Date Archives December 2010

I totally fail as Santa

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Eight days until Christmas and there remain a couple of gifts with which I am struggling. I am typically a fairly good gift-giver, honing in on things that the recipient will enjoy and that may have special significance as far as our relationship goes–that on the surface, it’s one thing, and underneath, it’s also something else–a reason to make them smile, a private joke, something special.

One person whose gift(s) I have been struggling with is Jason. I figured “Hey, we haven’t been going out long, so it doesn’t need to be an ordeal, right?”. Right? But then he said “Oh, I was thinking about getting you a new monitor for Christmas.”

…Crap. Not that it would be an unappreciated gift, but now what I’d already purchased was woefully inadequate. I needed something better. But what might he like? I don’t know him well at all yet! I messaged our mutual friend Tristan with “I need some help with Jason” and he immediately responded with “I’m Switzerland! Neutral!” “Whoa, whoa, we are not fighting, I just need help with gift ideas!” “…I don’t know, I’ve always had a problem getting gifts for him, too.”

…Double crap. I thought, and thought, and thought, the six brain cells I had left grinding so furiously that smoke began to waft out of my ears and the air began to smell vaguely of fried pork and ozone. I finally copped to him, “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what to get for you for Christmas. What do you want?”

“Socks.”

“I’m sorry, did you say socks? S-O-C-K-S, socks? Socks are not a good gift. Traditionally in my family, socks are a gift which is cried over*. Try again.”

“Maybe a t-shirt.”

Socks and a t-shirt. The fabric of our lives. This is what led to this totally-slick text message I sent today: “What size t-shirt do you prefer? If you were getting one as a gift which is not to say that you are?”

Sliiiiiiick.

*My little brother used to be more excited for Christmas than any other kid, EVER. When the JC Penney Christmas catalog arrived, he would pore over it obsessively, composing an extensive list, circling things, and dog-earing the pages. As the holiday approached, he would search the house up and down, looking for packages he could poke or prod. One year, he triumphantly announced he knew what he was getting for Christmas because he had found the list he made in our mother’s jewelry box with certain items checked off. A week or two before Christmas, my mom would put out the gifts from the family under the tree, and the sparkling wrapped packages only served to increase my brother’s frenzy and intense desire to open them NOW. Every night, he would plead with my parents to be allowed to open one gift under the tree, just one, please, just one, because he just couldn’t take it any longer. My parents had various ways of dealing with this request. One year, my mom told him he could open a gift early, but that she had a special one for him in the basement and that she would go and get it. She went to the basement, quickly placed a shiny quarter in a box, wrapped it, and brought it upstairs. The rest of the family laughed raucously while he cried in his bitter disappointment, because as a family unit we are cruel, adept at hurting one another, and each take genuine pleasure from terribly mean jokes. Another year, the week before Christmas, my mom had made a large pot of chili, which my brother, a notoriously picky eater, refused to eat. She bargained with him–if he ate an entire bowl of chili, he could pick a present to open from under the tree. Watching my brother gag while forcing chili down his throat made for a poignant Christmas scene, particularly when my dad remembered the reason for the season and snapped at my mom, “JESUS CHRIST, Jill, don’t make him vomit at the table!” Under twinkling Christmas lights, gagging all the way, my brother finished the chili and dashed for the tree, picking a package he’d had his eye on all week. He ripped through the paper, opened the box, and found several pairs of socks, and cried, and cried, and gagged, and cried, while the rest of us laughed. To this day, I don’t recognize a holiday unless someone is crying.

How horrible our Christmas will be! No….how jolly!

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Last week Saturday was the 27th annual Kent Winterfest. I run a Kent-based community on LJ, so every once in a (long) while, I will look at the city of Kent website and see if anything is going on that’s worth sharing with the community. The Kent Winterfest, while a bit cheesy with its block-long Santa parade and tree-lighting ceremony (and pet parade deathmarch), is still earnest and festive, so I dutifully passed the info along. In addition to Winterfest was a bulletin about the craft bazaar, which was billed as being “Not your grandma’s craft show” and “more of a gift show than anything”. In fact, after I posted about it to the community, the craft show organizer found it somehow and made his own post to the community, again selling his show as something extraordinary and out of the usual.

Sounds pretty good, right? I had gifts to buy, and this would be a place to get them all, save perhaps one or two picky boys, one of whom was dragged in my wake so it would have been impossible to buy for him regardless, particularly if I had to bully him into loaning me cash so I could do so–that sort of thing tends to dampen the spirit of giving a bit.

Guess how much shopping I got done? Go ahead. Take a moment and guess precisely how many people’s needs and wants I satisfied out of my extensive and varied list over the course of my visit to this gift show. No. Lower than that. Nope. Lower than that.

One. I bought one gift.

We were all of us deceived. This was no urban craft uprising. This was no gift show. This was my grandma’s craft show. I should know, having been dragged to show after show after show by my mom, who reveled in a style of home decor that can only be described as “horrible country handicraft cow nightmare”. This was room upon room of crochet snowmen and knit kleenex box covers and crappy scarves (I did not realize that just cutting an elongated rectangle out of fleece counted as a ‘craft’) and tacky appliqued sweatshirts and bedazzled jean vests…and it goes on like this! I saw weaselmom from across the room, our eyes met, we pointed at each other and bellowed “THAT BASTARD LIED TO US! CROCHET! CROOOOOOCHEEEEEET!!”

We chatted for a while, openly mocked the wares of the tables, cursed the name of the organizer, petted her cute little weasels which is totally not a euphemism, and then went our separate ways–I stopped by mschilepepper‘s booth and bothered her for a while (I should note that her wares are completely and totally high-quality and in fact I own and wear some of her necklaces and have purchased and gifted some to others)–apparently we had just missed amazoni whom I’m certain will corroborate my story about the quality of said craft fair. After chatting with Jeanine for a while, we made our way over to Kent Station, knocked another gift off my list, grabbed some coffee, and discussed our plans for world domination while we waited for the Santa Parade to begin.

The Santa Parade was indeed a short affair, but to its credit, it did again contain alpacas and some sort of princess. They also had Darth Vader wearing a Santa Hat. I also helped myself to some more alpaca-petting which is, again, not a euphemism. We decided not to wait around in the freezing cold to witness the tree-lighting, as it takes place an hour after the parade ends with really nothing going on inbetween, and instead made our way to Spiros for delicious gyros and then on to Shindig for super-delicious hot holiday booze to ease the sting of the craft fair and lying mcliarpants liartons.

“Ten minutes and not ONE person has said ‘LET HIM OUT!’. This is why I love Seattle.”

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On Saturday, Jason, Amy and I went to see Penn & Teller at the Paramount theater. When I first saw they would be in town on the Paramount sign, I squealed and very nearly drove off the road in my excitement–they hardly ever tour, and come to the Pac NW even more rarely; this was their first show here in more than a decade! Sure, I COULD go see them in Vegas, but that would require more effort on my part. A lot more.

As it was, we put in the bare minimum effort possible and didn’t bother to make reservations for dinner anywhere as none of us thought getting a table near huge shopping venues during the busiest shopping season of the year would be an issue, which meant we spent some time wandering around looking for somewhere that didn’t have people stacked out the door, and ended up eating at a restaurant simply called “Mexico”. The food was indeed vaguely Mexican, which meant delicious margaritas for all.

After dinner, we went to the theater and found our seats. Amy and I were on the fourth row in the second mezzanine, which was pretty ideal in terms of being able to see the stage–had even a basketball player parked himself in front of me, it’s unlikely he would have blocked my view. However, we were seated next to The Amazing Crow Woman who could not be merely satisfied with laughing and clapping, she had to caw like the world’s largest and most obnoxious bird. There’s always one. And that one is always next to me. Well, this time there were at least two, because after the show, some dude who just stepped out of mom’s basement and away from his collection of serial killer fingernail clippings for the first time in a decade tried to strike up a conversation with us. I’m not quite sure where his goggles were, but his conversational skills included a vacuous stare and a spit-filled pronouncement of “I liiiiike maaaagic”. He then proceeded to ask Teller to sign the backs of his credit cards.

The show itself was wonderful–they did some tricks I remembered from when I saw them in 2005, but also added quite a few new parts to their performance. I tried NOT to be drooly goggle-eyed boy when I approached them, but I swear to you it was difficult, because I adore Penn and Teller in a way that’s probably not entirely healthy. Nonetheless, I don’t think they had a conversation on the plane on the way back home about that frigging weirdo chick they met…I hope.