Christmas Time! – Page 10

Buon Natale

December 25, 2009

Mmmm, Christmas.

Two days ago, boss was awesome and told us to go home for Christmas at around noon, even though we were supposed to work yesterday too. Yay, extra long weekend!

Yesterday, wrapped all my presents, made some cookies, finished and posted my newest Christmas NYRA Tale, went to my mom’s Greek friend’s big ass party again, and was half an hour late for the late night Christmas Eve church service. Not sure if that’s a win or a fail. Stupid family made me late and I missed O Come All Ye Faithful. I only even go for the music, dang it! :doitnow:

And during Silent Night, waving my candle around like a lighter at a concert, while wearing my Santa hat during the service.

And this morning got to family at around 10am and shortly after started opening presents.

Then at 11am I had to leave for a bit… to go to work. -_-

Just for a minute. It may be Christmas Day, but it’s also still Friday, and the freezer’s temperature chart still needs to be changed. I got there, repeatedly said “Fuck you!” to it while changing it out, writing the time, date, and initials on it, a nice “11:17am, 12-25-09” that I’ll totally show my coworkers on Monday and totally get yelled at for. Dedication.

Then back to the house to continue opening presents. And getting what looked like a bottle of booze that was actually olive oil. 🙂

Then food.

Then more food.

Plus watching my little brother make his trains collide, in a god-like lust for transportation disaster. Incidentally, it seems the Pennsylvania Flyer kicks the Polar Express’s ass.

Now I’m sitting here next to him as he’s watching various train videos on YouTube.

Plus we’ve been having a Christmas Day Chat among NYRAnians which has been quite nice.

In this, our pseudo-White Christmas. Where the leftover snow from last weekend is getting killed fast from rain and rising temperatures. Christmas is supposed to bring snow, not kill it! :doitnow:

I love this day. 😀

Can Hardly Wait

December 21, 2009

Goodness, how many Christmas songs am I going to criticize?! 😀

The one of the moment is “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”. It’s an okay song as a whole, if a bit dated. But there is one line in it that just sticks out like a Mormon on SnipeMe.

“And mom and dad can hardly wait for school to start again.”

Wow, WTF? I mean, I’m not blaming the song for this line, because it can’t help, well, speaking the truth. Line comes right after listing what some kids hope to get for Christmas. I guess like a whole this-is-what-these-people-are-thinking during the Christmas season. Kids are eagerly anticipating their gifts, and the parents… wish the kids would STFU and go back to school already.

Ah, those mature responsible adults. :irked:

Frosty the… Puddle

December 20, 2009

So on Friday night, Frosty the Snowman was on TV. The hat is put on him, he comes to life and says “Happy Birthday” for some reason, they dance around and have fun, but then they realize he’ll be gone once the snow melts.

So they figure the best way to remedy this is to stow away on a train that’s heading for the North Pole for some reason. Stuff happens and they end up off the train short of reaching the point where every direction is south, so Frosty and the little girl Karen are lost in the woods and Karen is freezing to death, so they somehow end up finding a greenhouse full of poinsettias. What luck!
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SNOMG!!!

December 19, 2009

So we just got like 16 inches of snow. WIN!

So I went outside earlier to brush some of it off my car, then slipped on some ice, went back inside for a minute, then went back out, brushed some more snow off my car, froze, and back inside again. Good times.

Check it out…
LOL snow

It’s like a cross between a blue sedan and a jagged snowy mountain. This was before I started brushing snow off, but I didn’t really finish the job, and it now looks more like a jagged snowy mountain growing over my little car, all covered except for the red NYRA sticker. 😀

Season’s Greetings from NYRA!

December 18, 2009

Today, I’m proud to announce I have completed the sending of the 4th Annual NYRA Holiday Cards! Largest batch yet by a wide margin, a whopping 480 NYRA holiday cards were sent this year!

I find it interesting that this being the fourth year in a row that I’ve done this whole entry-a-day in December thing, having started that the same December I sent NYRA’s first holiday cards, this is the only time I’ve really specifically mentioned them on here, save for the bit last year about the sentient post office machine and a blurb in the 2007 and 2008 recaps.
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Cut to the Chase

December 16, 2009

And now for a Christmas miraculous edition of…

Here’s to You!!!!

So I raise my glass and say, “Here’s to you, NYRA!”

For today, after several weeks of toiling and bugging the crap out of everyone for votes in some Facebook contest sponsored by Chase bank, NYRA has met with success. Amazing, breathtaking, miraculous success on this December 16, 2009, nine days before Christmas and 6th night of Chanukah…

NYRA has won $25,000.

For so long, we’ve been a small-budgeted organization, weak next to bigger stronger organizations who can run big ass campaigns and hire staff who aren’t starving to death. For so long, we’ve had members who wanted to help out but didn’t know how and we didn’t know what to have them do. We’ve always been great at keeping ourselves afloat during adversity like a cork in the bath tub, but we’ve still been seemingly without direction and without a future.

Perhaps God showed us mercy. What is known is that all our people had to do was vote for us. What with it not costing anything and being very straight forward instructions, it had a recipe for success. What is known is that, somehow or another, we built our miracle at last, through Keith’s incessant calling of members, through Alex’s exhausting tabling, and the invaluable efforts of our other members, who all came together, believing that this could be done.

We built this Christmas miracle. Or Chanukah miracle, as Hal suggested, seeing as it is Chanukah right now and a lot of our members are Jewish. It wasn’t just handed to us. Well, the opportunity arose, but it took us, all of us, our determination and efforts, and we made it happen. We waited all day today for the results to get posted, biting our nails nervously, worrying it may all have been for naught. And then, around 6pm, Alex got the e-mail. And then, we found the miracle we had been building up had happened, had shown bright before us. Shining bright the future of the youth rights movement that merely six months ago we thought may just be a pipe dream. Shining bright for us to walk into and build it up together.

Christmas Voyeur

December 14, 2009

Some Christmas songs are so terrible they are worth being griped about multiple times. I speak again about the entity responsible for horrid neuron-genocide known as “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”.

Really, it does the same thing that “Santa Baby” does, in that it actually sort of implicitly sexualizes Santa Claus. In the case of “Santa Baby”, it’s about some chick wanting Santa to hurry down the chimney and bring her presents, and it’s sung in such a tune that those “presents” could be just about anything and certainly not all she wants (giggity). Which is messed up when you figure Santa Claus is like 1700 years old, and unless the singer is supposed to be Mrs. Claus, we’re talking a girl with some major daddy issues.
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Semitic Cousins

December 12, 2009

I hereby decree…

Arabs and Jews are the same people!

I might want to throw Greeks and Italians into that mix, too, for a lot of this.

Last night was the first night of Chanukah, and I can guarantee all our Jewish friends were up late and stuffed themselves with lots of delicious food. And they’ll do the same tonight. And tomorrow night. Eating and celebrating, running late into the night, with lots and lots of people.
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Geography FAIL

December 11, 2009

Have you heard the song “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” by Band Aid? That collaborative bit from the ’80s all about how poor Africans are starving and to think of them at Christmas time? That goes “Feed the world… let them know it’s Christmas time!” Sounds nice on the surface, and Lord knows idiots like my mom eat it up without a thought. But when you really look at it, the song is rife with profound ignorance about the place they are singing about.

Alexander Cohen covered this one well a couple years ago already, and I have to agree with everything he says there.

Look at these lyrics: “And there won’t be snow in Africa at Christmastime/ The greatest gift they’ll get this year is life./ Where nothing ever grows, no rain nor rivers flow./ Do they know it’s Christmastime at all?”
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Materialism

December 10, 2009

I’m just going to come out and ask this. Just what exactly is wrong with materialism? And, in order to really answer that, I must also ask: just what exactly is materialism?

In a little resistance to Black Friday and Christmas shopping in general, you get people self-righteously looking down their noses at the shoppers, sighing that the season has lost its spirit, that people are just materialistic and *gasp* want presents, and are thus slaves to corporations by buying into this whole gift thing, that gifts aren’t supposed to be what Christmas is about.

I talked about something similar already three years ago. Though that was more about specific presents and attitudes towards them. Right now I’m referring more generally.
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