Saturday, January 14, 2012

Sharks and Mermaids


Long before I met my Joseph, I was a wild, foot-loose guy in Idaho.  I had my best friend, who also happened to be my cousin, Nicole.  We had wonderful adventures when I rented my first place all by myself in Coeur d’Alene.  We were both in community college going for artsy things and life just seemed infinitely beautiful and wonderful.  Because this was the 1990’s, one of the songs that came on the radio that we adopted as one of our anthems was Billie Myer’s “Kiss the Rain.”  This song lead us to an even better song:  The Shark and the Mermaid song
Mermaids were always my thing, as evidenced by the mermaid tattoo I have on my right arm. 
Only a couple of years later (even though it felt like a life time later) I found myself married in Seattle with a dog (soon to be two of the mongrels).  I told my hubby about the song, and even tried to sing it to him in spite of my lack of a Siren’s voice.  He did his own research and read the lyrics, and it was Joseph who decided that this was our song.
The song details the affair of a beautiful mermaid who falls in love with a gruff shark and in spite of the world thinking that they were an unlikely match, they “grew together, they were strong.”  And as mermaids were always one of my favorite things, I fell for the sappiness of this song as our song hook, line, and sinker. 
In 2009, for our upcoming ninth anniversary, Joseph hired a local jeweler to create “upgraded” rings for us.  On the inside of mine the inscription reads, “Shark loves his Mermaid.”  On the inside of Joseph’s the inscription reads, “Mermaid loves his Shark.”  And the mermaid/shark theme has sort of permeated our life together. 
Now, my love of mermaids is well known among my friends, and this year my friends Nate and Jackie gave me a mermaid cookie cutter.  This sent me into my pantry to assess my cookie cutter situation.  I threw out a lot of those old metal cookie cutters, as they have a nasty habit of rusting when they sit around my damp house.  So that left me down to only my plastic cookie cutters and my new mermaid cutter. 
Now, I had a great many of these plastic cookie cutters because I had happened one day upon a set of 50 animal cookie cutters so my pantry is full of dinosaurs, dogs, cats, rabbits, lions, sheep, and on and on.  So this year when I went to make my Christmas cookies I found that I was completely out of Christmas shapes.  So that is when I got creative. 


We had a Shark and Mermaid themed Christmas!!! 
I added some ocean friends for them, too.  I imagine there was a wise-cracking octopus and a prissy angel fish.

And maybe there was a seahorse with a heart of gold. 

Whatever they looked like, the cookies went down great with a cup of coffee! 




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