shade of a great redwood, or sitting on a cliff above the tumultous sea, I am expanding. I am ready for new horizons, if you need me, I will be at the cusp of the ordinary, waiting.

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