Oh Christmas Tree

Yesterday my family engaged in our time-honored Christmas tradition of driving half an hour to a Christmas tree farm to cut down our own tree. The event is so well-rehearsed right now that the script is as familiar as our favorite holiday films. Each member of the family chooses a tree that they like and then shoots down any suggestion made by anyone else. My mother's familiar line is always repeated at least five times on several different trees, "NOT big enough!" Outrageous at the suggestion that we get a tree shorter than my dad standing up straight with his hand in the air -- the exact height of our living room -- we inevitably choose a tree about a foot taller than said height, bring it into the house and have to chop off the top, creating a slightly trapezoidal shape. My mother insisted that you really don’t notice the top of the tree that much, and fulfilling tradition we selected an incredibly tall tree. I was unable to stay around to see the tree go up, but I can’t wait to go home in a few weeks and see it. Hopefully we won’t have a repeat event from a few years ago when our tree tipped over. We tie it to the curtain rods now to help prevent this tragedy from becoming habit.

Happy Thanksgiving

An amusing anecdote from my Thanksgiving to yours: Just call it a bit of advice. If, at one in the morning, you are standing on the streets of DC with your cousin who has come to visit you, and you find yourself tipsy and her drunk, and she suggests that her mother (your mom's sister) may be awake, and she wants call her mom to ask her a question about your crazy family heritage... if all this happens to you, remember that your family will most likely not let you live it down. And it will be a topic of Thanksgiving dinner conversation.

"In America, we straddle a cultural chasm over premarital virginity loss, with some believing it's absolutely morally wrong and others seeing it more like pork chops -- anathema to some people's religion, dangerous without proper preparation, but otherwise a fine thing."
~Faye Flam

I read this in the Philadelphia Inquirer this morning and thought it was just too amusing. It's good to be home.