Another holiday post.

She was a long-legged thing, seductively pretty, with an elfin smirk and a knowing look. Beneath her short green skirt she wore red and white striped tights that ended in little green turned-up shoes. She was sexy; I wasn't entirely sure she was appropriate for our Christmas tree, but I bought her anyway because she was so beguiling I couldn't help it. And when I lifted the bag she was in out of the car and lost my grip on it, I heard her fall with a "thwack" against the garage floor and knew without a doubt that she had shattered.

I went out last night to buy more ornaments for the Christmas tree, which we decorated on Thursday. Yes, you read that correctly. I've complained here before about the end of the semester and what that means for an academic, and as both of the grown-ups in this house are academics, that means that during November and December, we can't afford to spend too much time on holiday preparation.

Have I mentioned that we celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas?












It helps if you have special glasses.

So anyway, we've got our hands full. And that's why this year I've decided that, from now on, Chranukah (or Hanumas - take your pick) will be a holiday that will be celebrated well into the New Year. I don't plan to take down my decorations until the end of January. In fact, I still have lights to put up.

So last night, I headed out to a few stores to see if they still had any ornaments in stock. They had very few, but I was able to find some that I liked: a pair of dance shoes, because I love to dance; two little animals for Bean, which caused him to have a tantrummy fit when he found out he wouldn't be allowed to play with them; a sort of pretty, sort of garish metal thing with glass beads, two of which fell out and need to be glued (it was in the bag with the aforementioned broken elf); several candy ornaments, including some Hershey's Kisses; and a couple of others. Not a bad haul, especially considering how picked-over the store was and how long it took me to find these among the really crappy ornaments (Santa in Hawaiian shirt riding a dolphin; bottle of beer with sign, "if you're not serving beer, I'm not doing the time" (I have no idea what that means); big clangy metal disks reading "Gurl."

To "top" it all off, in an effort to better blend our holidays, and in response to Bean's insistence that we have a star atop the tree - which we never did growing up because we always associated the star with a religious significance, which Christmas didn't have in our home (though, oddly, we had an angel, and we kids never questioned that) - I also spent about twenty minutes trying to draw and then cut out a Star of David that was not leaning to one side. I failed. Interestingly, the second effort, the one for which I enlisted the help of a ruler, is just as lopsided as the first effort, the one I eyeballed. I am not sure what that means. I will be covering one of the stars with alumninum foil and hoping that the overall effect is not to bring down the relative classiness of our tree.

Happy Chranukah.