Xmas Past

Just past midnight already, so this will be short.

I dread Christmas, then get cranky about it as the internal pressure mounts ... Then it's here and by the end of the day I'm happy with it, content with it, so deep inside it I have a hard time imagining the world outside it.

That'll pass. But right now I'm all alone in a house quiet but for Anonymous 4 singing On Yoolis Night (and of course the buzzing in my ears), my chair an island in a sea of wrapping paper and piled boxes and indescribably multivarious objects. The tree glows, I'm getting cold (we didn't have a fire), I'm fading out ... So, what was Christmas?

Christmas was weeks of fretting over what to get for whom and when to go shopping. Shopping requires a mood, and long work days and evening meetings and the never-ending identity crisis were not conducive. But it always comes together in the final few days. Partly because I get ruthless and suddenly can't give a shit about my job. Partly because close deadlines wonderfully focus my attention. Partly because the spirit finally penetrates and I loosen up and find myself surprisingly able.

Until that time, I'm angry. Maybe that's not the right word, but it seems close enough. I'm made cranky and even more self-loathing than usual by the annual avalanche of realization that I buy things to show my love because I feel inadequate at showing it in other ways. I really don't think I'm inadequate like that, but there are pieces missing, instincts that are weak, parts of our various relationships in which I cannot show leadership and am more or less missing in action, and filling Christmas with the sort of cheer that attends wrapping paper and getting new things that reflect some thought and familiarity is at least something concrete that I can do. So the season progresses with me being cranky over that.

And then it starts to come together, and I find a thing here and a thing there that I know he or she will like and my heart suddenly fills with a weird joy that almost makes me cry and I think I must be emotionally unbalanced or something. But it passes and come Christmas Eve, all is well, and I am just happy.

Christmas was hours spent talking to Dell Computer and FedEx to prevent my wife's purple new laptop showing up at the door while she was home only to have it get delivered at the house anyway, and she even signed for it, and I felt like a total schmuck, and today she was pleased and surprised and had no idea and thought she was signing for our kid's new printer or something. So she said. I'm not so sure, because of an unguarded late-night comment a week ago, but such things can be forgotten, and no matter.

Christmas (Eve) was dinner at Mikuni and a stroll in sub-freezing temps down an over-decorated street and Lessons & Carols at Folsom's 150-year-old Episcopal church, where the comforting rituals of my childhood were somewhat informally replayed and my boys got a refresher glimpse of the church thing and my mother got to sit and sing with me and my family and I was happy to slow down and ponder the meaning of this mixed festival and holy day from within the thumping rhythm of old Anglican hymns, Venite adoremus Dominum.

Christmas was sleeping in and wondering at the phenomenon of everyone else sleeping in too, having presents at eleven or so, a late post-noon breakfast of eggs and ham, too much random food throughout the day, a new board game played, a new DVD watched, lots of drive-by huggings, homemade lasagna, self-absorbed playing with something new, shopping adventures recounted, and finally, while I'm trying to be quiet and focus, my mother carefully and not very quietly folding the colored tissue paper for next year.

Yes, we keep bags and tissue (for stuffing) and bows. Ribbons and wrapping paper are for the fireplace, but the rest of it lasts for years and years.

I've been at this for an hour? I'm a slow typist. Time to retire. I hope your Christmas was, like mine, better than expected. And if you don't do Christmas, that's fine, I hope it was a good day, I'm just not going to be unnecessarily polite about it.

By Design

The most brilliantly complex systems come about by accident and evolution. Weather. Biology. Religion.

Our society has transformed Christmas into a festival of excess. Excess materialism, excess food intake, excess expressions of cheer. That's not all bad. Some of it is very good. There are also intense moments of introspection and spirituality and love of family, friends, people. All good.

Also a time of stress and melancholy, anger and suicide, sadness, family strife, and eleventh hour reconciliation. Name your nectar or name your poison, you will get more than you expect over Christmas.

As we've transformed Christmas, so we've transformed New Years. More excess -- but now it's a past-stress blowout. Fun, parties, fireworks (if you live in my neighborhood); or home alone if time and chance put you in that space -- and always the resolutions.

I don't make them usually, but I might this year. I feel it's a brilliant design to place new beginnings and new resolutions a week after the premier festival. So much about Christmas tangles our children and our childhoods and our marriages and our loves and losses, our families and those indescribable relationships, dreams not met and targets just missed, tangles all these and more -- faith lost, edging to restoration, almost there until the candles are blown out -- Christmas tangles all the loose ends into a beautifully lit ball and tosses it into our laps ... And then what do we do with it?

Roll it out onto the floor for a week and start a new year resolved not to do THAT again, or THIS, or SOME OTHER THING, and who knows, maybe this time one of those resolutions will stick.

I don't have any really bad habits beyond staring at a computer too much, but I can think of a thing or two I must resolve to change. So maybe this year, the brilliance of placing a few new bets a few days after reaping a lifetime's harvest of old ones will pay off. Time will tell.

Tree Hunting

The tree farm we go to is a little family biz up a side road an hour's drive up towards the mountains. Been operating forty years. They built a quaint little Christmas village.


I could be snarky but it's nice, really, not overly commercial. They sell trees (cheap!) and ornaments and hot chocolate. Boughs are free.


I used to always say, let's take this one! Then I figured out they weren't little kids anymore who'd laugh at anything.


I always bring a saw and someone always asks, why'd we bring a saw? And we never use it.


If you cut well above ground the tree will eventually grow another main trunk for someone else. We found one nearly perfect (pics later, prolly). To cut no more than we needed I climbed up onto the cut trunk of another, three or four feet above ground, and commenced with the sawing. It fell, and I was King! I was Man, I Cut Down Tree!


It's fourteen feet tall, more or less. Thirty two bucks, something like that.


I started to get in the Christmas mood and took this picture. I'll get over it.


They had the usual life-size creche thing and the baby in the middle was rolling his eyes and going "Dad! It's 4 B.C.! It smells like a fucking barn in here! Couldn't We have waited, like, a couple thousand years? I mean, building codes. Building codes! That's all I ask. And some decent Thee-damn music!"

Hang a Shining Star Upon the Highest Bough

And have yourself a merry little Christmas ... no-o-ow.

Out of the Cold

There is a bittersweet moment when shopping for my loved ones. Especially at Christmas.

I am a Christmas grouch. Life never runs smoothly and there’s never enough time and to have this demanding season thrown in the middle of it annoys me. I’d rather just keep to routine. But beneath the commercialism and consumerism and short-lived attempts at recalling some ancient Middle Eastern mythology there is some real cheer and eventually it finds me and I start to enter into the spirit.

I’m not sure what the spirit is. As described in the Dickens story, it is the happy fun pagan element of Yuletide, which Scrooge, the atheistic grandchild of dour Puritans who regarded Christmas as un-Christian, could not in his coldness abide. The Spirit of Christmas was the new unfolding merging of ancient traditions of social order reversal –- a-wassailing we will go -– treat us or else –- with the post-Puritan Victorian sense of sentimental Christian charity. Not a bad thing altogether, but I don’t know how much of that applies to Christmas today.

Gawd, I think way too damn much.

Anyway, so I go to the stores and I start casting about for material ways to show my love. This is a sickness but so many of us have it there’s no point seeking a cure. Not really knowing how to show my love in earthy daily ways that forge strong bonds, I reflexively, and probably as a typical male and/or consumer-culture citizen, put store in the giving of gifts or more precisely, the focused providing of wealth. I give not just things, but things the person given to will really enjoy having.

And in that moment of acquiring some desirable object or other, of imagining the moment when it becomes a part of and enriches the life of someone I love, my heart fills, and I’m standing there in an aisle at Best Buy surrounded by clamshell-encased technology with a water balloon in my chest about to explode and pink edges forming in my eyes.

But it passes. Suppression of emotion must be a survival trait: It happens so readily and without a thought.

It’s followed by a sort of peace -– mission accomplished but to a much greater degree, a general thankfulness that I am in a position to celebrate the season more or less as everyone else does, especially if I don’t struggle with it. My heart goes out to those who cannot – the poor, and the unloved, and to those who are losing their jobs. Sure, you could say that’s the spirit, or part of it. But that isn’t seasonal, really. I can afford a day off and an extra meal and a shiny gizmo or two. That isn’t seasonal either. I’m thankful all the time. Maybe a little bit more now, because I can duck out of the cold. But I still think of children who never really get presents. It all makes for a complex emotional cocktail. What do you do with it?

Happy St. Stephen's Day

We went to the Christmas Eve service. My mother was visiting, and it was important to me to go find a local one and go with her. We all went to a little old Episcopal church near here, founded in 1856 (that’s truly venerable for these parts), small and wooden and peak-roofed and decorated with Greek Orthodox artwork. It was a little old place with a little old choir made up of little old people and full of celebrants who may or may not have been regulars, very small town stuff. We three men tried to sing bass when the hymnal provided it and just the melody otherwise. My guys, who aren’t church-goers anymore either and were baptized Presbyterian anyway, found the experience sort of new and interesting if not strange. Somehow I got the giggles. Really not supposed to get the giggles in church, especially when you’re old and mature like me, and I got in trouble with my wife for it. But what the hell, it’s Christmas, it’s a joyous time! Too joyous to recite the congregation’s part of the Eucharist in such dour and dreadful tones, but that’s how Episcopalians do it. All my kid had to do was add the tiniest bit of inflection to his voice and I was off giggling again. And then we went up for Communion, and I tried to give instruction but you know how hard that can be when it’s something you learned as a child and just do. So I knelt there with the wafer a little bit and the priest got to my son first, and he didn’t know what to do and didn’t pop that wafer into his mouth soon enough, so it got grabbed and dipped in the wine and he didn’t get to drink from the cup and was all disappointed afterwards and wanted to go back around but I didn’t let him.

Everyone has beliefs and the beliefs of thoughtful people are true for them and due full respect. I don’t tell my sons what to believe, I only tell them what I believe. It doesn’t happen to include a God at this time but my outlook on the universe is sort of mechanistic. Other viewpoints are equally valid, so long as they are arrived at honestly. My kids’ sort of disdain for religion is due to their callow youthfulness, I think, and will mellow with age. Who knows, they may become believers, as they find ways to fill the spaces they discover within themselves. Whatever truly works is good. Meanwhile I suppose I’m a hypocrite for going through the motions at a church service. But at Christmastime I enjoy it. The reasons are buried within my psyche and do not really require a lot of analysis. My boys got exposure to a part of their own culture, both at the family level and in a broader sense. All the observations they had the opportunity to make are theirs to use as they see fit.

In other news, the kid that made me laugh has become a big opera buff. Even put a few classic operas on his Christmas list (and got ‘em). The other one is developing a healthy taste for jazz and for classical music, and insists I read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People now that Christmas is over with. It’s his Bible. He’s sixteen. Kids these days.

Now it’s St. Stephen’s Day (“Bright the stones which bruise thee gleam, sprinkled with thy life-blood's stream”), or Boxing Day in some parts, or, around here, Kid With A Retail Job Has To Work Nine Hours Day while the rest of us kick around wads of wrapping paper and eat leftovers.

Wie treu sind deine Blätter

Paula requested a picture.

As usual the thing is about twice as tall as me. Every year I discover how much stronger my sons have become. Not so long ago I did pretty much all the work of hauling it and setting it up, with assistance that could best be described as willing. Recent years it has almost gone up by itself. Once up, I string the lights, as that takes a combination of tactics, long arms and acrophilia that haven't yet entirely passed along. Then the Miz takes over and the decorating happens.

Why don't I help decorate it? There is no certain answer. I don't mean to leave that part be, but I have increasingly complex reactions to the Christmas season and the Miz has learned not to wait for me to gear up for it. I don't really get into Christmas until a few days beforehand -- yeah, like now. Until then, I am full of emotions, most of them variants of depression, as well as a weave of procrastination and preoccupation that accomplishes nothing helpful, not to mention my increasing disdain for the religion of consumption that is this particular festival's most visible hallmark. But a time comes when all that begins to pass, and the beauty of the tree, its needles green and true, helped along by some seasonal music by Buxtehude, soaks into my soul, along with a sort of peace, and it all finally begins to make a little sense.

New Post if by "Post" we mean "Whine"

This title was directly ripped off from Roy. I changed it a little so as to be guilty of a lesser form of plagiarism. Much worse than George Harrison's when he allegedly borrowed the tune of the Chiffons' "He's So Fine" for his big hit "My Sweet Lord". I think they went overboard on that. I was listening to country the other day and heard what I swore was a country rendition of "Shooting Star" (Bad Company) except they'd made some major changes, it wasn't the same song at all, and I realized, huh, that's a total rip off. Yet so far as I know no one's said a word about it.

I looked up old George on Wiki and I thought it said he was an influential satirist but no, they said sitarist. If I had a sharper wit I'd make something of that, needles to say.

So anyway my employer, a division of IMC that was supposed to lead the corporation into a new marketing space by acting like a start-up, instead acted like a start-up run by a corporation and went through some pseudorandom head cuts and the heads cut included mine. But I still have an office and go to staff because I am still an employee until Jan 2. This is to provide me some benefit for being full-time employed throughout the year, has to do with bonuses and health insurance etc.

It was fun to sit in staff yesterday and hear the boss say we're in pretty good shape, got allocated this many millions of dollars, and though we're headcount constrained we can hire contractors and consultants as needed. Needles to say, I mean needless, I very nearly pointed out that contractors generally cost more than in-house engineers unless of course your staff is expected to keep shrinking. But I said nothing. It's unprofessional to be snarky and besides, the remaining heads need to figure that out for themselves and take steps. Some did so a few months ago and have jobs in other divisions. I now wish I was as smart as them.

My whine is that I am now in my last week. The holiday season effectively shuts everything down, so there will be no more interviews and hiring decisions after this week until I am officially out. So to stay employed, to stay within the inconstant embrace of the mother corporation, the people I've been talking to need to decide to hire me within the next few days. No one's said yet they won't, but no one's said they will either, and Christmas is right around the corner, and I just haven't been able to get my mind into it, and my wife has run the numbers and determined we can't afford for me to be unemployed after all, and it's cold and rainy outside, and when viewed from the outside with the path ahead rapidly crumbling, the world looks very cold indeed. Yes, I have many blessings to count, but I have also often looked at the world through the eyes of my inner homeless person, aware that but for a few lucky chances I'd be at my rightful place under a blue tarp at the river, watching the rain hit the water, and wondering what the hell I was supposed to do.

There are so many ways I could explore that theme.

One of them would require a very rugged typewriter.

I am still trying to produce the Christmas-gift DVD. Never mind the details, I've been working on this thing for months. It overtaxes the old desktop I got maybe five years ago. Finally, I appropriated yesterday the machine my son and I rebuilt last year. Cleared a space on the backroom desk and set it up. It is a Core Duo with a big SATA hard drive and is working out much better. Wish I'd done it months ago. Last night I was up until two trying to get video to render. Still getting errors and errors, but I am getting them faster, and that helps.

My coordination of the Christmas tree pick-up fundraiser is working out, at least. We make a couple grand off of that typically, or used to, to pay for badges and supplies and defray the cost of summer camp etc. But every year, sales are down. People have artificial trees these days and don't need the Boy Scouts to come round after the holidays and take their trees away for a small donation. Those small donations add up but they don't add up like they used to. Maybe next year we'll station scouts at a few tree lots to solicit sign-ups. The grocery store isn't yielding enough customers. We have learned that every shift needs a cute new scout to offset the older cynical scout, and that properly asked, people will make donations even if they don't have a tree. But still.

Tree and Leave

As we have done for thirteen years, we went up to Pollock Pines today to cut our tree at a family-owned, minimally maintained tree farm. My son took a hatchet because he felt like chopping things. My other son grabbed a measuring pole, even though we never need one because we always get trees that are longer than the pole. I carried the saw. I watched both the hatchet and the pole – really a length of PVC pipe – swing through the air as we went down the path between the trees. Boys never change.

“You have a battle axe,” I said. “And you a pike.”

“What’s that? Your battle saw?”

“My war saw. It’s a Polish weapon.”

Thirteen or fourteen feet of noble fir for thirty-three bucks. We’re going to need deals like that for awhile now. Last week my division went through its warned-against downsizing and I was among those hit. I am now looking for a job within a shrinking company at a time of year when budgets are short and staffing is static. If I don’t find one in the next two weeks or so, my twelve years four months as an engineer for Infamous Megamultinational Corporation will come to an end.

Seniority? Accomplishment? Capability? If you are familiar with high-tech you know they mean nothing. It is always about cutting headcount to make a number, and selecting whichever head happens to be in this bucket or that box for the bad news.*

Are there other high-tech sorts of jobs in California’s third-largest metropolitan area? Maybe a few. Not more than a few. And there is no shortage of engineer types vying for them. It will be a very interesting year, this one coming up. But meantime we will have a merry holiday season. Got a bunch of walnut and almond for the fireplace, plenty of leftover DiSaronno from the Italy trip, and my wife’s a fabulous cook. The severance package will get us partway though the Spring. Chin up and all that, what.

* - There is always much more to it than that, of course, but I never learned how to be popular on the junior high school playground.

Credit Cards Roasting on an Open Fire

Look, I don't follow the news much anymore. It doesn't help my immediate life much if I do. I got enough going on, trying to position myself at this nutty corporation so I am always perceived as having value, balancing productivity against my innate laziness, coming up with actionable ideas re novel writing, learning to write creativelike (though I'll never touch Raymond Chandler's pure pulp poetry), doing a thing or two around the house so the entire family edifice doesn't come a-crashing down, and being under the constant surveillance of my inner demons, I got enough of all that and more for the news to matter much to me. I especially get cheesed off when I overhear people talking about news that isn't worth a moment's notice anyway, national-scale gossip about some damn TV star or sports anti-hero.

But! What the flip are we doing to our country? I heard driving in that there is a big credit crunch hammering the economy, and that Citigroup Inc., one of the big banking thingies, has been bailed out by a huge investment from Abu Dhabi. Or the way I look at it, our profligate buying on credit has us teetering like a poorly loaded cargo ship and only a big heavy line from the Arabs is keeping us from rolling over and sinking. The Chinese have bought much of us up. The Arabs are continuing to do more and more of the same. The only thing that keeps me from sweating in panic is that the Chinese and the Arabs are not natural allies. I mean, it's not like one of them has a resource the other one wants, giving them both incentive to cooperate. Surely there's no reason to imagine a consortium of next-generation world leaders slavering over the big fat pig that is increasingly on the block and sharpening their knives for a feast. No, no worries about that.

Who's to blame? All of us, I guess. All of us who maintain deep lines of credit, who don't pay off our houses so we can instead buy SUVs, who keep our economy buzzing by enriching the middle men who sell us plastic electronic gizmos manufactured on another continent and that really don't do a lot to enrich our lives in return. What does that shiny new iPhone really do for you? Just more shit to learn how to do, and you know it will break before you adapt to it enough so that it becomes a true enhancement. And if you didn't have a credit card you would never have been able to buy the damn thing in the first place. Would that really be a loss?

All right, so worrying about yet another foreign investment may sound like so much paranoid nativism. Don't we want a truly open global economy and isn't this another step towards reaching it? Maybe, perhaps, I don't know. It just doesn't feel right. And as I not only witness but personally participate in the continuing shift of some of the most productive elements of our economy -- manufacturing -- to factories and business parks in distant countries, and compare the focus and willingness to work over there with the attitude of millions of Americans who collect welfare and live in houses built by underpaid illegal immigrants, I can't help but expect we are setting ourselves up for a fall of historic proportions. Was it Nixon who shifted the dollar from being based on gold to being based on oil? Was it really to prevent Saddam selling oil in euros that we went to war? I doubt that, and I don't know why I should care that oil is sold for a basket of currencies and not just dollars. I don't know anything, in other words. But I don't think my concern is based solely in ignorance.

So here we are starting that special season when we show our love by buying people stuff and waiting until we get our meager income tax returns months later to pay for it. The connection between that and the finer points of the Christian mythology completely escape me. I like Christmas, parts of it. But the decorations and the canned music and the sales and above all the concern of commentators over the importance of "consumer confidence", which is nothing more than an exhortation to treat consumerism as some kind of social or moral or at least patriotic duty, they all make me want to just visit with family, play games, eat a lot and be careful not to buy a damn thing.

I don't know if this post was going somewhere, but this is it. Time to, uh, work now.

Merry Christmas II

The news won't let go of the church in Queens that was burgled of its collection during a Christmas Mass. It's given the press an opportunity to do what it does best: create clever headlines laced in moral outrage. But the cash was there, and to someone who would take it, the fact that it's Christmas wouldn't stop them. Hell, he was probably angry that it was Christmas and he had nothing better to do than steal from a church. Being a compassionate soul, I wish him a long prison term in which to dwell on his self-loathing.

I've always believed that I live in a crime-free neighborhood. It's very quiet and we live at the end of a long-ish dead-end street. No thief with an ounce of self-preservation would venture into a trap like this to burgle anyone. They always look for an alternate escape route.

So I thought. About four o'clock Christmas morning my wife was awakened by headlights down in the cul-de-sac sweeping across our windows. Now that she was awake, she got up and turned off our outdoor lights and morphed into Santa for a minute to fill my stocking, and went back to bed.

The next day while walking the dog, she ran into a group of neighbors and learned that in the darkness of early Christmas morning, someone had broken into two of our neighbors' cars as well as a tool shed, and made off with keys and credit cards and a thousand dollars' worth of tools. Major big hassle for people. They have to cancel all their cards, re-key their house, all that. And such a violation to discover on Christmas morning!

Thought Number One: We're not so safe. This habit of never locking the house might not be such a good one. Not that I'm worried about anyone coming in when we're home. It's the middle-of-the-day thievery that concerns me; and even so, we really don't have anything. A computer, a DVD player, a television. Big deal. So long as they don't burn down the house, I can live with it. Would rather not have to, of course. And they're not likely to get my grandmother's silver: it's in a nondescript cardboard box in the garage, hidden in plain sight. How's that for security?

Thought Number Two: Why the tools? This is what I think. To work in construction, you need your own tools. They're a major investment. So you buy a pre-owned set from midnight tool supply. What else is a responsible, hard-working, and piss-poor family man to do? It just sucks for my neighbor. Big house notwithstanding, he's a construction worker. And as fun and easy-going as he is, I doubt he will get his replacements from midnight tool supply.

Thought Number Three: Mark all your tools. Heck, I got a cell phone for Christmas, I think I'll mark it too. So: Engraver, or soldering iron? Or just a big scrawl in fingernail polish?

Merry Christmas

The last presents are wrapped and the stockings stuffed and nothing but adrenaline keeps me from going to bed. That and the peace of this quiet moment.

Christmas Eve was always a magical time. We'd go home late from my grandparents' house, where we had opened presents, sleepily watching the night sky for that tiny sleigh, then crawl into bed with the fragrance of the tree and glittering lights lingering, maybe a sense of peace and wonder too if we had gone to the candlelight service. Contentment filled us, for tomorrow was a play day, the best play day of the year.

I loved recreating the magic for my children. Santa presents were always wrapped in special paper they never saw on anything else, stockings filled with candy and tiny toys and whimsy. Even as their belief gave way, it came back for a few fun moments in the morning. Today, there's no more pretense. The presents are all from us. But that doesn't make it much less magical, and the stockings are still full of fun, useful and silly things.

Now: It's dead quiet outside, cold and foggy, nary a sound. Even the cats are sleeping. I turned off the house Christmas lights, turned off the tree. The inside temperature hovers about sixty. All I hear is the ringing in my ears and a clock ticking.

What do I want for Christmas? That my kids have a fun day. I look at the pile under the tree and conclude they probably will. But none of this is stuff we couldn't get any other time of the year, and some of it is stuff, like clothes, that we do get other times of the year. Is that my wife and children have a fun, relaxing, somewhat magical day my only wish?

No. I'd like two things for Christmas. The small one is that every visitor to this pointless little site, whether out of accident or purpose, has a happy Christmas Day, whether or not it being Christmas means anything to you; that this day, in other words, is a good day, unmarred by troubles, family squabbles, heartaches, unsatisfied hungers, or anything else that will detract from its naturally perfect beauty. The other is a wish -- a silly and pointless wish, unfortunately -- that just for a little while every human heart has love and forgiveness for others, and is simply incapable of any malice. I wish that for a little while, no human being is able to bring himself or herself to hurt another. No matter what the circumstances. Just can't do it.

How long is a little while? How long does it take for a new habit to take hold? About three weeks? Then let's give this wish four weeks to do its work. Imagine if everyone now alive was open to look in their hearts and find a way to do what they believe they must do without allowing it to hurt anyone; and then made that kind of thinking a habit, and never looked back.

That's what I want for Christmas. We'll see what tomorrow brings. Time for me to go sleep on it.

Trees and Lights

We always go up to Pollock Pines -- it's about an hour up the hill, past Hangtown, up into where it snows. Pack a lunch and drive into the pine forest and stomp around in the mud awhile. Hey, if you live where it gets to a hundred and ten in the summertime, that's not such a bad deal.

Grab a saw and head off into the tree farm. They don't organize their trees in any way. It's just a patch of picked over forest, with many of the tree candidates growing second, third, fourth generation out of older root stock. None are perfect. All have personality. We have to throw snowballs at whoever's got the camera. It's a rule.


People complain about the price of trees. Fake trees is why the Troop always has to hustle for more fundraising business: We pick up dead trees after the holidays for a small fee and take them away. I'm coordinating it this year. Always, someone says, oh no, we have an artificial tree now, you don't have to come by any more. Well, I don't know if I'd pay sixty, eighty bucks for a little one-time tree either. Tree lot trees cost too much. But up where we go, it's four dollars per foot, and no charge over eight feet, plus a dollar for wrapping (makes it easier to haul); so we paid $33 for a fourteen footer, which is all that'll fit. I think that's a fair deal, with a family trip and horsing about in the mud in the bargain.

Got house lights up too. I make it up as I go.

Next couple three days are for traveling about to various family, taking panicky trips to the store, and unexpected periods of laziness. Everyone either have a fabulous Christmas, or a fabulous time enjoying not having Christmas!