Month: December 2004

I don’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before – so if I did, you can just skim on past or perhaps visit one of the other fine blogs I’ve listed over on the right. See you tomorrow!

Okay, for the rest of you – I just wanted to say that when I was a kid of Santa-believing age, every Christmas Eve was a hellish sleepless night for me. That’s right. Hellish. You know why? Because Santa won’t come if you’re awake. And if you do happen to wake up, you have to pretend you aren’t awake because what if that noise wasn’t really the heat registers but Santa in the living room? My house growing up was tiny – 4 rooms and a bath, and if I breathed the wrong way, Santa would know for sure and he wouldn’t leave anything. So I would lay in bed, rigid with fear, waiting for either sleep or sunrise.

Doesn’t that sound happy?

It wasn’t. I did the same thing the night before Easter. I was always the kind of kid who heard noises at night and assumed the worst. I am exactly the same as an adult. It was a blessed relief to learn the lowdown on Santa, let me tell you.

Okay, so fast forward to last night. Junior asks me what he should do if, on Christmas Eve, he needs to get a tissue in the middle of the night. Because he’s not supposed to be awake, you see. Oh God, how cruel to make our children so much like us. Junior may look like his dad, but he’s got so much of me in him. His current paranoia is tornados hitting the house, or fire burning it down. I refuse to admit to him that tornados are a big fear of mine. Even though, as I told him for the 100th time that I’m almost 40 years old and I’ve never seen a tornado, so I’m pretty sure we live in a safe place. It’s weird how you have to act like you aren’t afraid of things you are, just to keep your kids sane.

Anyway, I told him it’s okay for him to get a tissue, Santa knows that sometimes people wake up and roll over. And that Santa is in and out in an instant, so chances are, he wouldn’t be there anyway. I mean, what else do you say without blowing the whole thing. I just wish someone had told me that when I was little, but who’s to say whether or not it would have made a difference.

I think this is going to be the 10th Christmas in a row that Santa doesn’t bring me a garage. I’m starting to really dislike the guy. I mean, I only ask for one thing, right? A garage. It doesn’t even have to be that big and fancy. I’ll take a plain one. I’ll even handle painting the inside and putting up shelves and hooks so we’ll have a formal place to hang up our shovels (snow and the other kind. Dirt?) and our power tools that we don’t really use as much as we should, which you can tell by looking at the shrubs in front of the house.

So I don’t think Santa is bringing a garage because he probably already would have had to start working on it, don’t you think? It’s only a few days until Christmas (Junior can do the math, so he has reminded me about 700 times that it’s only three more days – see, public schools work!) and I think they’d have to put in some kind of foundation. I’m resigned to looking out the window on Saturday morning and seeing my driveway. Resigned, but not happy about it.

Okay, sorry for the interruption. Moving servers is a bigger pain in the nether-region than I anticipated (due to my stupidly trying to upgrade some software at the same time) but I think I’ve got it all set. My email was a bit off yesterday and this morning, but I have a work-around in place. Whew! Remind me to not do that again, okay?

What else, then?

Oh, right. I need to update my Christmas music page – it just isn’t high on the list of priorities if you can imagine that. The thing is, I haven’t purchased much in the way of holiday music this year. I had a couple of items in my Amazon basket, but when push came to shove, I didn’t end up buying them. I did pick up two CDs, though, and will give you a brief review because you mean that much to me. I want to help you with your CD buying, you know.

Barenaked for the Holidays – A+

Just fantastic, really. And it even contains three Hanukkah songs, two of which are just beautiful, and a version of I Have a Little Dreidel that had the kids clapping their hands and singing along. The one sore spot for me is the remake of Do They Know It’s Christmas. Do not mess with the all-star 80s version, gentlemen. The best part of that song is switching singing styles between Boy George and Bono, and we were forced to fake that when we tried to sing along with you. Really, did this song need a remake? No.

Radio Disney Jingle Jams – C-

I’m just not crazy about it. I’m sure there are tweens out there who think this is the greatest Christmas CD ever, but I remember thinking that about the Partridge Family Christmas album. We were both wrong.

The ones I want but didn’t yet buy:

Chris Isaak Christmas – I’ve heard nothing but good things about this.

A John Waters Christmas – yes, that John Waters. No, he doesn’t sing, he just picked all the offbeat (and some disturbing, I hear) songs.

Okay, the DNS servers need to talk to each other to get you guys pointed to this new server. I feel like a character in Horton Hears a Who. You know, the people who yell because nobody believes they exist: “We are here we are here we are HERE!”

Today school was cancelled due to snow. It wasn’t much, so I’m not exactly sure why they cancelled, but actually, it worked out for me because Junior developed a cold or something over the weekend and I didn’t want to keep him home because he’s already missed too much school. This way I could keep him home and snuggle up with him (did I mention he passed it along to me?) and it wouldn’t count! Weee!

In other news, a friend of ours from the place where we eat breakfast on Sundays gave us a little box of treats and I just now discovered that her peanut butter fudge is EXACTLY like my grandmother’s used to be. Now I have to hunt her down and force her to give me the recipe. You see, Grandma B decided to never give anyone the recipe. Or she’d leave out key ingredients. I don’t know why she wanted to take the recipe to the grave, but she got her wish.

On that happy note…could it be any COLDER out there?

Would you rather win a Best of Blog award or a few “Buy one get one free” coupons for margerine? Right.

I did nominate my two favorites over at http://www.blogmechanics.com/bob/ for the Best of Blog awards. I would love to be as good and as funny as my favorites. Maybe if I put a little more effort into it. A little more “elbow grease” (What the hell is that?) to channel my dad circa 1977.

Okay deep breaths. Mr. Dump is out looking for a Christmas present for me, with a whole 6 days to spare! Do I have a wonderful guy or what?!