Tag Archives: Christmas excesses

December 26

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December 26

We’re all mindful of the date. Christmas has been done.
Jingle bells are now passé. “Noel” has had its run.
Mall Santas can be irascible for another year
until Christmas season once again draws near
and they must again be jovial, mindful of the tykes
who must be assuaged with their promises of bikes
or quantities of other toys as parents hovering near
make lists of wished-for plunder they’re meant to overhear.
Cash registers the whole mall through will jingle jangle jingle
as crowds of Christmas shoppers brave the crowds to mingle
and provide their little darlings with all that they desire.
So do stores and Santa Claus every year conspire
to insure our economy continues to expand.
So as he bows and leaves the stage, give Santa Claus a hand!

 

Prompt words today are jovial, mindful, bow, irascible and quantity. Images by Chris Murray and Mike Arney on Unsplash.

Christmas Cookies

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Click on photos to read the tale and increase photo size.

Christmas cookies alll ready for guests.
Christmas cookies after someone leaves the door open and Diego sneaks into the house.

Holiday Reprieve

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Holiday Reprieve

Do you approach with trepidation
all this Christmas titillation?
When all its plans start to congeal—
the presents, decorations, meal,
all the usual preparations
and the usual perturbations—
perhaps you need to curb frustration
by taking off on a vacation.

Life is short. Don’t hesitate
if you’ve no wish to celebrate.
So much of Christmas’s elation
is a mere regurgitation
of the things, year after year,
we’ve done to try to raise some cheer.
If neither presents opened nor
those Yule carolers at your door
bring you peace and joy and cheer
even at this time of year,

more ways than one to cook a goose.
Open the cage and let him loose,
then pack a bag and take off, too,
to Zanzibar or Katmandu.
Go find a place that is less spangled,
simpler and less Xmas-angled.
Go examine life’s ecologies,
and I’ll make your apologies.

Prompts today are life, congeal, usual, trepidation and celebrate.

Last Time I Went A-Wassailing

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Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

Last Time I Went A-Wassailing

Having voracious appetites for whimsy and for wine,
and although the custom is not culturally mine,
I find passing the wassail cup  simply too divine.
Sadly, with each passing, I’m increasingly supine
until the floor once under foot ends up under my spine.

Asked to leave the party when I got out of line,
I thought I’d go a-caroling somewhere except online.
Alas, I lost my Wassail cup near Hollywood and Vine,
and afterwards my harmonies started to decline.
So if you dare to venture out and take the same bus line,
 if you find a Wassail cup, it’s certain to be  mine!!

Prompt words today are wine, voracious, wassail, and whimsy.

Wassailing is a British tradition, but how it was initially performed seems to have varied by region. The most modern version involves wishing good cheer and health in the coming year to the people around you, usually while drinking a warm spiced punch. The wassail beverage likely started as a hot, sweetened mead or wine. Nowadays, the punch is a bit more complex, with fall spices, fruit juices, and sometimes other liquors added to the mulled wine or cider.

Christmas Gifts

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Click on first photo to increase the size of all and to read captions.

With our Xmas dolls, in Betty’s green checked bedroom.
A teenage Xmas in the new house. Note the giant shell hairdryer.
Dressed up for Xmas by my older sister.

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My mother was the hero of Christmas. Decorated waste paper baskets from the church bazaar, that “Skunk” game I’d been begging for, played once and never again, that one last doll when I was eleven, purchased more for her own nostalgia than my need. The tree went up as the orange and brown of Thanksgiving was disposed of, and the jubilation of Christmas stretched on until New Years, when the tree came down.

For my dad, however, the end of Christmas was never quick enough. The tree lights hurt his eyes, he said, but I always wondered if there was more to it than that: some sparsity of the Christmases of his past that had broken its spirit in the heart of a young boy raised on a South Dakota prairie that furnished few rewards, let alone extravagent Christmases, but still expecting more, perhaps, than an orange in the toe of his sock. A pony, maybe, or a stick of hard candy, a jaunty new blue winter stocking cap or simply a mother  more given to Christmas than his own busy midwife of a mother, always off to somewhere else.

In our mad months of enthusiasm over tinsel, ornaments resurrected from the attic and the mystery of wrapped boxes, we overlooked the remnants of that little boy’s pain, but some part of each of us, detecting it by some subconscious radar, never gave up trying to heal those hurts of former Christmases with tiny Black Hills Gold tie tacks, new wallets and papier-mâché sculptures meant to prod him from his apathy. It never quite worked, except for that sculpture, ugly in its craziness, laughed and pondered over, then left to age and weather on their unroofed patio until its demise, giving one small hope of reviving a small boy’s wonder over Christmas and the unexpected. His forbearance over the years made him, perhaps, another subtler hero of Christmas, just in his putting up with it.

The prompt words for today are orange, game, hero, jubilation and quick.  Here are the links:

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/rdp-tuesday-prompt-orange/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/09/11/fowc-with-fandango-game/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/hero/
https://dailyaddictions542855004.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/daily-addictions-2018-week-36/jubilation
https://dversepoets.com/2018/09/10/quadrille-64-quickwrite-something/

Post Christmas: Falling to Hell in a Hand Basket by Kim Scaravelli (Reblog)

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 I found this blog post so hilarious I just had to reblog it.  I’ve put a link to Kim’s blog at the bottom.  I recommend you read her past posts and then hit the “follow” button so you don’t miss out on any of her future posts.

Post Christmas: Falling to Hell in a Hand Basket

kimscaravelli

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December 28, 2014

2014-12-28 15.18.17To quote my sweet little old granny, I have “fallen to hell in a hand basket” since December 25th. I have been wearing my Roots sweatpants for three consecutive days.  I no longer even entertain the pretense that I might eat a non-candied fruit or a vegetable NOT deep-fried and/or dipped in ranch dressing. There are candy wrappers on my bedside night stand and I’m dropping Baileys in my morning coffee (don’t judge me!). December 18th was the last day I walked further than the distance from my front door to my car. My belly button now looks up at me when I sit and my muffin top has morphed into a full-sized Bundt cake. The cellulite dimples on my ass resemble a dot-to-dot activity page from a kid’s colouring book and I’m pretty sure that if I could reach them with a pen, they could be joined into the image of Santa’s village, complete with sleigh and reindeer.

During the past few days, I have read nothing but Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl and a slew of trashy magazines pulled from Christmas stockings. As a result, my vocabulary has expanded to include over a dozen new ways to say ‘vagina’ and I have a newfound understanding of the mating rituals of boy-band members, Family Channel stars, and the Kardashians. Sadly, I no longer know what’s going on in Syria (although who really does?), why oil prices are dropping, or what my voting inclinations might be in the next federal election. Oh well…

It’s Post-Christmas; a surreal netherland vaguely linking the manic shopping and visiting and partying madness of December 1-25 with the disciplined repenting of January. Come New Year I will strap myself to a stair climber and press pause only to eat carrot sticks and dry quinoa. While scaling those endless steps to lean perfection, I will make a plan to pay off my VISA and my line of credit and catch up on 20+ years of unused RRSP contribution limits. 2015 will be the year when I finally clean out the basement rec room… and my bedroom closet… and the backyard shed! I will be better, faster, stronger than ever before!!! But that’s still a few days from now…

Perhaps I should start with baby steps; tiny progressive movements towards adult behaviour and appropriate hygiene.  I will focus on an attainable goal that doesn’t require too much mental or physical exertion… I will shave my legs!  Yes.  This seems like a very good idea.  After all, there are still sort-of-social things happening.  While I cannot imagine ever again donning pantyhose, history tells me that such things sometimes occur on New Year’s Eve.  I should make a pre-emptive move and mow down the kneecap-to-ankle forest before it becomes a situation requiring input from professionals!  I will begin with a soak in the tub…

Nothing like soaking in the tub with a nice glass of wine… and another selection from the trashy magazine mountain under the Christmas tree.   I think I will skip the whole leg-shaving thing in favour of a bit more wine (educational note to readers: always bring the bottle into the bathroom!).  After all, I’m putting on my Christmas jammies when I get out of the tub, so what’s the point really?

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