Bah-Humbug

Today we went out. I don't go to the malls at all in December. Today was a clear reminder why. Traffic was terrible. The stores were crowded. There were long lines at all the check outs (and we weren't even at the mall). Oh, and worst of all: Christmas music. I walked into one store to look for one specific thing. Christmas music was blaring. I left and went into the next store just to look around. The line to check out was lengthening down the side of the store and the same exact song was blaring in there. I left. Was I safe outside? Of course not. That shopping area has music piped into the parking lots! It was crazy. We came home without buying anything. I guess that's good.

After dinner we ventured out again. To Target. Ross wanted to pick up a digital converter box for the TV. On the way there and back we drove through the neighborhood and saw lots of Christmas lights. I actually like Christmas lights--at least ones done tastefully. What we saw was mostly crap. We did find a couple of houses on August St. that were really cool. They had their trees completely wrapped in white lights. It was a lot classier than all the trees that we saw with the bottom 3 feet hastily wrapped in lights (we saw blue, yellow, green, red, white, and multicolor stumps).

Christmas in Italy was so different. No Santa. Three days of everything being dead because everyone was home with their families. There are some things I do like about the holidays. All food: panettone, stollen, eggnog. I suppose I'll spend the rest of the month at home--eating cake and washing it down with eggnog. Ha!