Deck the Hollies

Apparently Christmas is a thing.

I mean, no duh it's a thing. It's the thingiest of things. Almost everybody knows about it. Lots of people celebrate it.I just mean…people get really intoChristmas, you know? As they should. It is the most glorious of celebrations. There are just so many ways to celebrate that it’s at once delightful and overwhelming. Everybody emphasizes something different.

My workplace is all about Christmas games and contests.

Etch-a-Sketch’s family holds a Christmas party each year in October. My impression is they feel like Christmas parties in December are overrated, and people are less swamped in October anyways.

My mom often buys a Christmas box of chocolates from our local fancy candy store. The family eats it all together, everyone taking turns in choosing a chocolate. The idea is to find the chocolate that you most desire. Many a time I’ve bitten into a chocolate I was positive was English toffee-flavored only to find it was actually coconut cream or peanut-caramel.

Lots of people especially enjoy singing Christmas songs. When Baby Brother was, well, little more than a baby, he would sing Christmas songs nonstop during the joyous season. His three favorites were “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Jingle Bells,” and “Deck the Halls.” He knew only a few lines of each song, which he would sing over and over and over again. This was particularly true of “Deck the Halls.”

Deck the hollies boughs of jollies

Baby Brother would sing.

La la la la la, la la la laaaaaaaaaaaaaa

At the end of each round of “la las,” he would change the key to a higher pitch and start over. I’m sure someday Baby Brother will be the sweetest of tenors, but his prepubescent soprano could break a department-storeful of glass bulb ornaments and Christmas lights.

I like to make up a Christmas newspaper every year. When I was thirteen, I had this English teacher who had stacks and stacks of The National Geographicin his classroom. I read so many of those magazines during the fall that I decided to write an imitation article for my Christmas paper. (National Geographic articles have a very distinct style, for those who haven’t had the pleasure.) I posed it as a guest article by Velvet Darwin of The Irrational Geographic about a faraway village where they celebrate Christmas all year round or something like that. ‘Twas a thing of beauty.

But that’s not all, my friends. There are still a million and one other ways to celebrate Christmas.

Check out Pinterest, for example. Christmas crafts abound, as well as new takes on Christmas cards, gift wrapping, and traditional Christmas treats.

The other day I happened to see an interesting pin on Pinterest. It was a photo of a long slab of raw meat.

“What’s this?” I asked myself. “A recipe for a delicious marinade?” As a person who cooks only for myself, I have little interest in marinades for excessively long slabs of meat, no matter how delicious, so I scrolled on past.

Then the text at the bottom of the pin caught my eye. “Winter White Red Velvet Fudge” it proclaimed.

“There’s no way,” I said to myself. But there was a way. Some people apparently like to celebrate Christmas by making festive fudge that looks exactly raw meat.

The knife doesn't help.