Christmas Day

One of the most interesting things about the Christmas season is the way it makes everyone so... contemplative. 'Tis the season for the making of plans, the tallying of accounts, and (for those Festivus-celebrants among us) the airing of grievances. Part of it, of course, is due to Christmas' position at the end of the calendar year; but part of it seems to be because of our goal, every year, to get Christmas "right."

This year we're going to spend less. Or eat less. Or bake better Christmas cookies (and then eat fewer of them). This year we're going to start a new tradition, or give only locally-made gifts, or try to make it through the weekend without fighting with our relatives.

This year we're going to send our cards on time; do our shopping on time; wrap everything in wrapping paper made with 100% post-consumer content. We're going to destress, take our children to the Nutcracker or the animal shelter, give them more presents so they won't feel the pinch of the economic season or give them fewer presents so they will learn the joy of being satisfied with less.

We're going to find the perfect present for everybody, but we're not going to make Christmas about the presents, because that's not what Christmas is about.

This year, we're going to learn once-and-for-all what Christmas is really about.

As this kind of thinking passes through our minds the way a Lionel engine meanders on electric tracks by the three little carolers cast together in red-and-green plastic, in another direction comes another train, this one traveling on an introspection born of uncertainty.

What if she doesn't like what I bought her? What if I picked wrong? What if they think my house isn't clean, or that I've put on weight, or they don't like the movie, or they don't eat the cookies; what if there's nothing to talk about, or we start fighting after all; what if the bread doesn't bake or the pie doesn't jell or we can't get tickets?

What if they don't get me what I wanted? What if all of my presents are so wrong that it means that no one was paying attention, and then why weren't they paying attention???

What can I wear so they think I'm successful? What can I show them so they think I'm interesting? What can I feed them so they think I can cook? What should I put in my house, or plan for our time together, so they understand that I understand what Christmas should be?

And this whole thing takes months, sometimes. Thinking and shopping and essay after essay in the New York Times (et al) about how to plan a meaningful Christmas, a stress-free Christmas, a low-cost Christmas, an anti-consumer Christmas, a healthy-food Christmas, a fashionista Christmas, a spiritual Christmas, a secular spiritual Christmas, a magical Christmas, a right Christmas, the Christmas where we all finally prove that we know what Christmas is all about.

And in the meanwhile we get all discombobulated and short-tempered trying to work out the various cross-purpose equations. (This is where the grievances start to get aired, unfortunately. It's no coincidence that Festivus is celebrated on December 23.)

And then in my case on Christmas morning itself my family arrived while my hair was still wet and before I had a chance to light the twenty-four glittering tealights (uncheck the "appearing successful" and the "magical decorations" boxes), and in everyone else's cases it was something else a little bit different but a little bit the same, and the truth is that we muddle through the day like we do every year, and then it's over.

The squash turned out well; the Hello Cupcakes were a huge success; I tried a new way of baking bread which caused the crust to stick to the pan (but the upper 3/4ths of the bread tasted fine). I gave a few good presents, and received my long-awaited toaster as well as a MAGIC BULLET (which was UNEXPECTED and SO AWESOME!!!!!). Later we all went for a walk, to see the fifty Christmas trees outside the White House.

And now it's over. (And I've got about an hour-and-a-half left of being contemplative before I chuck it and start looking at the twenty-four fabulous cooking things that the Magic Bullet can do for me. ^__^)

I wrote at the beginning of all this that I didn't know how to create a celebration out of such a high-maintenance, cross-purposes holiday. (Yes, I know I used "cross-purposes" twice now. Is there a better way to describe Christmas?) And I've decided, now, that I don't know at all what Christmas is "all about," but we got a good meal out of the day, and a pleasant walk, and my parents get to read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle while I get to plan out how to use my Magic Bullet to make my own hummus.

And I was about to end the post there... when I got a link, via Twitter.

The Christmas season began with a man getting trampled to death at a Wal-Mart.

It ended with a blogger raising enough money (from anonymous donors) to keep her friends from losing their home.

Forget the twenty-four tealights and the recycle-paper Christmas cards and even my amazing Bullet. Forget the introspection and the contemplation. That's Christmas.

Still More Of This Picture-Taking Stuff

The sign is a little blurry, but it says "Free Holiday Treat! Get a free cookie when you buy a Fresh Value Meal!" Someone should send it to Fail Blog with the label HEALTH-CONSCIOUS FAIL.

One of the selling points at the National Zoo's ZooLights exhibit was the opportunity to get your picture taken in front of a snow globe. When we went, this is what happened: we walked up and saw a person in a panda suit dancing around inside a giant inflatable snowglobe. Suddenly, the snowglobe begins to deflate. The person freaks out and pulls the panda head off. The "event manager" tells her to stay inside the snowglobe and it is reinflated (while she is still holding the panda head, looking both terrified and miserable). Once the snowglobe is back up, the woman puts the head back on and starts right back up dancing. My friends and I all whipped out our cell phones to commemorate this moment.

At the Target. Footie pajamas for women. And not just this particular one. There was a whole aisle of them. Mmmm... sexy.

Now, I don't remember how long it took to play a game of Clue when I was a kid, but I was very disappointed to see it miniaturized and advertised (clearly to parents) as something that will only take 20 minutes, tops. What -- you can't even give your kids the full half-hour anymore?

And a partridge floating above a cypress bush!

Stockings

When my sister came to visit me this afternoon, she found me safety-pinning socks to a string of red beads.

"Are you no longer using the dryer?" she asked me. "Is this one of those earth-friendly things?"

"No," I said. "I'm hanging stockings."

I explained that I had wanted to put up some stockings so that I could stuff them (shh... don't tell my parents... I want them to think Santa's doing it), and that I had looked at stockings at the Target but they were all appallingly ugly, and I had looked for hand-knit locovore free-range stockings at the Farmers' Market and at Eastern Market but I couldn't find any, and then I remembered that I had a few pairs of woolen socks of my own.

"I do not want a gift from the inside of your old dirty sock," my sister said.

"It's not old," I told her, "it's rustic. Plus they're completely clean. Also it's frugal -- why should I go buy some socks that are pretending to look all woolen and rustic when I have socks at home I can use?"

"Stop calling those socks rustic," my sister told me. "And where are you planning to hang them?"

I showed her.

"The stockings were hung by the air conditioner with care..."

"Absolutely not," my sister told me. "I'm taking you to the Target."

At the Target, we followed the sound of screaming children to the Christmas aisles and found ourselves confronted by an array of gigantic stockings, three times the size of any human leg.

"Wow. These are ugly," my sister said.

"I told you," I told her.

We pawed through stockings large enough to fit entire Easy-Bake Ovens or Tickle Me Elmos or whatever people are pretending Santa brought for their children this year; stockings emblazoned with Hannah Montana and High School Musical without even the passing courtesy of pasting Santa hats on the various characters; stockings covered with fake fur or sequins or NASCAR advertisements.

"NO NO NO NO NO we are not bringing any of these things home," I said. "I'm going to leave and go hang my old socks on the air conditioner."

"No you are not," my sister said. "We will find something."

And, eventually, we did. And, although I argued at first that the appliqued snowmen and penguins were not in keeping with the general theme of the decorations (which is "live plants and flame"), I had to admit that they looked much better than my worn-out old socks.

Now all we have to do is wait for Santa.

A Prayer For My Plants

When I was younger and used to keep paper journals instead of this online one, I used to write prayers directly into my journal. In red ink. (I think so God would know they were extra-important.)

I think part of the reason having live plants in my apartment makes me feel all Christmas-anticipatory is because there is now a living, breathing, palpable reminder of the Christmas countdown: Can I keep these plants alive for the next twenty days???

I've never successfully kept a plant alive in my life. I still remember being the only kid in my class whose beans wouldn't sprout, and four years ago when I moved into my first "real" apartment one of the first things I did was get a geranium in a pot, which lasted for about a week even though I watered it and did all of the things the little plastic tag on the plant told me to do. (So I threw the geranium in the trash and went to the animal shelter and got a cat instead. The cat thrived.)

Of course, six beans and one geranium do not a track record make, not necessarily. But right now I'm mostly worried that the two cypress bushes and the poinsettia will freeze to death because they're on my windowsills and even though they're getting sunlight they're also getting cold air; and the Christmas-tree-in-a-pot will die from lack of sunlight because it's too big to fit on my windowsill so I've put it on the floor, but it's not in a very sunny spot, so maybe it won't be able to photosynthesize...

So, in short, a prayer for my plants:

Dear God, please help me to keep these plants alive. I'm going to follow the instructions on the little plastic tags, but I know my poinsettia is not in a warm enough place because poinsettias come from Mexico and are not meant to sit on a windowsill in Washington, D.C., and I'm afraid my Christmas tree is not getting enough light, even though maybe in a real forest it would only get that much light because it's pretty small and the other trees would cast shadows over it, and in all fairness I could move it to a sunnier spot, but the sunniest spot in my apartment is where the table is, and if I put the tree there I would have to move the table, but if I moved the table to where the tree is then the table would block the door to my bathroom. Also my Christmas tree is bedecked in Christmas lights so it needs to be near a wall outlet.

But even though I don't live in Mexico and my windowsills are too cold and my Christmas tree is only in partial light, please, please help me to keep these plants alive. Thank you. Amen.

Reclaiming Christmas

I spent last night redecorating for Christmas. (Then, for good measure, I cleaned the kitchen.)

Now my apartment feels right.

I think part of my repulsion to the ugly plastic fake Christmas tree came from its so-close proximity to my learning about the Black Friday Wal-Mart mob; I had literally come home with this tree-in-a-box, sat down to see if anything on the internet had changed in the last two hours, and learned that in another store in another city, a man had been trampled to death.

I kinda felt complicit. Sure, literally I wasn't, but I had also been in a big-box store on Black Friday and it was just a different combination of factors that made it not my store but that other store.

So I took back the ugly plastic tree, and despaired that I didn't know how to get my apartment ready for Christmas.

Then, on a work-related errand (I was returning catering trays to Whole Foods -- did you know they'll re-use them if you bring them back?) I saw an entire window display of rosemary trees. I didn't know such a thing existed. I guess I hadn't thought about the shape rosemary takes when it isn't inside a spice jar, but apparently it is Christmas-tree shaped, and just the right size for my little apartment.

I went nuts. This was perfect. The rosemary tree would live, in its pot, through the holiday season, and then I could strip it of its "needles" and put them in a generic tupperware and use them in my cooking. And, since I hadn't yet ever cooked anything which required rosemary, I would get to look up and learn some new recipes.

It was two days before I could get back to the Whole Foods. This worried me a little, because I was afraid all of the pretty rosemary trees would be gone, but I told myself it was an unreasonable fear. This is America, after all. Store windows are always full of products. Nothing ever disappears. The closest I had ever come to not finding what I wanted in a store was when I price-watched this green corduroy dress from ATL until it was 50% off, and then I went in to buy it with another 50% off coupon, but by then all of the ones in my size were gone, so I bought one in the next size up and ran it through the washer/dryer so it would shrink to fit.

When I went back to Whole Foods, all the pretty rosemary trees were gone. The man working Lawn and Garden told me it was blight; there wouldn't be any more rosemary tree harvests this season, and there wouldn't be any more rosemary trees anywhere in the tri-state area.

I was crushed. But I rallied and ended up walking out of the Whole Foods with four living plants: one miniature Christmas tree in a pot, two little cypress bushes, and one golden poinsettia.

Now my apartment is full of pretty green things, and I've hung up the lights and this afternoon I am going to put up some stockings and buy some tealights for the windows and get a whole bunch of peppermint and butterscotch candy canes to put into a glass jar that used to contain Priya-brand garlic paste.

I feel like I've reclaimed Christmas.

This, I know, is silly, because buying live plants at Whole Foods is only moderately different from buying a plastic plant at Target; and even my delight in my pretty golden poinsettia (instead of those everyday red poinsettias) should not be attributed to any sense of finding anything special; the only reason there was only one golden poinsettia hiding in the back behind all the red ones was because everyone else had already bought all of the golden ones and there was only one left.

Still, it's so much nicer in my apartment. And Blue is back in the Christmas spirit. ^__^

More Christmas

One year, the day after Thanksgiving, my mother opened off the holiday season by sliding a cardboard box filled with two gigantic stuffed bears down our front staircase and calling out "Here comes the Christmas crap!"

When I was very young those two bears were my size and magical; at that point I was a teenager and they were just two oversized stuffed bears -- as my mom aptly put it, "Christmas crap."

I guess it's easy to believe that the Christmas season is beautiful and mysterious and anticipatory if you're five; if a string of lights wound around a doorway causes you to exclaim, as my sister once did, "It looks like the entrance to Disneyland!"

Later this afternoon I am going to take that damn tree back to the Target, and tomorrow I am going to go to Eastern Market and see if I can find something a little less plastic with which to adorn my dream apartment. It probably won't be a full-sized Christmas tree, but it will be something. Maybe candles, or handmade stockings. Maybe a plant. I don't know.

I could go all DIY and make my own decorations, but my creative instincts are best kept to experiments in cooking. (This morning I tried; I took some tissue paper from an ATL bag and folded it into quarters and attempted to cut it into a snowflake, like this one guy suggested to do on the NYT. It looked like a three-year-old had done it. I put it in the recycle bin.)

So I'm sitting here, staring at my apartment, which is otherwise filled with lovely natural wood and my pretty parquet and my five framed photographs of places I've been and my sixth framed cutout of the newspaper on the day Obama won the election, and now my ghastly plastic tree, and thinking "well, if I put handmade, locally-made red and green candles in the windows, if I maybe bought some hand-knit stockings and hung them across my bookcase, if someone at the Eastern Market is better at hot-gluing things to pinecones than I am and maybe I bought one of those and put it on my table... then would it feel like the anticipation of a holiday?"

What does one do to herald in a season when one is too old to believe in the magical properties of a stuffed bear, too "discerning" to consider a string of colored lights around a door transformative, too depressed by the news of the Black Friday mob death (not to mention the grossness and the ugliness of all the disposable plastic garbage available at Wal-Mart and Target) to want to do a lot of shopping, and too unsure of what the best ways are of returning any sense of celebration to a holiday that has long lost its ritual, but maybe it would be nice to have something special in one's apartment, because it's friggin' Christmas for Christ's sake!

Oh -- and too frugal to believe that one should spend a great deal of money on this kind of thing.

(Btw, GoriGirl, thx for the suggestion re: potted live plant. Will look for one when I am out tomorrow morning.)

Christmas

When I was a kid, I used to love to look at the Christmas tree. It seemed so peaceful, so pretty. There were two ornaments I particularly liked, for reasons I can't remember why -- a little gingerbread boy and a little gingerbread girl. One year I was infatuated with a set of "realistic"-looking birds that someone had given my mother and which ended up on the tree. But mostly it was the lights against the nighttime darkness.


(Our tree, Christmas 2004.)

It's a Blue family tradition to put up the tree the day after Thanksgiving, and since I do enjoy keeping traditions alive and I am going to be hosting my parents and my aunt and my sister in my dream apartment for Christmas 2008, this afternoon I went to the Target and I bought a tree and I came home and I put it up.

I want this Christmas tree out of my house.

It doesn't feel peaceful and it doesn't feel right; it feels plastic and gross and ugly. And it's not because I went and bought the cheapest one, either (though to be fair I bought the second cheapest one). It just looks awful, especially after I came back from the Target and read online that a man had been trampled to death this morning at a Wal-Mart:

By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.

Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains.

They broke through the glass doors.

And now I have a stupid plastic fake Christmas tree in my dream apartment, which is otherwise only filled with things I like.

I want to take down the ornaments and unstring the lights and put the tree back in its box and take the box back to Target. And then I want to -- I don't know -- maybe go to the Farmers' Market and buy some gourds or something, or a poinsettia, or maybe buy nothing at all, because the whole thing has thoroughly depressed me.

People decorate for Christmas because we to celebrate the season, and because we crave ritual and all of that. But this tree isn't any kind of a celebration. It's ridiculous, and ridiculously ugly. It's completely, 100% anti-Christmas.

So after I take it back, then what do I use to decorate my apartment?

Blue Builds A Bed

My bed arrived yesterday. Early, in fact. I was given a delivery window which began at 9 a.m., but the bed was here by 8:30. Not bad.

The first thing I did was unpack the vacuum-sealed, flat-pack mattress (and watch it wiggle and shimmy itself back to regular size), so I could go back to sleep! I got the Sultan Heberg, the cheapest of Ikea's spring mattresses, and all in all I'm quite satisfied with it. Not quite as firm as I would have hoped, which surprised me (I was taking bets on the spring mattresses being firmer than the foam ones) but I seem to be sleeping on it just fine. Also it kind of smells a little bit like chocolate.

The Dalselv bed itself came packed in a box about five feet high and six inches wide/deep. The putting together part was very easy, once I sorted out the minutiae of two hundred different screws, and it went up in a little over two hours.

And here's the picture:

Not bad, eh? And check out that parquet!

Papasan

When I started fantasizing about how I would want to furnish my dream apartment (and trust me, I've had a long time to fantasize about it at this point), I spent considerable time dreaming about my very own papasan chair.

Not one of those plastic "circle chairs" from Target, but a genuine, rattan, Pier 1 papasan.

Now, those things aren't cheap, and I (unfortunately) still am cheap. But fate has thrown me into a lot of different places as I've bounced around from bed to bed, waiting for this apartment eviction business to end, and at my last temporary sleeping place I made a new friend who also, coincidentally, happened to be selling a genuine, gently-used, super-price-reduced Pier 1 papasan on Craigslist.

I'm sitting in it now. I smuggled it into my hotel room through the back door. (I suppose there isn't any law against bringing one's own furniture into a hotel, but it still felt a little like I shouldn't advertise it.)

So now I don't yet exactly have an apartment, but I do have my first piece of real furniture. Not bad.