A Bungee Christmas Season

After getting over myself and everyone, I got rare and wonderful good news today and the Jingle Bells came back. It seems to me that everyone's falling a bit into the old Christmas feeling, smiling a bit more, etc. A lot of Dickensian comraderie has reached us this season. So I cleaned, moved things around and even decorated today. I really pushed it & I'll pay for it tomorrow, but while I felt it, I went with it. Put the holiday music channel on, hauled out the holly, hung the beaten up old paper decorations and hung everyone's stockings. The tree will take a few days, so it waits. But I'm well onthe way. This year, I think, I'm going all out. I think I just friggin need to have an overdone, "every string of garland hanging" kind of Christmas, ya know? I'm talking around the walls of the living room, over pictures and clocks- every bit of available space yells Hello!!! Christmas!!! Colors and light everywhere! So that when you take it down, the house looks Scandinavian sparse (I can live sparsely- Scottish and Swedish blood doesn't lend itself to Rococo boudoirs anyway).

But that sparcity is a beauty to me, too, in the New Year. When you have the bleak harsh light of January pour in on that freshly stripped room, it feels like a new year.

Anyway, as my SIL Mac says, "But I diverse."

Tonight my BFF (haha- that term) calls from where she's spending the holidays and is living thru an Oedipal Saw movie with her son. Down, down, went the spirits as I sympathized by recalling scream-inducing holidays with my family, most them dead now. And the only time I see my brothers is at funerals anymore, and they sometimes don't even do those. The last time I saw a nephew was also the first time I met him in his 22 years, and that was at his father's funeral; my oldest brother. So yeah, family kicks your ass like nothing else in life. Jobs come and go, friends and lovers too, but family is there til you're all dead. No matter how close or far you are, no matter how long you go without seeing them, they're family. And they know all your buttons. They can gut you like a mackeral. It's gotta be worse when it's your own kids who are torturing you on purpose. I mean, you gave them life, and they hate you so much as to say these things?

So yeah, it's been a bungie kinda deal. This may be a bungee Christmas season. I've seen them before.