Karen Sandler

Category: Traditions

  • A Visit to Oaxaca, Mexico

    My husband and I had a marvelous trip to Oaxaca, which is nearly the southernmost state in Mexico (only Chiapas stretches farther south). We were there for a week with five days of touring and a couple days on our own. The scenery is stark (it’s very desert-like), but the city of Oaxaca and the Oaxaqueños who live there are wonderful.

    I love murals and so many of the ones I saw were brilliant. These were indoors in a shopping area.

    While we were there, the state of Oaxaca celebrated Dia de la Samaritana, or Good Samaritan’s Day, which falls on the fourth Friday of Lent. In addition to the decorations everywhere, people gave out “agua fresca” (fresh water), which is water flavored with fresh fruits, herbs, flowers and other ingredients. We had horchata that day. The “Papel Picado” (the paper decorations) were so lovely.

    Another part of Oaxacan culture that I absolutely fell in love with were the alebrijes (ah-lay-bree-hiss). These are carved figurines made of wood that are painted bright colors in fantastical designs. The ones below are from a museum exhibit of the work of Manuel Jiménez. He popularized the wooden alebrijes.

    I bought way too many alebrijes at the artisan markets. Some were for family, but most were just for me. This one with the cat family sitting on a bench is my favorite. <heart emoji>

    I have a ton more pictures (like of the wedding parade we became impromptu members of), but it would take many more newsletters to show them off. I don’t want to put you all to sleep, lol. Suffice it to say, it was a fabulous trip.

    Some of you reading this might remember my science fiction trilogy, Tankborn, Awakening, and Rebellion. I now have a new series planned that’s a spin-off of the world of the Tankborn books. The first book, Mishalla’s Courage, is published and the second book, Pheno’s Treachery, will be available later this year.

    Click here to order Mishalla’s Courage as an eBook for the device of your choice. It’s also available at that link as an audio book and as a print book edition with color illustrations.

    I’m planning five more novellas, all featuring new characters introduced in Mishalla’s Courage. So you’ll want to get started now with the first book.

  • Is Recombined Really a Christmas Movie?

    While my largest body of work is in the form of published novels, I have also written a number of screenplays. I have a habit of writing a script, then deciding it would make a better novel or writing a novel that later becomes a script. My Tankborn Trilogy started as a feature screenplay (for a full-length movie). The trilogy then came full circle when I adapted the world of Tankborn into a short film script. Here’s an account of how it all happened.

    Back in September 2016, I attended a pitch session in Los Angeles. It was one of those “speed dating” kinds of things, where we had five or ten minutes to sell our work to a director. After time ran out, the director would move down to the next writer in line and we writers would do our sales pitch all over again.

    The Tankborn Trilogy

    I hadn’t intended to pitch my YA sci-fi trilogy, Tankborn, but I’d brought along a copy of the first book to show I had some cred. Once the five directors I pitched to spotted the hardcover sitting on the table, they didn’t seem to want to talk about anything else. I had screenplays to offer up, but the book was “IP” (Intellectual Property, a term I learned that night). And for many in Hollywood, IP is like catnip to producers and directors.

    I hit it off with one director in particular, Regina Ainsworth, and I sent her my trilogy. Regina loved the books and wanted to talk to me about a possible movie trilogy. But by the time of our chat, I realized what I really wanted to do was to adapt the three books for television. Regina came around to my way of thinking, but then she upped the ante. To give us a “proof-of-concept” to use to pitch the TV series, we would make a short film.

    We brainstormed ideas, and eventually agreed on the concept for Recombined. It took over a year from the concept to the script (rewrites, and rewrites, and rewrites). Plus we were fundraising, and Regina was locking down locations, crew, and cast.

    Recombined Movie Posters

    Meanwhile, we were writing draft after draft of the pilot for our series and working out the series bible. I was working on other projects as well, and helping Regina whenever I could. But as director, the heaviest lift was hers. Finally, in early December 2018, at the former Warner Bros Ranch lot in Burbank, our marathon shoot of Recombined commenced. For that part of the story, check out this post from 2019.

    So, is Recombined a Christmas movie? You decide:

    • It was shot in December, the month we celebrate Christmas
    • The plot of Recombined revolved around a celebration, just like Christmas does
    • It premiered in November, which is pretty close to Christmas
    • There were festive decorations on set
    Festive decorations

    QED

    So, what movies do you think are non-obvious Christmas movies? Share in the comments.

  • Memories of Halloweens Past

    I loved Halloween as a kid. Spooky decorations. Carving jack-o-lanterns. Dressing up in a costume and going out door to door in the neighborhood.

    And candy, candy, candy! After I got home from trick-or-treating, I immediately dumped out my candy on the living room floor and took stock of what I got.

    My mom could be pretty creative with the costumes. One year she made my two older sisters matching pumpkin costumes. I don’t know why, but Mom tied them together by the wrist. Maybe she didn’t want them to get lost? One of my sisters told me she was in tears the whole night.

    The next Halloween it was my turn to wear the pumpkin costume. Mom stuffed a bunch of newspaper into the big orange bag to make it round like a pumpkin. I remember how scratchy it was to wear. To give you an idea of what it looked like, here’s Gnorm the garden gnome wearing a pumpkin costume.

    Pinocchio was one of my favorite books, so another year, Mom made me a Pinocchio costume. It had shorts with suspenders and a white shirt. To make me look like a wooden marionette, Mom wrapped brown Kraft paper around and around my arms and legs. I couldn’t bend my elbows or knees. Not sure how I made it around the neighborhood to trick-or-treat.

    As a grownup, I’ve dressed up for the occasional Halloween party. A couple years ago, I attended a horsey Halloween. Those horses were saints considering what they put up with. Hershey, a quarter horse mare, was especially sweet to the kids despite being decorated with fake spider webs.

    What are your memories of Halloween? What candy did you always want to see in your trick-or-treat bag? What was the coolest pumpkin you ever carved? I’d love to hear from you how you celebrated (or didn’t celebrate) the holiday. Let me know in the comments.

  • 7 Jewish Authors Get Personal About Anti-Semitism

    Anti-Semitism: hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as a religious, ethnic, or racial group. —Merriam-Webster

    When I was asked to put together a roundtable discussion on anti-Semitism, I admit I felt like a fraud when I agreed. My Jewish dad “converted” to Catholicism when he married my mom (although the conversion never really stuck), so my three sisters and I were all raised as Catholics. I remember arguing with a Jewish girl in my grade school class about Jesus (not trying to convert her, but in disagreement as to his significance). And I never set foot in a synagogue while I was growing up.

    But then there was that time when I was six or seven when the Brownie troop told me that there wasn’t any room for me (although there was for my best friend), and my mom told me it was because my dad was Jewish. There was that day I learned that the care home where my Alzheimer-afflicted dad lived had included him in a church activity despite his records indicating he was Jewish. And then there was the very scary day when Nazi-Twitter attacked me and my friends came to my rescue and got the hateful tweets blocked.

    So I may be a stealth Jew, but I’m Jewish. And when I asked seven Jewish authors to write essays on their everyday experiences with anti-Semitism, I was startled by how familiar their stories were to me.

    We’re lucky that in the United States anti-Semitism is only rarely expressed violently. But the most recent ADL Global 100 study, a survey commissioned annually by the Anti-Defamation League, found that ten percent, or about 24 million individuals in the US harbor anti-Semitic attitudes. And as you’ll see in the essays below, there are likely many more people who would never consider themselves anti-Semitic, but who confront the Jewish people they meet with micro-aggressions that can be exasperating, heartbreaking, and even frightening.

    Here’s the question I asked these seven authors:

    How have you seen anti-Semitism expressed, either in the media, on the internet, or in your personal lives?

    And this is how they answered. Read more.

  • Near Death, Divine Providence, and Mining the Past

    Ford Fairlane 1964
    photo credit: DSC03226 via photopin (license)

    When I was 12 years old, I nearly died.

    At the time, my two older sisters and I lived with our mom in the San Bernardino Mountains, about 2 hours east of Los Angeles. It was Easter Sunday, and we’d gone to visit my grandmother in L.A. for Spring Break. Grandma and Papa had dropped us off at the bus station in downtown L.A., and Mom came to pick us up at the bus depot in San Bernardino.

    Mom 1970sMy mom, God love her, was a terrible driver. She was a lead-foot, not only on the gas, but on the brake as well. She drove “down the hill” (from nearly mile-high Blue Jay to San Berdoo’s thousand foot elevation) screaming around those mountain curves, most likely with her foot on the brake most of the way.

    She picked us up at the bus depot, me and my sisters still wearing our Easter dresses. We tucked our luggage and our basket of Easter eggs in the trunk, then Mom headed back up the hill. My older sister Debbie sat in the middle of the car’s bench front seat next to Mom, and I sat next to Debbie by the door. Our oldest sister, Linda, sat behind me in the back seat.

    Mom might have used less brake going up, but the brake drum nevertheless got hotter and hotter until about halfway up the hill, the heat actually blew a tire. We pulled into a nice, level turnout and a kind passerby changed the tire for us. The gentleman told my mom she better let the brakes cool before continuing on home. We sat around for what Mom thought was long enough, then pulled out again.

    Stier Sisters Late 50s
    Me, Debbie, & Linda celebrating Linda’s birthday with a Barbie doll cake.

    I don’t remember if there was a smell, or Mom could feel the heat through the brake pedal. In any case, she decided to pull over into another turnout and let the brakes cool again.

    Except this turnout was sloped. The car started rolling backwards. The brakes were well and truly fried and no amount of stomping on Mom’s part would get that car to stop. The car just kept rolling toward the edge where the mountainside plunged down a couple hundred feet of steep embankment.

    For some reason, Mom didn’t think to try the emergency brake. I suppose it might not have worked anyway. She was struggling to put the car into park. When that didn’t work, she jumped out and tried to stop the car with her body. The car knocked her down and partially rolled over her. Not with its full weight because at that point, the rear of the car was already over the edge, so the front end was partially off the ground.

    While Mom was fighting to stop the car, Debbie had gotten the passenger side door open and was yelling at me to get out. I remember sitting sideways, my feet hanging out of the car, watching the pavement roll by under my feet. But I was frozen. Debbie couldn’t get me to budge. All the while, Linda kept yelling from the back seat, “I can’t open the door! I can’t open the door!”

    We were all about to die. And then a miracle happened.

    The car stopped. Linda got her door open, I finally scrambled out of the car with Debbie close on my heels. When we turned back to the car, we realized it had stopped with one front tire hooked to the berm that edged the turnout. That berm wasn’t even a foot high.

    Mom was banged up but nothing was broken or needed stitches. We three girls were perfectly fine. The car was towed out of its predicament, and it went on to suffer through more of my mom’s abuse. The Easter eggs ended up rotting in the trunk because we all forgot they were in there, a fact that we girls chortled over for years to come.

    Yeah. A miracle. That my mom wasn’t hurt more badly. That we girls didn’t flip right over the edge, none of us seat-belted into that pre-airbag car. That Debbie and I didn’t bail, and the car didn’t flip with Linda trapped inside. All those possibilities make me shudder now.

    Oddly enough, as dramatic as this experience was, I’ve never used it in a book. I’ve probably used the fear, the panic, the horror of it without consciously realizing where I might be pulling it from. It became a story that we all found hysterically funny because it did have a happy ending.

    In this case, reality was much better than the what-ifs. Thanks to God and miracles.