Oh, my dears, it’s so close now, so very, very close.

There are a lot of old older people out there who don’t care much for the excitement, the wonder, the sparkles and reflections and tinsel and candles and suspense and giggles and hand-clapping and jammied children and ribbons and pretty paper and surprises, and this makes me sad for them. However, I also figure they were pretty much the same when they were young younger. I think the ability or tendency to glow and laugh and clap and appreciate things is there in all of us, and whether we let let the light of these things shine through us – or not – is a choice we make. Scrooge was Scrooge because he chose to be Scrooge. Yes, certain childhood happenings helped mold him, but ultimately, he chose his life. Free will choice. All of our lives are that way. We can’t always control the circumstances, and sometimes Karma really hits us below the belt, but we can always control the way we deal with it. Most of us go up and down, back and forth, hot and cold with our reactions; even-keeled people are rare and actually rather boring. But whether we reel from the blows and get back up, or stay down and cover our heads and wait for more, is up to us. We’ve all been there.

Me, I love Christmas. What, you didn’t know? 🙂

I also love Christmas movies. Certain ones, that is.

Enjoy.

Now, please enjoy this video in several parts, that I used to show each year to my 8th graders, each with a kindergarten student as a guest, laps full of cookies. The Christmas Messenger, starring Richard Chamberlain, the most beautiful man in the world.

Christmas Eve is such a magical time. It’s all ahead of us, you see. To paraphrase Katie, age 8, in What Child Is This, by Caroline Cooney, the night before Christmas isn’t called a ‘night,’ it’s called ‘eve,’ and Christmas morning isn’t called ‘morning,’ it’s ‘morn.’ Eve and morn: two special words to highlight two special times.

How special are they? They are special already, in their own right, but how you make them special for yourself and for your children is entirely up to you. I hope you give them memories they will cherish all their lives, so much so that they will pass the glory along to their own children.

Children flourish with roots, but they soar with wings.

May your Eve be full of anticipation and warmth, and may your Morn be all you hoped it would be.

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly

A house down the road from us has deep blue lights festooning its shrubberies, hanging from the eaves, and framing the windows. Their tree is white and covered with blue lights. It’s a beautiful blue and the contrast is lovely but it’s not Christmas-y. Blue is not a Christmas color. Blue lights are what mortuaries put on the tasteless white tree in the lobby: white tree, blue balls*, blue lights. Blue “Christmas” decorations bring me down. They make my heart heavy. Whenever I drive past this house, I don’t want to look but I can’t help it; it’s like a train wreck with a blue bow, pretending to be merry. It’s like a coffin with a sprig of holly.

I’m a child of the seventies, and “House of Blue Lights” has a rather different connotation for me. Hint: not Christmas. When I was in college, we were forbidden to put blue lights in our windows. It was considered advertising. And if you’re going to advertise, you’d better have the merchandise handy when customers respond. Of course, some did; those homeschooled churchy sheltered girls down the hall, who’d never been allowed to go out anywhere on their own or with friends in their lives before, went hog-wild with the freedom they had never been taught to handle, got knocked up, and had to drop out before the first semester was over. They didn’t even HAVE to advertise; the pheromones were so thick it made our homemade candles flicker funny. These girls were not typical, of course; they were just wild animals who suddenly had no harness. So to speak.

Ahem. Blue Christmas.

When I see all that blue, no amount of twinkle can make it seem holiday-like. It’s just. . . sad. Blue is a sad color when it’s not the sky or the sea or a robin’s egg.

This is all merely my opinion, of course; if you wish to deck your halls with pink and turquoise plaid, or with John Deere tractors, or with taxidermied critter tails, by all means go for it.

I’m a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to Christmas; I did create my own tradition with my tree, but I’ve stuck to it because for me, it was perfect. People with blue balls are of course free to create their own traditions, too.

I never wanted a tree that was nothing but an impersonal work of art; a Christmas tree should not appear untouched by human hands and have nothing to do with the people who put it up. A Christmas tree should be a reflection of the traditions and taste of the people involved. But blue? Sad. Gloomy. Mourning. Death. I’ll have a blue Christmas without you. I’m blue, da ba dee da ba die. Am I blue? Song sung blue. Blue eyes crying in the rain. So now they paint themselves a sad song and color it blue. Please don’t make me blue, sing me no sad songs. Sing me a song of sadness and sing it as blue as I feel. You’re cloaked in red, I’m drenched in blue. You couldn’t be a deeper shade of blue. That’s as blue as the boy can be. Blue, blue, my love is blue. Don’t it make my brown eyes blue. Etc. Blue is sad. Christmas is happy.

Or should be. I hope yours is. If I had a magic wand I would make it so for all of you. Whatever you do in December, may it shine with happy lights.

*Blue balls are not Christmas-y either. Why, what did you expect to find here?

I do love to fix a big company dinner, and tonight I get to do that. Belle and some of her friends are coming down to feast on pork tenderloin, old rotten au gratin potatoes, green beans, corn, and homemade bread. I’m not fixing any dessert because I figure we’ll all get enough dessert in a few days anyway. Besides, my oven is full of things I have to hide from the cats.

This being Saturday, Hub and I filled the van with big black bags and made our weekly jaunt to the dump, after which we had our weekly date for lunch, even though it was mid-afternoon.

What makes this weekly lunch a date? We go INSIDE, that’s why. If you just go through the drive-through, it’s not a date. And, if you go to a restaurant that doesn’t even have a drive-through window, it’s a formal date.

Why did we have lunch at 3 in the afternoon? Because we’re on break right now, and 6 a.m. has been replaced by 11 a.m. And when you skip breakfast, you’re ready for lunch at 3 p.m.

Never try to argue or out-rationalize ‘food’ with a fat chick. We’ll win every time.

Dinner’s at seven. Come on over. We’ve got enough food for all of you. You don’t even have to bring ice now; we finally got the icemaker fixed. It broke seven years ago and flooded half the upstairs and all of the downstairs, but I think I waited long enough to have that tubing replaced; I wanted ice and I wanted it NOW. And now I have it.

Next up on the “to do” list: stairs for the deck. 25 years is long enough. And no, leaning a ladder against the deck isn’t good enough. Although, it does work.

On a tangent, the janitor at my former middle school was so lousy, my students once conducted an experiment using him as its base. One of the kids found an absolutely humongous dead bug of some kind and brought it in. The bug (fresh, intact, but definitely dead) was strategically placed on the carpet in the front of the room, directly underneath the pencil sharpener, in plain sight. Then, the kids made a mark on the board and took a picture for each day the bug remained on the carpet.

The bug was never removed; the kids took pictures and marked time until there was nothing left but a little pile of black and red dust, and then the dust blew away. The carpet was NEVER SWEPT. I reported this but was told that the janitor had definitely vacuumed my classroom daily; it was checked off on his report. I offered to produce my evidence but was told it was a non-issue. I know the janitor was busy, shooting baskets in the gym for hours at a time cleaning and emptying wastebaskets and refusing to touch vomit and all, but I think falsifying his report should have been a kick-out-the-door. He was our secretary’s son but that just couldn’t have had anything to do with it.

The kids offered to conduct this same experiment with feces but one must draw the line somewhere.

I’m not by any stretch of the imagination what one would call a fastidious housekeeper, but when the dust on the carpet is so thick people are leaving footprints in it, and giant insects are left to turn to dust, I’d say it needed to be dealt with.

But oh well.

“For peace of mind, resign as General Manager of the Universe.” I need to do that.

Now to peel some potatoes for tonight.

Sure you don’t want to come over? I’m going to run the sweeper in a few minutes. . . .

Mamacita, Scheiss Weekly