A Christmas Mish Mash

First, a rant.
You know, I love to shop, and I do a lot of shopping by catalog and on-line.  Every year about this time, I start getting unsolicited catalogs in the mail.   Actually, the deluge usually begins around Halloween, and the first few hundred are actually kinda neat; fun to look at, fun to share, fun to see the innumerable things that are available for purchase, fun to laugh at the pretentious, inflated prices of most of them.  Until this year, no one else I knew seemed to get many catalogs, so it was easy to hand them off.  Even so, by Thanksgiving, I was usually more annoyed than amused at the sheer volume.  This year, however, annoyed does not begin to encompass my feelings.  How about HARASSED?  Or PISSED OFF?  Not only am I being swamped by catalogs, but so are my friends- most getting catalogs for the first time.  They are a bit bemused about it, but I am PISSED OFF!  WHY is it possible for Land’s End, for example, to spend next to nothing  inundating me with catalogs- the SAME catalog, multiple times- while it costs me 37¢ to mail a one-ounce letter?   I jokingly threatened to save all the catalogs that came between Thanksgiving and Christmas and then take a picture of the stack, but within less than two weeks, the stack was already knee-high.  I am sick of merchants, people!  I am sick of Christmas carols before Halloween, I am sick of lugging tons of catalogs out to the street to be recycled, and sick at the thought of how many hundreds of thousands must be ending up in landfills.  I want to amend the Constitution: the Christmas season does NOT begin until the day after Thanksgiving; no merchant can send out more than one catalog a season- and it has to COST THEM to do it.  

And now, for no apparent reason except these things just popped into my mind, Compare and Contrast… or something like it.

Living with one old lady and two cats rather than with two kids and a dog.
I have done both.  Believe it or not, there are some similarities, at least in comparing the old lady to two kids.  There is no comparison between dogs and cats, however, except that they both shed.  Cats have fur balls.  Dog lick their balls.  Enough said.  

• When my kids were living at home, they bickered all the time.  Mama bickers with the cats all the time.  Verbally, it makes the exchange one-sided… but not quieter.  


• Kelly bossed Jake (and vice versa), and Mama bosses Patches.  


• With two kids, there was always some debate about who made the mess (unless I saw it being made with my own eyes).  With Mama and the cats, it is always a given… given a particular mess, I know exactly who made it.  


• My kids didn’t pick up after themselves, and neither does Mama or the cats.


• My kids played with their imaginations, and verbalized their play.  Mama does the same thing, except that she is always pissed off at her imaginary friends and shouts at them a lot.


• Before the kids could drive, I ran Kate’s Taxi Service.  Now, I run Kate’s Taxi Service for Mama.


• I used to live in fear of losing my kids whenever we went shopping.  I have no fear of losing Mama when we shop.  I am inured to it now.  She disappears every time.

One Christmas, Two Locales:
Christmas in San Diego is slightly different than Christmas is Tennessee.  It’s not just the warmer weather; we have lots of green Christmases in Tennessee.  It’s the trees that get decorated.  There is something so wrong and yet so wonderful about lighted palm and eucalyptus trees.  They don’t really look Christmasy, unless it’s in a “Nightmare before Christmas” kind of way, but they are strikingly beautiful.  We got in last night and so were driven through San Diego in the dark and got to see San Diego in all its Christmas glory.  There were fireworks as well, as the Chargers won a game in Qualcomm stadium which is just down the road from our apartment.  We don’t usually get to see fireworks in winter in Tennessee.  There is not as much Christmas carol playing here as there is in Tennessee, and what there is did NOT start before Halloween.  

The apartment in CA and the house in TN
     The apartment is clean, uncluttered and totally lacking in cat hair.  It’s nice to give my clothing a two-week respite from feline shedding every month.  It is noisy here, mostly traffic and car alarms going off, though on the weekends the air is alive with the sound of inebriated twenty-somethings who haven’t yet learned how to drink without getting drunk.  At least they walk home, but they walk under my window, and they usually sing, swear, fight, or screech while they are doing it.  Males tend to fight, vomit and go to sleep.  Females tend to scream, cry, and beat on the sleeping males.  Not much of that going on in my house. My house in Tullahoma is filled with collectibles and furniture and is decorated to the nines for Christmas.  We have a 12 foot tree that is spectacular and decorations in all the main rooms and on the porch.  The apartment has a metal tabletop “tree” from IKEA and two metallic reindeer.  HOHOHO!  All we need is a lighted eucalyptus and we are ready for the holidays.