Park Slope Reader

holidays

Holiday Post-Mortem

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: , ,

Now that the holidays are behind us, and I have the benefit of hindsight, I find it an ideal time to conduct a postmortem, in order to assess the main causes contributing to the one-of-a-kind stress that rolls around every December. By Nicole Caccavo Kear, Art by Heather Heckel

I wish I could pen an article about how to reduce holiday stress, because I think that would be a very useful piece that might improve your quality of life in some small but important way.

Regrettably, I’m unqualified to write such an article. If this last Christmas has taught me anything, it’s that I am terrible at stress reduction. I am, however, excellent at stress amplification. And, also, sarcasm. And so I offer you . . .

There are many things I have no idea how to do – use the timer on my oven, for instance, or change the security settings on my Iphone. But if there is one thing I’m excellent at, it is maximizing stress. Choosing the most ambitious, complicated and anxiety-orovoking way to do things. When it comes to Holiday Stress, I’m the nonpareil.

 

Anatomy of Holiday Stress

 

1. The Making of Holiday Cards

The way so many of us kick off our season of stress! It’s unnecessary, vaguely eco-hostile, budget-sucking and, let’s face it, kind of an imposition on the people you send to, who have to find a festive way to deal with the card onslaught.

Stress is maximized when and if you use the cheapest photo card company, with the least user-friendly design platform. This will ensure it takes at least three hours to make a crappy card with lousy fonts you don’t even like.

For extra agida, don’t get around to making the card until mid- December, matters are exacerbated, as you will stress every day the package fails to arrive in the mail. This will also necessitate that you rush like a deranged person to address the envelopes as soon as they arrive.

Pro tip: Lowball your order so you end up with too few cards and have to agonize over who will get a card and who will not. This will cause long-term stress, too, as you’ll wonder for weeks, months, or even years if one of the people who didn’t make the cut is bearing a grudge against you.

2. A Trip to Santaland

Nothing kicks holiday stress into high gear like a trip to Santaland at Macy’s. Maximum unpleasantness can be achieved if you go without your spouse, and take all your kids, even the middle schooler who hasn’t believed in Santa in half a decade. In fact, that child will lay the foundation for Santaland stress by constant referencing Santaland’s “blatant consumerism.” The middle child elevates who has zero tolerance for standing still or waiting in line. And whatever you do, take your four year-old because not only is she the one most likely to be terrified of Santa and beg to leave just as you’ve gotten to the front of the line but nothing says Stressed Out at Christmas as much as your preschooler disappearing into massive mobs at Macy’s.

Pro tip: Use your time-tested, fail-proof, secret Santaland shortcut– it won’t work and your stress will be exacerbated by the fact that it takes you by surprise.

3. Buying a Christmas Tree

A real one, naturally. This will require you to re-invent the wheel every year, and also feel guilt at the small part you played in de-forestation. Then, too, there’s the trouble of cleaning up hundreds of little needles, watering the tree and constantly worrying about it catching your apartment on fire. Let your children trim the tree, ideally with precious and fragile heirlooms.

Pro tip: Make a big deal about the great honor of placing the star atop the tree. That way, your three kids can argue about who gets to do it, and two thirds of them will be disgruntled.

4. The Making of Christmas Cookies with Your Kids

You may be tempted to pick a simple cookie, but if you really want to burn out, choose the Industry Standard for Stressful Baking With Children – the sugar cookie. This baking process has four different phases– mixing dough, cutting shapes, baking, and decorating – but appears deceptively simple, thus robbing you of the recognition for your great labor.

Pro Tip: Make icing by sifting confectioner’s sugar into boiling water. This variety of icing gives you a window of approximately three minutes to apply before it hardens, and is rendered useless. If there’s one thing more stressful than baking with small children, it’s baking with small children, fast!

5. Travel

Here is where maximizing stress gets tricky. Different modes of transportation offer different kinds of stress, and it’s hard to tell which is worse. On the one hand, driving all day in the close quarters of a clown car, with the near-guarantee of traffic, and the high probability of hazardous winter weather – that’s classic holiday stress. On the other hand, there are stressors that only air travel can offer: the total lack of control, huge delays and last-minute cancellations, turbulence, dealing with overworked and irritable airport staff, and, of course, the other passengers on the plane, who might, at any moment, freak out for any number of reasons and derail your whole holiday.

Pro tip: Don’t bring a change of clothes for your little one who is one hundred percent guaranteed to spill the complimentary beverage all over herself and probably you, too.

6. Believing in Santa

Santa means stress for the whole family. The kids can worry about ending up on the naughty list, to say nothing of having a fat old guy watching them while they sleep. Your stress as parents is both practical and emotional. Perpetuating the myth of Santa requires you to wait until as late as possible before stuffing the stockings and putting the gifts under the tree, and you will worry all the while that one of the kids will stumble in, Cindy-Lou-Who-style, and catch you red-handed. But that’s not all! You also get to worry, every Christmas, that this is the year they’ll ask whether Santa is real and you will have to break their hopeful little hearts by telling them the truth. It doesn’t get more stressful than that.

 

Nicole C. Kear is the author of the forthcoming chapter books for children, Have No Fear! and Sticks and Stones, the first two books in a series entitled The Fix-It Friends (Imprint, May 2017).

The Perfect Party

By Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Madonna dance-off. Limbo contest. Cannoli cream cake. 

Year after year of my childhood, that was the formula for my birthday party, which took place in the basement of my Staten Island home. It was a three-prong party plan that worked. Well, four prongs, really. Just before the cake was served, came the Chaplin-esque birthday cake pratfall, courtesy of my father. He’d walk down the stairs to the basement, carefully holding the cake box aloft, only to stumble at the bottom, throwing himself down the last few steps and tossing the box extravagantly into the air. The crowd would gasp, and he’d jump to his feet, open the box and reveal that IT WAS EMPTY! Ha! Ha HA! No need to worry, the cannoli cream cake was intact, upstairs.

So:

Madonna dance-off.
Limbo contest.
Father pratfall.
Cannoli cream cake.

After the age of 11, I could have done without the pratfall, but generally speaking, it was a good party. The formula worked. I am reminded of this as I enter the winter, also known as Kear Family Birthday Season. Three kids. Three birthdays. Lots of headaches.

I’m not the sort of parent prone to observing wistfully, “Things were so much simpler when we were kids.” First of all, of course things were simpler. We were kids.  Really, though, I’m just not terribly interested in adjudicating which time period was better/ easier/ simpler/ less stressful. The circumstances of our lives and our world are too fluid to make it a satisfying enterprise. Besides, since I’m not the proud owner of a time machine, there’s not much I can do about it anyway.

If I were that sort, though, I’d definitely observe that birthday celebrations were simpler when I was a kid. Of course, it might just be that birthday celebrations were, and are, simpler when you inhabit a living space in which more than 260 square feet is allocated to each family member (yes, I’ve done the math).

We just don’t have the space to host a birthday celebration at home. This is the party line.
It is part true and part me playing the NYC No Space Card.
“No space” is the golden excuse that comes free with your exorbitant rent in New York City.  I’d say it’s one of the hidden perks except that I think it’s the only one. Regardless, it’s a goody.
Unwanted house guest angling to crash at your place?
“I wish we could but we just don’t have the space.”
Your spouse planning to purchase some hideous piece of furniture on the level of When Harry Met Sally’s wagon wheel:
“I wish we could but we just don’t have the space.”
Your child begging for a dog, or a baby brother:
“I wish we could but we just don’t have the space.”
The No Space card is so valuable it almost makes up for not having any space.

But the truth is, even if I had all the space in the world, even if I lived in Staten Island, I would try to get out of hosting a kid party. Because of the cleaning.

It’s not that I’m against cleaning. For an adult cocktail party, I’d happily scour my bathroom like Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. But tirelessly cleaning my apartment, top to bottom, only to have a horde of children obliterate it again, within minutes, has always seemed to me a task that only a dupe like Sisyphus would take on. The pointlessness demoralizes me.

For these compelling reasons, I’ve avoided hosting parties at our apartment for over a decade. This would have been impossible financially – since paying for a kiddie birthday party in Park Slope costs what weddings do in other parts of the country – except that my grandmother’s apartment building happens to have a party room.

The party room is the hero of this tale. The party room, spacious and clean and practically free, has made it possible to celebrate my children’s birthdays …  not to mention baptisms, first holy communions, Halloweens and whatever random holidays they’ve had a hankering to observe.

We’ve thrown so many birthday parties at the old party room that my husband, the kids and I are nothing short of a well-oiled party machine. We can set up a party in a tight fifteen minutes if need be.

My husband does streamers. It has taken him years to perfect his streaming technique, and to describe it would be to reveal trade secrets I am not at liberty to disclose. Let’s just say his moves are as intricate as a Simone Biles floor routine: double stranding and full twists and three-point-anchoring. It’s not for novices.

The kids are on balloons. Thankfully, they’ve spent their whole lives training their lungs for the task. At least, that’s what I surmise all the yelling was for.

I set up the folding tables with juice and snacks and paper products. I hang up the charming homemade birthday signs. I spread age-appropriate art supplies and activities in key locations around the room.

Then David turns on the music and the party is on.

We’ve perfected the party the way you nail down anything, through trial and error

PInata?

No, oh no, never again.

Karaoke machine?

Yes, indeed, well worth the investment.

Finding the right number of guests has involved a learning curve, too. Instructive, indeed, was the year I let my daughter invite everyone her heart desired and everybody came, creating a level of mayhem not witnessed since the sinking of the Titanic. She ended up hiding under the table, in tears.

Then, only a month later, there was the party for my other daughter, in which we catapulted to the other end of the guest list spectrum. So eager was I not to repeat my over-inviting mistake, that I severely under-invited kids. That’s not exactly accurate. I invited all the kids in her day care class. I just intentionally threw the party at a time when I knew no one would be able to come. It worked. Only two guests made it. The three toddlers ended up overwhelmed in the large room and I couldn’t handle the strain of having to make conversation with the two parents in attendance. My daughter ended up under the table, in tears. I felt like joining her.

Of course, no sooner did we stumble upon the perfect party formula then the kids outgrew it. Now that my older kids are tweens, it’s all about the sleepover birthday party. And sleepovers, I have found, can’t be shot on location. They are not an away game. You can’t outsource sleepovers. You have to have sleepovers at your house.

I have tried to play the No Space card, but my kids are old enough now to play their own cards. The Guilt cards. The Childhood-Is-So-Fleeting-And-Before-You-Know-It-You’ll-Wish-We-Were-Still-Taking-Up-More-Than-Our-Allotted-260-Square Feet Card.

I’ve got nothing that can trump that one.

And so we begin a whole new trial and error process. Which, I guess, Is parenting in a nutshell.

Nicole C. Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s Press, 2014). Her chapter book series for children, The Fix-It Friends, will be published by Macmillan Kids’ Imprint in spring 2017.

Small Shops, Big Impact

By Filed Under: Part of the Solution, Shop Local Tagged With: , , ,

Take a stroll down Park Slope’s Fifth Avenue, or Seventh Avenue, or head on east through Grand Army Plaza into Prospect Heights. Here’s what you’ll find: proof that a strong, locally-owned business economy is good for the community. You will encounter a dizzying selection of unique gifts to help you whittle down your holiday shopping list (phew!), as well as a diverse group of business owners whose investment in the community makes Park Slope and the surrounding area the place to give back while you shop.

There are plenty of statistics showing just how important it is to shop small.

Usually, a higher percentage of the revenue created in a small, locally-owned business will stay in the local economy, when compared to a big-box retailer’s revenue; small businesses tend to create more and better-paying jobs, and the existence of a myriad local businesses spurs competition and innovation, meaning you’re more likely to find unique, high-quality items at reasonable prices. And nationwide, “non-profit organizations receive an average 250 percent more support from smaller business owners than they do from large businesses,” according to the organization Loyal to Local. In Park Slope, many business owners live in the neighborhood or nearby. Park Slope is not just somewhere they work; rather, it’s a place they work to improve.

The ways in which local business owners give back are as varied as the kinds of stores you’ll find here. These good deeds range from free origami lessons at local fairs, provided by Taro’s Origami, to donating all profits to charity, as Life Boutique Thrift donates its profits to Chai Lifeline, an organization that helps Jewish children with life-threatening illnesses. Many businesses also participate in A Taste of Fifth, an annual event occurring in April. Attendees can sample food and drink from local restaurants and watering holes, and the proceeds benefit several local charities, like Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) and Good Shepherd Services.

At Bhoomki, which appropriately describes itself as “ethically fashioned,” you can find luscious designs made from eco-friendly fabric by traditional artisans. Bhoomki’s owner, Swati Argade, says her store has “become a destination for people who want to buy ethically.” She feels lucky to be able to “provide that service” to shoppers. Every year, Bhoomki donates some of its wares to benefit various charities, like the Rainforest Alliance, and supports local public and private schools by donating gift certificates. When I told Argade that, nationwide, nonprofits receive more in donations from local businesses than they do from big chains, she was not surprised. She imagines that “there’s probably a lot of red tape involved” for larger companies, whereas she, as a small business owner, is in her store three or four days a week. “It’s very easy to reach me,” she says.

The fact that local business owners make a point of giving back is especially impressive given just how difficult it is to own a small business, in any neighborhood. Owners in the area face what Mark Caserta, Executive Director of the Park Slope Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District, calls a “citywide problem”: ever-increasing rents. As property value increases, so do the rents.

Frank Ling, senior teacher and manager of Taro’s Origami, says that rising rents are the “main threat” to business owners. Every day, he passes shuttered boutique stores on Seventh Avenue on his way to work. Many other business owners echo Ling and Caserta’s concerns. Chris Yanatiba, owner of Yanatiba in Prospect Heights, wonders if there is such a thing as “small” business anymore, given just how high rents are. Clarence Nathan, owner of Premium Goods, the go-to spot for sweet kicks, sums it up well: “retail business owners have it rough.”

Park Slope and the surrounding areas could go the way of neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights, where many of the mom-and-pop stores have been replaced by chains. One resident of Brooklyn Heights feels that the local business scene there has lost much of its “substantive personality.” But Park Slope is holding on, and many local businesses have successfully adjusted to an economy that’s still sputtering after the recession. As Caserta says, business owners have to be innovative because, “fundamentally, people have changed the way they shop and go out” since 2008.

In spite of all that, Park Slope is a place where people want to see small businesses survive and flourish. I asked Clarence Nathan what he would say to encourage residents and visitors to shop small. He said that instead of encouraging shoppers, he “would like to thank them. To shop small is to WANT to support the small guy.” Many Park Slope residents do make the conscious decision to shop small; according to Nathan, they don’t feel the need to shop in “high-end districts,” walking around “with that recognizable shopping bag.”

I asked several store owners, though, whether customers could do more to support Park Slope’s vibrant local economy, given the challenges they face. Tabeel Rush, owner of Tabeel’s Aromatherapy Gift Shop & Salon, encourages residents and visitors to, first of all, explore the area, to come see what Park Slope has to offer. “Fifth Avenue has a lot of things going down,” Rush says, referring to the 500 small stores, bars, and restaurants on Fifth Avenue alone. And Rush knows Fifth Avenue well—her store is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year. She encourages shoppers to “come in and talk to the people and experience the products” that local stores are offering.

You’re bound to discover something unexpected, and the Slope features a mix of veteran and new stores that are ripe for exploration. At Park Chemists—“where gift shop meets pharmacy”—you’ll find a thoughtful selection of holistic and naturally-based goods, in addition to amazing customer service. At this store, which opened in the summer of 2014, customers “feel like they come home” because they’re treated “like family,” says co-owner Gary Valevich.

So, this holiday season, take the time to explore. It’s important to do so, partially because Park Slope doesn’t experience the same level of foot traffic that booming neighborhoods like Williamsburg do. Swati Argade opened a second location, Bhoomki Home, in order to offer ethically made home furnishings, in November of 2014, but she had to close the store after only eight months. Many of her customers later told her they never got a chance to check out Bhoomki Home. They probably thought it would be around longer, but, the economic landscape that store owners face adds a sense of urgency.

That’s why it’s so important to make a conscious effort “to keep these stores alive,” and to help Park Slope keep its “small business character,” as Argade describes it. Once you’ve crossed the threshold into one of Park Slope’s unique boutiques, you’ll immediately notice some striking differences between these stores and big-box retailers. One is, as Clarence Nathan describes it, that local stores know their customers, and they focus on “selecting the right product” for shoppers. These store owners are like curators, diligently scouring Etsy and trade fairs in order to provide shoppers with a memorable selection. As Ann Lopatin Cantrell, owner of Annie’s Blue Ribbon General Store, says, “We do our best to source items that are unique to our shop. One of my favorite parts of having a store is pulling together fun and clever merchandising stories. We always try to outdo ourselves each year,” she says, which is “good news for our customers.”

Customers who want to help ensure the success of their favorite stores don’t always need to spend money to do so (though this certainly helps). Valevich encourages satisfied customers to, in effect, advertise for their favorite shops through word of mouth. Customers can also spread the word via social media. Many stores maintain active accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms; Cantrell says she feels “grateful for all the social media love.”

If you spot something fantastic while shopping, snap a photo and tag the business. You can use hashtags like #shopsmall or, if you’re shopping on Fifth Avenue, #theother5th. And there’s an added benefit to following your favorite stores on social media: you’ll be one of the first to know about special events and sales. Many of Bhoomki’s sales, for example, are advertised to those who have signed up for the store’s email list.

Store owners and the 5th Avenue Business Improvement District have a lot planned for this holiday shopping season. On Small Business Saturday, November 28th, the 5th Avenue BID will conduct its annual tree lighting, and, as Caserta reminds us, “Christmas lights will be up over the Avenue again.” Bhoomki’s holiday sale begins that day, and it’s also when the store will launch its holiday merchandise.

The festivities will extend throughout the entire season. Customers can help celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Tabeel’s Aromatherapy Gift Shop & Salon with a big sale on December 14th, and the store will also be hosting a smaller, in-house Kwanzaa celebration later in December. At Yanatiba, customers will be able to order custom-made silver jewelry, while also browsing through eclectic offerings of Early American furniture and gift items from around the world. So, as the leaves in Prospect Park change color and fall, and as the holidays approach, why not buy local? It’s a great way to ring in the new year in Park Slope.