Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2003 - 12:46 p.m.
Greetings,
Candles. I’ve got candles! They are not Halloween candles either, they are Christmas candles.
Yes, I know it’s October. I had the chance to get Christmas decorations from one of those catalogs nursery schools and boy scouts send out to drum up money for their organizations. So I did.
I bought three tea light burners. One is silver with cutouts of Christmas trees. Two are gold – matching gold globes that look like the balls you hang on the tree. (That sentence, no matter what I do to it, looks vaguely pornographic to me. Oh, well.)
I already know the golden balls (what the hell, let’s roll with it) will go on the coffee table (John’s old storage chest/coffee table from his Magazine Street and Houston Cad Pad days – only spiffed up a bit from his time). The silver tree tea light burner will go on the entertainment center where currently an orange Jack-o-Lantern shaped tea light burner from Cost Plus World Market holds sway.
As a little digression - I love Cost Plus World Market. It’s like well, a world market. Lots of stuff from India and Africa and China and Thailand and other exotic places.
Last time I was there I got the Jack-o-Lantern tea light burner. I also got a rubber duck (I collect rubber devil ducks) with a costume on. She’s got cat ears instead of devil horns and she’s carrying a little Trick-or-Trick bag under one wing.
So anyway, I got candles for Christmas today. And I recently ordered a “Santa Train” wooden display for the mantel and a snowman nightlight where you can pour holly berry scented oil in his top hat and when the light glows it heats up the oil and the scent of holly berry drifts merrily across the room. (Or so it said in the Avon catalog.)
The Santa Train is for Tommy because he likes trains and also in honor of the train at City Park during Celebration Under the Oaks. My Christmas in New Orleans is really not complete until I set foot on that train and whoosh around the park looking at the lights and sometimes freezing my butt off, but more likely wondering why the hell I can sit in a moving train at 9 at night in December and only be wearing a sweater.
I’m thinking no tree again this year because why fight tradition. Tommy and I have never had a tree for Christmas. We disagree about live versus artificial. We also disagree about flocked versus non-flocked. (I didn’t even know what the flock a “flocked” tree was until I met him. I think it’s got to be a thing that only happens in parts of the country where it doesn’t snow. All I know is that a tree with fake snow on it is scary. And not in a good way.)
We also have four cats – three of which would no doubt climb the tree and of those three, one would definitely knock it over trying. And let’s not get into the stealing of the ornaments.
So no tree for us.
What we do like to do is get a pine needle garland (fake) and wrap some colored lights around it and then drape that around a window or a doorway. We do agree on this: white lights are NOT Christmas lights. Only the multi-colored ones are! MAYBE a string of red ones, but not the white ones!
The white ones are cool, but not for Christmas.
Since some of you in the back row may not have heard me.
WHITE LIGHTS ARE NO GOOD FOR CHRISTMAS – ONLY THE MULTI-COLORED ONES. MAYBE THE RED ONES.
Switching topics totally, they painted the walls last night after work.
Yesterday I was just admiring how dark they were and the marble effect was kick ass. It was like working in an Italian marble cave or something.
Today it’s mint green everywhere. Light! Airy! Drape some white lights over some doorways and you’ve got something right pretty. ;)
Actually, the mint green is not bad. Sort of hospital/industrial, but in a good way.
I would like to go to lunch, but it’s not quite time yet. So I suppose I should do some of the jolly, joyous work I have in front of me.
Actually, it’s pretty cool work. Tables in Word, that sort of thing. I could get creative. I could type or cut and paste. I could do a lot.
So maybe I should do it.
Until next time,
Olrun
