Ridin' the Flavor Train to Tastytown

My favorite winter sport is eating. Not in a competitive way, just generally. Now that the holidays are over I've put the brakes on the crazy rich foods (the cookies, oh god, the cookies) and have been making more sensible yums (the banana waffles I made for brunch yesterday don't exactly count as sensible - but hey, I used whole grain flour and there were bananas involved so shut up - I should have snapped a photo of them because they were gorgeous.). This weekend I've been particularly productive in the kitchen and thought I would share with you some photos of the tasty treats I've concocted:

The hummus (MDH and I dipped into it a smidge before I snapped the photo):

The cucumber chips:

What remains of my whole grain pasta with spicy Thai peanut sauce with onions and sweet red peppers (chopped raw scallions on top for garnish and a little kick). I wish there were more left over cause it's one of those dishes I like better cold:

A little something I like to call "Grape Salad", but is really just green and red (or black) seedless grapes removed from the vine and stem and rinsed like mad. If you get the right mix of grapes they should be sweet and tart. They look so pretty don't they? Another one of my alternative snacking ideas as they are good to reach for instead of popcorn or chips:

What the hell else am I going to write about on a lazy Sunday, eh? I'm having so much fun sharing the food pictures, I'm going to throw in some other photos I've taken recently:

Look! My amaryllis finally bloomed. It's freaking huge too, like more than 3 feet tall. Now that it's actually flowered it's no longer creepy. In the background of this photo you can see the shopping bags filled with Christmas tree ornaments because I was in the process of taking down our tree:

Traditionally I shop for Christmas decorations the week after Christmas when everything is 75% off. It's pretty dumb to pay full price for this crap. I leave the new ornaments wrapped up and forget all about them until the next year and then it's like having a bunch of little surprises when I'm decorating the tree. Next year I'm sure I'll be delighted when I unwrap this goofy toadstool ornament. (That's my friend Jogger's wedding invitation on the table in the background - February 2nd is the big day!):

Below is what might be one of the worst Christmas presents I've ever gotten. It's safety orange nylon. NY-LON. It's even more revolting in person. No gift receipt either. To make matters worse I felt bad because I knew my mother was unable to go out Christmas shopping this year (she broke her pelvis this past fall and is still recovering) and bought everything on QVC, so I told her it was cute. I am a big fat liar-head.

On a bright note, this is one of my oldest and most favorite and most miraculous Christmas ornaments. It's a hand blown (I assume) glass snowman and it's very delicate. It feels like a feather. The thing that is miraculous about it is - look at it's nose - that it's nose is still intact. All these years (about 8) and I haven't managed to smash it or break the tip of that snowman's nose. See you next year little snowman...

Happy Sunday.

Because I'm Better Than You, That's Why

Sometimes, sometimes I don't wash my hands in public restrooms. Now you know. Don't hate me though. Keep reading. I have my reasons and alternative solutions. I feel a little bit funny about it when I don't, but then I think it's probably OK because typically I don't have to touch my lady junk directly, so to speak, and I don't pee on my hands when I'm using a public toilet (or anywhere else for that matter, at least not on purpose - I felt I must clarify for those of you smarty pant-ses out there) and since it's not physically (it's really a mental block) possible* for me to poop in a public restroom the difficulties that might sometimes arise in cleaning up after that simply don't come up.

Now that I've gotten that important announcement out of the way I'd like to say that what I worry about more than sometimes leaving the ladies room without washing my hands is that sometimes other public women's room patrons (see bullet points of previous post below mentioning my friend Dan's extensive, habitual use of women's restrooms - we don't want to be politically incorrect and assume that all women's room patrons are necessarily women now do we?) seem to notice that I haven't washed my hands and when they do they give me the hairy eyeball, or at least I perceive that they do and this post is my way of giving an explanation. You see most times I do wash my hands in public restrooms provided that the circumstances are such that:

A. There is an option for warm water to be dispensed from the tap. When you live in colder climes having the water blast from the tap at minus ice balls degrees is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing when you'd like a nice cold glass of water to drink and a curse when you would like to wash your hands after using a public toilet and discover the water is not only coming out of the tap freezing cold enough to stop your fucking heart, but also that there is really no option to warm that shit up. Oh sure the tap has an "H" on it indicating that hot water might be available if only you wait long enough, but some middle management penny pinching asshole has turned the hot water off and you are only kidding yourself that it will ever warm up. Not to make a pun, but hell will freeze over first before that water heats up. The hot water is a ruse. I'm not washing my hands here.

B. There is a paper towel option for drying my hands. Those air dryers are for suckers. It takes a year and a day to make any progress and I've got places to go and people to do. The air dryer fritters away my life and I haven't got time for that shit. Half the time when I do consent to using the air dryer the air blowing out is just as freezing cold as the tap water and/or I end up frustrated and drying my hands on my pants or desperately going back into a stall and dabbing at my hands with toilet tissue to dry them. Either way it ends in tears.

C. Please don't even get me started on the cloth diaper towel dispenser type of hand dryer that just spins and spins in filthy, germy circles. I have never in all my travels encountered one of those contraptions that wasn't brownish-yellow and dripping wet with ladies room cooties. No thank you. Even if I had whizzed all over myself why would I wash up and then dry off with that gross spinny diaper towel.

D. The absence of miscellaneous other minor gross outs and inconveniences including but not necessarily limited to:

No soap. No towels. Broken hand dryer. Bathroom filthy in general. Sink clogged with tissues or paper towels. Puddles of water (I hope it's water) on the counter and no place to lean without touching it. Not enough sinks and/or towel dispensers thus causing me to have to wait in line to wash my hands or stand dripping waiting to dry them afterwards. Unable to make the appropriate Ninja moves or otherwise psychically connect with the automatic laser tap/laser soap/laser towel in such a way that causes the laser dispenser to hook me up with the necessary hand washing supplies to make it happen (I'm performing freaking Tai-Chi in a mirror front of ten strangers who are waiting to use the facilities after me and nothing is happening).

So in closing the main reason I don't wash my hands in public restrooms is because I'm a germophobe. Would you like another helping of crazy?

If it makes you feel any better or at least less inclined to hit me with the stink eye, rest assured I usually carry disinfectant wipes in my purse that I employ just in case of such emergencies as not being fully satisfied with the cleanliness of the facilities at hand. I'm not going to pee, leave the rest room without washing my hands and then run off and make you or anyone else a sandwich. It's cool, don't worry about it.

*For those of you that may have been reading my blog for a long time you might remember** that I have previously mentioned being able to poop anywhere. That used to be true but is not anymore. At one point when I was living my life on the road (anyone seen the movie Up In the Air yet?) I adapted my body so that I could poop or sleep anywhere*** and under any conditions.

**It's kinda creepy that you remembered that Dude.

***Anywhere indoors. I have always and probably will always**** be unable to sleep or poop out of doors.

****OK. Like maybe if end of days came and everything was destroyed and I was left here with no running water (how will I make my tea?) and only pine needles for a bed, because I can guaran-fucking-tee you that I will not be called up to Jesus when the rapture comes. When that happens, that's when I'll poop outside.

Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter

There isn't much to report but today I'm compelled to write a blog post anyway so what you're probably going to get is a rambler. I'm just going to keep typing and see what shakes out. I'm pretty sure that bullet points and blurting out whatever comes to your stupid mind are how Byron and Tennyson and did it.

Let's see... it's kind of late for all the happy new year well wishing stuff (consider yourselves well wished) and I wouldn't share with you my list of resolutions because I don't make new year's resolutions. I'm patently opposed to them, although for some reason I seem to come up with all of my brightest ideas to incorporate big changes and/or improvements to my life in early January. I keep these to myself until mid-February or so... just so they are not mistaken for new year's resolutions.

One of my bright ideas for life style improvements that I will not be implementing officially until mid-February, and is most certainly not a new years resolution, is the need to incorporate more exercise into my daily routine. I have recently been toying with the idea of rejoining my old gym and I just can't bring myself to do it. Not in January. What is more pathetic than a middle aged fat chick joining a gym in January? I guess maybe a fat chick never joining a gym at all, but still. Or now that I think of it, more pathetic than that is the fat chick who joins the gym in January and then stops going in early February and yet continues to pay for that shit well into the next year. Especially more pathetic when said fat chick already owns enough gym equipment to train the US Olympic.... um what? I was going to say women's basketball team or something like that just to be silly, but after taking a quick mental inventory I've realized that I probably realistically could train the curling team right here in my very own home. Have you seen those guys? What could they possibly need that I don't have in my basement this very minute. I'm pretty sure I have all the necessary equipment, which is to say a treadmill, two stationary bikes, a set of 3 pound weights (pink ones) and an industrial size push broom. Something to think about...

But enough about my semi-real plans to coach Olympic curling...

What else is new? Did I ever tell you about my best friend Amy's stalker? It's her ex-boyfriend from forever ago, blah, blah, blah. It's kind of old news. He's deranged and he lives in Los Angeles and for some reason is still upset about the fact that she broke up with him well over 15 years ago. Now that's a grudge. Anyhoo... he's just your average psycho ex-boyfriend stalker sending threatening emails and such. Amy has a restraining order and followed all the proper channels. Yawns all round. But what is very interesting and exciting news is that Amy's stalker must have gotten bored of her ignoring him and has recently been stalking and making prank phone calls and sending threatening emails to her ex-husband Assface. Saying all kinds of lovely, obscene things about Amy to him. It's delicious and not just because it makes Assface so very angry, but also because Assface doesn't have the same amount of common sense that God gave to hamsters and refuses to hang up the phone or put the stalker on his block-senders list. He listens and reads and sets himself up for a right huge hissy fit every time. Funny.

I think there is no better way to end a shitty rambling post like this one than with bullet points detailing the highlights of our trip to Columbus to celebrate New Year's Eve:

• Dinner at the swanky restaurant was a bust. It was a four course prix-fixe menu which at $45 per person seems very reasonable, but the food kind of sucked. We would have been better off to rent a room at Claddaugh and doused ourselves in beer and corned beef.
  
  
• Alas before Frenchie had the chance to get drunk enough to pass out while sitting up she and Nature Boy got a call from the sitter that their son young Jimmy Neutron was sick and they had to leave the festivities early. Bummer.
  
  
• The rest of us were able to rally until midnight and watch the ball drop with what remains of Dick Clark. Guilty laughter filled the room as Amy dared to say what we were all thinking - he looks a bit like Cha-ka from Land of the Lost. I'm not saying that he should be hidden away. Why should he? You go Dick! I admire his bravery and fuck it - he owns the goddamn show and he can host if he wants. More power to him. But how about some fucking subtitles? Nobody could understand a goddamn thing he was saying. I take that back. Seacrest and Clark were like psychic friends, simpatico, slurred speech and drowned out by a crowd of thousands cheering in the background, Seacrest seemed to understand every word:
  
  Clark: Aahhh mahh gah heeba Ryah!
  Seacrest: That's right Dick.
  
  
• I might be a terrible person.
  
  
• Fuck it. Dick Clark had a stroke and his face looks funny and it's hard to understand him. Big deal. Host the show my old friend, but maybe have someone smarter than Ryan Seacrest translate for us.
  
  
• I spent New Year's Day with 2 of my very best friends in the world, Amy and Dan. We went to see Avatar, but not in 3D for fear that I would get motion sickness and throw up as I have been known to do when I get caught up too tightly in the action.
  
  In the middle of the movie I had a full on, nearly peed my pants, silent laughing jag when Dan came back from his second trip to the bathroom during the film and whispered to me, "I've been to the bathroom twice during this film and just now realized that both times I was in the women's bathroom."
  
  Apparently he just thought it was one of those really nice, all stall men's restrooms. Sure.
  
  
• My new favorite breakfast food in the whole wide world is pho and my favorite place to get it is here. We stopped by on our way out of town where I quickly slurped it down and then grabbed a bahn-mi to go for my lunch later on. Who knew that the girl who never even tried canned tuna fish until she was 20 would love Vietnamese?

That's all I've got. You still there? Thanks for sticking with me.

Auld Lang Sausage

Howdy! I don't have much time to spend on a post today as I'm busy packing and running errands, getting ready for our annual trip to Columbus to spend New Year's Eve with the usual suspects.

This year we're doing it in high style and half of us are staying in a swanky-ish hotel downtown where all of us are meeting for cocktails and having a nice dinner together followed by yet more cocktails consumed into the wee hours of the morning. Or if previous New Year's Eve history dictates we will probably all eat too much, get incredibly drunk and then crash and burn before 10:30pm at which point:

• Frenchie will already have passed out cold, but somehow still be sitting up.


• Steph will have exhausted the hotels entire inventory of stemware because apparently she needs a fresh glass each time a new kind of wine is poured.
  
  
• MDH will have snuck out for an after dinner Italian sausage and pepper sandwich snack from the street vendor outside the restaurant.


• He will hide the sandwich in his pocket and save for later consumption.*

That's how we roll.

Have a safe and happy weekend. Oh and HAPPY NEW YEAR!

*The sausage thing happened on one of our first New Year's Eves together, long, long ago. MDH bought the sandwich when we were all leaving a night club and nobody saw him. With the exception of Nature Boy, our designated driver, we were all totally polluted, stumbling, drunk. Hours later, after we had been safely deposited back home, MDH and I were drunkenly making out, still fully clothed and when we came up for air I looked over and noticed that all of a sudden he was wailing on this sausage and pepper. Even if I hadn't been so drunk I couldn't have imagined where in the hell it had come from so I asked, incredulous, and not just a little jealous because sausage and pepper sandwiches from dudes with street carts are pretty damn good drunk food, "Where did you get that?" to which he replied, matter of factly, "Eh whass in mah pah-ket."

It's Day Old & Bold Baby

Merry Whateveritisyoucelebrate!

Today MDH and I are celebrating not having to drive 2 and a half hours to spend Christmas day at my uncle Dan's house. We are celebrating having the banana pudding I made yesterday to take to my uncle's all to ourselves. We are celebrating the biscuits and gravy I'm going to make us for brunch, and the icy roads that made it all possible.

There is nothing like the glory of wiggling out of visiting elderly relatives with an excuse that is not lame.

The Pudding
The Solid Sheet of Ice That Is Our Driveway and Street

Best Wishes and Happy Holidays to You and Avoiding Yours!

The Happy Meme

The Vegetable Assassin tagged everyone for a meme and I normally might wiggle out and try ignore such directives, with the excuse that I didn't think they meant me, but lately I could use a meme listing 10 things that make me happy and being non-specifically tagged by my friend Veg is just the push I needed to get started.

I decided to do a photo meme of 10 things that make me happy. I took most of these pictures today.


1. My big green bamboo bowl filled with tangerines. This makes me happy every time I look at it for several reasons, not the least of which is that I happen to have a thing for big giant bowls and green ones in particular. I also love my big green bamboo bowl filled with tangerines because it was a very thoughtful gift from my mom. We were shopping in a store together and she must have noticed me eye-balling and dry humping this bowl. I didn't buy it, but I also didn't say anything to anyone about it either and thought I was being all low-key, so I was thrilled silly when she sent it to me for my birthday a few months later. I should dry hump things in stores more often.

Tangerines also make me happy. I love them and the ones in the bowl are also a present from my mom. She has them shipped to me each year from a citrus grove down the road from where she and my dad live in Florida. These tangerines are amazing, yummy and juicy, but they aren't very user friendly. They're very pithy and overloaded with seeds - so I slice them into quarters and eat them while leaning over the kitchen sink. The rinds make the garbage disposal smell good too.


2. A nice cuppa. I love tea. Hot or iced. It is difficult for me to remain in a bad mood if there is a cup of fragrant, lovely tea sitting before me. I always have tea in the house (loose leaf) and in the summer there is always a fresh pitcher of iced tea in the fridge. I make it every day. It's delicious and loaded with anti-oxidants and how often does that happen? That something you love is actually good for you?? Above in the photo is today's tea selection served in my $20 hardware store teapot. The tea is Scottish Breakfast and is dark black, malty in flavor and tastes great with a little cream (fat-free half and half) and sugar (Splenda). I find that the ritual of making the tea is very calming and you can't rush through making a decent cup of tea. If I'm in a hurry I grab a cup of coffee or have nothing at all. (I hope the chemicals in the Splenda don't cancel out the health benefits of the anti-oxidants)


3. Watching my $9 potted amaryllis from Target grow. It started off grotesque, appearing to be bald baby skull half buried in the soil of the shiny silver pot and has slowly begun to morph into a fully erect and proud phallic staff of weirdness. It's fascinating and it changes every day. I'm given to understand that eventually a big red flower will bloom. In the meantime I'm enjoying it from a distance, although I do sprinkle a little water on it from time to time and occasionally poke it with a stick.

4. Eating in restaurants and trying new foods. When I was growing up we didn't have a lot of money so we didn't eat out very often and when we did it was always the same places over and over again. My parents weren't and still aren't very adventurous eaters and there were tons of foods I never tried or had even heard of until later in my life. I never had Mexican or Chinese food until I was well into my 20's and the first time I had Indian food was about 6 years ago, well into my 30's. I don't care if a restaurant is fancy or expensive necessarily, but I love to experiment and try new things. For the most part I like everything and I'll eat just about anything except organs, eyeballs, ball-balls, etc.. A lady has to drawn the line somewhere. At least this lady does.

5. Wandering around grand old neighborhoods looking at grand old houses. My dream house is giant rambling Queen Anne on a teeny-weeny lot that has more bricks than grass. And big old trees. The house in the picture is one I took in a Louisville neighborhood that I wandered around in with MDH a few years ago.


6. Traveling anywhere on earth with MDH. Sometimes he gets nutty and plans things without me, and sometimes he let's me take care of everything, but mostly we plan all the big trips together. It's so much fun, the anticipation and build up, deciding where to stay and eat and what to do and then when it finally arrives and it's happening... well there's simply nothing else like it. Every time we fly together, we hold hands just as the plane starts taking off and when the plane leaves the ground we say to each other "Here we are!", as in we did all this planning and here we are, off on our adventure. It's what I had engraved on the inside of his wedding band. I waited all my life to meet someone like MDH who wanted to travel and experience the world and do it NOW rather than waiting. Traveling with MDH also entails some other things that make me happy like staying in nice hotels, eating in restaurants and wandering around grand old neighborhoods.


7. When things are surprisingly uncomplicated. It doesn't take much to set me off and make me furious, but it also doesn't take much to make me happy either. I had trouble finding a picture for this one - so here is picture I took when we were on Kauai last January.

• Being the first person in line at a check out.
• Getting an appointment for a haircut within the same week that I call.
• Going into a store and finding exactly what I was looking for and getting out quickly.
• In Michigan you don't have to physically go to the BMV to renew your driver's license - they send you a new one with the same old picture, get this, in the mail. It's awesome. Not having to go to the BMV makes me happy.

8. Sparkling Shiraz. It's my new favorite wine. I tried some a few months ago and now I'm totally hooked. It goes with everything.


9. My cat Turtle. I love his funny little furface. There are moments when I'd like to drop kick his hairy ass through our plate glass window, like when I bust him chewing electrical wires or drinking the water from the Christmas tree pan, but otherwise, he's pretty groovy. He doesn't jump up on the counters or pee anywhere other than where he's supposed to. Mostly he does all the things you'd want a pet cat to do - he plays with toys and looks all ferocious and cute at the same time and lays on my lap to be petted.

10. Clean sheets and towels. There is nothing quite like burying your face into a warm and fluffy freshly washed bath towel straight from the dryer or flopping onto a bed newly made up with warm soft sheets that still smell of fabric softener. It's also great to step out of the shower and onto a warm and freshly washed bath mat.

I expect I shouldn't really have to tag anyone for this meme since Veg was crystal clear that we were all to do it. In fact you've had plenty of time to complete this assignment and should be done with yours by now. Let's see it.

Angel Face

My kid sister loved the shit out of Christmas. You think you know people who love the holidays and get all nutty excited? Well you don't. They are probably half asleep and drooling compared to my sister and I miss her this time of year more than any other.

Because of having Down syndrome my sister never matured intellectually beyond the age of 3 or 4. So it was like living with a very little kid for 15 years. Most children grow up and stop believing in Santa Claus. They become sullen, sour and insolent teenagers and then move on to become bitter, jaded, cynical adults (or was that just me?) about everything but especially so around the holidays. But my sister didn't. She stayed a little kid on the inside and she believed in all of it.

*As a side note, in very tiny font that I'm putting at the top of this post rather than the bottom, before I dig into my sappy sister holiday post I would just like to say that although I have written posts about my little sister before I always skirted around terminology and today I really struggled up there trying to find the right words to use. My family and everyone we knew in the special needs community used to just say "mentally retarded", but I've been out of it for awhile and now am given to understand that it's not always considered politically correct, although I used to belong to an organization called ARC which stands for "Aid Retarded Citizens" - it's still called that - so I'm confused now. Anyhoo... I would just like to let anyone reading this know how much I despise the word "retard". It's never funny to me. I Hate it with a capital HATE. Even when you change the emphasis like in the movie The Hangover (which I enjoyed very much by the way ) and say "re-tard" it still sets my teeth on edge. I think that anyone that uses the term "retard" should be forced to spend the afternoon volunteering at a group home for mentally challenged adults (which you can do through an organization like ARC) with varying degrees of special needs. Get to know some of these fearless, joy-filled and loving people and use the word "retard" after that. I dare you. Frankly I think the world would be a better place altogether if everyone spent some time with people who are mentally challenged or have special needs - we all have a lot to learn from each other. Using the word "retard", no matter what the context, degrades people who are mentally retarded or whatever term you care to use. Thanks for listening. Carry on...

My sister believed in Peter Pan, Tinkerbell and pixie dust, the Easter Bunny, Batman, Superman, Isis and Wonderwoman. She believed in Mork from Ork, Scooby Doo and the Fonz. But she lived year round talking about and anticipating Christmas and Santa Claus. She believed that a bunch of reindeer flew all the way to our house and landed on our roof without ever pooping (when you grow up around animals you think about these things and you never hear about anyone getting pelted with dung falling from the sky and our dad never had to hose off the roof on Christmas morning) and that a jolly fat man in a red suit let himself in with a key left under the mat on the front porch (we didn't' have a fireplace until later). She believed it all. And not just in a quiet wishful way, but in a jumping up and down, shouting out loud to anyone who would listen kind of way.

It wasn't the kind of enthusiasm you see every day is what I'm saying.

Right before Thanksgiving one year there was a guy wearing a Santa suit and ringing a bell in front of a bucket outside of the K-Mart in our town, he wasn't even wearing a beard or anything, not even trying to look like Santa (other than the suit I guess) and my sister ran towards him, arms open and squealing with delight, looking almost like those teenage girls you see in old news footage grabbing their faces and screaming like lunatics over the Beatles. It was a little embarrassing but once we peeled her off of him he said it was the best thing that had happened to him all week and I don't think he meant it in a perverted way at all because the man had tears in his eyes and seemed pretty overwhelmed.

Nobody in my family ever made any effort to tamp down her excitement either. No, quite the contrary, we would build it all up. My mom let my sister mark off the calendar every day, counting down till Christmas starting on my birthday in July, so that by the time her birthday arrived on December 20th, she was nearly apoplectic and bursting into flames from all the hype. Not to say that it also wasn't an ongoing lesson to help her learn about counting and dates and seasons and such, but a mostly the lessons ended with, "and that means it's only this many days till Christmas!"

You might be able to tell by looking at the picture at the top of this post that my mom also let my sister be in charge of most of the tree trimming. That's our old mashed up fake tree that I mentioned in my previous post and I love how all of the ornaments are right in the middle. I would also like to point out the vomit-y blue and green shag carpeting that my mother actually had installed - on purpose - when we moved into that house.

We would get her so worked up that by the time Christmas Eve finally rolled around my sister was bloody freaking exhausted and getting her to go to sleep was never the problem you might have thought it would be.

After we went to bed my dad would eat all of the cookies she'd left out for Santa except for one that he would leave behind with just one bite taken out. My mom would make sure that some of her toys were left unwrapped and set up to look as if someone had been playing with them already, like a dollhouse all set up or one time a new record player was left turned on with a record spinning on it all night (needle off of course), so that it looked like Santa had just left before he got caught in the act of playing with her stuff.

Maybe lots of families do these kinds of things. I hope you'll feel free to tell me about some of the goofy stuff your family did or does in the comments. My parents used to do it for me too when I was little enough to still believe, but they got to continue to do it for a very long time afterwards and I think that must be pretty special. Eventually I got involved in it too. I was all quiet and cool at school (I believe I mentioned something earlier about sullen and sour), but at home I would do anything to get my sister started. Not that it took much more than asking her how many days till Santa comes? or singing carols at the top of my lungs to get her to start squealing.

Have I ever mentioned that we were not Christians? I'm not sure how relevant that is to my story here, but we weren't anything. Maybe you could say agnostic, but my mom never wanted to put a label on it. We ended up celebrating Christmas in a non-Christ kind of way. We never talked about Jesus, but we had a tree and presents appeared under it on Christmas morning. She put up mistletoe, served eggnog and baked cookies.

I think my mom really liked Christmas and after she left her church continued to celebrate it in ways that incorporated her own favorite things about the holiday without having to think about or explain the religious portion of it to me and maybe also to herself, since she stopped putting out the gorgeous hand painted porcelain nativity set that she had inherited from her grandmother when I got old enough to start trying to apply logic to the story and began asking the tough questions about Christmas. If Joseph isn't Jesus real daddy then was Mary married to someone else before Joseph and got a divorce like the Shapiros?

All of our holiday fervor was fueled by our love for my sister and for me it still is. I love Christmas. There I said it. Even though she's gone now and Christmas will never be the same without her, and surly as I've become, I've managed to hang onto a bit of that joy that was always in the air around her and hope that you and the people you love, whether you believe in Jesus, Santa or Mork from Ork, can feel it too.

Merry Christmas.

If you're interested, here are links to some of my other posts featuring my little sister (they aren't quite as sappy as this one):

Cat-like Gag Reflexes

I'm Sure Your Family Is Weird Too

Deep Thoughts

Scare Tactics for Teens