Happy Christmas Fairy, or How I was De-Scrooged

Some years, the beloved Christmas Spirit pays me a gentle visit; others, I’m as grinchy as can be and go around growling at cheerful people at regular intervals. Grinchalicious, I like to call it. Ahem. This year, I was not feeling very optimistic about the chances of the Happy Good Cheer Fairy tapping me on the head with her sparkly red wand of joy, but she came along anyway and gave me a good wallop. In the form of stuff. Stuff! And a fair amount of good luck to top it all off. It’s just plain weird: two days of green traffic lights, consistently guessing the perfect routes to avoid huge messes of backed up traffic, parking spaces instantly opening up for me in malls crowded with rabid Christmas shoppers, and unintentionally taking routes through town that took me right by the places where I needed to run errands that I had previously completely forgotten about. Hmmm. All my luck appears to be traffic related. I have been blessed by the Automotive Fairy! If only she would fix my worn-out brakes now. Maybe I should take them off of my car and leave them under my pillow tonight...

On to the stuff and happy holidayness! One of the big bonuses to having two jobs, I discovered, is that I got to go to two holiday parties. Two parties with free food and a chance to dress up and wear fancy uncomfortable shoes that looked absolutely stunning. Joy! Both parties were this past weekend, on my first two days off in a row in over a month. More joy! The first one was for RECON, the environmental company I’ve been working for most of this year since April. It was at the Hilton on Harbor Island. Schmancy! My hot date and I arrived late due mostly to my multiple wardrobe issues. I had to sew straps on my dress to keep it from falling down, and I was having a horrendous time trying to force my hair to do something attractive. It didn’t work, and we arrived at the party an hour late but just in time for dinner. One unexpected benefit of our lateness was that we ended up at a table in the corner, and there were only four of us there. Most of the other tables were full, and had about 10-11 people around them. Having only four of us was a good thing because we played a game of “hot potato” with a gold pine cone and whoever ended up holding the pine cone when the music stopped got one of three prizes sitting on the table. Remember, there were only four of us. What a deal! Everybody won! Technically speaking, one person didn’t, but since that person was a half of a couple, they got to share. See below for an illustration of Who-ville style celebrating and sharing around the Christmas tree!

And here is where my joyful receiving of stuff begins. I won a $50 gift card for Crate and Barrel! The really serendipitous thing is about this is that I suddenly don’t have much silverware anymore, and I’ve been really needing to buy some, but I just don’t have the money. Well, tonight after work (after taking the much less traffic-jammy 163 instead of 15), I ended up near the mall where Crate and Barrel is. How fortuitous! Now I have a whole set of spiffy new heavy silvery objects with which to eat my food and stir things. But it doesn’t end there! Oh no. Last night I went to the big fat party at Stone Brewing Company. It was fabulous. Truly! And not just because I won more stuff. But here’s how the stuff came about: every year a raffle is held, and you get tickets based upon attendance (those are the easy ones), early arrival, and if you bring a white elephant gift to share. I arrived with my dear brother, and we looked smashing, I must say. We were informally voted best-dressed couple by several attendees. Never mind that we’re not a couple, California being one of those uppity states where it’s illegal to marry your siblings. But I would have liked a tiara....I digress...


Anyhow, they raffle off a HUGE amount of stuff. And I’m not kidding. The stuffness was overwhelming--a surfboard, a beach cruiser, THREE handmade guitars, lots of clothes and leisure packages... They use a really great system: each package has a small box in front of it, and you only put your tickets in the boxes for things that you were truly interested in winning. No waste! One of the things I wanted didn't have many tickets in it, so I put four in the box--and I won!!!! Holy crap! I got a Mission Playground jacket, a pair of expensive sunglasses, and VIP tickets to a few SD Rep shows of my choice. Hot damn! The sunglasses were humungous, and according to one co-worker, made me look like an alien. I’m not surprised--I knew they wouldn’t work the moment I took them out of the box. I have a very tiny face, and these things were truly gigantic. We ended up passing them around for folks to try on and laughing at their absurdity, but then they really looked good on this one young woman. So I gave them to her. It’s Christmas! It’s fun to give stuff to people. And I also got the very very fine present that my brother brought to the party, which was a coveted bottle of Stonewall Ale and a tape of “Little Tookie Sings” -- a collection of holiday tunes sung by my wacky sibling, complete with scary gremlin voices and drum machine riffs. Even more coveted! I could tell that several people wanted my Stonewall beer and tape, but since I’m a girl they didn’t have the heart to steal it from me. Yay for being a girl!

However, my luck did run out just around the time when I was eating dinner tonight and an obnoxious Christmas song inexplicably popped into my head and settled there for a long while. Yes, you cynics out there, there ARE some non-obnoxious Christmas songs. It was that horrible whiny tune about “Do you hear what I hear (do you hear what I hear? Huh? DO YOU?)” and then that bit about “A star, a star, oh blah blah blah blah blah, with a tail as big as a kite...with a tail as big as a KIIIIIIIITE!” You know, even as a child, I hated that song. Somehow the melody is a limping wounded thing and that kite bit is simply a wretched choice of simile. A kite? A kite just isn’t that big. Or poetic. It doesn’t instill me with a sense of majesty and awe, which is what I think they must have been aiming for...after all, this is Jesus’ special star. Didn’t they intend it to be majestic and awesome? And big? They may as well have said “with a tail as big as a fire hydrant“ for all the beauty and wonder that it stirs up in my mind. Yeesh.

But I have new silverware and a cool jacket made out of organic cotton and recycled plastic bottles, and beer, and theater tickets and a warm fuzzy feeling. The best thing of all is that I am truly blessed with the best brother any living human has ever had, and a host of amazingly generous and kind-hearted wonderful friends. Now THAT is a rare gift indeed.