As TGOTS mentioned in her post, we are both about to bail for a few days of, as the lovely Karen Carpenter so oddly put it, “Christmasing.”
I’m generally sort of cranky about Christmas in the weeks leading up to it; my family is big, there are a lot of presents to buy and wrap and mail, all that shopping doesn’t fit with my general anti-consumption mindset, and so forth. But once in a while I get a fleeting moment of genuine glee, an actual bit of pre-Christmas happiness wafting through my heart.
I got one of those moments last night. We were socked with snow this weekend, with a good 18 inches landing on our lives. Last night was trash night, so I had to shovel a route for the trash cans to travel down our long driveway (which we generally ignore in winter, parking at the end close to the road). So there I was, in the dark, alone, just my breath and the scrape of the shovel and the thwump of the snow — and I looked up, and my neighbors’ houses were twinkling and colorful, and the stars were out, and the night was crisp, and I just beamed. “Christmas!” I said aloud, to no one in particular. Then back to the shoveling.
I found more joy this morning, courtesy of the radio. Not Christmas music, but two happymaking songs: “Dancing Queen” — which will forever take me back to the living room of my dorm, junior year of college, and an incredible lip-synch performance by three of my dearest friends at our dorm talent show, an episode that deserves fuller description at some later point — and “Up Around the Bend.” The latter just makes me happy in the way that most CCR songs make me happy, and I drove along in the sun and the snow and it’s my last day of work before a nice few days off and — well. Christmas has its moments.
TGOTS and I will be back next week, unless she gets itchy while she’s with her family. My family has dial-up, so I’ll be blogging only in my mind.