Adventures of a Tofu Slut

So Maybe I Don't Entirely Hate Christmas After All. I'm in a much more festive mood today, possibly because I've been ignoring all the Christmas CDs on my desk in favour of dealing with the raft of Grammy nominations, none of which involve the words "Santa" or "Holly". Plus I have a candy cane, and the possibility of a singalong Messiah. VOLKORNBROT!

Aaaaand there's probably no-one reading at this point who gets the reference. Nevermind.

Candy Is Dessert Too, Right? Today I smell like licorice, courtesy of licorice soap from starfishchick and Absinthe from BPAL.

Fall under the spell of our Green Fairy! An intoxicating blend containing wormwood essence, light mints, cardamom, anise, hyssop, and the barest hint of lemon.

Whoa, licorice. Which I like, but I'm sure would cause many other people to run screaming from me. Luckily by the time I left the house the anise had faded, and other things had come through, namely the cardamom and something green, possibly the wormwood and hyssop. I like it, but it's fading quickly.

Wednesdays Are The Best Day Of The Week. ( LOST )

Where's My Toronto Camouflage? There's some sort of event happening downstairs that involves tables of free food. I was going to go down and see what I could score, but I noticed, as I was leaning over the railing, that everyone was wearing black. I think my brown and jean look would have been highly suspicious. The perils of being a west coast hippie in the big city.

Love Is In The Air, Quite Clearly. Those of you who are posting such wonderful things about the people on your flist, it's really lovely. There isn't nearly enough gratuitous ego-stroking in the world.

Yeah, I Got Nothing. I'd be defriending me right about now, too. :D

Half-price Hallowe'en candy has no calories, right? ::eyes Shoppers' candy aisle::

I watched The Faculty last night. It was funny, although I found Josh Hartnett's EXTREMELY LAME HAIR at the beginning a wee bit distracting. Overall, though, I'd say it wins, because I'd intended to be working on something else while I was watching it, and I didn't get barely any of that other thing done.

Although I have been asked for Christmas lists, I'm having a hard time thinking of anything I want this year. Correction: I'm having a hard time thinking of anything more creative than my enormous Amazon Wishlist of Doom, and/or cheaper than an mp3 player or a digital camera. I guess I don't need anything. How is that possible? I'm obviously not doing my part in this, our consumerist society.

Coming up, on the 11:00 news: Belle & Sebastian, Hawksley Workman, and why I love them so very much.

ps. Good luck, Americans, with your voting adventures! May your lines be short and your votes worthy.

Everybody needs to be really nice to me for the rest of the year, because I got some very cute (and silly), very on sale Christmas cards for next year, and I know you all want one (if you saw them, which you won't until December).

Also purchased: cute, extremely cheap bras, which probably won't last long, but which actually fit, unlike the rest of my bras.

Not purchased: lunch from the fancy pasta place, as it seems to have closed. Goodbye, green curry sauce.

So, I'm trying to pack the stockings, and my father's stocking is SO ENORMOUS this year, I don't know how I'm going to get it all in. And we even use nylons so that we can fit in more presents (because they stretch, you know)! I think I might have to put his gifties in a full set - both legs.

I think we've decided to go see Mona Lisa Smile tonight. I haven't heard particularly good things about it, but there's really nothing out there, and everything that I was going to recommend, someone has already seen. So this seems to be the only option. And Thai food first, which, yum. Right now, though, I have to go make a marinated veggie salad for dinner tomorrow, assuming I can get in the kitchen between my mom making butter tarts, and my dad making trifle and stuffing.

Have a wonderful and fun-filled Christmas, everyone! And if you don't celebrate Christmas, have a fantastic Thursday!

3. Christmas Eve. There was a time (back when I was tiny and we still had contact with the relatives) that we would go to my Aunt's place for Christmas Eve. We'd hang out, then the kids (seven of them, all older than me) would go to bed, and at midnight they'd get woken up to open their stockings. But as the kids got older it got less fun, so the new tradition became the Christmas Eve Movie.

When we started this, only one theatre in town was open on Christmas Eve, early shows only, 3 screens. So we were pretty limited as to what we could see. Now, of course, everywhere is open, so we can be much pickier. I've already started scoping out the movies to see what I think we might all enjoy.

Sadly, the movie is usually followed by the traditional Last Minute Wrapping of Presents, because there's never quite enough time beforehand.

We're not a particularly traditional family, especially when it comes to holidays, which are usually celebrated only occasionally, if at all. My dad, though, loves any excuse to cook for large groups of people, so Christmas has become a pretty big deal in our house, especially now that I live across the country and that's usually the only time I get home.

By now, we do have a few traditions associated with Christmas, most of which have mutated over the years to become what they are today.

1. The tree. The tree goes upstairs, in front of the bay window. By edict of my dad, it has to be as tall as we can fit in the house (9 or 10 feet, I think) and can't be one of the super bushy kind, but has to be a little Charlie Brown in appearance, so that there's room between the branches for the ornaments to actually hang. We have a lot of beautiful ornaments, mostly from art galleries and craft fairs, and they're all different, so we need to be able to see them.

If we don't get the right kind of tree, my dad pouts.

It's also become a tradition to buy the tree before Christmas Eve, a lesson we learned one year when my dad and I spent hours driving around trying to find somewhere that still had trees for sale.

After we drag the tree up the stairs and into the tree holder, there is the traditional "is this straight?" viewing, usually followed by tying the tree to the wall with fishing wire so that it doesn't fall down. This is followed by the traditional vacuuming of the trail of needles, performed by my mom or myself, accompanied by much grumbling.

We've settled into roles when it comes to decorating the tree, too. My mom doesn't really like dealing with the tree, so she gets out all the ornaments, pulls things out and admires them, and generally putters. My dad climbs on the ladder and we put the lights on the tree, followed by the ornaments on the top half. Then finish off the tree. The cat helps by batting at the strings of lights as we're putting them up. I get to wield the staple gun and put lights up around the windows and on the bannister. (In case you're wondering, this isn't as destructive as it sounds. My parents added the second floor to the house when I was little, and it's unfinished - there is no heat, no insulation, and the interior walls are just rough boards, so the staples really don't affect the look at all. Visitors to our house in winter know to dress warmly, since the upper floor is where all the socializing/hanging out takes place - it's all one room, with the TV, couch/chairs, dart board, pool table that is usually covered with boards and used as a table for gaming or big dinners, another smaller table, and lots of bookcases. When we're feeling particularly energetic we light a fire in the wood stove, but mostly we just wear sweaters.)

After Christmas the decorations come down and we do our own version of the Much Music tree toss, and shove the tree out the window into the back yard. Except for that one year when we shoved it out the front window, and it got stuck in all the wires and we couldn't get it down, until eventually we managed to pull it loose and it fell on the car. Good times.

(This got a little long, so for the moment, that's the only tradition you get to hear about.)

You know, I hate shopping when I know what I'm looking for, because I never find it, and I get irritated, because it seems completely obvious to me what stores should sell it, and why isn't it obvious to those stores???

This whine brought to you by the fact that I got all bundled up and braved the cold* at lunchtime today to walk to Chapters et al to find a calendar - just your basic wall calendar with pictures of Canada, only I needed a wee one that would fit into a stocking (what the guy at Book City called a "cubicle calendar"). What I was not looking for was a little calendar with 16 pictures of Britney Spears, yet that seemed to be all the universe was willing to offer me. I see calendars like this everywhere, so why not in any of the 5 places that I tried?

*I swear there was a time in my life when I was not obsessed with the weather. In fact, I'm quite certain that I lived my first 25 years in blissful ignorance of weather, and then I moved out here, where we actually *have* weather, and I became an entirely boring conversationalist. On the other hand, at least I understand all the jokes about Canadian winters now.

You know, I think I'm almost through my Christmas shopping. All I really have left is stocking stuffers, which I'm hoping to start on at the craft fair. Oh, and a couple of people that I have no ideas for, so I'm in denial about them.

This year, in a complete break with tradition, I did not buy any Cheapass Games for people. It's sad, I know, but you can't let things get too predictable. On the other hand, my parents are still getting a handful of promo CDs that I got free from work. Some things are just too good to pass up.

All right, people (not you people, those people, the mythical Them), it's only September. It's BARELY September. There is no call for you to be talking about Christmas! I still have the fans on in my apartment! I don't want to think about winter when we haven't even gotten to enjoy fall. I don't know about you, but I'm not in any hurry here, so the next person that talks about tinsel and mistletoe is getting smacked.