It’s beginning to feel a bit
I grew up mostly in Texas and Florida, both southern states, so we never had snow, just crisp, bright winter days. At least those are the days I remember. Maybe some small patches of snow if we’d driven one of the huge family Buicks up to Oklahoma to visit relatives.
But now I live in Taiwan, and Christmas is one of the few times I feel nostalgic for the U.S. (That and when I just want to get in a car and drive along a long, straight empty highway for several hundred miles.)
I don’t have a Christmas tree; no place to put it, and if I had one I’d have to put fake presents under it, and as Christmas isn’t a holiday here, I’d have to go to work before I could open them. That would be just as well, as I can’t think of anything more depressing…well, if it were also my birthday or something…
Oh, wait.
I do have a small wreath I put on my shoe rack in the hall outside my apartment door. The gold glitter residue it leaves on my shoes has diminished over the years. I also have blinking Christmas lights for my balcony, the real kind, not the piercing LED perversions that I’m sorry JUST DON’T FEEL LIKE CHRISTMAS LIGHTS.
I have some CDs with holiday songs from the late 60s. Our family was a bit behind the times when it came to Christmas music, but then again, I don’t think my parents dealt with the 70’s very well. Most of the decade, I seem to recall, was spent in a state of panicked denial that mystified me at the time. The 60’s Christmas songs, on LPs in dusty yet festive cardboard jackets, are welded in my memories, right next to unwrapping a remote-control van that could only turn left on the puke-green carpet of our living room in El Lago, the bright blue sky outside muffled by white curtains.
It just got cold today. Time to put up the lights.
