December 20, 2009

Christmas tree? Decorating? Christmas tunes? I think it's just that I'm way too paranoid to decorate the house without losing my mind. Should the lights go around near the trunk of the tree or on the branches? And if they go on the branches, how do you hide the wires? Should I start placing them from the bottom to the top or the other way around? All doubts that I feel must be cleared before carrying out the decorating journey. When they become difficult to find, I get all bothered and say things like 'Merry depressing Christmas' and 'this is so not worth the effort put in' or 'if those three wise men were so friggin intelligent, why don't we get them on a friggin time machine and transport them to our present to figure out a better way of doing this'. And bothered stuff like that. Well, you get it.


But there are some things that are pretty high on my list of Top 10 Things I Love About The Season.

10. Food. There is seriously a lot of excellent food and M.E.A.T around the holidays.

9. Gifts. Yeah, I'm that superficial.

8. Christmas Carols. I'm a sucker for Christmas Carols – the originals as well as the new stuff.

7. Chocolates. A division of point 10, yes, but there's so much it ought to have a group of its own.

6. Santa. No matter how creepy he is a little tiny part of me still believes in him.

5. Christmas movies. I love those.

4. The cold. Usually we get lucky, this year not so much.

3. Time Off.

2. The Holiday Spirit.

1. Family. It doesn't get any better than family.

‘My Grown-up Christmas List’. Any version of it chokes me up and I sincerely love it. It's truly magical and wonderful and worth inviting into your home for a couple of minutes.

I think I love this song (version by Amy Grant)
because I was introduced to it by my parents when I was in school and it was played year after year. It was tradition then and I guess I'm trying to carry on that tradition now. But most importantly, these are the things that mean Christmas to me.