Year Without Shopping

It’s Christmas Eve.  Babykin goes to his dad’s family’s shindig and comes home whenever the party is over, then we put out cookies an’ alla that and he goes to bed.

Of course, it’s getting to be more fun as he gets a little older.  Tonight he was putting out cookies and he decided to put out one of each (giant blondie, lemon bar, snowball) and three of the midnight crackles we made this morning (Dorie Greenspan’s Baking).  All the while I’m saying, “Santa’s having cookies at everyone’s house, he just needs a taste…”   Because Santa’s watching his empty carbs, you know?

To no avail.  I told him that sometimes people like to leave a carrot out for the reindeer.  He knows just where they are!  Ooh!  And did I mention celery?  Me and my big mouth!  Then I asked him how many carrots he thought we should leave.

“Well, how many reindeer, um, does he have?”

“Uh, well, there’s eight, pal.”

“Okay.  One, two, three…”

With that, the contents of my crisper was transferred onto the kitchen table, where it will sit until I can figure out where to hide it or I get to tired to care, whichever comes first.  I had a minor fit of hysteria a moment ago when I considered what it would be like to eat eight full size carrots and four stalks of celery, plus cookies.  It makes my stomach hurt just to type that!

I do love carrots though.  I drink carrot juice by the half gallon and I eat raw carrots also.  I’ve never liked them cooked.  They taste like dirt.  I mean, plants are made out of dirt, just like we are made out of doughnuts and pizza and, to a lesser extent, dirt, and the truth is, some of them really taste like it.  They’re also made out of sunshine.  Why can’t they taste like sunshine?  I refuse to believe that sunshine tastes like cooked Brussel’s sprouts smell.

By the way, that was quite a difficult phrase to type, “ Brussel’s sprouts smell” because my S is missing.  The button is on my desk, next to a bit of lego and a used tissue, which isn’t far, but it most certainly isn’t attached to my laptop anymore.  Makes typing any of the myriad words with S in them a little bit of a hindrance.  Which in turn, makes me thing of Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn.

From amazon, which doesn’t credit the particular reviewer, so this may be the publisher’s blurb: “Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” …Encroaching totalitarianism [has resulted in banning certain letters] as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop. As the letters progressively drop from the statue they also disappear from the novel.”

My holiday writing will obey that particular rule, and we will note the level of difficulty in following it.  I can already tell it will limit my ability to accurately tell what exactly I am thinking.

Happy Holiday to all my people!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 25th, 2009 at 2:00 am and is filed under Daily Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.