Well technically...

Okay, so it may be strange and confusing and even a little disturbing that not even fifteen minutes after I posted the most incredibly long and confusing piece of tedium/angst ever seen on the Web (including ALL of my previous blog entries), I am now doing a random sarcastic fluff piece on life and Christmas and (finally!) some weather that is appropriate for this time of year.

I actually hung out with somebody on Sunday. Like, you know, a friend activity. For, like, 9 hours. And it like, totally rocked, man. Supercool groovitude. Or whatever the teenyboppers are saying these days... Yeah, so we spent three or four hours at Walmart, and we went out to eat twice, and we went to Barnes & Noble, but mostly we sat around talking. It was a lot of fun. Also, we tried on shoes. And yes, Sarah, I did look for some plain brown loafers, but I couldn't find any that that were plain enough. *grin*

I also bought a tiny little Christmas tree ($4.99) and some ornaments and lights to put on it so that my grandfather's Christmas doesn't totally suck. It looks like I'm probably going to NC for the holidays, and I feel really bad for leaving him here on his own, so I want to do something nice for him. I'm also contemplating putting up some lights in my front window (which is, naturally, larger than I thought it was when I was buying lights, and I already took them off that stupid little white holder thingy so I'm pretty much screwed). I find Christmas incredibly exciting. It's my favorite holiday by far...it was always so magical when I was little, partially because I got lots of presents from my paternal grandparents (I was the only grandkid on that side of the family), but mostly because my mom put her heart and soul into decorating and polishing and cooking and shopping and wrapping and just generally having a nervous breakdown so that I would have a wonderful Christmas no matter how little money we had (and we usually didn't have a whole lot). Every year my parents would tell me how tight things were, and they'd say we weren't going to have a lot of presents this year, but every year there would be two distinct mounds of presents under the tree--the larger pile of presents, mostly from my mom, but some from my dad which he persuaded her to wrap for him, were uniformly gorgeous and creatively festooned with ribbons and bows and artfully deployed tissue paper in a wide range of colors and textures. The other pile looked like they had been wrapped by a two-year-old on crack with materials salvaged from a thrift-store dumpster after a flood. Those, of course, were the ones my dad had to wrap, although when I got old enough to wrap presents he always made me wrap most of the ones for my mom, and he hardly wrapped anything. I will never understand how somebody so intelligent and talented (he actually is quite good at little cartoon-type sketches) can do such a lousy job of wrapping a present. Sometimes, usually when he had persuaded me to wrap a large and bizarrely-shaped present for Mom, I suspected that he did it on purpose out of sheer laziness.

At any rate, aside from my mother's annual there's-no-time-no-money-no-tree-no-holly-no-presents-wrapped-yet-what-am-i-going-to-do! meltdown Christmas was a highly enjoyable occasion for me. Every year we would greet the ornaments like old friends and exclaim over their beauty/cuteness/unfortunate breakage/hideous deformities (that last category was made up almost exclusively of saltdough ornaments which I created at the advanced age of three with a great deal more enthusiasm and glitter than taste--or recognizable shape, for that matter). My mother would wrestle with the fifteen thousand strings of lights, some of which came from different model years and manufacturers, others from distant planets (probably constructed by Grinch & Scrooge, Inc.) where functionality must at all costs be avoided and no bulbs from any other manufacturer/planet may be compatible and at least one bulb will already be burned out before you even plug them in and the rest will not light up if there is one bulb that is even thinking about contemplating a brief flicker, let alone going out. My dad, after much grumbling, would put the star on the top branch of the ridiculously tall tree my mother always insisted on, and, after even more grumbling, get one of the bulbs to light it up to her satisfaction. This never took more than two or three minutes, but the way he fussed about it, you would have thought she'd asked him to supply the entire neighborhood with electricity for their Christmas lights by running on a treadmill while the rest of us opened presents and ate his chocolate Santa or something.

My mom would always drive me around so we could ooh and ah over the houses with the extravagant displays of lights in their yards, and I secretly longed to live in one of those houses and be able to show my friends the Santas and reindeer and stable scenes in my front yard (funny how Mary and Joseph are often right next to Rudolph and Frosty, isn't it?). As I grew older and understood how much work was required in such a display, I was very glad that we didn't have one of those yards, but I still like looking at them.


I'm not sure why I'm in such a nostalgic mood. Maybe because it actually feels a bit like Winter now (it's close to freezing outside), and my feet are icy, even in thick socks, and I was listening to my Robert Shaw Christmas album in the car and I couldn't eat a lot of ice cream because I got too cold. I have an urge to go to Colonial Williamsburg and walk around saying "Brr" a lot and sniffing the wood smoke and fallen leaves and then eating ginger cakes and drinking hot cider and grinning insanely. Also, this will be the first Christmas I have never spent with my parents, and that is definitely going to be an emotional roller coaster (probably for them as well).

Speaking of parents...I hadn't heard from mine in a few days, because apparently there are incompetent people doing road work in Uganda and some of the workmen messed up the Internet connection, so they're back with the dial-up again. Also, my mom injured her leg somehow, and may have to have surgery, and you have no idea how much the idea of my mom having surgery in an African hospital scares me, prejudiced and unfair as I'm sure that is.

I will write about Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire sometime later this weekened, I promise, but right now I just do not have the energy.

Good night, everyone.