HOLIDAY DANGERS AND DISEASES EXPLAINED

I am finally back at the New York desk, after flying home from London and going back to the Johnson family homestead in Philadelphia for the holiday. The mj signing workshop elves (me) were busy this holiday weekend. I spent half a day at a table full of paper, inks, and assorted crafty things making the cards myself.

“Why?” you ask. “Do you really have that much time on your hands?”

No, dear readers. It’s not that. The reason I am hand-making every single card (well, I am for the time being), is because, A. I love you, and B. I may have a genetic disease, brought out by the holiday.

It begins with my mother.

The holiday season brings out a few things in my mother, such as: her relentless organization, her insatiable craftiness, and her collecting habit.

My mom denies the fact that she is a collector. Even the most casual visitor to Chez Johnson will see through this in a second. My earliest memories include watching my mother dust the hand-painted German beer stein collection, which rapidly took its place alongside the precisely arranged ceramics from various European countries, the rugs, the swords, and the bagpipes. That’s just the one room. The next room is devoted to her Cat’s Meow houses (which, if you’ve never seen them, are flat wooden replicas of famous buildings, each with a small black cat painted somewhere on the front).

But my mom is also very, very crafty. Crafty like a fox. She’s one of those people who can make anything. She crochets. She embroiders. She does ceramics and oil painting. And she appears to have been born with the innate ability to do flower arranging, fancy bow-making, and wreath making. Her wreaths are famous in our town.

This craftiness has, on at least one occasion, led to disaster.

One year, when I was in college, I came home for Thanksgiving and my mom told me she needed some help. She was going to make one of her famous wreaths for a friend, and she needed to collect some pine cones. So, one afternoon, we went to the park with some bags to scavenge around.

I was wandering along, making some selections (my mom is very choosy, so there was a lot of, “No, not that one. That one isn’t fat enough.”), when I noticed that a little squirrel was loping along behind us. He seemed really interested in what we were doing. After maybe ten minutes of being followed from spot to spot, my mom was getting worried.

“What’s with that squirrel?” she asked.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“Scare it off with a pine cone.”

I threw a pine cone near, but not at the squirrel—just to give it the idea to move along. It didn’t budge.

“That’s weird,” I said. I threw another, a little closer. Again, the squirrel looked at the pine cone with contempt.

“Let’s get away from it,” my mom said.

We started speed-walking with our bags of choice pine cones. The squirrel sped up too. We went faster. It kept pace. We started to jog, and it followed right along behind us.

“There’s something wrong with it,” my mom said, the panic coming into her voice. “Maybe it’s rabid!”

My mom started fumbling in her purse.

“I’ve got pepper spray!” she said, holding up a little orange vial. “Stand back!”

My mom certainly doesn’t hurt animals, but there really did seem to be something wrong with the squirrel. And though pepper spray is painful, the effects fade. In any case, it was her idea, and the best one available.

The squirrel easily dodged the spray. It danced around the spritzing with the grace of that one person at every wedding who really, really knows how to do the Electric Slide, and is frankly just showing off.

Then it gazed at us and moved closer.

“Run!” my mom yelled.

We ran all the way across the park, the squirrel right on our heels. She managed to keep it from getting into the car with us by making it dance around the pepper spray again. We huddled there, breathing fast. It stood outside of the car and watched us.



Sometimes, little things can be scary.

“Here,” my mom said, handing me the spray. “Put this in my purse.”

I did this.

It was a cold day, and the running had caused our eyes to water. As she started the car, we were both rubbing them. She had just pulled on to the road when we both began to scream.

It turns out, when you spray pepper spray, it gets on your hands. It also gets on the container, so if you touch it, it gets on your hands. If you immediately rub your eyes, you will pepper spray yourself. This is exactly what we did. My mother was, by this point, actually on the road and trying to drive with pepper spray in her eyes. The first place to pull over was a Burger King. She wheeled into the parking lot, and we ran inside to the bathroom and started frantically washing our eyes out.

We generally do not discuss the squirrel-pepper spray incident. My mom is past wreaths now, anyway. All of her attention goes to the Village.

You see, this time every year, my mother’s collecting and crafting collide to make a perfect storm of holiday cheer in the form of her Dickens Village. The Dickens Village is a set of collectable houses and figurines based around “A Christmas Carol.” But when the figures got popular, they expanded it to include all of Merry Olde England, so you can buy London Bridge or Big Ben.

My mom has been collecting her village for a while, so she has quite a number of pieces. 25 storage boxes worth, to be exact. I know this because I moved them all from the attic on Black Friday morning.

The village is set up on a large wooden platform, which is covered in a thick, staggered layer of Styrofoam. The houses are set up in perfectly ordered streets, each one carefully chosen so that they are of different heights and types. The fishmonger goes next to the cobbler, which is next to Scrooge and Marley. The bigger buildings, like the church and the train station take up important positions. Then, she has to lay down the lakes, the railroad tracks, and the dozens of tiny trees. Then she arranges all of the little people. It takes almost a week to put the entire thing up.

As I was walking out the door, she asked me to stop at the craft megastore to pick her up a bag of something called “Buffalo Snow,” which is fancy, crafty fake snow.

Even at the slower times of year, the craft megatore is a little overwhelming. At the holidays, it brimmeth over. They can suddenly justify the fact that they have entire aisles devoted to ribbon and fake tree branches. And on Black Friday, the place was full of people with mad looks in their eyes. They had come to CRAFT.

So there I was, blocking out the frenzied rumblings of uncaged scrapbookers by turning on my iPod. I laughed a little as I picked up the fake snow.

“This stuff is silly,” I said to myself. “It’s a good thing I’m not into this.”

But then, I realized, I had the signing cards to get in order. I decided just to wander over to the paper aisle. The store had a wide selection, with hundreds of papers.

“This is good,” I said. “I’ll just take some of these, and . . .”

My eye landed on a sticker making machine.

“Oh,” I said, going over to it. “This could be good.”

I took the sticker machine and put it in my basket.

“I’ll just look around here,” I said. “There have to be some other things I can use.”

An hour later, I was sitting on the floor of the rubber stamping aisle, reading a book on embossing technique and asking the staff detailed questions about heat guns. I had this sudden rush of CRAFT ENERGY. I had to MAKE SOMETHING, FAST.

I was becoming my mother.



Something had happened to my mind.

“I have to get out of here,” I said, breaking out in a cold sweat. “I’ll go to the mall now. I’ll get some Christmas shopping done. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll go right now!”

I drove like a maniac to the mall, still buzzing with the need to accomplish something festive. I usually sit down somewhere and write a list before I shop, but I hadn’t done this. I entered the mall with a blind need. I spun around a few departments at Macy’s, trying pin down a purchase, but I was too frazzled to make any decisions. It was hot, so I wandered over toward the Clinque counter to take off my coat. A wide-eyed salewoman pounced on me.

“Oh my God!” she said. “We all just got off break! And I had, like, a bag of cookies. A little one! Like one of those 100 calorie packs! Anyway, I’ve had my sugar, and now I’m on a sugar rush! I tell you! Anyway! What are you looking for?”

I dropped the lipstick I had absently picked up and took a step back.

“I’m just looking,” I said.

“For what?”

“Gifts.”

“Okay!” she said. “How about this?”

She thrust a box of fifteen lip mini glosses at me.

“Great collection,” she said. “Everyone loves it.”

Except that everyone doesn’t love it, because fifteen lip glosses is way too many. It’s a guarantee that you will hate at least half the colors. You will use, at most, three of them. And they were mini lip glosses, which means they cost about thirty cents to make. This is a gift that says, “I really don’t know you, but I had to get you something. Have this crap.”

“No thanks,” I said.

She looked seriously peeved.

“Then what do you want?” she snapped.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just walked over.”

“Okay,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I’ll be over there if you need me, hon.”

And then she went back to her Clinique coven and started talking about how indecisive I was. Really. This was totally out of order and way too much pressure, especially considering that my brain was still hurting from the craft store.



The Clinique lady had had too much sugar. Also, she was evil.

I bolted for the escalator, and wound up in appliances. This is truly the home of the bad impulse buy. This is where electronic massagers, tabletop waterfalls, and wafflemakers live.

Suddenly, I felt myself slipping again. I could feel myself being pulled toward a set of comically oversized wine glasses, as if drawn by a tractor beam. Not even the most medicated of my friends and acquaintances would have wanted these glasses. Yet, I picked them up. I had to buy something. I had to be festive, and I had to show that crazy Clinique lady that I could make a fast purchase.

“Maybe these,” I said quietly.

I felt myself grinning. Someone was getting a gift from this department. Oh yes.



I was getting the look that says, “There is a quesadilla maker in your future. Merry Christmas.”

I took the glasses to the register, but was beat there by a woman with a stack of cartoon reindeer plates. She proceeded to buy them individually, with cash and coupons, questioning the cashier about the cost of each plate, haggling over the price. I clung to my hideous glasses, watching the cashier fight back the urge to break into a homicidal rage. I felt a certain degree of superiority, because I was only buying one thing, and I wasn’t going to cause a problem about it. But then, my mind cleared again, and I saw the true horror of what I was holding. I set it down and went for the escalator again, this time going back down to the Clinique counter, where I PROMISE to you the woman said, “There she is again!”

I ran for the door.

Before I knew it, I was home with all of my purchases—stamps and inks and paper—making cards for you.

So, if you’d like a signed card to go in a book you’re giving this holiday . . . or for your own secret, nefarious purposes, let me know. I can craft it. I have the tools.

CAR STORIES

First of all, holiday shopping time is here! To that end . . . if you are thinking about giving one of my books for the holidays, I’ll be happy to personalize it for you. Yes, the MJ Signing Workshop is about to open. All you have to do is follow the instructions in the link above, and I’ll send a signed card you can put in the book(s). Cost? Nothing. The Signing Workshop Elves (me) do not accept cash when delivering holiday cheer. Now you’re not just giving a book—you’re giving a personalized book! Yowza!

But let’s talk about cars.

I haven’t owned a car since I moved to New York City. Sometimes I explain this to people outside of New York, and they look at me as if I’ve said something really crazy, like, “I live in a giant mushroom!” or “I travel by goat, exclusively.”

Owning a car in NYC is like carrying around a huge barrel of pickles all day—you can do it, but really, it’s just annoying and unnecessary. There’s nowhere to park it. You don’t really want to drive around in the city. And there are plenty of other ways to get around. New York is the only place you can get away without having a car without seeming like a freak of the first order, which is unfortunate, as our environment is suffering terribly and we could use a few less of them.

Anyway, though I am not a car person, I do like to drive. I used to have cars, too. Here is a brief history of my car ownership:

CAR #1, DER STORMBREAKER

Throughout high school and college I was obsessed with the idea of owning a car. It didn’t matter to me what car—any car was fine. But I was always spending my money on frivolous things like tuition, so I remained carless until my college graduation day. On that day, my parents presented me with an antique Cutlass Sierra. Yes, it was big, grey, square, and ugly . . . but it was mine.

I don’t know where they got Der Stormbreaker from. In retrospect, I imagine it was owned by a gun nut, or someone who liked to drive around supermarkets very slowly while screaming out the window about the government. Maybe this was because driving around in Der Stormbreaker was like cruising around in a mobile library or a modified missile silo. It was a very tough car, good for a deeply paranoid person who felt like they needed a lot of protection from the outside world.

Der Stormbreaker had some issues. For example, the music system, which consisted of a tape player that thought its function was to eat tapes, and a radio that changed station and increased in volume whenever I turned left. This caused me to replan a lot of my trips so that I could make as many right hand turns as possible. But Der Stormbreaker’s biggest flaw was the fact that whenever there was rain or snow, the brakes stopped working correctly. I was guaranteed a fishtail whenever there was any kind of moisture in the air. My father didn’t believe me when I explained all the times I had found myself spinning and landing in the other lane, facing the opposite direction.

“Okay,” I said one rainy day. “If you don’t believe me, take it out yourself.”

I wasn’t trying to kill my father. The point simply had to be made. He returned a half an hour later and simply said, “You need a new car.”

Der Stormbreaker wasn’t even worth selling. Eight months after I got it, we traded it to some guy for a new driveway. I pooled all of my resources and went out to purchase car #2.

CAR #2, YUKI SEAGREEN

I had saved enough money to put a down payment on a brand new car. I bought a brand spanking new Toyota. Yuki was blue-green, hence the name. She had a lovely new car smell. When I turned on the radio, it stayed on the same station, no matter which way I turned. She stopped in the rain. She was both cute and gas-efficient.

“And safe!” they said at the dealership.

A year almost to the day after I drove her off the lot, I was driving in downtown Philadelphia along a road I knew well. Unfortunately, the woman next to me didn’t, and she turned out of her lane and directly into me and Yuki at a fairly high rate of speed, slamming us so hard that she sent the two of us about fifty feet across a (miraculously empty) major intersection. Yuki was hit so hard that all her airbags deployed and I never got to see our crash at all. She took blow after blow. I could hear bits of her smashing away. She handled it like a Powerpuff Girl, adorable and invincible. Our progress was only stopped when we took out three parked cars and a parking meter.

Yuki was dead, but she had died protecting me.


CAR #3, SCARLET SPEEDY

After Yuki’s murder, I was given a check from the insurance company. I had been a car owner for less than two years, but headed out to buy my third, and to date, final car. I decided to get the first decent used car I saw at the dealership, the same dealership that had just sold me Yuki. They looked upon me as a very good customer.

“I have just the car for you,” the salesman said. And he walked me over to a low-slung red car. I didn’t think of myself as the sporty car type, and my family had a phobia of red cars because they owned three of them before I was born, and they all met weird and untimely ends, usually while parked.

I bought her anyway.

Scarlet was seven years old when I bought her, which is why I could afford her. Also, her previous owners had been heavy smokers, so she had odor issues that took several weeks to sort out. She went fast. Very fast. To make Der Stormbreaker move, you practically had to stand up on the gas pedal. Yuki required a fairly normal amount of pressure. That same amount of pressure made Scarlet go 95 miles an hour.

I drove Scarlet up to New York on the day I moved, and on her very first night there, she got a hundred dollar parking ticket and a 8 by 11 inch neon sticker on the window that said: THIS CAR HAS PREVENTED THE STREET FROM BEING CLEANED. This sticker was impossible to remove, and it stayed on the window like a scarlet letter until Scarlet was sold two weeks later.

And that was that. Jump to the present day, where my car story continues.

There is a car here at the London Office. It’s Oscar Gingersnort’s. It’s a silver sportscar. A really sexy silver sportscar. It’s also really small. I have many nicknames for the car, including: the clown car, the postage stamp special, and Eine Kleine Carmusik. When Oscar picks me up at the airport, it takes about ten minutes of unpacking and stuffing to get both me and my suitcase into it. And that’s provided I bring the little suitcase. It sits wedged between my ribcage and the dashboard and slowly squeezes the life out of my body with every turn. And English roads are all turns, even the straight ones. They love turns. They invented the roundabout just so they could make more of them.

“If I got another car,” he said, as we drove to the London Office from the airport a week or so ago, “I would probably get one with a back seat.”

“If you got another car,” I said, “you could park this car inside of that one.”

Oscar’s dapper little car has a stick shift, which I never learned to drive. I expressed my desire to learn. I backed up this claim by going out and buying a copy of the Highway Code, which is a book you can get here that explains everything you need to know to pass a UK driver’s test. I opened it to find 800 TEST QUESTIONS. The UK driver’s exam is WAY harder than anything I had to do in Pennsylvania. I spent a day leaning things like how to go around roundabouts, what dual carriageways are, and what UK street signs mean.



Without question, my favorite of the UK street signs. Can you guess what it means? Does it really even matter?

Having mastered the necessary material, we went out on Sunday night to a deserted supermarket parking lot, in the dark, in the rain, where I prepared to learn how to drive left-handed stick. I was amazed that Oscar was letting me use his baby for training.

I listened to him explain the ridiculous number of steps involved in making a manual car go anywhere—clutching, shifting, unclutching while accelerating, gear-shifting, engine-listening, something about “revs,” something about stalling the engine.

“I’m going to destroy your car,” I said. “Are you really sure you want to do this?”

“It’ll be fine,” he said, showing that same spooky lack of concern that he exhibited when we were at the Parade of Arsonists the other week.

But I was nervous. All this talk of revving and stalling scared me. I finally got up the courage to reach for the key when, out of the dead silence, there was a loud VROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM all around us. In the next second, six cars . . . all little Volkswageny things in the same exact make, but an assortment of different colors, came streaming into the parking lot. They started doing fast spin-out turns at the top of the lane.

“We should go,” Oscar said, showing his very first sign of concern.

The little car parade then came right for us and started circling the area where we were parked. Circling us! Like they were in some kind of car musical. They revved their engines and skid around.

“Oh,” Oscar said, “people like to come and . . . skid. We should go. Now.”

We hastily changed places as the little multicolored cars whipped around us. Oscar had to do some tricky driving just to get us out of the parking lot.

“You mean they just drive around the supermarket on Sunday night?”

“Pretty much.”



We were suddenly in the middle of a scene from The Italian Job.
As we left, I noticed police cars peeking out from strategic locations all along the way home. Apparently, this driving around supermarkets really fast on Sunday night was a really well-known thing. People were getting pulled over.

So my lessons were derailed for the moment. But you can get I’m going to get back to them, if only to drive somewhere to see that sign.

USING FEAR FOR FUN AND PROFIT

First of all, happy voting day. If you aren’t old enough to vote, it’s your job to go after anyone in your house who is. This is the time to pull out the sharply pointed stick and poke, poke them in the direction of the polls. Get out there! Herd them!

Second, I have some very happy news to report. Thanks to YOU, 13 Little Blue Envelopes has made the Teen’s Top Ten list! I am so happy to be included on this illustrious list, chosen by readers. There will be celebrating at the MJ desk tonight.

Speaking of, I’m back at the London Desk now. I got here just in time for Guy Fawkes Night. If you have never been to the UK, Guy Fawkes Night is sort of the English answer to Halloween, but without costumes. In 16somethingorother, a man named Guy Fawkes and a gang of wiley conspirators tried to blow up Parliament. They were caught and stopped. And ever since, the English have celebrated on the 5th of November with big bonfires (in which they burn effigies of Guy Fawkes) and fireworks.

So Oscar Gingersnort and I went to a large torchlight procession through the town. This was kind of fun, except that I was fairly certain that thousands of people walking along in highly flammable coats and massive scarves while carrying fire was an idea of questionable merit. Especially since some of the other people around us were twelve year old boys playing “Slap Each Other with a Stick of Fire” and some girls who were walking backwards while talking on their phones. And then there were the clearly very drunk guys. And the toddlers with the ginourmous torches.

“This is going to be an inferno,” I said to Oscar with a smile. “Many will perish.”

“It’ll be fine,” he said, sending an e-mail on his blackberry as he walked along with his torch.

The English are like that. They never worry. Even if we did set the entire town on fire, as we came very close to doing on several occasions, I think they would just say something like, “Oh rot. Go and fetch the bucket, then.”

But we made it to the big field across town. There was a massive bonfire and a carnival. The first thing we encountered was a huge ride called the Big Boost. The idea behind the Big Boost was simple. It was a big spinning thing, with only two clusters of seats, each at either end of a long spinning mechanism. They strapped you in, and then they sent you way, way up high as they strapped the other people in. And then, it spun. The seats themselves also spun all around, so people were doing 360s while being flung all around.

Oscar didn’t even need to ask me what I thought about going on it. He knows my answer would be “No @#%$^&#%$^&#ing way.”

See, I don’t like rides, really. I have finally come to this conclusion. I can take the occasional log flume, and I’m okay with things that just go around, or bumper cars, things like that. But the Big Boost is not for me.

Maybe this is because I grew up near a major Eastern Seaboard amusement park. I rode the rides back then, and I noticed that most of the people strapping me in to the death machines (as I call them) were stoners and freaks. I climbed into seats and allowed myself to be buckled in by people so clearly high that they may have thought I was a giant walking hot dog, and they were just putting me into the Big Magic Hot Dog Machine. Maybe it’s not a huge shock that this park had a bad reputation for things bursting into flames and people flying off rides.

And just recently, I was in the Midwest, and there was a fair. They had a “ride” there that was just a HUGE CRANE. The sign was hand-written on a piece of poster board. People were being strapped into tiny harnesses and then being hauled up the crane and swung back and forth. The people running this crane were two fourteen year old boys who played the pull-away hand-slapping game while people were swinging above us.

I don’t get this at all. I would be happy to pay NOT to get hauled up on a crane by snarfling guys whose voices were cracking as they took my money. And yet people were lined up. People who did not outwardly appear to be insane.

What is this? I don’t get it at all.

And things like bungee jumping or jumping out of airplanes? Oh, friends. Oh no, no, no. This is where I whip out the MJ Manifesto and begin to read.

Airplanes were invented to get us around, and they work really well for that. And humans are simply not meant to jump 10,000 feet. There is really nothing accomplished by this. It’s not like falling and screaming your head off is a skill, because if it was, I would have about nine Olympic medals by now. I’m not parachuting unless the wings fall off my plane, and even then, I think I might try to coast it out. I’d sit up in first class, drink all the nice drinks, and pad myself with pillows.

“Oh, Maureen,” someone out there is saying. “You’re just scared.”

You bet I’m scared. And for good reason. I am smart enough to know that jumping out of an airplane is a stupid idea. I think this is natural selection at work. I’m prepared to handle normal risks, like riding in a New York cab, or flying in heavy turbulence, or eating sushi on Monday. I even took my first skiing lessons on the top of an Alp during a blizzard with a mad Swiss racing instructor named Jean-Claude. But high-risk hobbies that involve huge heights that can actually kill you? No. I like being alive, and there are plenty of other stupid ways I am likely to kill myself with no help at all.

But anyway, I was staring at the Big Boost mumbling under my breath, and Oscar said, “I know you won’t get on it. My ears are still ringing from the water slide.”

Okay. There was a water slide incident. I had this kooky idea that the English guy would like the water park, so I organized a trip there in the summer. I thought it would be fun.

Apparently it was, for everyone else. As Oscar tells it, I got on the double raft with him on the first tunnel slide and ALLEGEDLY screamed by entire way down the dark, long, twisting tube until we crashed into the pool. I actually can’t remember what happened—it’s all black to me—but I’m sure that is an exaggeration. Obviously it wasn’t too bad, because I got on the massive open air slide with the six person rafts. However, I went down backwards, and the other people on the raft claim that, again, I was screaming the entire way, taking only one small pause for breath. And then I went on again with the words, “Okay, I’m going down facing the right way this time.”

This I remember. Facing down the slide didn’t really help much, because I could see the first drop and the entire New Jersey skyline all the way out to the ocean, fifty miles away. We were very high up.

It’s possible that there was more screaming. I cannot say. My memory bank goes blank again here. I remember the view, and one second when I was thrown all the way up the wall of the slide, and nothing more.

When I got off, five year old children ran around me, giggling with delight. Oscar had to buy me a beer just to get me to start speaking again. I happily held the towels after that. Holding the towels is a lot of fun, if you look at it the right way.

My point is, I want to keep alive and in one piece, so I can keep writing for YOU! It’s YOU I am thinking of! Plus, I need to stay sharp for when the zombies come. Or the werewolves.

I’m just saying. Don’t look at me like that. It’s not like I’m a coward or something. Now go vote! Scram!