Hello December

December to me means advent calendars.

Am I too old for this? Probably. I don't ask for them. My mom gives one to me because she can't give one to one child and not the other. She gives one to my sister because I'm older than her and I've gotten more, so she can't cut her off otherwise it wouldn't be fair.

The same goes for the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

But seeing as cheap chocolate tends to make me break out in hives, it has to be something good. This year it's Lindt, and I already think it was a delicious choice.

I'm not sure what advent calendars have to do with Jesus and frankly I don't care. Religion's never been a part of Christmas for me.

As much as I hate the rabid consumerism of it, I do like the frivolous excesses we go to in December. I think it's because we never had money in August and September to do back to school shopping, so Christmas for me always meant finally getting new shoes and clothes.

Christmas meant long nights cutting stones and polishing silver, getting fifty dollars for sitting at the craft fair table because I never ever got an allowance. It meant gathering up all the scrap metal from underneath the porch, the stuff we'd scrounged from alleys, peoples' garbage or wherever to sell to the scrap dealer, so you could buy presents.

It meant doing everything to frivolous excess just because you could: gaudy blown glass ornaments, hung three to a branch, tinsel, glass reindeer and bears and huge glass balls in the windows. An orgy of giftgiving, consumption on a ridiculous scale, because it's only once a year.