Tibbs Eve

 Happy Tibbs Eve from the Rock.

Tibb's Eve is a Newfoundland tradition on December 23rd that marks the unofficial start of Christmas. It's a day for pre-Christmas fun, and is also known as Tip's Eve or Tipsy Eve: 

• Celebrations

  Tibb's Eve is a time to decorate, sing, bake, and have a few drinks with friends. Some people attend music shows, while others have family potlucks

• Customs

  Tibb's Eve customs vary by community and family, but some traditions include decorating the tree, singing and dancing, and making handmade Christmas cookies. 
• Meaning

  Tibb's Eve is popularly interpreted to mean the day one can get "tipsy" and start drinking Christmas cheer. 
• Bars

  Bars have embraced Tibb's Eve and compete to attract customers. 
• Returning home

  Many Newfoundlanders return to their home communities for Christmas, and Tibb's Eve is a time to reconnect with friends before Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 

Tibb's Eve is a sacred tradition in Newfoundland, and is only known in Newfoundland.  

On Those Days

 Thank you all for your lovely words of support on my last post. I found this on line and it spoke to me so deeply I thought to share it with all of you who have suffered similarly.

On those days when you miss someone the most, as though your memories are sharp enough to slice through skin and bone, remember how they loved you.
Remember how they loved you and do that, for yourself.
In their name, in their honour.
Love yourself, as they loved you.
They would like that.
On those days when you miss someone the most,
love yourself harder.

Author : Donna Ashworth

Grief

Many of long time readers will know that I went through grief-counselling some years back when my physical health began to suffer and my doctor of the time referred me to this amazing grief therapist. I had lost 8 close friends in the space of 18 months and the symptoms of my grief were not what you'd imagine as in crying all the time or depression. No, I was wound tighter than a drum with my blood pressure soaring through the roof and my tricky kidneys beginning to fail.

I was with the therapist for a 6 months of weekly sessions and he was incredibly understanding. He passed on much wisdom to me. One was when you suffer a severe heart breaking loss it opens up all the other losses in your life once again. Yes.

Well reader, I am there. All the chickens, so to speak, are home to roost now. My missing daughter's birthday was last week and that compounded everything, all the losses.

I tried to track down Peter, my grief therapist today but failed. I will try again. He was, I think, older than I. My siblings appear to be all cheerful and getting on with things so I find I can't/won't attend the weekly Sibling Zooms. I can't handle cheer. A friend dropped off a poinsettia and a fresh caught salmon yesterday and I could barely thank her but cried like a baby after she left. Kindness does me in.

I light a candle for the last photo taken of my brother every day and talk to him, hoping I'm not going right off the ledge.

I have delayed reaction to loss and I am hoping with Grandgirl staying with me by the end of the week I will climb out of this pit as it is affecting my overall health. I'm constantly nauseous and exhausted and not fit as we say out here.

The fact I am writing all of this down is a good sign, n'est pas?

Any shared stories of grief would be appreciated. 

I feel massively alone.

Sunday Selections

This week, all things blue and a book

Joining others in this Sunday Selection mix of photo-dumps.

Elephant's Child

From The Highrise

Drifting through Life

Many of you are familiar with my local beach, I visited it last week and it was completely deserted so I took advantage of some bitingly blue shots.

My  9 year old great niece was the only child performer in Stars on Ice at our vast arena. Not a bit of nerves on her and she brought the house down with her skill and triple axle moves. 

Just finished this book and loved it.

The Olden Days

Over the last few days there's been a lot of buzz on social media about the "olden days." Romanticized in extremis I should add. Christmases past particularly but more often than not about lovely smells in kitchens and 4 clotheslines and the lovely old wood stove used for everything from baking and boiling to hot water and heat.

Romantic for some, perhaps, but a drill down into those blissful times will reveal an overworked mother, often with multiple children - my sister-in-law is the youngest of 17 - you read that right - who baked all the family bread and did all the laundry by hand, mended her children's clothes - having made them - if lucky - on a treadle sewing machine with her tired legs after a labour-intensive day and if she had enough oil for the lamp to sew by.

She tended the kitchen garden and collected the eggs and made the butter and milked the one cow or many if it was a farm. She collected the wool from the sheep to spin it and knit her family's sweaters and socks and cut down the father's shabby clothes to fit her sons and used flour sacks - often dying them in different colours from dye harvested from flowers and vegetables to dress her daughters. She bottled and preserved all the fruit and vegetables, down to the excessive eggs for the winter season.

She never, ever stopped. Her husband had it comparatively easy. Escaping from the house to do his work in a factory. an office or a farm or as a general labourer. He came home at night and put his feet up and was served his supper and fresh clothes for the morning and read his newspaper if he was lucky enough to borrow or buy one. And the children were told not to bother Daddy after his hard day.

The woman's incredibly hard day was demeaned and dismissed, despite what she had sacrificed to be this unpaid slave breeder. By her husband, by his buddies, by her church - who also expected she would supply free labour to clean the church and wash and starch the altar linens and her sons' surplices if they were altar boys.

She had 3 choices - service to the church (nun or teacher or nurse - the church owned the convents, the schools and the hospitals and profited greatly), marriage, or a single life, mocked and condemned because she couldn't "get" a man.

She never could use her brain or get educated to a higher level beyond grade school. With rare exceptions from more enlightened parents.

I was born in 1943 and lived with my grandparents for a while and witnessed this lifestyle first hand even though all their children had gone, some to emigration. Granda still worked as a labourer and granny had no electricity and no running water and even with just me in the house, she worked non-stop from dawn to dusk. Financially and religiously trapped forever.

She passed on many words of wisdom to me, the top one being: "Get an education, colleen* and you'll avoid this."

Words I followed, never wanting the lifestyle of either her or of my mother. 

So yes, I am enraged by all this memory washing. A lot of it by men. Who to this day don't ever understand (and don't want to) the workload and sacrifice of their mothers or sisters. Apparently they all "enjoyed it."

*Irish for little girl

Wondering - an Absolute Rant

Just the back of his head, I can't bear that face or voice anymore. Fakery all the way down to the lifts in his shoes.

I imagine many of us are. About where THIS is all going. The wee tiny planet I mean. This earth we walk on.

I try and stay away from the news these days, Most unlike me as I'm a bit of a news junkie. The Guardian, Morning Joe until he and Mika snivelled off down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring of Orange Jesus (OJ). Many of the US papers which I once respected are now gone sideways as well, kowtowing like cowards in advance to what is to come.

We are extremely nervous in Canada too as our conservative top dog is a Heritage Foundation graduate and a worshipper of the OJ and could be our next PM as Trudeau just ain't got it according to most electors, see polls.

We know what all this will bring. Christian Fascism. Extreme. 

I mentioned I try and stay away from the news but I have to open one eye and check it out more often than I like. PBS, Irish Times. CBC - our national news has weirded out. No good insightful coverage anymore. 

OJ proceeds with his appalling and terrifying cabinet appointments. One more evil than the next. I don't often use that word but evil and indecent and criminal comes to mind from all surrounding OJ. And the outrage, though unsurprising, about Joe Biden pardoning his son was laughable. He would never have pardoned him only that OJ promised to incarcerate him forever on a retribution tour of revenge on the "enemies within". And that list is terrifying. Military tribunals, etc. All for the offence of disloyalty. Baby Bush set the precedent for torture and OJ would relish that. 

He WILL suspend future elections. He will encourage other countries to go far, far, right and suspend theirs. And plunder every treasury he can get those orange hands on. Women will live as in 1850 with no votes, no divorce, no health care and fair game for any predator - and there are many in the cabinet and elsewhere.

It shows the weakness in the whole farcical structure of government in the US when OJ can infest the Supreme Court and other judicial bodies with his briberies or blackmail and turn the whole shaky edifice on its head into an unrestrained oligarchy/autocracy. 

I am chillingly reminded of when Nazi Germany tried to "export" all the Jews and when that failed, resorted to prison camps, followed by death camps.

Wait and see as all these countries he asked to house them are now rejecting OJ's attempts to export his millions of emigrants. He is already talking of numbering them. Carefully following in the steps of his hero Hitler and Project 2025.

I so want to be wrong in all of the above. But alas and alack I don't think I am.

My heart is with my American friends. Just about breaking for them.

Come to Newfoundland, you would be welcome on this isolated rock that everyone seems to forget about. You'd love it here. 

We keep a very low profile.