I took the day off yesterday.
My stated goal was to complete all of my Christmas shopping in one fell swoop, to get all of it done on a weekday during the day so, if I choose, I don't have to go back into a mall until January.
Here's where, if this were my normal life, I'd say, well, but... (I slept in too late, I missed my bus, one of the cats got sick, I didn't plan well enough etc. etc.) This is not, evidently, my normal life. I actually completed Christmas shopping yesterday, going literally from one end of the city to the other, starting at about 9:30 AM and ending at about 6.
This, mind you, included shopping for wrappings and hostess gifts.
Then I came home, and was sort of bored...so I wrapped all of the presents.
MASS QUANTITIES OF CURLING RIBBON.
I have inherited my mother's propensity for curling ribbon, it seems. Almost every package sports a lovely froth of curling ribbon, sometimes with more than one color of curling ribbon.
I swear I've gone insane. It's the 7th of December. I'm ready for Christmas. how weird is THAT?
The wrapping paper is silver, with holographic sparkles. Or it's a fine, heavy green, textured, a joy to run my fingers along. An all-purpose paper that I used up last night.Or it's a cream color with rough painted squares and gold hearts and stars.
The curling ribbon is holographic silver or gold or iridescent white. It sparkles when I turn the Christmas tree on.
The tree itself is my ficus, bedecked with lights, glass balls, and candy canes. It doesn't smell like a Christmas tree, but I don't mind too much. I figure that next year I'll actually get a real dead tree to put in the living room, because I miss the smell of a real Christmas tree.
I remember Christmas in the mountains. I'd swipe a candy cane from the tree, put on my boots, and head outside, into the snowy silence. The white at dusk would swallow me up; I'd go lie in my snow tunnel under the manzanita, perfectly protected from passing eyes, suck on my candy, and listen to the forest.
The wind, stirring the treetops. The crackle and thump of the occasional branch giving way under the weight of the snow. The burbling noises that Stellar jays make among themselves, the brush of their wings as they fly by. The far-off sound of the freeway, nearly obscured by the shush of wind through the trees.
The cold, clear nights, when the moon was full and I cried because of beauty of this blue light was too much, too perfect; the nights when it was snowing and there was no light to be had, when fat flakes would fall through the beam of the flashlight. The smell of the trees and the sharp, cold smell of snow on the ground. Waking up and going down the driveway to see what creatures had wandered by in the night.
My tunnels in the ravine that only I knew about. The bowl I made for myself in the snow, down where the quail spent their summers, underneath prickly manzanita bushes. I felt much more like a wild thing, then; I like the wildlife I imitated was out of place in the world of humans. I too startled easily, had my habitat encroached on, was vastly misunderstood.
I too spent the winter in hidden hollows, blinking sleepily as the noon sun struggled thinly over the hill.
Tell of a time you got a wish that you then wished you hadn't gottenI once did a very, very foolish piece of magick.
I wanted, with all of my being, the return of someone who had walked away from me.
He did return. I learned, to my sorrow, that I had been much, much better off without him. I learned that you cannot make anyone love you if they don't really want to. And I learned that, sometimes, when you lose someone it's far preferable if they stay lost.
how goes the war?
Forward, to victory!...oh, wait, I need to go get my blankie. can you hold on a bit?
