Sunday, November 27, 2016

I Want Christmas, Continued!

I always love the Christmas season, but this year, more than ever, I need a good old-fashioned one.  I have a terminal case of We-Are-Going-To-Have-a-Sociopath-in-the-White-House Syndrome.

Even back in ancient times, before cable TV, smartphones and the Internet, we knew how to celebrate the Christmas season.

It always started off with the annual collection.  This was my idea.  All three of us Minicozzi kids would pool our money together to buy gifts for Dad, Mom, Grandma and Grandpa.  As the Advent season ground on, we would add whatever coins we could spare to the fund, and by a few days before Christmas we would have enough to get something nice for all four of them.

“Nice” was a relative term.  Our family was working class, and we lived in a small town, next to a small city, in the middle of the apple growing area of Washington State.  Nobody in our family expected diamonds or anything like that.  We weren’t rich, not by any kind of stretch.  Some sweet-smelling hand lotion from the dime store was a “nice” gift from three kids who had been pooling their change.

We always had the most fun on the days and weeks leading up to Christmas.  The streets in the Downtown shopping area in the small city next to our small town were decorated for the season, and the stores had their colorful displays in the windows.  Window shopping and browsing were obligatory and fun, especially if you were trying to figure out what you could get for Mom, Dad, Grandma and Grandpa with the money collected from you and your siblings.  I think that’s where I learned how to be both budget conscious and a spendthrift.  I can spend a lot of money, but I know how to get a bunch of decent stuff in return, even if some of it is stuff I don’t need.

I don’t remember when I stopped sitting on a store Santa’s lap, but I remember one of the times I did.  I was a terminally shy kid, but I was persuaded to go and sit on the lap of the big man with the big beard and tell him what I wanted for Christmas.  I must have been cute or funny, or both, because my parents laughed about it and told their friends.

Our Catholic elementary school held a Christmas Pageant every year, and the whole school took part.  Every grade had a presentation.  I made my stage debut in the First Grade, as an innkeeper.  Our grade was presenting The Nativity that year.  When the time came to cast everyone, Sister A. gave all the plum parts to other kids.  I was a homely kid, tall for my age and awkward.  In addition, I had attention deficit problems.  There was no way that I was going to get the part of the Virgin Mary, and I was not likely to be cast as an angel, either.  Joseph, the shepherds and the wise men were all boys.  The only thing left that would at least give me a line or two and a chance to shine was the part of an innkeeper.  I became Innkeeper No. 2, in a line of three.  Innkeeper No. 3 (a boy, of course) was the one who got all the lines because he got to direct Mary and Joseph to the stable.  All I got to say was that I didn’t have any room.

I learned very early in life that it’s best to get on the good side of the director if you want to be cast in a decent role.

I got a laugh when I spoke my line in the performance.  I wasn’t trying to be funny.  I was telling the two holiest people in the world that I couldn’t put them up, for Pete’s sake!  Later, my Mom told me that the audience laughed because I was cute up there.  I wasn’t trying for cute, either.  I was trying for unforgettable.  I was unforgettable, but not in the way I wanted.

I have a special memory of the school Christmas Pageant when I was in the Eighth Grade.  My singing voice had been discovered the year before, and my wonderful Seventh Grade teacher, Sr. Ernest, had passed the word on to my very dear music teacher, Sr. Dolores Mary, who had arranged for me to get singing lessons at a local music school on a partial scholarship.  In the Eighth Grade, I was asked to sing “O Holy Night” in the annual pageant.  The catch, though, was that I had to sing it in French.  I had never attempted French in my life.  Sister Ernest, who was of French extraction, taught me how to sing the words phonetically.  Poor Sister Ernest!  She tried hard, but I had a terrible time getting my American mouth around some of the French pronunciation!  I wish I could sing it for her now, because now I can do it properly.  Back then I was just a kid who couldn’t speak French who was thrilled to be asked to sing such a big solo.

Sister Ernest would be proud.


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For more of my humor, go here.


Sunday, November 20, 2016

I Want Christmas!

I know.  Thanksgiving Day hasn’t even come yet, and I’m on Christmas already.  This year (2016) I am in desperate need of Christmas, more than ever.  It’s one of the symptoms of a disease called We-Are-Going-to-Have-a-Sociopath-In-The-White-House Syndrome.

This would have made my mother say,
"It's so pretty, I hate to open it!"
What Not to Give Me (A Single Female Baby Boomer) for Christmas

Everyone likes to get presents.  I am no exception.  There are times, though, when a thoughtful gift can turn into a pain in the ass.

Take large plants, for example.  There are people who love spending time with plants.  I am not one of those people, and there are many more of us.  Plants don’t like me.  I think plants are fine, so long as someone else is taking care of them.  I am the kind of plant parent who thinks that plants should be seen, but not in your face.  When I DO give a plant attention, it is a death sentence.  Plants take one look at me and die, because they know they are doomed, anyway.  Never give someone like me a plant, if you value its life.

Please don’t give me a pet, either.  I already have one:  Harmony the Cat.  She has been an only cat since I adopted her, and I don’t think she’d take kindly to having competition for her position as Empress of the Apartment.  I don’t relish the thought of fights to the death being conducted in my living room.[1]

Another impractical kind of gift for me is any kind that involves large amounts of perishable food.  This includes big baskets of fruit.  Fruit is delicious.  I love almost all kinds of fruits, especially things like grapes, apples, pears, peaches and oranges.  Those things can be easily eaten.  Whole fresh pineapples and whole coconuts require muscles and/or sharp implements and a lot of patience.  Often, there is a whole fresh pineapple in the middle of one of those big baskets of fruit.  To add more craziness, one person cannot possibly eat all that fruit before it starts to go bad.  Have you ever tried giving fruit away to your friends?  Don’t – unless you enjoy wasting time and carrying oranges around.

Nobody has ever given me a Costco gift certificate, and I hope that nobody will ever do that.  I have never taken out a membership in any company that expects customers to buy things in bulk.  Families can save money that way.  I would only end up with a small apartment full of stuff that would go bad or that it would take me a year to use up.  Yes, you can buy a TV at Costco, but that never occurs to me because there are so many other places to get a good bargain on a TV.  On the other hand, if anyone wants to give me a Costco gift certificate for a great meal at a fine restaurant, I will grab it and love it.

Oh, and I live in a small apartment.  Before anyone gives me anything that takes up room, I hope s/he takes the size of my apartment into consideration, especially if it is a butt ugly thing that the giver is re-gifting to me.
... like this thing!
Pretty dishtowels are nice, and I have one hanging in my kitchen.  I almost never use it, though.  I air dry all my dishes on the dish rack because it’s more sanitary that way, and easier.  If anything in the kitchen requires wiping, I use paper towels or a sponge.  The dishtowel is just there for looks, although nobody ever looks at it.  My kitchen is full of everything from big bottles of Poland Spring water to a big bag of cat food to just about anything a kitchen can hold.  One little dishtowel is lost in the clutter.

Sets of bath towels can be a good gift, but that shelf in my closet where I keep towels and washcloths is already bursting with them, and I don’t think they want more company in there.  This is my fault, in part, because the local odd lot store sells nice towels at cheap prices and there are times when I am in the mood to shop.  You can guess the rest.  I have more than one useless item that I bought in that store, along with some good stuff.  I discovered Sarabeth’s preserves and storage ottomans there, for which I am grateful.

One of these days I’ll write something about a lack of closet space, for which storage ottomans take up a lot of the orphaned stuff that doesn’t have any room.

That’s a whole other story.





[1] In fact, you should NEVER give anyone a pet unless you are SURE that the person will love the animal and care for it and make a lifetime commitment.  Seriously!

Sunday, November 13, 2016

A Black Friday Poll

Yes, I know.  It isn’t time for Christmas-related stuff yet.  We haven’t even had a chance to survive Thanksgiving Day.  That’s a whole other thing itself.  There is one aspect of the Christmas season, though, that we should address before it has a chance to overcome us:

Black Friday




I would like to conduct a little poll to see what my readers have planned for Black Friday.  Please choose one of the following:

I plan to:

(A)  Hide at home, with all doors and windows locked, binge-watch episodes of “Law and Order” on TV and eat Vanilla Almond Granola directly out of the box.

(B)  Do all my Christmas shopping in one day – online – sitting in front of my computer wearing PJs.

(C)  Get to Target, Kmart or Walmart before anyone else, defend my place in line with a baseball bat and a shotgun and bring someone with me who has sharp elbows and good shoving skills.  If possible, bring my scariest-looking relatives with me, male and female, including kids.

(D)  Refuse to think about Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve, then run around like a junkie on Speed trying to buy everything at once.  This is like Black Friday, except there won’t be as many bargains and a lot of people will be too tired to fight, anyway.

(E)  Refuse to think about Christmas shopping until Christmas Eve, then go online and send everyone gift cards.  This is the last resort of the lazy and of people who hate to go outside to shop.

(F)  Other (you don’t have to elaborate, unless you have a really juicy idea).


You may post your choice in the Comments section below.

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