Let Me Get Sappy For a Moment

For me the holidays have never really meant a lot. Yeah, as a kid it's all the same "OMG stuff!" reaction but, as people get older, they tend to be a bit more family-oriented toward this time of year.


This makes my second winter since moving out of my parents place and, as of September, a full year of living on my own ("On my own" includes parents paying for bills, folding my laundry, washing my dishes, changing a flat tire, and cooking my dinner. Yep, good to be on my own...)

For me "family" doesn't really mean a lot. Whenever extended family visited (or we visited them) I'd be tortured by cousins as they broke my toys (I has toys that lasted 5+ years that only took 30 minutes to break in the hands of a cousin). I have always managed to interact better with adults than kids my own age and I'm glad I finally am one. Heck, I can't wait until I'm 30 so adults won't lump me into the "Stupid Young Adults" category.

You kids wif yer got dern laptops and infinity scarves!

Throw in the usual family drama llama sessions and figure the point I'm trying to make is that Thanksgiving and Christmas have always been a "Why?" thing for me. Had I known it was even a thing, I would have sequestered myself in my bedroom and listened to music with headphones on whenever the family thing happened.

When I got older my family stopped celebrating Christmas. It wasn't that we hated it, or were all bah hum buggery about it. We simply didn't bother. A tree was a pain in the butt to set up and maintain, wrapping paper is annoying, and we already get what we want the other 364 days of the year. Christmas is to me as what Labor Day is to you (except you don't have to hide for 2 months leading up to Labor Day.)

Except this year, it's like my heart melted. Suddenly I want a Christmas tree, something I haven't had in nearly ten years, and I want to put presents under it, and I want to get something special for my parents that says "I know you" and "I love you", and I want to go to their house and spend all day with them and have a huge dinner. We would load the wheelbarrow (or sled, depending on the snow level) full of wood, and I would pet all the cats who miss me (meaning everyone except Sandy), and we would do chores, and it would be lots of fun and as I go to sleep I have the warm fuzzies that only comes from being super duper happy.

Even if I don't accomplish all of that, it does give me an understanding of what real Christmas is.


...But no matter what happens, I will never tolerate Christmas music.

Classes That Should Be Taught at BYU-I

DRV101 - Driving on Icy Roads

DRV 110 - U-Turns are Illegal

DRV 120 - Your Brights Blind Other Drivers, Turn Them Off


EMO101 You're a Grown Up Now

EMO102 Seriously You're A Legal Adult

EMO103 Stop Acting Like a Child

EMO105-A Coping with Anxiety

EMO105-B Coping with Depression

EMO110 Moving Here Won't Solve Your Emotional Problems

EMO120 Helicopter Parents

EMO125 Being an Old Maid at Twenty Years Old


HLTH101 Nobody Cares That Your Mom/Aunt/Roomate is a Nurse

HLTH02 It's Just a Cold

HLTH105 If You're Vomiting It's Not the Flu

HLTH110-A Constipation - Help I Can't Poop

HLTH110-B Diarrhea - Help I Can't Stop Pooping

That Time I was Flash Robbed

Otherwise known as my first Trunk or Treat.

I know we're well past at this point, but if Christmas can sucker-punch me on October 28 then I can punch right back.

Plus, now that it's past October, have you considered adopting a black cat?

So the day started for me actually on October 30th. I worked 12 hour night shift starting at 6PM and had to switch to dayshift as fast as possible (I keep night shift hours even on my time off) so the fastest way possible was to stay awake long after I would have normally gone to bed. I got off at 6 AM, went home, waited for my brother to get up, helped him into his costume (which takes an extra person and 20-30 minutes to put it on), put on mine, and was right back to where I had worked only two hours earlier.

Now, I haven't done anything with Halloween since I was about eight years old. After that we would just buy our own candy and have a Simpsons marathon consisting of VHS tapes we'd recorded episodes on years ago. So it was actually a lot of fun to see people letting their inner child have free reign. There were people dressed up Mario Kart style, including 3 balloons and scooters. Green army men. Enough pirates to form an actual crew and enough witches (self included) for a coven. After getting my fill I headed home, 21 solid hours of being awake under my belt, and took a long nap while playing the "Just one more hour" game for 4-5 hours until my brother got home from work.

It was like having kids except  I actually got sleep.

From there we went to out friendly neighborhood trunk or treat.

Initially it felt like a flash rob, the participants becoming increasingly wild as the sugar in their system hit critical saturation. There were plenty of Elsas this year, and the one girl going as Cinderella was probably mistaken for an Elsa too, but there were a lot of cool ones too. A couple of my favorites were a tiny little Anna with a crochet hat made to look like her hair (complete with white streak) who's name was actually Anna, a Luigi with a ghost vacuum, and a kid in a stack of boxes I had mentally nicknamed Awesome-O.

If you're still young enough to go trick or treating yet watch this cartoon, your parents don't love you.

Now here's where I probably turn into an old coot.

I'm already awake trunk or treats defeat the whole point of the thing and that it has basically broken down into a fast-grab of candy, but what I wasn't expecting was the picky nature of the kids. I had one walk right up, take a good long look at the bowl, and proclaim "nah." And, by the end of the event, our bowl had actually gained different candies. That's right: the children were dumping lesser candies on us.

All I could think was "What the heck?" Back in my day (there's the old coot thing again), when we had to actually walk further than 6 feet for our candy, we appreciated every last bit we got.

I still enjoyed it though. It's been so long since I actually saw children dressed up in costumes that I guess I forgot the whole event of Halloween even existed on that level.



And, on a totally unrelated note do you have any idea how expensive razors are these days?