exanimateI wondered why I wasn't surrounded by my family, and I tried to remember Christmas I'd spent with family. This flashed me back to my years in Phoenix, where we celebrated Christmas on Christmas eve. (I always thought it would be so much better if we did it Christmas day like they did in the books and movies.) I remember Christmas being awful growing up - always fights, drinking, repressed anger, my stepfather lurking in the shadows, me hiding someplace with a book. I wondered if my family in Arizona was spending Christmas eve with each other, then suddenly wondered why, if they were, they didn't give me a call to see what I was up to. Talk about a big picker-upper! I also wondered if my sister was getting to celebrate Christmas with everyone or if there was some weird tension thing going on that had her hiding at home with her husband and kids. I hope they got the presents I sent them.
A lot of this I do really blame on the Christmas Grinch of last week, who made me see this whole event as Just a Lot of Work. Today
shadowdaddy is trying to cheer me up, very nicely letting me pick the movie at Scarecrow (Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, the BBC TV series, very low production values, questionable acting), fetching me drinks, making cookie dough. I was hoping I'd cheer up making "Our New Tradition, the Christmas Eve Fritata" (the only thing I could come up with given the ingredients I had to work with), but it was an incredible failure - just sloppy cheese sauce on a bunch of sauteed vegetables - and it made me feel worse. The idea of doing Shrinky Dink ornaments became pretty pathetic then.I just don't know what's going on with me tonight. I just don't. I have no joy in anything.
