December 8

glass shards that’s for remembrance

I spent all day walking around downtown doing my Christmas shopping, which I like to do all in one day because it makes me feel more like an elderly lady from a small town in England who goes in to London once a year to do her shopping and then staggers home on the train with a load of parcels, “parcels” I tell you not “bags” or “packages,” and possibly sees a murder happening in a car of a train going the opposite direction and then, mirabile dictu (this is the kind of thing I’m pretty sure elderly ladies from small towns in England say all the time), manages to solve the murder. Ok, so that was Miss Marple, but my point stands: All at once, in the town center, is the best way to do your Christmas shopping. If we were meant to do our shopping online or in big box stores, we wouldn’t have been given souls, not that I believe we actually were given souls or that there is any such thing as a soul or anyone to do the giving, but you know what I mean.

a snow globe
in a snow globe
in an evidence locker

Other Christmas traditions I feel strongly that everyone who observes Christmas should observe:

• You must have a real Christmas tree. Don’t fight me on this because you will lose.
• You should hang up a stocking no matter how old you are. True, there’s no such thing as Santa—I figured this out through sheer force of logic when I was three and still don’t understand how anyone maintains faith in Santa for longer than that—but either someone who lives with you should fill the stocking for you or you should fill it for yourself because you deserve to reach deep into a woolly toe for a treat on Christmas morning.
• You should sing Christmas carols at some point during the season, I don’t care how, why, or with whom, but I’m pretty sure that something about singing Good King Wenceslas winds your brain up for another year. And you don’t want your brain to just wind down in the middle of the year, do you?

a squirrel scrambling
across the roof…
I still feel imaginary