Merry Christmas!

My thoughts on Christmas

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I love getting gifts, I love giving gifts, I love decorating, I love cooking, and I love singing traditional songs. While I do think that Christmas has become too commercial and too drawn out (the marketing starts at Halloween now? Really?), I do love what it stands for. I love the whole season.

For Christians, the day stands for the birth of Christ. While I don't believe in Christ as God the Son, nor as a man who died for our sins in order to buy us eternal salvation, I do believe that Jesus existed as an historic figure deserving respect and emulation. Factual accounts of his life lead me to believe that he was a social worker, a volunteer, and a charitable man. A doer of good deeds, a teacher and healer, and a revolutionary. A radical, progressive humanist. A passionate activist. I can get behind all that! While Dec. 25 was not necessarily his birthday, its as good a day as any to celebrate Jesus and the spirit of generosity, kindness, compassion, and pacifism we'd like to assume he represented.

For ancient Pagans, Christmas was something else entirely. Its proximity to Solstice is not accidental, and I still love the Pagan traditions of bringing light to the darkest time, of bringing green growth in from the dead winter, and of celebrating warmth and abundance with yuletide carols and bountiful feasts. I like having something warm, bright, and exciting to look forward to in the darkest week of the year, and I'm very comfortable attaching Solstice and Christmas together in my own mind. I celebrate them both, at once. For me, Christmas is a joyful hybrid holiday representing the best of both Pagan and Christian sentiment. The fact that it stretches from Thanksgiving to New Year's Eve, at least, is fine with me.

In the tongue-in-cheek Pastafarian tradition, "Holiday" can be celebrated whenever, however, and for however long one wants. I don't mind celebrating Holiday from Thanksgiving to New Year's, and I don't mind calling it the Christmas season, and I don't mind praying for peace on Earth and goodwill towards men. I don't have to be a Christian to see the beauty in these traditions, and I'm grateful for this opportunity to celebrate.

Merry Christmas!

I'm just about positive we can't top last year's Christmas gift for these girls of ours, but we expect a merry holiday anyway. Clover, the Christmas chihuahua, turned out to be the BEST dog for our family! I'm so glad the Alternative Humane Society staff saw fit to place her with us, despite (or perhaps because of) our bustling, big family. 

To say I was surprised to be given a chance at Clover is an understatement. After all, walking in to the adoptathon on Dec. 17 and saying I had 1) preschoolers, 2) a history of giving up my last two dogs because they had been poor fits for my family, 3) no small-dog experience, and 4) every intention of presenting the pup as a Christmas present, I was expecting to spend some time convincing staff that I actually hadn't lost my mind. Instead, they handed me a wiggling black pup (she was about 10 months old at the time) and said, "you want this one."  

"I have three little girls. The youngest is three. Are you sure?"  I really had a hard time believing they were going to entrust this darling, fragile puppy to me and my children.

"She will LOVE them," the director told me. And she does! There could not be a better dog for our family, except perhaps Paisley. He's perfect, too. 

I feel so lucky to have these two great dogs in my home right now. I haven't felt this settled with my dog family since Mirri died (December 15, 2004). My years of longing have ended. 

Truly Taupe

I love paint samples. I could spend hours holding Svelte Sage against Urban Putty, comparing Macadamia with Sea Salt, and nestling Dromedary Camel into Quietude.

I wonder, sometimes, if it stems from my childhood. When I was eight, my mom married a housepainter. I used to hold his colorwheel sample books, riveted at one end, and fan them for endless hours. I still remember the joyful discovery of one beautiful combination after another, and the way my favorite blue-gray looked against ten of its most complimentary peers.

When I worked, more recently, in the prepress department of a commercial printer, I'd sometimes spend my lunch hour in the breakroom comparing CMYK and spot color samples. It was somehow lacking—perhaps because "2583 M" is so much less romantic than Aubergine.


A Sherwin-Williams employee, seeing the difficulty I was having in choosing a blue, recently offered to loan me his colorwheel, a fanning rainbow, to bring home with me. I was thrilled by his offer, but I declined, choosing Open Seas on the spot. Had I borrowed the wheel, I would have enjoyed it. I might have enjoyed it so much that I'd have had trouble resolving to give it back. 

On another related topic, I can't recommend Sherwin-Williams' Harmony paint base highly enough. It has very little odor and no VOCs, and is the only interior paint that I can use without falling ill. I've used it in every room in my house save one, and that one's getting painted this weekend. Painted in Open Seas and Truly Taupe.