Life

A Blatantly Christmas Post and Music Video

Leave a comment

As the title says, this is a post with an embedded video (just published this month) that I find incredibly beautiful, inspirational, and moving, with gorgeous music and images…and an ending that makes me tear up a little every time.

But it’s blatantly Christmas-focused (the focus is a traditional carol and the connection of the season to the history that inspired it), so if that is not your thing, or Christmas-related material bothers you, then feel free to go on to read someone else’s posting of the day.

For everyone else, I hope you enjoy this as much as I do. 🙂

 

The Juggling Act

3 Comments

superwoman4This is how many of us feel on a regular basis (or maybe it’s just me, but I’m going to phrase it like that because it makes me feel better to pull you all into my circus, LOL).

173093__new-year-new-year-holiday-girl-smile-mood-gifts-juggling_pThrow in some of this (because the holiday preparations are in full swing, with decorating, shopping, baking, cooking, and most important of all, spending time with each other, which is the foundation of good memories):

????????And this (because my five weeks grades are due Tuesday)…

 

Final Front Moose Tracks on the Road to HeavenAnd this (because final issues for the book always crop up and require attention, from setting up accounts to creating TOC lists, to creating cover letters and mailing out review copies and trying to build some promotional efforts)…

And I have brewing a perfect storm of craziness that quickly escalates stress to red-line levels. Like on a daily basis. Tempers can flare and cause reactions that definitely don’t add to the serenity of life. 🙂

perfect-mumsAs a mom (even though my girls are teens they still have a gazillion activities, sports, and social issues to navigate), it’s easy to start to feel like this:

What to do?

live-in-the-momentI don’t have any silver bullet, I’m afraid. All I can offer is an idea that occasionally helps me to slow down so I can process what’s happening. It helps me to deflate some of the intensity of stress when it begins to overwhelm: Just live in the moment.

Attitude affects everything, whether its the day-to-day grind or the challenges of facing illness and pain (when my father was undergoing chemo and treatment during his final illness, he reiterated that to me many times, and one of the moments he was most proud was when his doctor’s office staff pooled to together and gave him a little pin that said “Great attitude award”, because he had one of the best they’d ever worked with).

While we can manage some things (like schedules or what we add to them by saying “yes” to too many things), there is much we can’t control. Much that just has to get done and needs that have to be met.

They will be. It will all work out. Just consider what this poster says. It helps. It really does. 🙂

11568-Be-Free-Live-In-The-Moment

 

Anyone else have tips for getting through stressful times?

 

A Bittersweet Gift: The Dickens’ Village

6 Comments
image

A photo of my mother-in-law and her late husband is perched right above the village she created

image

The village all lit up

Last year I inherited my mother-in-law’s rather extensive “Dickens’ Village”. She built it over several decades, and some pieces need repair (like the gorgeous church, which isn’t pictured here because the steeple is broken). But it’s a beautiful collection, and my girls, when they were little, always used to love to go to grandma’s to look at it all lit up during the holidays.

It’s a little bittersweet now, to have it in our home. Her home was sold about a year ago because she suffers from Alzheimer’s. She lived with us for a summer and spent time with each of my husband’s siblings, but as she got worse, we had no choice for her own safety and well being but to move her to a constant care facility about 30 minutes from us. As of now, her disease has progressed to the point that although she usually recognizes that she knows us, when we visit, she doesn’t always know why or how, or who we are.

The village is one of the tangible reminders of what once was in our little family and can never be again.

So we will keep the village safe and put it out with love each year, in memory of all the happy times we spent together. Someday, I will pass it down to my girls, and they can keep the memories – and the remembered love – of their Grandma McCall alive and well.

Winter Wonderland II

Leave a comment

imageThis is the same tree I posted last night, in the early daylight this morning. It’s all sort of artistically monochrome outside at the moment.

It kept snowing and snowing last night (we finally got the 8 or so inches the weather people had claimed we’d be getting beginning on Tuesday, when all we had was rain and a little icing).

I love trees in general, and I love seeing them in all their phases, including dressed in lovely robes of snow. The dark branches and trunks make such a pretty contrast with the white of the snow, before the wind blows it all bare again.

Hope everyone has a great Thursday!

Winter Wonderland

6 Comments

image

This is the view outside my kitchen window tonight.

I love winter snow; it’s so fresh and sparkling. I love to feel the flakes melt against my cheeks when I take our English Shepherd, Cassie, outside for a little walk around the house.

It definitely puts me in a December mood.

Sleigh bells ring….are you listening? 🙂

Artist Interview: M. Reed McCall

Leave a comment

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by fellow blogger L.N. Holmes. She asked some great questions that really made me think. We covered a lot of ground, from industry thoughts to how an award-winning medieval romance writer shifts over to mainstream contemporary fiction…and why the two genres are not all that different after all, to me. 🙂

L. N. Holmes's avatarL. N. Holmes

M. Reed McCall, author, Moose Tracks on the Road to Heaven, book, novel, ficiton, Mary Reed McCall, new book Copyright M. Reed McCall

(Please note that I am adding the addition of colored text. My questions will be in red and the artist’s answers will be in purple.)

L.N. Holmes: “Where is your hometown?”
M. Reed McCall: “I am originally from Rome, NY, which is about an hour east of Syracuse.”

L.N. Holmes: “What is your chosen artistic profession?”
M. Reed McCall: “I am a writer–although I am also a high school English teacher, which requires its own kind of artistry, and I have been working with students (numbered in the thousands by now) for the past 26 years.”

View original post 2,238 more words

Tea Wisdom

1 Comment

image

From my tea today – Good Earth’s “Sweet and Spicy”, which is one of my favorites at this time of year, for its lovely cinnamon-sweet warmth.

I love my dog, and, in the words of my sister-in-law, who helped me organize my pantry cupboards a few years ago, I “have more tea than all of China” because I enjoy it so much, it’s true.

But I also love my husband and wouldn’t have thought to make this kind of comparison.

What do you think?

Vintage Christmas

2 Comments

Vintage-Christmas-card-christmas-33061199-500-363It’s true that I enjoy vintage Halloween and Thanksgiving  pictures…but I adore vintage Christmas images. Here are a couple for you to enjoy  as a start (you know there will be more in coming days, LOL!)…

Vintage-Christmas-christmas-32887773-1200-881This one is a favorite for the atmosphere it evokes. It’s peaceful and warm, all at the same time. It reminds me of the Night Before Christmas book my father used to read to us…and it also kind of reminds me of this scene from Anne of Avonlea (another favorite film made from a book, this version featuring the irrepressible Megan Follows as Anne Shirley. You can see her performing now on the CW’s series REIGN, where she plays Queen Catherine de’ Medici, pictured here on the left, just behind Adelaide Kane, who plays Mary Queen of Scots, and Toby Regbo, who plays King Francis). 1212-final-580x385

I always loved this second entry into the “Anne” trilogy, because she became a teacher in this film and experienced the freedoms of life on her own for the first time. I had my own VHS copy of the trilogy, and when I was a first year teacher (newly-armed with my undergraduate degrees in English and Russian, and a mere 22 years old), living away from home and not in college for the first time in my life, I would watch this video again and again, snuggled into my little studio apartment above the diner in Hancock, NY, where I had my first teaching position. Cozy and wonderful – the perfect situation at a perfect time in my life.

There are many more reasons why Christmas-time – the whole month of December, really – holds such a special place in my heart, as it does for so many others. But those will be subjects of other posts. Here is another lovely image for now, and I’ll save some of the other stories and pictures (and another sneak peek from Moose Tracks on the Road to Heaven) for later!Vintage-Christmas-christmas-32837432-1024-768

Inside the Head of a Normally Balanced Writer When Doubt Strikes

Leave a comment

So, I received my very first proof copy of Moose Tracks on the Road to Heaven this morning (isn’t it pretty? LOL).imageimage

In the thirteen years since my first book was published by HarperCollins (Secret Vows, back in 2001), I’m often asked what it’s like to see one of my books in a store or hold it in my hands. The answer has never changed, from that first book to this, my eighth published novel: It’s a combination of pride, excitement, pleasure…and a tangled mess of doubt and worry.

I suppose it’s all part of the paranoia of any creative person. I’m not usually bothered much by the creep of insecurity, but there are moments when it pokes up its dark little head. Seeing one of my finished books for the first time is often one of those rare occasions…which is good for me, because it’s often tempered by those other, far more positive emotions I mentioned feeling at the same time.

With this book, the doubts are perhaps a little stronger, probably because it’s been so long for me since I’ve had a new book out (the last, “first-time-I-held-a-new-book-I’d-written” was back in 2006, in fact) and because this book is quite personal and a totally different genre from what I’ve published before.

So, where does the doubt come from, for authors who experience it? Continue Reading…

We’re Not “Normal”

4 Comments

imageI don’t know why, but this little wall hanging has always tickled my funny bone. One of my older sisters (I have six of them, for those of you who haven’t been around here long enough to have seen other posts on it) purchased it for me up north around 10 years ago, during one of the years when several sisters, our families, and my parents would rent a great camp for a week up on Fourth Lake in the Adirondack chain of lakes.

We continued to show how “normal” we were as adults when we all were home for one of the reunions we used to have periodically, since several of us are spread around the country; Pa and Ma asked us all to participate in a commemorative family photo session, we shocked the photographer when Pa suggested we do one shot where we were all making crazy, funny faces. So there we all were, in dresses, stockings, and heels, with Pa in a suit and tie, sticking out tongues and making crazy expressions (except for the sisters who were laughing so hard they couldn’t do it). It’s one of my favorite pictures, and if I can scan a copy of it (and get permission from my other sisters to post it publicly, LOL) I’ll share it at some point. 🙂

So I guess that’s part of the reason why the little wooden plaque above just seems to capture the quirkiness and fun of life growing up as part of a pile of rambunctious kids. Being all females only added to the “color” of our lives (and having only one bathroom with the whole house on a well that would run dry periodically made things even more interesting. My father tried to institute really short “Marine”-style showers, but that didn’t fly).

tumblr_m08fgrLNES1qbrsgvI can still remember “counting off” when we got into the van (to be sure we weren’t leaving anyone behind). And I remember in the early 1970’s, watching my older sisters (I was second-to-youngest) in the back room, putting “dippety-do” on their hair and putting in big rollers.

The squabbling about who got the bathroom when was kept hushed and to a minimum, thanks to no one wanting to raise Pa’s wrath and have him institute a “schedule”. He did when necessary, but usually he tried to let us work it out, to learn how to work together. That was sometimes accomplished with talking, but other times it happened with a few well-placed pinches, body-blocks, pointed glares or raised eyebrows, LOL.

There was also an epic water fight, once, that happened when a group of us (all teenagers at the time) were supposed to be cleaning the kitchen but got into some kind of verbal conflict that escalated into physical battle with full-blown spraying of the water nozzle and thrown buckets of water. That particular incident is so amusing for me to remember that I memorialized it in the fiction of Moose Tracks on the Road to Heaven. 🙂

I could write a book with all the hundreds of crazy, fun memories of those times to inspire me (oh, wait, I did, LOL).  Maybe I’ll post that scene as the next “sneak peek” from the book.

So how about you – are you from a prim and proper family, or a bit of a rough and tumble one? Any fond memories from family lore? I love hearing them, so please share in the comments!