Holiday Spirit

santas a dreidl and the fruitcake hurling bus
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

You'd think I had some holiday spirit after all - my tree is up and there are even lights outdoors and Frosty, bless his ancient plastic heart, is shining away out in the yard, although somehow over the past year he's gone emo and there's a freaky black tear trailing from his left eye. Well, I know how he feels, so that's all appropriate and everything.

Getting the tree was awesomely easy. Yesterday, A and I went over to the East West Asheville art walk to see our friend J who is a potter and had some stuff on sale at another ceramicists studio. We ran into everybody there and A bought a couple of Christmas gifts and I nobly stopped myself from buying myself a metal owl and then I stopped myself from buying myself fantastic coffee cups and then we went outside and LO, there were about 30 Santas milling around. Not only that, which was awesome in and of itself - I love my neighborhood - but this large brown bus, which lives up the road from me and about which I have been intensely curious (M said darkly that it was a stripper bus and they drove around with strippers on it, which I also found totally fascinating and wanted to see really badly - I have a warped mind and I immediately wanted to know how the strippers stayed upright as the bus was driving and also, that would have to be illegal, so what if the cops started chasing them and then the bus driver was like, "You'll never catch me, John Law!" and started hauling ass and careening around the corners while the strippers clung on to their poles for dear life and there was lots of screaming and, yes, clearly there's tremendous potential here) was parked across the street with the rubber chicken throwing art machine mounted on it. I know the rubber chicken throwing machine of old and now I have discovered that the rubber chicken people live in my new neighborhood. Therefore I rushed over to them and babbled and took pictures and came way too close to saying something like "Will you be my new friends?"

They said that the machine had been modified to throw fruitcakes for Christmas and that they were all part of SantaCon and then we went over to the Admiral parking lot and took more pictures and met A's neighbor H, who was also wearing a Santa costume, like everyone. I felt underdressed big time. H was handing out goodies, peppermint patties for the nice and condoms for the naughty and alas, I just got a peppermint patty. Figures. Sigh. However, next year, by hook or by crook or by Rudolf's red nose, I am totally joining SantaCon. That looked like way too much fun and I could wear my Christmas Witch hat for some purpose at last.

So that got me fired up for the holidays a bit and also I noticed that the place next to the Admiral, which has been, over the years, sequentially and also at the same time, depending, a car repair shop, a video arcade, a fruit & veg market, a barbecue stand and a really freaky sort of funky church with giant black velvet elvis jesus paintings and tiki torches is currently being a Christmas tree stand and garage. A and I went over there today and bought a wonderful tree in about five minutes flat. Really, it was the most painless tree shopping experience ever.

"Where do you think these trees came from, though?" asked A. I mean they were really nice trees, not those kind of dried up attack trees that you usually find in sort of sketchy roadside stands.
"Jamaica," I said, "Judging by his accent."
"No," she said, "seriously, do you think maybe they're stolen? Or they just went out to Pisgah Forest and cut them?"
"I don't know," I said, "and furthermore, I don't care. They're always telling you to buy local and you just don't get much more local than this; we could practically walk this thing home. So if it's local and stolen, well hell, whatever."
A laughed. "Yeah," she said, "We reduced our carbon footprint all right!"

And now my house smells like pine and chocolate, because I'm making double chocolate cream cheese brownies for M's birthday, which is tomorrow. Maybe there is a point to December after all.