To My Readers…

Many of you have asked when I would I resume 3 Questions. I intended to start up this month, but around Christmas I began having trouble with my left hand. It is difficult and somewhat painful to type for any span of time. I'm typing this by clicking letters on a character chart. I can't write a 700-word article however so 3 Questions will continue on hiatus.

In the meantime, there's a lot of information in the archives, many with links to other writing/publishing sites. Maybe you can take a second look around. Also, if anyone would like to guest post, email AmyM3QA(at)gmail(dot)com. I am happy to share the space.

As always, thank you for your support.


AmyM

Time to Regroup...

3 Questions...and Answers is a one-person show. Lately I have not been able to give it as much attention and effort as I need to meet my standards of quality. As a result, articles have been intermittent and, at times, not very good.

So 3 Questions is going on a brief hiatus to regroup and reorganize. I appreciate all the support of my readers over the last 10 months. Be assured this will be just a hiatus - 3 Questions is not ending.

Thank you for understanding.


AmyM
Editor

The Home for the Holidays Writing Contest

We had some great entries to our contest. Thank you to all our participants!

"Lethal Louey" by Erika Hoffman (right) is the Home for the Holidays finalist. Hoffman is a freelance writer from Chapel Hill, NC, most recently published in A Cup of Comfort for Families Touched by Alzheimer's. She will receive a certificate for "Lethal Louey."


The winner of the Home for the Holidays Contest is "Christmas Past" by Cappy Hall Rearick (left). Rearick is an author and columnist from St. Simons Island, GA. She will receive a $25 Borders gift card and her winning entry is published below. You can read more of her work at SimplySouthernCappy.com.


Congratulations and Happy Thanksgiving!

Christmas Past
by Cappy Hall Rearick

Rushing toward me like linebacker William Perry, aka "The Refrigerator," Christmas is arriving too early. This annual emergence of generosity and over-spending always makes me nostalgic. In the old days, as soon as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade was over, workers were stringing Christmas lights in my small South Carolina hometown. When I think back on those days, I find myself gazing through the windows of my past and missing my mother.

By the end of November in the Fifties, until the beginning of the new year when I was forced back to school, Mama’s house was wrapped in the magic blanket of Christmas.

Having grown up during the Great Depression, Mama continued to be haunted by the things she'd wished for as a child: food and shoes. As an adult, they were her two extravagances. Holidays at our house meant lots of cakes, pies, cookies and bedroom slippers.

We had a huge pecan tree in our back yard to which Mama claimed to be allergic, so she sent me to collect nuts for her holiday baking sprees. It was my job not only to pick up the pecans, but to pick them out, as well. I used a hammer to crack them open and an ice pick to clean out the bitter pecan tissue hidden within its ribbed folds.

Mama would bake a batch of nut cookies, give me two to eat, then put the rest of them in the freezer "for later." She made it her mission in life to put everything but dust bunnies in our new chest type freezer.

From Thanksgiving till Christmas, I rushed home from school each day anticipating a mouth-watering aroma of whatever she was baking. Chances were pretty good that I would get a taste.

Mama's fruitcake was my favorite. So full of candied cherries, pineapple and the pecans I'd gathered, it could have won contests. Kids today turn up their noses to fruitcake, but that's because they never tasted my mama's.

On fruitcake baking day, the warm fragrance wafting from our old kitchen became a memory etched into my heart. It may have been the almond flavoring that added punch to the aroma, but it was Mama's generous helping of her soul that made it memorable.

Recently I was perusing one of her cookbooks. I laughed at pictures I'd filled in with a red Crayola that made everything look like strawberry something. Gazing at the faded recipe pages worn down by many seasons of use, nostalgia again washed over me.

Mama had scribbled everything from sugar cookie to rum ball recipes in the margins. Even her spaghetti recipe was written on an index card and stuck in the middle of the book. And right next to made-up concoctions and recipes borrowed from magazines and friends, was her signature fruitcake recipe.

The memory of those Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays snapped my synapses to attention like a new rubber band. I had never attempted to bake a fruitcake, but oh how I longed for one at that moment. Mama was gone, I thought, but I was here and so was her recipe. I could bake one myself for my grandsons, even if I had to force them to eat it.


Christmas music filled the air as I floured and mixed the fruit, nuts and almond flavoring. By the time it was packed in the tube pan, I was grinning like a fool. I followed directions carefully and in time, the sweet fragrance I remembered from so long ago drifted through my own house. It was almost like going back to the womb.

Three hours later, I took the cake out of the oven and placed it on a rack to cool for an hour, as her recipe instructed but after thirty minutes, my olfactory sensory neurons replaced my brain cells. Upside down onto the cake plate it went, where I forced myself to let it rest for five minutes. Apparently that was not long enough, because when I lifted the pan, the heart of the cake tumbled out everywhere. Candied fruit and nuts decorated my kitchen counter, fell on the floor and eventually stuck to the soles of my shoes. What a glorious mess but what a wonderful smell — just like I remembered.

Looking at cake all over the kitchen, I wanted to pitch a good ol' southern hissyfit. Instead, I went to my bedroom where I keep a pair of old pink bedroom shoes. The heels are worn down and thin; the terry cloth is smooth with age. They had been my mother's, no doubt, a gift from a past Christmas. The slippers had been under my bed since her death.

I pulled them out and slid my feet in them. I flip-flopped back to the catastrophe awaiting me in the kitchen, while asking myself what my creative mother might have done when face with piles of fruitcake globs.

I'm sure she'd have used a cliché, as was her habit. "When life deals you crumbs," she might have said, "make crumb cake."

Smiling at the thought, I grabbed a handful of the sticky mess, rolled it into balls, and then called my grandsons in from where they had been digging up my yard in search of buried treasure.

"Hey fortune-hunters," I yelled. "It's your lucky day. You've been chosen to "sample" the first-ever, authentic Gummy Bear Christmas Ball."

They stopped digging to stare at me, perhaps wondering if I had already "sampled" the cooking wine.

"Catch," I yelled.

They caught every one, gobbling them up as fast as I could pitch them. I was reminded of the guilt trips Mama had laid on me about starving children in China when I didn't eat all my veggies.

I asked my grandsons if they liked the Gummy Bear Christmas Balls. They grinned, showing off the sticky fruits stuck to their teeth. Then they said, "Got milk?"

I think Mama would have liked that answer. I know I did.