“Just look at us now, part of it all. In spite of it all, we’re still around! So wake up the kids, put on some tea, let’s light up the tree. It’s Christmas Day!” -Neil Diamond, You Make It Feel Like Christmas
Here we are again. It is Christmas Day! Through another year since the last one, we have lasted. Yay!
As usual, yesterday was another run of Christmas Eve, the longest day of the year. The Christmas Eve runaround leading up to the relative lull that is Christmas Day. Started with waking up, running to work to change a temperature chart, back home, wrapping presents, watching specials, listening to Christmas music, etc. All the way until around 7pm when once again my family went to my mom’s Greek friend’s Christmas Eve party. Ate lots of delicious food as usual, then I went to the 11pm Christmas Eve service at church like always. Wearing my Santa hat.
And listened to the sermon, which was about It’s a Wonderful Life, which the priest admitted to only recently watching all the way through the first time (iknorite?!) even though the church had been doing some activity before then supposedly about the movie. So, in other words, the priest admitted to professing to know about something that he in fact knew little about. Bizarre! :cute:
Well, part of surviving a church service when one has ideologically pulled away from Christianity like I have is to look at the whole thing as just some story everyone there is making a celebration of. Pretend nobody actually takes this seriously but that this is all just for fun. Hey, for most of the people there, that may actually be the case!
Once more, after communion, we all held candles, turned out the lights, and sang Silent Night. With joy.
And once more, upon the choir walking back down the aisle, we all sang Hark the Herald Angels Sing. Which I felt tempted to finish with a loud cheerful “Hell yeah!” But I resisted. Sorry. 😛
Then I talked to the priest, who’s known me for a while. I told him my realization about O Come All Ye Faithful.
Then I thanked him for not being Fred Phelps, and he took that as a compliment. 😆
Went home and prepared last few gifts.
And the NYRA website, which had been down for several horrible days, had at last come back. Just in time for Christmas! Christmas miracle.
Then went upstairs to my living room, on which I had put my colored lights. I gazed out at the divine night sky, watching for Santa…
And off in the distance, under a tower with one of them blinking red lights…
I saw a star.
I think. A star there in the night sky on Christmas Eve…
Or, no, it was actually the big electric star that on a tower that some nearby company puts up every year.
Hmmm… what a time to first notice I’m able to see it from my house! 🙂
So I unplug the lights for the night and go to bed.
And in the morning…
It’s snowing.
Ever so lightly. No real accumulation. I wondered just what does and doesn’t qualify as a White Christmas. Do Christmas morning flurries count? Does it count if it’s leftover snow from several days ago? Does it count if it doesn’t snow until later in the day?
In any case, I drove to my family’s house with the tiny Christmas snowflakes whirling around me, and arrived at the house to my very excited little brother, who got a fancy new train set, and is right now running that train round and round and round and round…
And has been using the new saucer sled he got from Santa as a flying saucer full of aliens attacking the train!
And we had our feast, our feast of roast beast.
What does Christmas have in common with the United States?
They’re both crazy mixtures of stuff from a crapload of different cultures… yet white Christian conservatives seem to think they belong only to them.
And the Dallas Cowboys lost. Sweet.
Christmas.
Yeah. 
