I have a long and, if we are to draw any conclusions from Paul’s glazed-eyes reaction to even the brief summary, rather boring story to tell!

I recently bought myself several Demeter Fragrance Library samplers on sale. I have been trying them. Yesterday I tried a scent called Fuzzy Sweater, which reminds me of some of the perfumes I wore in high school. The one that came floating to mind was Chantilly, though I don’t remember what it smelled like so I can’t really say if it DOES smell like Fuzzy Sweater; the name Chantilly was just stored in the same part of my brain that categorized Fuzzy Sweater as a High School Perfume.

That led to a feeling of nostalgia for Chantilly, and also curiosity to remember/know what it DOES smell like. I remember it being inexpensive (anything I wore in high school was inexpensive), so I looked it up, thinking I’d buy a bottle for $10-20ish and have the fun of trying it again.

Well. WELL. It turns out, the whole topic of Chantilly is fraught. FRAUGHT! You can find message boards online where people are discussing their STRONG and VARIED opinions, as well as confusion in the face of other people’s opinions! Some people RHAPSODIZE about [one particular scent note] while others claim to be unable to perceive anything except [other particular scent note], and then there is further discussion about whether those particular scent notes are GOOD or BAD; there is also an entire sub-topic about whether it is An Old Lady Perfume, and what does that mean anyway (and I mean ACTUAL ANALYSIS of what it might mean, in terms of the various elements of fragrances—not just huffiness).

And gradually I became aware of another issue, which is that people might be talking about DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF CHANTILLY. If I am following the saga, the maker changed at Some Point. I wearied of research before being able to discover WHEN this happened, but interestingly, the bottle shape I remember is right in the overlap between makers. That is, there are bottles made EARLIER by Houbigant that look very different from the bottles made LATER by Dana, but in the middle there is a particular bottle shape that (1) was used by both, and (2) is the bottle I remember. It looked like this:

(image from Amazon.com)

So! WHICH KIND DID I USE, HOUBIGANT OR DANA?? Furthermore, in the same part of my brain where I store the memory of Chantilly, I store a vague feeling of disappointment. Such as: I’d tried the sample bottle many times in the store, then finally bought a bottle, and felt it wasn’t as good as the sample. And/or: I bought a small bottle to start, loved it, finished it, bought a new bottle, and it wasn’t as good. That kind of feeling. And yet I DID wear Chantilly for years, so it wasn’t THAT disappointing. But still: maybe the sample/first bottle was Houbigant, and the bottle I bought / second bottle I bought was Dana!! Depending on which of those memories, if either, is accurate!

I started poking around on EBay, which is a great place to buy old perfume and also a terrible place to buy old perfume. The prices vary wildly! Shipping varies wildly! With or without box! What percentage full! Etc.! And I am sure the site is just PACKED with fakes. Like, WOULD someone have a new-in-box bottle of Chantilly from decades ago? BUT MAYBE THEY WOULD! Sometimes people receive perfume as gifts and never use it! Or sometimes they buy ahead: I myself have a new-in-box bottle of Charlie that I bought YEARS ago on clearance for when my current bottle of Charlie is empty, but that day may never arrive! (Though I am wearing Charlie today, because now I am in the mood for perfume I wore in high school.) Plus I have several new-in-box bottles of various L’Artisan perfumes that were being discontinued, because I knew if I didn’t have another bottle waiting I’d hoard what remained of my current bottle. And there is the concept of Old New Stock, where apparently a bunch of stuff is found in an old warehouse! But also: I would expect fakes to be new in box, so perhaps I should stick to the partially-used bottles which seem more likely to be real. It’s not as if I am going to keep the box! (But on the other hand it’s so appealing to have it!) You can see how all this easily absorbed over an hour of time.

What I did was, I just kept putting candidates in my cart until I felt tired of browsing. Then I sorted them into two heaps, Houbigant and Dana. And I tried not to overthink it, but did overthink it a little anyway, but no matter, because I felt happy with the decision: I ended up ordering two used/partial bottles of matching sizes; one has the box and one does not; both had free shipping.

I am excited for them to get here! I hope they don’t smell exactly the same and also not good!

…Sigh. While proofreading, I took one more stab at finding out when the switch from Houbigant to Dana took place, and found there is also apparently ANOTHER switch to New Dana. Which is unfortunate, because I see the Dana bottle I bought is actually New Dana, but feel too worn out to find out if that matters or not—and yet, certainly the kind I used was NOT New Dana—but very likely New Dana is a name change ONLY, and there was no change to the formula. (Although…”New”…maybe that specifically means the fragrances were updated.) I tried to get myself interested in starting the whole process over again and buying a Dana bottle, but then noticed that I’ve been neglecting to take into account whether the bottles were eau de toilette or eau de cologne or eau de parfum, and I don’t remember which one I had in high school ANYWAY. Since I remember it being cheap, it was probably eau de toilette—but maybe THAT’S the solution to the Memory of Disappointment mystery: maybe I tried a sample of eau de parfum, then bought the eau de toilette.

…Okay, I forced myself to persist, and I now have a THIRD bottle of Chantilly on its way to me, a Dana-not-New-Dana one. For heaven’s sake. If they all smell the same and/or I don’t even like the smell anymore, we will have to do a giveaway!

Let’s just keep distracting ourselves with chatty things.

Julia asked if we could have another stranded-mail check-in, and I’d like that too. I’ll go first. The package I sent to Paul’s sister on December 11th finally arrived several days after Christmas. Something I ordered for Henry on EBay arrived in the week after Christmas, too, and I could see from the postmark that it had been mailed December 8th. We got lots of Christmas cards after Christmas, many postmarked weeks earlier (the record was the one postmarked December 9th that arrived December 31st). I don’t THINK I had anything completely lost in the mail, but on the other hand I don’t keep very good track of such things, so I can imagine suddenly saying “Hey, whatever happened to…???” And of course I don’t know how many Christmas cards might have been lost.

Speaking of suddenly thinking of something, I suddenly realized I’ve been focusing so hard on January 20th, I wasn’t remembering Valentine’s Day. We don’t do MUCH for Valentine’s Day (I put dinner on heart-shaped plates, and I buy myself a box of chocolates because I have given up on making that happen any other way), but I do always buy the kids these giant Hershey Kisses, and a pandemic year is not the year to accidentally forget a tradition. I was able to order them for Drive-up, AND they were 50 cents less if bought that way, AND this week is 20% off all Valentine candy, so that was good timing.

(image from Target.com)

I wish there was a way to say “No reply needed” on letters to representatives/officials. Or rather, I know there is a way to say it, and it’s by saying it, but in my experience they don’t HEED such instructions. I needed to write an email recently to a bunch of people in charge of our school system, and now emails are coming back to me saying the things that they have to say when they get input from a parent, and I am wishing we could SKIP IT. One email said the things and ALSO promised to reply at more length later on, and PLEASE DO NOT. And last time I wrote a letter of this sort, someone CALLED ME to say the things they are required to say, and that was the WORST.

I don’t really know how to segue from New Year’s resolutions and book reviews to whatever I’m going to write about today, considering the gap between posts includes a violent attempted coup in the United States. How does one move right over THAT into a chatty post about how Paul cleaned the bathroom floor by using a Swiffer, half a roll of paper towels, and plain water? Or maybe a post about all the page-a-day calendars I considered for my desk when I needed SOMETHING to do other than doom-scrolling? Or I could tell you about how our credit card information somehow got stolen again, but I don’t think we want to think about how some people get up every morning and decide to do things they know are wrong.

Well. Nine days until Inauguration Day. Sure hope the highly-trained elite force guarding our nation’s capital NOW feels prepared to deal with any coup attempts, so we don’t have a repeat of “Whoops, we accidentally let them all in, and then accidentally let them all leave!” And perhaps we could straighten out ahead of time the little glitch we discovered where it turns out the president is in charge of the National Guard in D.C., and doesn’t have to bring them in to protect Congress and the VP if his own preference is for the coup to continue.

I wish to discuss a book. Normally I would say exactly what I wanted to say (within the realm of normal human consideration), on the principle that authors who want to be happy should not seek out strangers talking smack about their babies. However, in this case, I know that the author’s wife reads here, and she knows I know, and that gives me an extra responsibility to be careful with my words. My original intention, before reading the book, was to get around that issue by Just Not Talking About the Book Here—but it turns out the book reached near-obsession levels for me, and I want you to read it too. And yet I am not willing to strongly recommend a book by telling you ONLY the good things. So here we are. I am going to tell you what I liked and didn’t like about the book, while KNOWING the author’s wife is STANDING RIGHT THERE.

(image from Target.com)

The Revisionaries, by A. R. Moxon (Target) (Amazon)

I will begin by telling you how I went into this book, because expectations matter. I follow the author on Twitter; he’s funny and he does a lot of political tweeting I agree with. When he wrote a book, I put it on my wish list, even though I am not really reading books by men right now. When I got the book, I was surprised by what a giant book it was (600 pages, with narrower-than-usual margins), and found it intimidating; combined with the male-author issue, it drifted to the bottom of the To Read pile. Over Christmas break I decided to just TACKLE it and find out one way or the other if I liked it, so that if I DIDN’T like it I could add it to the Read-Once Book Giveaway I’m planning to do sometime this month or next.

It took me awhile to get into it. It’s the kind of book where a lot is happening that isn’t supposed to make sense yet, and that is not my usual style of book, and it kept starting NEW plotlines where it’s not supposed to make sense yet, so then you have to put a mental bookmark in one thing you don’t understand and start a new thing you don’t understand, and also there were some long visual descriptions which I tend to skim; and so I was slogging a bit, and kept realizing I’d been skimming over something important and would need to go back and re-read. But the writing was good, and the characters seemed promising, and the plot seemed compelling, and I liked it enough to keep reading but not enough to think I would necessarily finish it. At some point, though, it Caught. There were two days when I spent virtually all my free time reading it: I would get up stiffly out of my chair, thinking I ought to do something else for awhile, but soon I would be back in the chair reading it again. When I wasn’t reading it, I was thinking about it. Paul kept asking me nervously if I was upset about something, but I was NOT upset, I was VERY THINKING. I finished it yesterday, and my tentative plan is to just start reading it over again, because I don’t really want to read anything else; the ONLY reason I might not do this plan is that I think it’s the rare sort of book Paul might like TOO (our tastes overlap almost zero), and so I might want to have HIM read it instead. But maybe I’ll read it again and THEN let Paul read it.

Now I am going to say the things I didn’t like, things you might not like either—or, in two-and-a-half of the three cases, things that might make you MORE interested in reading it. The first is purely subjective: I don’t like it when a book leaves me guessing, or when a book leaves me feeling like I didn’t in the end understand everything that happened. Paul, on the other hand, LOVES that kind of book, and refers to the kind of book I like as “spoon-fed,” which makes me want to think of mean words to describe the kind of book HE likes. One of the reasons I want to re-read it is because it was the style of book where What Is Going On is only gradually revealed, so I want to go back to the beginning and see if my finished-book knowledge helps me better understand what happened. But if after a second reading, and further contemplation, I end up feeling like (1) I was too stupid to understand the book and/or (2) the author did not effectively communicate the plot so that it could be understood and/or (3) the author didn’t really know what happened, either, and covered that up by making it SEEM like the reader is just too stupid to understand (the second and third things are the kind of accusations I would make about some of the books Paul likes), I will like the book less overall.

The second thing I didn’t like is another subjective thing: I don’t generally like when books try to be clever, or when I feel as if the author is saying “DID YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE???” (Paul DOES like that kind of book). This book was 10-15% too clever for my usual tastes: a tolerable level, but a level worth bracing for if you feel the way I do about it. On the other hand, I will say there were at least two moments when something clever happened and I had to stare into space for a few minutes, fully appreciating the moment (YES I DID SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE), which gives me a little insight into why other people might like clever books. (For one thing, it makes them feel clever for catching the cleverness. But that is annoying to me, too: Paul already believes himself cleverer than I think he ought to, so it feels like the author of a Clever Book is feeding Paul’s ego while also feeding his own ((LOOK HOW CLEVER WE BOTH ARE!!)), and that the two of them ought to knock it off.)

The third thing I want to discuss is the female characters. Speaking of effective communication (end of the paragraph before last), I am not sure I can successfully achieve that here, and may need more time to think it over / re-read before I can even figure out what I want to say, but I will give it a shot. There are good, strong, well-developed female characters in this book, and some of the book is written from their perspective, and I found their perspective reasonable and even very good, and I did not think my usual thought that male authors should not try to write from a female point of view, and in fact I thought more highly of the author for these portrayals. And you will not have to read about their breasts, or their firm thighs, or their endless thoughts on shoes, or whatever. But all of them are Eves: they are there because an Adam needed a helpmeet or a confidante or a girlfriend/wife or a motivation or a conflict in his relationship with a male God. They are Delilahs: strong women who have strong roles, but they are characters in a man’s life story, not the other way around. This book is about a man who, and a man who, and the man who, and the man who; then the women are added in. It does just barely pass the Bechdel Test, but just barely. Even the women’s THOUGHTS are almost entirely about the men in their lives. On the other hand, as I said, a lot of their thoughts are GOOD: the women are in many cases smarter, better, more aware, and more self-aware than the men; they see the men’s flaws, and they see the story more clearly than the men do, and there is some feeling that the reason they are Eves/Delilahs is that THAT IS THE WAY THE WORLD WORKS FOR WOMEN RIGHT NOW, AND THAT IS WHAT HAS BEEN DONE TO THEM BY MEN, AND THAT THE AUTHOR SEES THAT AND IS CONSCIOUSLY PORTRAYING AND SPECIFICALLY COMMENTING ON THAT VERY IDEA. And it’s clear he IS doing some of that (the female characters have some of those thoughts), but that’s not the whole thing: it still feels like a story where the men were put in first, and the women take the supporting roles. The supporting roles are VERY VERY VERY GOOD ROLES! We’re talking 99th percentile of good supporting roles! But they’re not the leads. The leads are Adam, and a male God, and Samson.

Anyway, none of that is stopping me from thinking about the book all the time, and wanting to start it over again at the beginning, and thinking you should read it too, EVEN THOUGH THE AUTHOR IS MALE. I thought it was remarkable. I have WOKEN UP HAPPY IN THE MORNINGS, THINKING OF HAVING THIS BOOK TO READ/RE-READ. I hope there are more books by this author, and I would pre-order any such books, and I only have maybe five or six authors total that I’d pre-order, and all the others are women, and two of them don’t write books anymore.

I will send one commenter a copy of the book (U.S. addresses only, but if you have friend/family in the U.S., you can have me ship it as a gift to them). To enter, leave any comment at all (if that kind of freedom freezes you with indecision, as it does me, you can comment with a recent book you liked, or some general/specific thing you like/dislike in books, or a treat you’re looking forward to eating later), and I’ll draw a name on…let’s see, today is Saturday, how about Monday? Mondays don’t have much else to recommend them. January 4th, “sometime during the day.”

Update: Choosing the winner. I use Random.org when I need a random number, and for contests I usually generate a little LIST of numbers: it’s typical to count through to find the 77th comment and find it’s from a commenter who doesn’t want to be entered, and then to go to go to the second pick, which is #58 and turns out to be my own reply to another comment, and so on. So what I do is, I generate, say, 5-10 numbers, and….okay, this is getting dull, I see that now. HERE IS MY POINT: My point is that as I was generating numbers and writing them down, I thought of the story of Jonah, which relates to this book and is not a spoiler, and how the people on the ship draw lots to see who God is mad at. And I don’t know precisely what drawing lots means in this story (I’m imagining straws, with one straw shorter), but I get the gist. Meanwhile I was still jotting my list, and I thought, “What would be neat is if the same number occurred multiple times in this random draw—AS IF I were looking for The Divine Answer to Who Should Get This Book, rather than looking for a random number.” And in my list of ten numbers, the same number appeared twice. And then this will sound like it is not true BUT IT IS: I drew an eleventh time, and got that same number a third time—as if it were saying “I SAID WHAT I SAID.” So it is commenter Angela of the 1:14 p.m. comment on January 2nd! I will email you, Angela!

I vent to you here about my Paul Complaints, so it seems only right and fair that I should also praise him here when he deserves it, not that I usually think of doing so when it happens, and not that it makes for very interesting reading anyway. But I have one such situation fresh in my mind, and it is this: he helped me change my cartilage piercings.

I see it has been nearly FOUR YEARS since I last attempted it AND ESSENTIALLY FAILED. I’d been too nervous to try it again. But this week I have been having hives again, and my eyelids reacted to a product and got all rashy and itchy, and my knee was hurting, and anyway something about all these physical woes made me freshly determined to at least TRY to make my cartilage piercings more comfortable to sleep on, by using the flat-backed earrings I ALREADY POSSESSED.

I asked the family at large which of them might feel capable of helping if I got stuck again and needed assistance. And to my surprise, Paul, who was not present for the births of any of his children because he is A Fainter, and who cannot bear to hear stories/reports of anyone’s injuries, and who has to yell for me through closed eyes if he gets any sort of bleeding injury himself, said he thought he could do it. “Really???,” I reallyed. “As long as you don’t keep talking about it,” he replied. “Okay, I will let you know when I’m ready to try it!,” I said. “Why not right now?,” he suggested. AND IT WAS ON.

First: one swift shot of bourbon each, just as in pioneer surgery.

Then: I got out the teensy baggie of flat-backed earrings and chose two of them and put them in a little dish of rubbing alcohol. Paul and I both washed our hands. I splashed a little rubbing alcohol on my first cartilage piercing, braced my resolve, and popped out the lock-back earring. I wiped the area with a little more rubbing alcohol, and then Paul was up to bat.

The tricky thing about flat-backed earrings is that they go in from the BACK of the ear (the front part screws onto the post). And Paul felt confident in his ability to handle this, until he saw the ear and did not see any hole, so there was some jabbing around, and some bending of the top of my ear back and forth, and I was starting to get a little queasy, but in the end he found it. There was a teensy spot of blood from the jabbing, but he persisted womanfully and did not faint or falter.

The next challenge was getting the front of the earring screwed onto the post with his giant muscular man fingers, but he managed that as well and we were halfway done!

At this point I looked in the mirror and did not really like the way the new earring looked. It’s a flat little disc, while the old earring was a gold ball just like the ones I always wear in my second lobe-piercings. I didn’t like that it was less noticeable; I didn’t like that it didn’t match my second lobe-piercing anymore. But we were halfway done and I thought I should at least TRY the new earring type: perhaps the ease of sleeping on it would MORE than make up for the appearance of it, or perhaps in time I would get used to the appearance of it, or perhaps I would like the flat backs but need to choose new fronts. In any case, no sense being HASTY without giving it a CHANCE. This was after all going better than expected.

I splashed some rubbing alcohol on the second cartilage piercing, got a firm grip—and, just as before, it was much harder to remove than the first one, and I wasn’t sure I could do it. I didn’t want to irritate it by dilly-dallying, but I almost broke a nail trying to pry it out; it did at last yield. More rubbing alcohol on the newly-bare cartilage, and then over to Paul.

This one went far more easily than the first one: the first one was pierced at an angle, which makes it more difficult to aim the earring, but the second one is pierced straight through. (I will not let this bother me for the rest of my life, I will not let this bother me for the rest of my life, I will not let this bother me for the rest of my life.) This one was done before I even had the chance to start to feel queasy.

For an hour or so afterward my ears were an outraged hot-pink, but now they have settled down. The new earrings are not bothering them at all so far. I still don’t like the way they look: I can see the post part of the stud sticking some ways out of the front, and then the little disk floating there. But I also remember that when I first got them pierced, I thought the stud looked OVERSIZED AND FAKE-GOLD AND WEIRD, and now I look back on those photos and think it looks perfectly normal, so.

Here is something nice about celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve: the next day, Christmas still isn’t really over. You know most other people are celebrating it right then, and in fact there is a relief to be past the worst part, which is when all your presents have been opened but you know most other people haven’t even started yet. Most businesses are closed, and Christmas music is playing on the radio all day. It still feels like CHRISTMAS. In contrast, after celebrating on Christmas Day, I woke up this morning feeling kind of flat and sad. I turned on the shower radio, which is set to the station that’s been playing Christmas music since Thanksgiving, and it was playing Take Me Home Tonight.

One of the things I like about the whole month of December up until Christmas is the continual enhancing effects of Special Christmassy things: I can listen to Christmas music on my walk and in the shower, and then I can choose a pair of Christmas earrings, and then I can have my breakfast on a Christmas plate and I can have Christmas tea/coffee in my Christmas mug, and there might be something Christmassy in the mail. When I am tediously making dinner for the millionth time, at least I can turn on the Christmas lights and choose the Christmas plates. Right now it feels like that Special Overlay is gone from everything at once, even though I still did use a Christmas plate/mug, and the Christmas lights will stay up until sometime in January. I could have listened to Christmas music on my walk and in the shower, but it didn’t feel right/appealing anymore.

Some of you asked what the Christmas Eve celebration schedule was like. When there are little kids in the family, stockings are filled during their after-lunch naps. (When kids are older, they go to their rooms and pretend to nap.) So then stockings are opened after naptime—earlyish/mid afternoon. (We didn’t do the Santa story, so there was no issue with that.) At around 5:00 we’d have a light dinner, usually soup, and then we’d go to the Candlelight Christmas Eve service at church. (When I had my own kids, we went on a Christmas Light Drive instead of going to church.) After church (or Christmas Light Drive), we’d come home, change into pajamas, and open presents (with wine/cocktails for the grown-ups and sherbet floats for the kids). Partway through presents, like around 9:00, we’d break for Christmas dinner, which was wurstenbroodjes (sausage rolls) and red and green Jell-o salads; then we’d open the rest of the presents, and then bedtime usually thrillingly late, like 11:00 or midnight. That was when The Worst Part was: knowing our Christmas was over, while most other people still had theirs ahead of them.

But then Christmas Day was fun in its own way: wearing new clothes, reading new books, playing with new toys/games/crafts, eating leftover stocking candy. Leftover wurstenbroodjes for breakfast. And by the time we woke up, sleeping late if we wanted to, we knew that most other people had caught up with us and their presents were unwrapped too.

Well! How was your Christmas this year? When I see a question like that, I sometimes feel as if I have to tell the entire story or else summarize broadly or else nothing—like it would be odd to tell just one or two details. But we’re all probably a little too worn out to tell the entire story, and summarizing has a way of making things sound more generic than they were, so I think you should feel completely free to tell just one detail/anecdote, or pick just a few things. That’s what I’m going to do:

• Elizabeth had said that when she didn’t have to wear a scoliosis brace anymore, she wanted to have matching pajama sets—but she didn’t give me a clear idea of what she meant, and I was nervous I’d choose wrong: she’s 15 and that can be a tricky age for mothers to choose fashion; also, women’s sizes vary so much from brand to brand and I wasn’t sure I’d pick the right size. I got her two plaid sets from Old Navy and they were a huge success: they fit great and I could tell she felt very cute in them.

• Paul’s sister’s package did not arrive in time. Her package to us, which she shipped a week after we shipped ours to her, DID arrive in time, so the whole thing feels very unfair. I tried not to let it feel like a very big deal: some people lost PEOPLE this year, and a late package is very minor compared to that. But I wish it had arrived in time, and I hope her Christmas was good anyway.

• I got Rob this Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America, and I’d dithered about it because it’s very sweary—but every time I looked at the sample pages I laughed, so I bought it. And when he first opened it he thought it was a real field guide, so he said in a normal, mildly-interested voice “Oh! Cool! Field Guide to…” and then got to the word “Dumb” and was completely surprised. Then I told him to read a sample page out loud, and I started laughing in anticipation, and then he tried to read some aloud and was laughing too hard to do it, which made me laugh harder, and anyway it was a fun gift.

Here is the other question I meant to ask sooner: We are trying to build up our supply of Christmas movies/shows, so that we can watch them all December if we want to. We don’t have very many so far. Here’s what we have, of what I can remember off the top of my head, so I will probably add to this list if people mention ones we already have:

• Love Actually. I used to watch it on my own because it was too naked and problematic for the children, but the last two years the kids have watched it with me (Paul absents himself). I realize it’s chock-full of problematic stuff. I fast-forward through the parts I really hate. I make loud remarks over the parts I don’t fast-forward: “THIS IS WILDLY INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR.” (x100) “SERIOUSLY SHE SHOULD NOT BE APOLOGIZING MULTIPLE TIMES WHEN SHE DID LITERALLY NOTHING WRONG AND ONLY THE MEN IN THIS SITUATION BEHAVED BADLY; ALSO THIS IS WHY SOME MEN SHOULD NOT HAVE POLITICAL POWER.” “LOVE DOES NOT MEAN SACRIFICING LITERALLY YOUR ENTIRE LIFE TO BE NOTHING BUT AN ACCESSORY TO ANOTHER PERSON’S LIFE.” “THIS IS TOXIC MASCULINITY BUT WE ARE SUPPOSED TO UNDERSTAND SHE MEANS IT TONGUE-IN-CHEEK, AND IT DOES SEEM TO MAKE HIM FEEL BETTER.” “THIS IS GROSS AND FAT-PHOBIC.” (x100) I do a fair amount of loud talking. But I love that movie, I just do. (You really don’t need to tell me if you don’t: I see so much of that every year, and it is disheartening to keep hearing people say how much they hate something you love, even if you get why they hate it.)

• Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. This is the first year we’ve watched it, and it’s just the sort of thing I was looking for (not to the exclusion of other things I might be looking for). Some dancing! Some singing! Some plot! Good costumes! A little silly! A little sentimental! Might have been nice if everyone hadn’t been white, but I guess it’s literally in the title so we can’t say we weren’t warned!

• The Muppet Christmas Carol.

• How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

• A Charlie Brown Christmas.

• Scrooged.

• Elf. This is the first year we’ve watched it. I’d thought there would be a lot more gross-out and stress-based humor than there was. We liked it and have added it to the annual batch.

• A Christmas Story.

• Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square. I will never be able to watch it again (SO CRINGEY AND EARNEST, like a play written by a Christian-school-attending eighth grader—and I say that as someone who, as a Christian-school-attending eighth grader, wrote plays and stories far better than anything I could write now), but it was good for watching once, and Dolly Parton is an angel and also plays one in the movie.

I don’t like movies where the plot is basically a stress dream. This is why I have not tried that Chevy Chase Christmas movie, or Home Alone, or Jingle All the Way.

I think people who grew up with It’s a Wonderful Life can love it, but it is too late for me.

I know a lot of people love the stop-motion Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but we have tried it and it does not click.

I wish I liked Hallmark Christmas movies, because I can see how much happiness they bring, and there is such a good supply of them. But I watched two in a row once as part of a job (the elderly woman I was visiting wanted us to watch them together), and if my sample size of two was accurate, they’re absolutely out.

If you tell me to watch that movie with Tim the Tool Man Taylor turning into Santa, I might consider it, but from the outside it looks like one extended fat joke.

Okay I LOVED Bad Moms Christmas even though I cringed so many times and it was TRULY TERRIBLE IN MANY MANY WAYS, but you should not take it as representative of my usual tastes, and also it’s not one I can watch with the family.

I meant to ask you so many questions earlier, and then I got waylaid by Unexpected Holiday Baking, which was a delight, but on the other hand I didn’t ask my questions and tomorrow is Christmas Eve already, so some of the questions will have to wait.

We are, as I believe I mentioned somewhere back there in the archives, having our family’s very first Christmas Morning Christmas. Not one single member of this household has ever had one of those! (My family celebrated on Christmas Eve; Paul’s celebrated on Christmas Day afternoon.) La la la how fun! And also: how…do we do that.

Years and years of chatting with other parents of young children has given me lots of information for how to handle it with young children: the setting out of the cookies (and baby carrots for the reindeer); the firm establishment of The Earliest Possible Time Mother and Father May Be Awakened in the Morning; the opening of matching Christmas pajamas on Christmas Eve night, so that everyone is adorable for the photos the next morning even if they have not combed their hair or had their coffee; the reading of Christmas stories before bedtime; perhaps a dose of benadryl with the hot chocolate. I remember a lot of these tips.

But parents don’t talk to each other as fervently when they have older kids—and of course by then families aren’t trying to start/establish Christmas traditions: the traditions they started when the kids were little have morphed naturally into something else. So I don’t know how to START this when the kids are older. Our youngest is 13 and has to be awakened if we want him out of bed before 11:00 a.m. Possibly by now we would have morphed into an after-lunch Christmas. But THIS ONE YEAR AT LEAST we want a Classic Christmas Morning situation.

The children have done a hard pass on the idea of matching Christmas pajamas, even as a joke; I think we needed to have started it sooner, so that it would be ironic/nostalgic at this point, but it’s too late for that. They do accept the idea of ATTENDING in whatever pajamas they were already wearing. I don’t think we’ll set out cookies and carrots, though we’ve considered doing it just for the ha-ha-look-at-us-doing-traditional-Christmas fun of it.

I just don’t get how this is going to GO. Should we…set a time to meet downstairs? Or when you have older kids do you just start celebrating Christmas whenever they finally get up? That could be like 2:00 in the afternoon, and I don’t want that, so forget I asked the second question and just answer the first one.

Also, when do stockings happen? My family opened them Christmas Eve afternoon, as a badly-needed float for the children who were running out of patience to wait for the presents that were still hours and hours away (after the Christmas Eve service, which wasn’t until after dinner). And when do you FILL the stockings? (We filled them while the children were taking afternoon naps. When they got too old for naps, we filled stockings while the children were in their rooms pretending to nap, because stockings happen after naps—this is how that tradition morphed.)

What do you do about breakfast? The nice thing about starting festivities in the afternoon (both for my family, which started Christmas Eve afternoon, and Paul’s family which started Christmas Day afternoon) is that no one is eating stocking candy on an empty stomach. I have heard tales of hearty egg/potato-type breakfast casseroles assembled the night before and popped into the oven in the morning? If you have any good ones, I would LOVE to have the recipe: I don’t have ANY recipes for make-it-the-night-before breakfast casseroles. I have also purchased some festive danish, which freeze well if no one wants them after all the stocking candy.

Excuse me but those of us who partake in booze definitely put a little booze in our Christmas morning coffee, do I have that correct? I was thinking of a little swig of Bailey’s. My tolerance is probably too high to feel it, but I’LL FESTIVELY KNOW IT’S THERE.

What else? Oh, I know: WHAT DO YOU DO CHRISTMAS EVE?? I’m used to doing CHRISTMAS on Christmas Eve! So now I don’t know what to do with it. Theoretically I suppose I would do the same things I used to do Christmas Eve Eve, but that doesn’t feel right: Christmas Eve is A Thing in a way Christmas Eve Eve is not—even if you celebrate on Christmas Eve. We normally have Festive Snack Dinner (grapes, fancy crackers and cheese, kielbasa, vegetables and dip, popcorn, etc.) for Christmas Eve dinner, and we’re planning to go ahead and do that anyway, and then the usual Christmas Light Drive (which we started when I stopped going to a church service but still wanted something between dinner and presents).

And what do you do with THE REST OF THE DAY? One of the nice things about an evening celebration is that you take the strung-out overstimulated children afterward and you tuck them into bed, and then they wake up the next morning and one one hand they’re sad Christmas is over, but on the other hand NOW they can play with all their NEW TOYS / eat their YUMMY STOCKING CANDY! And the parents have had a good night’s sleep and are ready to find batteries and assemble things and play games. And it’s a nice peaceful day, with all the pressure off, and nothing left to do but enjoy presents and eat treats.

And what about Christmas Day LUNCH and DINNER? What do you do about THOSE??