Day Three Hundred and Thirty Five
I haven’t finished it yet but still, trust me when I say: “go out and buy a copy of Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. It is fabulous. Calvino is playful, complex and intriguing. In the pages of the novel, you meet yourself, a middle-aged Reader. A man, of course, though you may also find yourself to be a young woman named Lucinda in the middle of an international consipiracy, foiled by a faulty publishing house and delightled by endless first chapters. Throw out Joyce. This is what postmodernism should be.
Ahem.
On a less adulistic note, we decorated the house last night for Christmas (minus the tree which we won’t get until Saturday) and it is lovely to see Christmas on it’s way. We have a small purchased Advent calender, a bowlful of candy, cable-car ornaments from San Francisco, lights and our Christmas stockings. The Christmas stockings are kind of amazing. My grandmother knit them and they are huge! They are as big as your leg if you weighed 300 pounds. Tall and fat they hold a lot of loot. My family’s one enduring tradition was to fill our stockings with fun, useful and jokey gifts. Oranges, beef jerky, new socks, pens, bullets, you name it. My grandmother got her needles out after I got married and made stockings for my new family so we can carry on the fun. Unfortunately I think funds are a little too tight this year to stuff them with anything but love…
Speaking of traditions my mother-in-law alerted me to some of the things they did when Jared was little. They used to put small Christmas trees in the kids’ rooms and they could decorate them however they wanted and with their own ornaments. They also used to put Christmas lights in their rooms and Jared said it was fun to have the “nightlight” reminding them of the approaching presents. I think we’ll use these but save them for when the boys are a bit older. Luc would still try to eat the tree so next year at the earliest.