Box me up day.

So this guy really has Christmas' number. Yesterday was a good day, as far as days go.
But today I woke up and couldn't get up. Again. This isn't a new phenomenon; it's been a recurrent theme of my holidays thus far. I seem to have contracted a virulent form of inertia.

During term-time I fill my head with reasons the next day has to happen; lessons, errands, people, stuff. On holidays nothing seems to have the same urgency.

I've been told I need to 'upgrade' my violin. This, being a task which could consume finite amounts of time, money and emotional energy (hey, I'm attached to that thing. I've played it most days for the last... fourteen years) is simply too much for me to contemplate.

Can't do it. It's going to require communication with my accountant (who is LOVELY, but whom I prefer to avoid like the plague), some kind of refinancing or redraw on our mortgage, which then makes our mortgage BIGGER... and really, truly and not-quite-ready-to-deal-with-this-yet, I can't justify keeping my violin as well.

Which is a little devastating.

Oh, and then I have to FIND a violin I'm happy with. Which makes me recoil violently, imagining all kinds of uncertainty about is this one better? Significantly better? However many thousands of dollars better? Really? AM I SURE???

Luckily I have my darling husband to divert me from my existential angst with riveting enquiries such as this one: "At what age do you think I should stop carrying Lappy on my hip?"
Dude. It'a a laptop. I know you love it like your firstborn child, but if Apple haven't come up with a way to make it follow you from room to room on delicate silver legs YET, it's probably never going to happen.  Think of it as your wonderfully intelligent child with tragically withered and useless legs.

And never mention baking trays again. Thank you.

Christmas crap.

Supermarket queue, O and I, eleven a.m. Thursday morning. In front of us, a grandparently-aged couple packing their groceries onto the conveyor belt.

She turns and coos at us "Look at that gorgeous face! And you must be so excited about Santa coming to visit and bringing you LOTS of LOVELY presents!" O looks slightly confused, possibly wondering who this deranged woman is. I smile awkwardly and just mumble a rough "Uh, kind of..."
My confusion gets translated into "Oh, I suppose he's a bit too little to understand about Christmas and Santa."

(You blogreaders who know me will now be shaking your head sorrowfully at the foolhardiness of this woman, as declaring any child "too young" or "too little" to understand a concept indicates an alarming deficit on the part of the adult, and often directly precedes an explosion on my part.)

"No, I think he gets the whole christmas thing, and he knows who Santa is (gleefully recognizing him sticking out of people's lawns, atop their houses and half-stuffed down their chimneys)... We just don't make a big deal out of it." I smiled, she looked awkward, they paid for their shopping.

In the cold light of the following day, I feel more indignant about this. Yes yes, wonderful meaning of christmas and all that tripe, but the way we celebrate it is ridiculous.

What if we were a jehovah's witness family? Ah, we don't DO Santa. What if santa has a one-present rule? What if I'm on welfare and this child's father is fighting me for christmas-day custody and the day itself is a riot of drunken, abusive relatives? Just saying. The distribution of wealth in our immediate vicinity is such that any of these options are perfectly plausible. Yes, it probably helps that I was not wearing any visible (a) religious paraphanalia (b)body piercings (c) needle marks and neither was the child; no, I am not perfectly fine with you foisting your middle-class preconceptions upon me.

Now I kind of feel like saying "You know, we celebrate Christmas as a pagan ritual and will sacrifice a black cockerel to the dark lord." (No, not Sauron). Just call me grinch.