It's The Most Wonderful Time
Of The Year ...

This is Onnie writing. I love Christmas, always have, always will. I love everything about it -- the cheezy displays, the carbon-non-neutral lighting displays, the crowds oh the crowds so terrible that I never actually buy whatever it is I went Christmas shopping for because I start hyperventilating in crowds on a good day, the candy-cane-flavored everything, the various permutations of Nog ... seriously, I love love love Christmas, and I'm always looking forward each and every year to these too-few weeks of The Real Christmas Season (which starts the day after Thanksgiving, no earlier, thank you very much).

And pretty much every year for the past dozen years or so, right around Thanksgiving, as I'm getting in the Christmas Spirit, I think, "I wanna do something really special this Christmas." Like ...

... Hmmmm ...

... and mostly I think of stuff like making a big book of every Christmas display I see -- every year while I lived in Seattle (1995-2000), I planned on going out with my camera and taking pictures of all the cool Xmas displays in my neighborhood (there were quite a few) ... but I never got around to taking more than a token handful of photos. You get home from work, it's dark, it's rainy, and taking out the old Yashica and going for a walk in the cold and wet is much less enticing when it's staring you in the face.

Or one year I decided I'd watch every Christmas special and movie ever made (or at least that I could find at my local Hollywood Video), one for each day of Advent. I made it through "Rudolph" and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" pretty easily, and of course "Miracle on 34th Street" and "It's a Wonderful Life," but then I made the mistake of attempting to sit through "A Carol Christmas" on Lifetime or the Hallmark Channel or something ...

Anyway, it's really easy to find reasons to go "Bah, Humbug" at this time of the year, whether or not you believe in anything Christmas is supposed to be about (besides spending too much, eating too much, and complaining about the weather), and I'd be lying if I said I'm all elf cheer 24/7 just because the radio's playing "It's A Marshmallow World" for the 437th time.

But I still get teary-eyed whenever Kris Kringle speaks Dutch to that little girl. And I always will.

My husband is a big kid with Reindeer Dreams and a Chocolate Yule Log in the cupboard. Isn’t he cute?
Colyn (Email) - 27 11 07 - 22:00