Happy Holidays

A little tardy holiday greetings from me to you...I've had limited access to the Internets.

My best wishes to all of you. I hope 2008 gave you many things to celebrate and 2009 offers hope of better things to come.

My thanks to all of you who stop in here and read or share your thoughts. You have helped enrich my life.

This photo is a stand of sycamore trees near my parent's home in Southern Illinois, which I took on Christmas Day

O Holy Night

I heard my favorite Christmas carol today, O Holy Night. It's a shame the third verse isn't sung very often as it's the most powerful...and the most revolutionary:

Chains shall He break, for the slave is our brother
And in His name all oppression shall cease.

Oops.

Don't think the church has quite got the ceasing oppression in His name part down. Maybe sometime in the next couple thousand years.

As Gilbert Chesterson said, Christianity hasn't failed...it just hasn't been tried.

Bow Down Before the Power of Santa

I'm not in much of a Christmas spirit this year...I don't really have a good reason (other than perhaps the let down of not having Eli here. We had a truly wonderful visit but it just doesn't seem worth celebrating without a child around. I don't have a religious reason to celebrate it. When I announced the other day to the LTR I didn't think I'd decorate this year he was shocked...and disappointed. This surprised me greatly. Every year I talk of my grandiose plans for decorating, which always includes getting the largest tree I can fit under our 12 foot ceiling. Each year he ribs me for it, protesting and complaining. So can he possibly be surprised when I decide if I'm just going to decorate for my own edification it's not worth it? Apparently, he can be. So he says he's going to do some decorating which means I'm going to have to end up doing it anyway, because you know he just won't do it the right way. Sigh.

And what I'm really dreading most of all is the shopping. Basically my family just does each other's shopping at Christmas time. We trade lists and go to town, ticking off each item. It's just not fun. I tried suggesting last year to my mother that we just buy for the kids or, at most, the kids plus each buy for one adult whose name we pick out of a hat. She looked as if she had seen a Grinch. I feel like Charlie Brown at the beginning of his Christmas special...I just don't get it anymore. Thus ends the longest parenthetical in the history of Scott's Take).

But it doesn't matter. We must all bow down before the power of Santa.

My Favorite Christmas Song

On oh so many levels.

A Christmas Intervention

Santa Claus is an enabler. And we can't stop the madness.

My family is out of control when it comes to Christmas. Since my sister and I were kids, my parents went all out at Christmas time, especially on presents. This was great when we were young, but it hasn't stopped. Christmas giving is like a crack addiction in my family. It feels good and we can't stop until we run out of money. And my sister and I have become addicted too. We're like the Osbornes whacked out on spiked eggnog.

Every year it's the same. We exchange lists and then we go do each other's shopping. I cringe when I hear those five dreaded words: I need your Christmas list. Then I'm obliged to spend days browsing for things I think I might want. When I do find something online I want I have to quench my desire to put it in my shopping cart right then. You mean I have to wait weeks to maybe get this? Thus Christmas robs me of my Internet given right for instant gratification.

But the worst thing about my family's out of control Yuletide is the sibling rivalry of giving. Each year my sister and I have an unspoken competition to see who can get my parents the "best" gift. It's always below the surface, but palpable after I arrive and disgorge my Christmas booty and place it under the tree. Then she and I stand there pretending to admire the tree but really sizing up each others gifts, wondering which one of us will have delivered "the" gift to Mom and Dad that they will remember.

And she's not above tricking me. I called her one year ahead of time to talk about what we each were getting the folks. I was hoping for a truce. Hell, they even suspend shooting wars sometimes for Christmas. But she's a sneaky Sis, and she led me to believe it was going to be a run of the mill Christmas. So, I show up with my gift wrapped items from Target and Macy's, confident that this year Christmas wouldn't get out of hand. It was not to be. I realized this as my Dad opened a large framed photo of him standing next to my sister, dressed in her cap and gown at her high school graduation, with a poem about the lifelong relationship between a daughter and her father. As the tears rolled down my Father's cheeks I looked at her and thought "fuckin' bitch."

(This year, though, I got her. I realized what to do this summer when I was home and my Dad and I got out the remote control hovercraft that I got my nephew last year that had sat unused since...Christmas. Operating the craft and watching my Dad, I had an epiphany: the Old Man wants toys! So this year I got him a remote control helicopter. Take that, Sis.)

So, we need an intervention. We're in a gift giving binge and Christmas is the trigger.

We don't need the 12 Days of Christmas, we need the 12 Steps of Christmas. Can somebody help? Mr. Grinch, where are we when we need you?

Christmas Sounds

The house is now filled with the sounds of a three-year-old playing cars and occasionally voicing a truncated Christmas carol: "Frosty da snowMen! Happy soul! Core-cob pipe but-don nodse eyes made outta toal!"

This morning he helped me put ornaments on the second floor Christmas tree.

It's going to be a lovely Christmas

It'll be a Blue Christmas

I guess we won't be seeing Rudolph this Christmas...