Major Sigh of Relief

By 9 tonight we’ll all be sitting in front of  the TV again and it'll be  as if those crazy endless weeks between Halloween and now never happened. Hard to imagine..Two little people slept over here the night before last so we were wakened at 5:30 yesterday – after being wakened at 3:00 when the smaller one climbed out of his crib and wordlessly presented himself at our bedside. “Oh God!” was all I could think, but before I could do anything David reached over, scooped him up and with one motion landed him in the open spot between the two of us where he made a little nest of his blankie, sighed happily and fell dead asleep.It was his big brother who woke at 5:00 but he was good. He waited til 5:30 to wake the rest of us. We really appreciated this since getting them to bed the night before had involved an unusually lovely combination of sobbing, cajoling and negotiating (we were the ones sobbing ha ha.)   That's why at almost midnight when it seemed like they might be at least temporarily 'down,' I got out the whipped cream that I had made to go with our dessert of strawberries and ladled some on top of more strawberries– pretty good! - then spooned some into a mug of hot milk laced with whiskey – even better! – then finally dug out a dusty bottle of Kahlua, added a few heavenly dollops of the peaky stuff, zapped the whole thing in the microwave and sat down next to the Christmas tree (still not exactly decorated) to read my book for an hour. I was afraid to actually go to bed; afraid of being waked by the little ones which of course I was anyway.But hey I did sleep in the end and in the morning the little ones left and the sun climbed and the sun sank and cooking began and wrapping ended and we finally finally finally got all the ornaments on the tree and now the holiday is almost over and I HOPE EVERYBODY OUT THERE HAS A WONDERFUL DAY OF IT. I myself am more than fine with facing the plain days ahead; with  standing in line at the pharmacy and laundering my dainty washables and thinking my own quiet thoughts.

Seasonal Amnesia

Remembering Christmas Past is like remembering childbirth: a certain amnesia sets in. If you asked me yesterday what happens most  Christmases, I would have said they were uneventful. Then I looked  one up in an old diary.How quickly we forget.That year, I came up with the idea that I should send a card to 192 people, and thus spent every spare moment over a five-day period entering their names and addresses on my laptop so as to generate labels. Finally one morning I pressed “Print” and hurried away to shower. When I came back, the pear-bottomed black cat was delicately shredding the sheets of labels one by one as they emerged from the printer, while sitting directly ON the laptop, causing it to beep frantically, then lose its mind altogether, writing  “#!” when you tried to write "the" and %#~" when you tried to type "and."And it kept ON doing this, hiccupping and speaking in gibberish for the next 13 hours.Then I spent five more days of non-existent spare moments working up a newsy collage of holiday greeting and when it turned out to be too big for a conventional envelope, I went and bought bigger ones, on which the printed labels now looked puny and impersonal. So I took ANOTHER five days and made everyone who came into the house help me decorate each one with a bright holiday drawing.And then there were the Disappointing Presents.  Our then-sixth grader wanted Army Guys, but when the bucket of them was opened on Christmas morning, I turned out to have bought the wrong kind: guys that couldn’t even lie down in the mud and inch along on their tummies. Our 10^th-grader-at-the-time turned out to be hoping for a  leather jacket and instead I bought her a big silky Cheese Puff of a thing. Also: the much-wished-for video game was sold out until March, it turned out you couldn’t BUILD Erector Set Number 6 unless you already OWNED Erector Sets Number 1 through 5 and the two presents I thought were sure-fire which I had bought and wrapped super-early I couldn’t even find until three days after the 25th.On climbing into bed that night, our boy’s eyes shone with sorrow.  “It’s my fault,” he said, so as not to sadden his mom. “I didn’t get in the Christmas spirit....I should’ve thought more about what I was giving, instead of what I was getting.”So this year we’re all TRYING to do that. Still, you sure can get turned around. It turns out I was the one who wanted a big downy Cheese Puff of a jacket! But while we're at it I’d like a new wallet too, since mine looks like it was mauled by a pit bull and is also covered with ink stains, as literally everything I own, even my very underwear. Also a nice book and  maybe some undies not yet written on- Oh wait but see?  I’m doing it again.  You forget it from year to year, but this season does just makes a person crazy!

A Picture is Worth 1,000 Words

I’ve been making my own holiday card for like the last 200 years or so, sending along the pet news and mentioning various  milestones. I also build in any pictures I think are funny, like this one of our nice old cat Abe which appeared with a caption mentioning how hard it is for him to live in a family where even the animals get made fun of.Then one year I had this picture, captioned "Alien Landing" in which I moved up to making fun of babies:This one below from last year served as a metaphor for how we all felt barreling down the slide toward 2010 - and I have to say I think a lot of us still feel  the way my little grandson obviously felt, second from the back there. Jittery times!Then finally there's this one, of  me on the new Weight Watchers Points Plus plan, rejoicing at great results.

You might as well laugh right?

A brand-NEW holiday card for 2010 getting worked on today because now is no time to stop smiling!

Hang 'em High

Here's one way to get a tree to behave: PAINT it onto the wall. What we do we hang our tree, sort of like the nurseries are starting to do but with one difference: they tie a rope to the top of their heads and make them sort of dangle, standing on tippy-toes to keep their scalps from tearing off. We're at least a little kinder: we tie the rope around the tree’s tummy, then lash it to the locks of the indows it stands between.It takes the suspense out of walking into the living room mornings, which everyone appreciates; we have enough ghosts around here as it is. At least once a week the ironing board busts out of its closet at midnight to land wham! on the floor. And then there's that old Navy footlocker once belonging to the first airman lost over the Bermuda Triangle. His parents moved into this house after his death and when the house was sold to us 30 years later it was sold footlocker and all. The wooden trunk sits behind a tiny  Alice-in-Wonderland-style door in an attic bedroom and tell ya what that little door yawns open all the time. Just yawns right open. It scares some overnight guests near to death.It never scared us. What scared us , until we got the rope idea, was hearing that soft whoosh when the tree fell over yet again because we knew what we'd see: every last ornament knocked silly, the tinsel hanging sideways, the treetop angel on the floor some 12 to 15 feet away....When she fell out of last year’s tree I drew a tear in one eye, dropped a little red ink around her mouth and put her in a tiny hospital bed, just for fun. It’s all you can do at this season: keep ahead of Crazy one laugh at a time.      

Bah Bah Bleak Sheep

Just to cleanse our palates a little let's list some things we DON’T LIKE about the holidays. Thoughts?

• You in the back.... Did you say carolers, really? You don’t enjoy answering the door in the midst of a marital spat to find 20 Up With People-types smiling and nodding at one another as they sing in four-part harmony? Dude what is wrong with you?
• OK down front here: You’re saying you don't like ribbon candy. What were you, born in the 1880s? Ribbon candy hasn't really been around since they began fluoridating the water. It takes kids’ teeth clean out of their sockets.
• Keith Richards in a Hallmark special about a lonely man redeemed by the love of a beagle? KIDDING! You’ll wait a while before you see that one Luv!
• Over here: Pop artists coming out with Christmas albums they expect you to buy just because they're pop artists? You say Josh Groban who you find hard enough to take without having to listen to him warble his way through ‘Chestnuts’? Now Susan Boyle on Silent Night you can stomach, am I right? She sailed into the hearts of us Americans anyway the minute she pitched a fit about not winning Peat Bog Artist of the Year or whatever it was. We love to forgive, we Yanks!
• Regis in a Santa hat? Well now that's just MEAN. Regis is our Ramses the Great; with a little blush on the old cheekbones he’s plain adorable, like something your aunt made in ceramics class. And you gotta love Kelly. You can just tell  she's fun to live with.

Anyone else? Anyone? Before we close the nominations? Think about it and write us here at the Grinch Department if something comes to mind. And as for me, well I just love everything about Christmas ,especially those carolers. ;-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_stLIofpIg&feature=player_embedded#!]

Knot a Pretty Picture

It's not a pretty picture around here lately. The house is an absolute mess, with a package of From and To tags mixed in with the clean laundry and a strew of half-addressed Christmas cards sharing the kitchen counter with a couple of houseplants I had to practically put IV's into they got so thirsty this last week.Time was at this season, we put a candle in every window and that was fine for all the years the kids were here because kids you can order around: “Go light the candles! Go turn the candles off!” But these last few years I find I will do almost anything to avoid dealing with window candles and so, to compensate, I have been slowly collecting a number of wreaths and small-scale Christmas trees all, need I say, fake, which when set in place twinkle away, and hopefully give the neighbors the sense that the Marottas really do care about such things even though they’re almost always AWAY on Halloween and they never EVER adorn their front door with a nice wide garden hat sprouting pastel blossoms come spring.Make a long story short it was the wreaths that were getting to me yesterday; I knew if I didn’t get them hung in a handful of key windows they wouldn’t get up until December 24^th. I have that much to do over the next ten nights …I had a young guy here yesterday, kicking the holy hell out of my stupid laptop which turns out to be the real culprit in last week’s Case of the Mysterious Despairing Address-book on my phone.  (Click here for that tale of woe.) Nick knows just what to do and was quietly doing it for three long hours, and somewhere in there I remembered that he is both an Eagle Scout and a certified wilderness survivor.I asked him about my knots.I was trying to use fishing wire to hang my wreaths but the knots just kept slipping such that they looked like slow motion yo-yos moving down and down the windows 'til I could come and yank them up again and then boom the same thing over and over. So he taught me how to tie the kind of knot cowboys use and just like that the wreaths stayed up. He even stabbed the various elements of my two fake trees together and they're both twinkling away now, one on the porch and one here in my office, the only still-tidy room in the house… And you know I've been thinking as I write this: Maybe I can just stay in here for the next two weeks and have the Domino’s guy come by now and then and sail a pizza up to me Frisbee-style.

the one clean room

Fallen Angel

TREE STRADDLERS BEWARE!

The following just captured by your crew here at Inside Addition: Grave News Today as Christmas Tree Angel Clings to Life, Dignity.

Proctologists Agree: Don't Try This at Home (Click here for the backstory.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaHYiHnjVGY]

Tough Jobs: Tree Angels and Santas

Well I made a video about Christmas at the mall. How could I not when I’d just been there and seen dogs sitting in Santa’s lap; when I'd just seen a 20-something pick up a DVD and say to her mom by the checkout, “Look we can give this to Dad!” It was a DVD called "Wolves." Poor guy. Some dumb science documentary. Dads get the short end of every stick that’s out there.A fella was here today to repair our counter-top. “I find you might as well just do whatever your wife tells you to do immediately,” he said at one point. “That’s exactly what my husband says to all younger guys. ‘Just do what they want and your life will be a lot easier.” Who died and left US queen? Note to self: don’t TOTALLY abuse the power.But this is not a posting about marriage; it’s a posting about Christmas and here it is: my first foray into the land of the Flip Video:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Xd68sy7pQ]