Even as a raging heathen, I do love me some Christmas. My favorite holiday, hands down (and that’s even taking into account the Hadaka Matsuri guys-in-sumo-loincloths-competing-for-trinkets festival every February in Japan).
I dig Christmas not just for the purty lights, that phenomenal Pogues/Kirsty McColl song and the excuse to put liquor in sweetened egg froth and then drink it, but because it gives a lot of people who apparently need it the excuse to be kind and less judgmental to one another, if only for a few golden moments. And I don’t give a rip about anyone’s reasons to be kind; just be kind, that’s all.
So yeah, Christmas. Dig it.
But this year, for a whole host of reasons I care not to revisit here, I’m not feeling it, the Christmas thing. I’ve had to fight to get myself through the bare-minimum motions. The fake tree for the kittens to climb. The presents, every one still in shipping, or if here, unwrapped. The Maola Egg Nog, since homemade requires major Yuletide energy.
So today, I finally dragged out the mulching lawnmower to address the global warming leaves still falling in the front yard, and afterward dragged the yard-decoration boxes down from the attic. And then I did the yard-Christmas thing, as best I could make myself, over two cans of Guinness Draught, listening to warped homemade Christmas CDs from years past, and trying to muster up enough gravelly voice to sing along to Tom Waits’ “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” so my neighbors could hear it, and me, and cringe, as they’re used to (“Charlie I’m pregnant … “).
Alas. what you see here, people, was the best I could muster in the yard-decorations department, a barely adequate stab at Christmas from a guy who typically overdoes everything. Happy ho, ho, I hope.
May 2018 find its way to kindness.
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