emjayne

The Anti-Christmas Carol

This year Target sold approximately 12 gift cards every second of business hours during the week of Christmas. This holiday is one heck of a commercial animal. It was nice this year that instead of rushing to hit the post-holiday sales, I cozied up with some post-holiday theater.

We checked out the "Santaland Diaries" show at Bryant Lake Bowl tonight.  The play is based off of essays written by David Sedaris, recalling his experiences working as an elf for Macy's. We can be horrible people when we think no one is watching, but it turns out David was watching.  Closely.  He mocks himself, he mocks us, and we all laugh together.  The intermission guitarist sounded more like Slash vs. Bing Crosby, and I couldn't be more thankful.  If I heard that quasi-Christmas song about a kid wanting to get new shoes for his about-to-kick-the-bucket mother before she goes to meet Jesus I think I might have punched someone in the noggin.

And I enjoyed Pacifico while chilling out during the whole thing.  Our waiter was so mellow even though he was bustin' butt (and ducking constantly) to serve the entire theater.  Cheers to you, buddy.  Nice work. 

Being tucked away in that little theater behind the bowling alley reminded me that underneath all the wrapping paper and glitzy bows, we are all just a bunch of fruitcakes. Humans are silly creatures. There was the herd of suburban trophy wives with the acrylic nails, Tiffany necklaces, and implants and cleavage galore. A pregnant woman looked highly uncomfortable in the theater seats, yet warm and content next to her partner. A set of parents herded their teenage iPod-toting son into the theater for a 'family event.' And then there was us: two teachers, a bankruptcy paralegal, a nurse, and whatever I am. I'm sure we annoyed someone, or made someone smile, or connected somehow to those around us. It's the Bryant Lake Bowl, afterall. A fishbowl of the human race, watching something on stage to get a sense that we somehow connect with what's outside of us.

Afterwards we trudged through the slush down the street (Lake and Lyndale) to the La Bodega Tapas Bar. I am not a martini girl, but I convinced myself I could handle a Washington Apple Martini after consuming my weight in sugar cookies and chocolate the past couple of days. We ate tiramasu while talking about everything from war to vacationing in Mexico to the death of Pakistan's Bhutto. It's just good to breathe easy with good people, you know?  Plus I love the color orange, and I was surrounded by it.  Posh.  Very posh. And half empty.  We had most of the bar to ourselves. 

For just a moment I forgot that my mom announced my divorce in her mass Christmas form letter.

And we even forgot about the fact that two of us got our halls decked (I mean cars decked) with snow emergency parking tickets and received the gift of two tow trips (for two cars) to the Minneapolis impound lot today. 

Home Sweet Home

Santa brought me a cordless drill.  I had a snowball fight and tackled a teenager in the snow.  I went to Christmas Eve mass and listened to a homily by a priest with a heavy Korean accent.  I ate shrimp, sugar cookies, wild rice, deep fried turkey, ribs, potato skins, mushroom caps, cheesy potatoes, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, caramels, chili (I have to stop - I can't even comprehend what the inside of my gut looks like now).  I scraped my car, washed my car, filled it up with gas twice, and spilled powder sugar all over the backseat.  I won a game of Life by ending with $2,620,000.  I watched the movie "Christmas Story", oh, I don't know -- 42 times.  I smiled when a father/son combo hunted down a jar of cherries in the grocery store, smiled when a little girl asked me to keep an eye out for Santa before she went to bed, and smiled when I watched snowmobilers whizz through the ditches of my hometown this afternoon in freshly accumulated powder.  I wore fuzzy white socks, cozy red boots, and impractical black high heels (ever tried to step over a mound of ice in a Minneapolis street in open toed heels?  Seriously, Emily?).

But now I am home.  And I don't want to be any other place in the world.  Home sweet home, I love it.  I hope everyone had a feliz navidad.   

The Coolest Cousins Let You Consume a Bowl Full of Sugar

My two youngest cousins, Spencer and Bennett, had the joy of Christmas exploding in their bodies like a Mexican jumping bean trapped in a little box.  Bennett, on the far left, has had stitches/staples in his face three times over the past three weeks.

"Bennett, what happened to your head the last time you got stitches?" I asked.

He stopped running for a moment and said, "I ran into glass."  Bennett will be four.

The boys took a break from playing with their new air rifles to color with me. You never quite fully appreciate the gift of eyesight until a sugar-hyped four-year-old waves an Nerf air rifle in front of your face, screaming, "How does this work?!" and randomly pulling the trigger.  Anyway, while coloring, they calmly snuck away to get a treat: Lik-A-Maid packets.

I have loved Lik-A-Maid for as long as I can remember.  Pure sugar, flavored cherry and grape, with a ambiguously flavored white candy stick to lick and dip into the sugar.  So when the boys brought the packets back to me with huge smiles on their faces, I could only support their artificially-flavored-refined-sugar adventure.

They poured it into bowls and spent 3-4 minutes dipping in the candy sticks or sucking it off their fingers...

And then Bennett cocked the bowl right up to his face when my head was turned and literally dumped a cup of sugar straight into his stomach.

To me, the most wonderful thing about Christmas is that you can find the kid in you again.  You start to remember that you aren't the tired, jaded, reserved adult you think you are, and that a green mouth once in a while is a perfectly wonderful thing to have.