Kicking It through the holidays

Elizabeth Youngman-Westphal

Special to The Village News

Welcome to 2023. This past holiday season was one of our best. It started with a 5-night cruise to Cabo with the grandkids returning just in time for Santa’s silly Christmas stockings.

We both got a bar of perfumed soap, his is rose scented from Paris while my gardenia bar is from London. Santa brought a bottle of floral scented Poo-Pourri, a new shaving brush, hand lotion, and an elaborate Imperial Rose Jewelry Box in blue enamel with gold filigree, a DVD of “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” and what would Christmas be without a pair of silly socks?

Tradition continued with the Christmas Day dinner. Adding to the merriment this year were Grand Champion Reserve Seabeck Earl’s parents, Mik and Linda, our besties Jaci and John, plus Mark, a college friend from VJ’s college days at U.C. Davis. Officially Christmas comes to a close prior to dessert. The table is cleared and it flips over to my hubby’s birthday fête with coffee and cake.

In between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I binged on a TV series out of Nashville produced by Reese Witherspoon. It’s about two ladies that organize. They will clear out your closets, your home, your kitchen, your drawers, your life. Their entire show revolves around eliminating clutter.

The first show I caught featured an aging size-zero Barbie doll. I say “aging” because of a few things like her lineless-expressionless face, her extreme botoxed lips, her long blonde extension-infused hair, zero-dress size (I know, I do sound jealous, but mostly I’m miffed) and lastly, her blinding-snow-white smile. Apparently, cosmetic dentistry is still a Hollywood craze.

I think this frantic closet celebrity is one of those “Housewives of (fill-in-the-blank) city”.

Maybe I am bitter. But on behalf of real women everywhere, I recently watched Cindy Crawford on a celebrity fixer-upper show, and amazingly enough, this international beauty is still exquisitely beautiful and appears to look like a real healthy woman. Which is the sign she has used professionals to maintain her appearance instead of hacks.

Enough of my ranting. Back to the organizational ladies and their TV show.

As it happens, Barbie’s room-sized-custom-closet was overflowing with haute couture outfits encased in clear dry-cleaning bags on wire hangers, which we are about to learn is equivalent to ‘original sin.’

The celebrity articulates her harried schedule filled in by the appropriate “ooh’s and aah’s” by the ladies just as Barbie clicks out of the room and out of view.

The next thing that happens is four ordinary looking working women in logo t-shirts barge forth like stormtroopers carrying overflowing bags filled with a variety of clear plastic containers, a ten-foot-bobtail truck stocked with more clear organizing units, and the entire city’s inventory of matching-felt-clothes hangers.

Fast forward one hour, the two hostesses recap how their business started and by the end of this 60-minute program, Barbie returns to an elaborately systematized custom showroom.

The show is addictive. I don’t recall what streaming site it’s on, but I binged on every last one of the shows ending with, oh, surprise, Reese Witherspoon’s new showcase for all of her movie costumes situated in the center of her mansion.

Admittedly, I was inspired. I even made a pact with myself to “Toss, Donate, or Keep.” Which sounds impressive.

But.

Wait for it.

Wait for it.

You know there is a big but.

Here it is. The Tennessee team of organizers has still not arrived with the truck. Now what am I to do with all of the unsorted floor-full of closet stuff?

For now. I’m gonna close the door and see if I can’t find that program.

Elizabeth can be reached at [email protected].