It’s weird that Christmas is this coming weekend. I guess it just seems like it’s still November in some ways. Of course, I am no dummy. I see the Christmas lights on people’s houses; I go to stores and do take note of all the holiday shit and the sales and red and green wrapping paper; and I do smell the cookies baking. Lord, do I smell the cookies. Seems like everyone in this office spent the entire weekend with cookie cutters and frosting—two different batches of cookies were brought in today for the “enjoyment” of the “team.”

Still, it really crept up fast this year. I am excited for the holiday though, because this is the first Christmas I am spending with G. We just assembled the old fake tree last night as we watched National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and we hung exactly one strand of 100 old-school, large-bulb lights outside across the porch. I love how simplistic yet colorful our Christmas display is. I love that we didn’t get the animated white wire reindeer, or the white icicle lights. Hell, no. We have a wreath on the door and 100 colored lights, period. We are making a statement: No Reason to Overdo Things, You Know… Jesus is Getting Tired of The Way Things Are Going.

We still need to decorate the tree. We’re thinking of doing it with blue lights. I never throw out a strand of colored lights. In fact, I have a collection of Christmas lights that fills about three Rubbermaid thousand-gallon tubs, so there is quite a variety of colors to choose from. But a tree with all blue lights sounds perfect to me. I love how soothing blue lights are. The blue lights we will use on the tree once hung around the perimeter of my bedroom when I was in college. I had them up year-round, and would sit down there listening to Jeff Buckley and Mozart with candles lit and just zone out. (Zoning out, besides being good for relaxation, was a great time to come up with bad poetry, as well.)

I have to buy 2 more presents and I am finished with the shopping. This year, I am being kind of cheap with presents. I can’t help it, I simply don’t have the money. No matter where I try to cut corners I seem to wind up with $4.16 in my checking account the day before payday. I remember there was a time where I’d never dip below about $600 even after paying my bills. Oh, to return to those halcyon days. What was I doing? Oh yeah… I was not paying a mortgage and large car payment and credit card bills. That’s what. I was also getting great business giving HJ’s at the bus station, but I got older and uglier and the johns no longer wanted to pay that kinda green for primo palm action. I’m lucky if I can make a $20 for a basic spitjob these days.

I jest.

I have no spit left after all the meth. I use the warmin’ jelly to get the best tips.

What was I talking about again?

…

Oh, yes, Christmas! Well, if we are talking about Christmas I should mention I made three whole batches of Christmas cookies myself, yesterday! Ho ho ho, indeed! They were two packages of the Nestle Toll House Pre-Cut-Out Sugar Cookie dough—complete with two packages of frosting; just snip the corner off and you can squeeze out the frosting all you want—and one of some chocolate chip cookies. I love these chocolate chip cookies because they have “swirled” chips in them—I think they’re half milk chocolate and half white chocolate within each chip. I don’t care, really, because they look REALLY pretty for store-bought dough cookies. Anyway, I made the sugar cookies and decorated them meticulously while I watched “The Two Towers” on TNT. I felt really festive and Betty Crocker-like. I don’t make cookies from scratch, ever. One time when I was still in middle school I attempted some Toll House chocolate chips, and didn’t pay attention to the fact that you need to add ingredients in a special order, and just dumped all the ingredients together and just mixed. The cookies came out flat and terrible. So when they started selling ready-made dough, I was crazy about that. Problem solved—for the rest of my life! Yay!

I also felt the elated “problem solved” feeling when they came out with Always With Wings. But that’s a whole other story, and not at all Christmas-y. No one wants to hear about a girl and her period on Christmas!