Christmas, etc.
How does that wretched John Lennon steaming pile of shit go? “So this is Christmas and what have you done?”
How people claim to like that depressing dirge is beyond me… I would have once said the only thing worse than “Merry X-Mas (War Is Over)” is that wretched Band Aid or Live Aid or whatever garbage Bob Geldof pulled out of his rancid ass in the 80s and guilt-tripped his fellow coked-out rockstars into singing lines on… actually, I bet the invite pitch was “hey, I’m doing a Christmas song, wanna come to the studio and do a line or two with me?” and they all assumed he meant of the Colombian variety rather than lyrics, but I digress…
They both suck. But Lennon’s sucks even more.
At least the other results in an annual crop of memes on the Ireland Simpsons Fans Facebook group, mostly at Bono’s expense, such as this one:
With U2 fans in the comments coming to his defense saying he didn’t want to sing that line. And I believe them, because it’s a terrible line in a terrible song, but then, fucking tell Geldof to sing that shit instead, since he’s the asshole who wrote it.
But anyway. Neither of those songs gets played at my house. But back to the question.
Well, I laid in bed late. And I texted my brother who’s down in Phoenix, where it was apparently raining yesterday and cloudy today (as close as they’ll get to a white Christmas).
It was technically a white Christmas here because I peeked out the window in the morning before going back to bed and my car was dusted, though no snow stuck to the pavement and it was pretty much all gone by noon other than a few small white spots in the shady part of the garden. The furthest I ventured outside today was to refill the front yard bird feeder, and it was cold, but not as bad as predicted.
Well, the forecasts seem to be less and less accurate. We were supposed to get 2″ last night and the same today. And as I write this, the snow was supposed to have totally started 20 minutes ago (4pm).
Pardon me, they revised that to say it starts an hour ago:
Odd, that, considering the sky was blue and cloudless not 20 minutes ago, or 40 minutes after this imaginary snow started.
In any case, I went over to my dad’s for dinner yesterday and I don’t think he was planning to come over here today. I normally order pizza on Saturdays but even if Domino’s is open, and even though I’m a pagan and it’s not my holiday, there is no way in Hell I’m ordering pizza today, so I’ll be doing steak, probably… although I do currently have a hankering for waffles, and my George Foreman grill did come with waffle iron plates, so… I might well leave the steak in the fridge for tomorrow and have waffles instead. LOL…
After that, I plan to curl up on the sofa with my electric blanket, my knitting, and the DVD of White Christmas I bought earlier this year and completely forgot about until I saw an Instagram post last night about one of the costumes in that movie.
Quiet solo Christmas, and quite possibly the last I’ll have like that for a long while if things go as planned in 2022.
When my mother was still alive prior to 10 years ago, I never got any peace and quiet on Christmas, because Christmas Eve was always a dinner and gift exchange at my parents’ house, and then on Christmas Day, there was always the family dinner version of a pub crawl, visiting her mother’s, her sister’s, possibly the sister’s daughter’s depending which of them was having the big dinner on that side of the family, her brother’s kids and their maternal grandparents (always my favorite place to visit!), and back then my brother was still married, so also his place and his in-laws’ place (another favorite!).
But now I don’t even live in that city, and neither does my aunt anymore. And everyone’s pretty much scattered.
Oh well. It is what it is.
Funny thing: I bought this reasonably big house expecting I would do a lot of entertaining in it and needed the space. But it was more of a fixer than anticipated, and by the time the work was all done and I was all moved in and set up, I’d had it with a couple of the clubs I’d joined when I moved here, so that eliminated a lot of the planned entertaining. And the ‘rona bullshit hit anyway (and a lot of the sorta-friends I made here made that their new religion). And I got back to working on my creative pursuits so the house is full of the materials for those, be it canvases and paints, lights and tripods, or the ever-present dolls, and thus the house is a mess, not some Martha Stewart set.
My brother did live here for almost a year when he left the city, but now he’s vagabonding in the US and Mexico, probably to never return. And I plan to basically do the same.
As for the decorations, well, I’ve posted those. But I think I put them up too soon, because I’m itching to take it all down, purge through what I’m not going to use in the future or haul with me on my journey (or pay to store somewhere), and get it neatly put away so I can get back to decluttering my house and “editing” or “KonMari-ing” my stuff.
I have a small rowing machine on order that’s already been picked up by FedEx, and I want to rearrange the living room so half of it is a home gym, and I kinda need the Christmas tree put away before I can get that organized, so it’s probably gonna come down tomorrow or Monday at the latest.
It’s a bit like all the candy, etc. I do observe Saturnalia from December 17-23, and while my version of “feasting” wouldn’t pass muster with a Roman (I mean, those people had vomitoriums so they could just keep on eating all day between breaks to barf it up… sure, that was probably just the Imperial elites who took it that far, but still) I gotta say that by the 6th day of it when I was at the grocery store, I had a real craving for salads and bought a few heads of lettuce.
I mean, I did buy candy, too… but I’m ready to get a jump start on my New Year’s resolutions.
Minor correction: Worst Jobs says they often didn’t bother with a vomitorium, just puked in the dining room and had slaves clean it up:
So, yeah, I’m a lightweight from a Roman perspective.
What else… yesterday on my way home from Dad’s I heard a mass of sirens and was a little freaked out as he lives in a coastal village 20 mins away from me with only 2 routes in and out, and it sure sounded like there’d been some nasty traffic accident on one of them.
Fortunately it turned out to be a firetruck covered in Christmas lights and followed by a similarly-lit tractor pulling a flatbed trailer, upon which one of the local firemen stood in uniform next to a colleague dressed as Santa. They were weaving up and down every street in the village, waving to all. Some people stood in their living room windows to wave back, but some families got bundled up to wait and wave at the ends of their driveways and the wet snow came down.
Nice little tradition, there. And obviously everyone else in the village knew about it in advance, lol.
BTW: it’s now 5:30 and still no snow.
And as for the bigger question of Lennon’s stupid song (next line being something like “another year over”), well, I’ll write a year-end recap next week.
Anyway, I do have some garden pics from earlier this week to close out the blog:
