Happy New Year and all that. Tessa certainly enjoyed herself with our four days of Christmas. There are still gifts for her sitting right now wrapped nicely upon the buffet, I am saving them for another day. Perhaps this will be our tradition, since I'm somewhat dying to create one of our own. A wait it out approach, a new idea of no you can't get everything at once in some crazy wrapping paper orgy on some predetermined day.Not to say I don't get in the spirit of it all. I am very happy, thrilled, giddy even to be given an excuse to shop for the people I love. It fills me with a sense of day to day purpose in an otherwise entirely manic time of year. So I won't be preaching the same "the meaning of Christmas is lost in the consumerism of the buy everything culture that's shoved down our throats by the blahdeeblahdeeblah...." even though I totally buy it (hahaha). I love the holidays all the same. I love the lights and the simple act of wrapping up a gift and handing it over to a cousin you see once a year. The absolutely pointless fun of cutting down a tree to watch it die slowly inside your house covered in tacky decorations. I love hearing the same crappy music on the radio every year and meandering through all the wonderful and hideous crafts at the local markets. I love watching the frantic faces on the small towners rummage through our small selection of shops and knowing they're thinking "yeah, buy locally my ass, who needs another blown glass candle holder?" And I love feeling totally self righteous because I did do all my shopping locally.
I do kind of wish that this extravagence was scheduled perhaps once every two years, maybe even five. Then the thousands of people who lost their jobs right before they finished racking up another couple of 00's on their credit cards might not have considered how much they're life insurance policies are worth.
So, yeah, maybe I love shopping and wrapping and being a part of some crazy cultural insanity rooted in excess but whatever. It's fun, I got to put a blinking reindeer nose on my nephew. What's better than that?
