Anticipating Christmas (AM)

Last night I listened to this She and Him Christmas album that Scampy gave me last year. Zooey Deschanel sticks in my craw a little, but for some reason, I don't hate this album. It's full of those secular christmas carols that reference snow and santa and family, not the baby Jesus (hello, if you're reading baby Jesus). You know the ones. They say things like chestnuts roasting on an open fire and silver bells, silver bells.  That sort of thing.

Of course, my idiot heart started filling my evening with pangs of longing, though the Christmas those guys are singing about bears no resemblance to the K Christmas experience. There are no chestnuts in Melbourne in December. There is no snow, thank Christ (hello, if you're reading Christ).  And because the K family has no Christmas traditions meaning we do something different every year, there is no idealised Christmas day for me to get sentimental about.  And if you guys promise me that you will interpret no disrespect to my fellow K family members when you read this I might as well tell you: K family Christmases are kind of lame. So why am I such a goddamned sentimental fool?

I pondered this as I lay in the bath listening to these songs and feeling all these feelings and decided that it's the anticipation of Christmas that I was feeling sentimental about.
When you're little, December is full of dreams of Christmas. All that Christmas-themed busy work at school,  then school holidays, then day after day of staring at the Christmas presents under the tree even though you know you're not allowed to and you try not to  but you are only human and very little, so you do. December for little people is pure anticipation and it's the best thing. December for an adult is pretty much day after day of feeling frazzled and disorganised, culminating in a disappointing Christmas day.

Anyway, I don't want to be a scrooge or anything, but I think I need to inject a little sweet anticipation in to these pre-Christmas weeks.  I'm thinking of getting an advent calendar and maybe trying to convince J and Pickle that we should do some pre-Christmas karaoke some time. I'm open to other ideas.