have yourself a merry little christmas

[timeripple]

It's my first Christmas all alone, and overall I feel pretty good about it, actually. ♥

Work has been insane and everybody’s been pretty stressed out, but I’ve actually been having the BEST TIME EVER. There's been free pizza and Indian food all week, and people keep bringing in cookies and cake and stuff, and there’s a constant flow of people who actually want to talk to me about children’s books and are happy to buy pretty much whatever I tell them too.

Except for the ones who have a whole host of issues that they neglect to mention until I’m three-quarters through my sales pitch for The Thief.

CUSTOMER: So I was thinking of getting them something about Greek mythology, you know, since I studied it for twenty years and I’d like to be able to share that with them.
ME: Totally! We have a whole shelf dedicated to it, it’s pretty popular right now, and we have all the Percy Jackson books, and let me tell you about this really great book with a mythology based in Greek and other ancient Mediterranean cultural...
CUSTOMER: Oh yeah, and their mother’s a hardcore Evangelical Christian, so nothing that’ll upset her.
ME: ...
CUSTOMER: ...
CUSTOMER: How about a nice, safe book of poetry?
ME (weakly): Sure. Poetry is... poetry is great!

This happened at least twice.

At least I was able to have a kind of fun conversation with her about Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses, and the post-colonial suck fairy.

I find this really funny, though, in the face of how I’ve spent the past year realizing that poetry is not safe; it is subversive and demanding and difficult. Poetry is hard.

In other news, last weekend cadragongirl and I bused down to NY to see snowqueenofhoth and mousapelli. We had lunch, exchanged candy, took cell phone photos, then M went home and Rachel and Mousi and I wandered around Kinokuniya for a while and dropped out stuff off at the hotel (Rachel napped while Mousi and I got settled) and then went for karaoke. We had dinner at a tiny Chinese place on the way (it was foul--good thing M wasn’t there--but I took over tea-pouring duties so at least we had tea).

The next morning Mousi and I hit up the bagel place, scored a table, and succeeded in finding the open-air market this time (The Shops at St Bartholomew’s), where we impulsively bought glass pendants. Mine is shaped like a boot. Mousi’s is a blue pineapple. (There were far too many pineapple jokes, thanks to her NaNo this year. I had a stale leftover pineapple bun with me in case of emergencies, and every time I mentioned this fact Mousi insisted she only heard “I have a pineapple”. When I pointed out the blue glass pineapple, she had to have it.) We picked up Rachel and went for karaoke at the other karaoke place (they’d booked our reservation for 12:30 AM, not PM, and in fact didn’t open until 1, so we hung out at the same Starbucks as last August, sipping caramel apple cider and looking at pictures of my hair). Mousi presented me with a handmade scarf, and it's all pink and purple and fuzzy and really warm and I've been wearing it all week. ♥

And here's the part where I talk about my first solo Christmas and get sappy about friendship and Christmas and songs about friendship and Christmas.

Christmas morning I awoke around 10, put my laundry away so there was a clear space in the middle of my floor, and had brownies and peppermint tea for breakfast while reading The Dark Is Rising and listening to Joan Baez. I opened my presents (highlights: calendar from M, The Fall DVD, a little red emergency lantern from LL Bean, and Mom-knitted fingerless gloves that have flip-down tops. They’re all gray and black and navy and striped like a tabby cat. I’m pretty touched.) I took a nap, woke up around 2, called the parents, and stumbled into the kitchen to make Swedish pancakes and re-watch the BTR Christmas episode. I kind of wanted another nap at that point, but went for a walk instead. It was dusk, and I went to the playground/park/marsh where some kids (supervised) were playing on the iced-over part of the pond. I didn’t mind them (or the parental supervision--good creeper-or-worse-hiding-in-the-woods deterrent). I just kind of wandered around the bare garden with its inch of snow, and reflected that on a winter’s evening at dusk, somehow all snowy woods are Narnia. I walked home content. Tuned up the fiddle, noodled around a bit, made quiche (NOM) and pumpkin chocolate cookies (not bad!) with the first Narnia movie going on in the background. Now I’m sitting here letting my gold-painted nails dry and trying to get down in writing everything that’s happened in the past ten days.

And reflecting on how much I’ve always loved “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” And by “always” I mean “since I was 14 or so and it was so perfect on that one Ally McBeal episode.” It used to kind of make me cry, maybe because I didn’t have any friends and then later when I did I wasn’t near them on Christmas.

But this year is different. I’ve been realizing over the past week how lucky I am.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Let your heart be light

From now on, our troubles will be out of sight


Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Make the Yule-tide gay,
From now on 
our troubles will be miles away.

Well, I have worries, but I’m doing okay right now. I have a job that I actually quite like most of the time; I’m healthy and sheltered and fed and insured and have some pretty great people in my life.

Here we are as in olden days,

Happy golden days of yore.

Faithful friends who are dear to us

Gather near to us once more.

We will never all be gathered together again; it can never again be the way it was. But most of us were there at A’s wedding, and I saw Rachel and Mousi in NY last weekend, and there’s reunion coming up. I live with one of my best friends, and I see others now and then, and others are around, even if they’re not often in touch.

Through the years we all will be together
If the Fates allow

You know, the song doesn’t say “through the years we all will be together AT CHRISTMAS.” We gather near when we can, and we’ll keep doing that in the years to come. It’s okay if not everybody can be at the same place at the same time, because we love each other and trust that love (and IM and Skype) to keep us close enough even if we can’t meet.

Hang a shining star upon the highest bough

I don’t have a tree or much in the way of decoration, but I’ve got a string of navy and silver stars hanging on my storage cube/bookshelf/table/thing, and the light from my IKEA lamp is pleasant, and my pitiful little bed is cozy, and I’m full of quiche and cookies and tea.

And have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

I am. I hope you are, too. ♥

Comments

[timeripple.livejournal.com]

ISN'T IT GREAT? *beams* I generally prefer traditional carols, the older and more pagan the better, but there's something about this one.

Uh, also Ally McBeal apparently happened when I was at an impressionable age.

Merry (late) Christmas to you too, and I'm sure I'll be back fairly often! I'm glad we got to hang out as often as we did this fall. ♥