Julie Pippert: Using My Words

Guys (men and women) you have to celebrate this holiday. In some way. Any way. Big. Small. A way that will let the person you love know you love him or her. Old or young, it matters. It matters for a lot of reasons. The surface one is that it's because our culture celebrates this holiday and all around each of us is this huge message of SHOW YOUR LOVE. We may say we don't buy into it, or shun "Hallmark" holidays but I am going to call BS on that. Nobody is that cool. Nobody never needs someone to show their love. Nobody ever learns to live perfectly well without love. We all need to feel loved, in some way. And, on special days, like today, we like to see it in some special way. I say this as someone who used to think she was too cool, too strong, too modern to need flowery hearts and fake holiday sentiment. Until I finally admitted I did, said so, and improved my marriage. When we got married, we had an emotional "pre-nup" in which he made me swear to never...

I am part of a special holiday Blog Carnival hosted on Blog Nosh Magazine and this post was sponsored by the Tide Loads of Hope program. I was standing outside my house, directly under my children’s bedroom window, in what passes for cold in Bay Area Houston. In my hands I balanced a big boom box, Say Anything style, except it wasn’t blasting music. It was blasting the sound of reindeer hooves on a roof, including snorts, and the jingling bells of their harnesses. That’s when I knew it. No, not that I had lost my mind; I knew that I had finally gotten my holiday groove back. I knew that come what storms may, we could weather them, and when you have a chance to stand outside in what passes for cold blasting sleigh bells on a boom box to bring a little magic to kids, your kids, who still believe in, well, the everything sort of possibilities…you go for it, big. This marked a huge change. I’ve spent my life trying to find my footing during the holidays. My family had the general tradit...

I remember my Valentine's Day childhood parties well, even though these days it seems like a hundred years ago. I went to a lot of different elementary schools so the parties are distinct, rather than a blur of similarity of places and people. There were a lot of common points, though, regardless of place. We'd sit at our desks---the old-fashioned kind (now) with the wood top, attached by a metal bar to the hard, slick wood seat (one size fits all, hard for smaller bottoms). The cubby was underneath the seat, so children's heads tended to bob down as if going under water to get a fresh pencil. We'd have ants in our pants, the teacher would say, because not one of us could sit still. Every now and again a child, usually a boy, would explode up from his desk, no longer able to sit at all, and the teacher, resigned to this sort of thing, would say something like, "Mark...Mark, what are you doing up?" And poor Mark, a victim of a heady case of excitement beyond hi...

Recently we took a little trip. We get the joneses fairly regularly where we feel the need to travel. Ages ago, pre-parenting, we used to hop planes and go all sorts of wild places. Because we could. Once upon a time I took a job just because they offered me free air travel anywhere, any time. Every Friday we'd pack a bag and take it to the office. I'd call my husband around 4:30 and say, "This weekend let's go mountainous!" or "How about fabulous Chinese in San Fran's Chinatown for dinner tonight?" Living in the northeast was great because so many fantastic places were so close, either by car or train. The high speed train was awesome. We could hit NYC enough that we got to know neighborhoods, and had their subway system as memorized as our own. Even Canada wasn't exempt, especially when I had to commute to work in Toronto. Later my husband worked abroad and we commuted between Europe and the US---well, he commuted. I took a lot of vacation time...

That's it, folks. I've hit the big 35 lbs gone. I was going to celebrate by flashing briefly a photo of myself from the fashion show---preferably in the gold sparkly suit (so not me)---but my friend keeps citing "work" and "busy" as reasons for not emailing me the photos she took. Yes, so busy we had time for a two and a half hour lunch yesterday. ;) To assuage your disappointment, I will instead flash a brief series of photos of the kids from Easter. Before the photos, I need to provide a confession, a caveat, and a note. One confession: I forgot my camera and so my mom used hers for all the photos---this is a problem for everyone because it meant my inner bossy control freak kept annoying us all. One caveat: My children hate the camera, HATE it, and ABHOR being photographed. Every single photo in which they look at the camera involved a bribe. Suffice it to say that unlike in years past when I confiscate all candy, they got to keep all candy. One note: The...

I want the record to reflect that Valentine's Day is not, in fact, merely a Hallmark Holiday. In the heavy and heady tradition of strong capitalism and commercialism, Hallmark, Nestle, Whitman's, Disney and every other big company that can get a foot in the door of this holiday has done so. So it might seem as if it is a big scam to part a fool and his (or her) money. But it's not. Let me go all Trivial Pursuit and Big History Geek for a moment. Third Century AD. Rome. This era is known as the Crisis of the Third Century , and is a period of time we should never forget due to the lessons it can teach: Crisis of the Third Century (also known as the "Military Anarchy" or the "Imperial Crisis" ) is a commonly applied name for the crumbling and near collapse of the Roman Empire between 235 and 284 caused by the three simultaneous crises of external invasion, internal civil war and economic collapse. The changes in the institutions, society, economic life an...

When my husband and I got married, quite a while back actually (going on 14 years), we did that thing, finally, that everyone had nagged and nagged us to do: went to a store and registered for china, crystal, and other things of that ilk. We were only in our mid-20s and honestly had never given any of that any thought. We didn't entertain like that, and neither did any of our friends. We perused all the shmaltzy shelves of stuff. It was our first foray, really, into the Breakable Zone. We were so young that we were afraid to pick up any of it, although the saleslady encouraged us to overcome our "look with eyes, not with hands" instincts our parents had hounded into us for our entire lives. We spent days, seriously, sorting through patterns and brands. We wanted classic, yet interesting. Eventually, finally, we settled on a pattern of china and crystal. We wrote it all down on the little form the store had. Yes, back in those days there was no "quick gun" to zap...

Okay Santa. Christmas. How we do this whole ordeal, err, I meant deal. I am the Child of Divorced Parents, which means Christmas represents, historically, the War of the Roses, red versus white. I sort of forgot the entire Christ Child bit for many, many years. I dubbed the holidays Code Name York, and wondered when I'd be old enough for a valium prescription. So my entire life I struggled to rebel against the case of massive stress-induced heartburn that most people called the Hap-Happiest Season of All. I'll show you much mistletoe-ing. I'll raise my hand and confess that, in my youth, I liked to sock it to the materialistic capitalists by handing out donation cards in lieu of gifts. I still do this as a slightly less angsty adult, but it comes from a good place, I swear. I'll also confess to being a totally materialistic capitalist who used the holiday spirit to milk as much booty as I could from family, who never, EVER seemed to feel that guilt everyone promised me...