The Desert Mermaid

All right, since #25 has a bit of an expiration date, you get the last two tonight, and then I go back and continue to traumatize my family with movies. (We just watched The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’ve always thought that was a weird movie, but you never realize how weird until your parents start watching with you.)

24. Favourite for Christmas dinner?

Turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and MY GOD THE YAMS. Yes, we do Second Thanksgiving around here.

One year we tried goose and it was a universal failure.  From then on, it’s been no goose for you.

25. What do you want for Christmas this year?

I made a whole Amazon wishlist and sent it to people and everyone ignored it.  But I think I’m still getting exactly what I want—a new computer, since the Bhelliom is not living up to its name—it definitely ain’t an All-Powerful Magic Thingy-Thing. And I’m pretty sure I’m getting a new one, since Dad, my brother, and I just went to our local compy broker in order to secure new ones for me and my brother.  So I harbor some suspicions …

And lookit that, Christmas is almost here.  Have a good one, those who celebrate, and a good holiday season/this time of year to those who don’t.  And to all a good night!

22. Most annoying thing about this time of the year?

That would be the occasional castigation for saying “Happy Holidays!” to your customers, who usually take it the way you mean it. Every once in a while, though, someone will stiffen and turn around to give you a good dressing-down.

They shouldn’t pick me. I brook no bullshit. “You do know the ‘War on Christmas’ is a false controversy created by Bill O’Reilly in order to cynically garner more ratings during this season, right?  People have been saying ‘Happy Holidays’ at least since the 50s—I can give you proof in the form of songs recorded in that era. Furthermore, ‘happy holidays’ is all-inclusive, which I like since Christianity certainly does not have a monopoly on midwinter holidays. The existence of other holidays does not actually cancel out yours, or threaten it in any way; in point of fact, Christmas is one of the holidays implied in the ‘Happy Holidays’ greeting.  However, if you would prefer, I will wish you a happy Christmas and a completely miserable New Year. In fact, let’s take it a step further and just wish you misery all around, since wishing you happiness obviously is not working.”

Yet another example of my signature move, the Blinding Infodump.  I could go on and on, but people usually give up before I can even get this far.

Also, I do not add that the other holidays implied in there include not only trumped-up Chanukah, the many and varied forms of Yule, Kwanzaa, and the New Year, but also Hogswatch, Giftmas, Festivus, Xmas, Titmas, and Atheist Children Get Presents Day.  Midwinter: the Do-It-Yourself Holiday.

19. Can you name all of Santa's reindeer's?

First off, Dear meme writer: EPIC FAIL on your pluralizing there. You do not use an apostrophe to pluralize anything; it is there for contractions or the genitive case.

Also, the correct plural of ‘reindeer” is: “reindeer.”

All right, now that we’ve straightened it out, yes, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, and the odd-one out, Rudolph.*

I remember wondering, when I was a small child, how on Earth a reindeer was supposed to have a red nose.  I expect whoever wrote the song was thinking of the sort of deer that like to eat our garden, who have black buttony noses—that’s how they’re always animated. But in fact reindeer look a bit more moosey than that, and it’s a little hard to picture a moose with a red nose, innit?

*Also Reggie the Glow-Wyrm, from an ante-up of the Christmas version of the Glow Worm song.

15. Favourite thing to eat at Christmas?

Rumballs!

Ingredients

1 cup finely crushed Nilla wafers (some people use Graham crackers)

1 cup powdered sugar

1½ cups chopped walnuts

2 tbsp. cocoa (sorry, Neth)

2 tbsp. light corn syrup

¼ cup rum

½ (or so) cup fine grain sugar

Combine wafer crumbs, powdered sugar, nuts, and cocoa.  Add the corn syrup and mix well.  Shape into 1-inch balls (this gets sticky—you have to wash your hands a lot).  Roll in granulated sugar. Store in airtight container.

I used to take these to school for lunch even though OMG TEH ALCOHOL.  They’re sort of ugly and so I’d get a lot of “What the hell is that?”*  But they were a good dessert because most of my friends were Mormon and wouldn’t touch ’em.

Another big winner is leftover turkey.  Yes, we do the giant Christmas Day feast with the turkey and the potatoes and the gravy and my god the yams, and yes our grilled turkey is unsurpassed, thanks for asking, but one of my special pleasures is the next day when you can to the kitchen and build sammich consisting of bread, mayonnaise, a tiiiiny bit of salt, and leftover turkey.  Then you go back to reading or playing video games in your pajamas with a delicious turkey sammich.


Happy thing!  My brother is home!  The whole family is back together and geekier than ever!

*Which is also the response I would get when I took pomegranates to school, back before they became The In Fruit.
 

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas?

When I see what people might like. It’s an ongoing process.

This year I’m making a lot of the Christmas presents, because what I’m making is something I love and wanted to share the love. Trust me, people will be very happy with it.

Happy part! It snowed today! And I don’t have to shovel—sure, it’s because I am teh sick, but hey, I take what I can get!

11. Worst Christmas gift you ever received?

I’ve never received a truly bad gift, I don’t think.  So I am going to change this.

11. Weirdest Christmas gift you ever received?

That would be the cassette tape in each of us kids’ stockings last year.  Each tape was a recording of a certain Famous Cartoon Character talking to one of us, personally. The character told me how cool it was that I was in Africa and that he heard I was interested in languages and that he hoped I was a good girl even though I was all grown up now.

See, the voice actor for that character was a patient of Dad’s. And the guy was stunned that we knew who he was, including his lesser-known roles. (“Are you kidding, Dad? He was that guy in that one episode of that show!* AWESOME!”) And happy.  And so he made us each a tape to sort of thank us for the recognition.

It was odd and sweet and I loved it. Thank you, voice actor!

And now for the Week o’ Happiness! What has made me happy today? Why, finding my old pirate story and reading through what I got done!  I’m not even wincing at my writing. I should write an ending for my little hobbit pirate.

Also my permanent account! I gotta get me a Christmas icon.

*I was actually more specific, but patient privacy on the blog.

9. Do you have a nativity scene?

Mom got a cute one at one point, but I never did understand how it fit in other than as a decoration for one of the old traditions, sorta like the tree.  And the baby Jesus was adorable, so I stole him and pretended he was some fairy baby or something a lot.

I don’t think we’ve actually dug it out in years.

childthursday

7. Hardest person to buy for?

My sister is difficult to buy for because she likes everything. You’d think this would make it easy, but the trick is finding something she’ll like that will last.  Most of the stuff I get her falls by the wayside quickly; neither you nor she can predict what will have staying power.

My dad is also pretty hard to shop for. Lately I’ve been sticking with media. One year we kids pooled our money and got him the Alien nine-disc set, including theatrical and directors’ releases of each movie (the two real Alien movies and the two that I declared dead to me) and all sorts of behind-the-scenes junk. He was happy enough with it, but the real winners there were my sister and me.

5. Do you like eggnog?

Yes, but as so many people say, I can’t have much of it at once.  I know of only one person who will polish off glass after glass, and that is my brother.

He could do this from the time he was three. Hell, he’d go around and finish off other people’s eggnog.  Lots of other people’s! Other people who were grown-ups, and who had the grown-up eggnog. Which we realized when he couldn’t stop giggling into his yams at dinner.

My brother’s past: not actually suitable for minors.

“Eggnog” was also, for reasons that escape me at the moment, one of our budgie’s nicknames.  Sometimes this got changed to “Nogz” or “Noggors.” We are a weird family.

Incidentally, what the hell is “nog,” anyway?  That we have to modify it with “egg” suggests that nog does not necessarily have to contain eggs, but I have never heard of any other kind of nog.  Can other things be nogged?  Can you have, say, rhubarb nog, or chicken broth nog, or cottage cheese nog?  God, I hope not.