What is Actually Meant to Happen Between Christmas and New Year?

So seven days is a long time, it transpires

Did you all have a nice Christmas? Was there harmony and peace on Earth, or at least in your own little bubble? Nobody throw too big a tantrum about Santa not getting the memo about the iPhone7 or whatever? Good stuff. All done and dusted, and we don't need to worry about it for another 359 days.

Plenty turkey curry to go round?

My effort, made from scratch from the bizarre contents of the fridge and kitchen cupboards down here. Rather proud of the eventual nosh, actually.

Christmas being all but taken care of, it's now very nearly the end of the calendar year. A convenient little milestone to make us all get all reflective.

I couldn't work out whether I was going to write something all deep and serious and reflective, or something twee and superficial. So this might wind up being both. With no common narrative thread running through at all, just the inane rambling style that you've come to expect*.

I think I prefer New Year to Christmas. 

There, I said it.

As a Christian I'm supposed to like Christmas because of all the "yay, woop, Jesus" stuff. It's a good story right enough, but I've heard it a couple of times now. Kinda like that year when I had my theatre job over Panto season. The first once-through the story is good. After that you notice the extra subtleties, and after that you notice all odd little bits, like the ad-libbing and the forgetting the lines, and the times when the set breaks. By the twenty-something-th time you've stopped paying much attention to what the story's doing or who's behind who, you've zoned out a bit, and you've learned where the bits are when you can squeeze in a crafty nap in the back stalls** if it's a quiet show.

But New Year, that's a cool thing that you can run away and do with your friends, right? New Year is good. It's also possible that my enjoyment of New Year is a bit of a knee-jerk to the notion that we'll all spend Christmas with our own nuclear families, to the end that I haven't yet had a Christmas with L that happened on 25/12.

I like New Year, both on it's own terms and by comparison with Christmas, I like it. For as long as I've been old enough to remember, it's been a time of year that I have spent in Scotland, where we are lucky enough to have the wonder that is Hogmanay, an evening that is supposed to be so well celebrated that the state gives us two days off to recover. I enjoy all of the hope and well-wishing that goes with it. It's less complicated and therefore more sincere. Where Christmas has "I wish you a happy day of celebrating the birth of someone I believe in and you probably don't (and the associated, "but I really wish you would believe in him, it's rather nice" that wordlessly accompanies every Christian to non-Christian greeting, whether intended or not)", Hogmanay has the plain uncluttered "Happy New Year", which does what it says on the tin. Different number at the end of the date, clean slate, fresh start, good luck with it. Sorted. It also generally comes with fire, alcohol and getting to stay up late with the people you like. There are fewer assumptions about what you have to do for New Year. Stay home and watch telly till you want to go to bed. Stay home and sleep. Stay home with a few mates and some food, drink and crap board games. All options. Ceilidhs, street parties, fireworks. All options, and on the whole the ability to freely choose between them.

I think I just find it comes out really chilled and companionable, because that layer of expectations is gone. I'm now really looking forward to this next New Year in a way I didn't quite manage for the Christmas that just happened.

There might be board games. 

I like the looking forward that comes with a New Year. Crazy optimism about what we all might accomplish, or just generally have the chance to do.

Me, I have a small list. 

Yup, there's always a list. Really I just like the bullet-point format that blogger provides. It's a list of quasi-mini-resolutions (because I don't believe in real ones), and things I'm quite desperate to do once I'm back in my own world, and not walking around in my old teenage shows.

• Bake cookies and eat them when they're still warm.
• Work out exactly how many days it is until I next have some holidays booked.
• Go to the gym, because I am a very boring person and I enjoy it. TANGENT. This Is Not A New Year Resolution. Talking about going to the gym makes me awkward, because there is a guilt/indulgence/self-image/exercise-is-terrible thing that society does. The flip side of which is being in danger of coming across smug for mentioning that I do actually make it there quite often. I like it. It's somewhere where I can go for a run and not need to worry about stepping in dog crap or getting hailstoned on. I can go rowing get not get a wet bum***. There is a machine that provides just the right amount of counter-balance that I, feeble as I am, can manage a pull-up. I've mentioned this before, but one day I'll manage one unassisted, and will then be totally unbearable. END TANGENT, thank you. 
• Make Lasagne. I like lasagne very much. I regularly tell L that I like her more than lasagne, but only just.
• Make late night fried egg sandwiches.
• Get very excited about the things that are planned for this year. 
• Watch Christmas Telly. Because it's not actually all that terrible when you spread it out thinly enough. 
• Churn out a couple of those blog posts that I've been promising. The ones I've been promising you guys, and the ones that I've been promising me that I'll do. Like the house tour that will only happen after I've tidied my bedroom. 
• Watch Firefly, again****.
• See people, especially the ones I like the most.

I will no doubt add to this list, or remove things from it. I like lists anyway. And I like this one much better than a list of traditional "Resolutions". I like taking things up in mid-December, or February, just to piss of the imaginary New Year Resolution people in my head.

So if today is Tuesday (this has been written ahead of time and "scheduled" for Tuesday so it's a bit of a head twister what day it is) then you've got the rest of today and all of tomorrow to make 2014 less shitty. Like how the average age of the congregation plummets when L a I walk in, think averaging out all of the days of 2014. Make the last one awesome and that average day will be a tiny bit better. Me, I'm going to go see some people I'm very fond of, so I'll probably manage to up the overall score for the year. Off you go and make 2014 turn out ok.

And then 2015 will show up and we can start the year as we mean to go on; shipwrecked and comatose.

Happy New Year to you all!

* And yet you inexplicably keep reading it. I know this, I get the stats, you lovely things.
**It was warm and dark, and it was only once, and I'm sorry.
*** Most of the time.
**** Arg, Fox.

Driving Home For Christmas

Like right now. 

I am currently sitting in my car in the car park of a Garden Centre chain somewhere near the Edinburgh bypass. This serves the triple functions of being a) somewhere I can pee, b) somewhere I can eat, and c) an almost exact half-way point on my journey.

I am writing this on the laptop, why only manages about 10 minutes of battery life, using the hot-spot function on my phone, which only has a limited battery life, in a car that doesn't have a cigarette-lighter-charge-point thing. I will come along and proof-read later. Save me the time and go ahead and point out the typos.

So I'm headed homewards. I will be spending the next little while at my old childhood abode, which as ever is likely to be a bit odd. I'm sure any of you who have left home, and then been away for quite a while during which you have not starved, feel a little out of place when you go back. I'm not the same shape as the hole i left. I have also in the meantime become rather allergic to my mother's feline replacement children*.

So this is my chance to wish you and yours all the best, but I will be a little more specific than that.

• I wish everyone will appreciate the effort you've gone to in finding nice things for them
• I wish you all at least some time where everyone gets on
• I wish that moment where the whole family is watching telly and then there's a bedroom scene doesn't happen to any of you. 
• I wish you good battery life on all if your means of external communication
• I wish you safe driving and good health and all that
• I wish that at least once, someone else will make you a cup of tea, and get it Just Right The Way You Like It. 
• I wish that you get to go for walks and get outside and not feel full and fat and horrible
• I wish that you get your fair share of remote control custody. 

So I will have much time to be writing things for you to read, although ironically nothing will happen for me to write about. I will read, heck I'll read anything. I'll crotchet. If things get really bad i might even take up cross-stitch again.

I will be drawing stick-men, so there's still time for requests.

Me, we'll I've covered 125 of my 250 miles, and should get going before my Mother wants another location update. Perhaps I should volunteer to be tagged so she can follow my every movement and stop asking so often?

I'll get back to all of the things that I like about long journeys. Getting through whole albums, car snacks, allowing my mind to wander off in to all those abstract corners it never gets a chance to go to.

Happy Christmas!

My gift to you can be this song, which is accompanying my drive today.

*Who she probably preferred all along.

How I Survive Christmas Parties

Only Just, is the answer you're looking for.

This week there are many parties, and everything is awesome.

"figs, and jigs and twigs, is awesome". Amen, Lego, amen. 

Four Christmas parties down, two more to go. Eek.

But I can do them. I am even learning how to properly enjoy them. This may be a sign that I am getting Old and Boring. Or perhaps just that I am starting to learn the tricks.

Have you ever done one of those painful work-based team-building things where you all answer a bunch of questions, each define yourself as a very particular (yet instantly forgettable) 4-letter combination that is meant to explain all of the problems in your office?

Myers-Briggs or something it's called.

Here's an internet version. Do it. You might even learn something about yourself. You're more likely to learn something about the inadequacies of trivial online personality tests, but heck - it might be fun. Either way, there's a comments box down there somewhere waiting to know what you are.

L says she used to be INTP, but then she met me. I'm not sure if these are connected.

My problem is this. I want to be all of the things, all of the time. Even the totally contradictory ones.
I am all sixteen personalities, and at least thirteen of them are more or less CHB*. I might even BE some of those contradictory things. It's the Intovert/Extrovert dichotomy which plays on my mind the most.

Sometimes I want nothing more than to turn my phone off, not answer the door and stay home eating cake by the pint, whilst wearing a huge grey gents hoodie that smells a bit funny but I can't bear to wash because it is new and will never be as fluffy ever again.

Then sometimes I want to be the one holding court, at the centre of attention, wearing too much leather and bossing people around.

I am, honestly and simultaneously, both of these people. I'm not a bit of one and a bit of the other, I'd damned well both of them. I want to be big and brave, and to be doing awesome stuff and talking to awesome people **, yet I'm also really quite scared of talking to people.

Tangent, L is now INFP, which I take to mean that she's getting soft in her old age (Happy Birthday!).

Christmas Parties, Kid.

Yes, those. So here we have my tips for surviving the inevitable season of enforced social enjoyment.

Hide for a bit

By not seeing too many people for a bit before a big thing. Our Saturday was chock-full of people-seeing activites. Three Christmas parties back-to-back, like that episode of the Vicar of Dibley. So Friday night was deliberately spent not-going out.

Take a Thing

It's never good to be empty-handed. That Friday night was spent in the house, making gingerbread. This is me spraying them gold, just because.

But what that meant was that we could show up to each of these things, and immediately have a) something to say "hello, I made you a thing", and b) be reminded that I'm capable of stuff, which makes me feel good about being me, and therefore makes me better company. Also, everyone gets biscuits.

I'm gonna let you in to a secret here. When bringing food, bring tiny food. Parties are full of nibbly food and people worried about eating too much. So they don't eat the things which look too big and rich. They eat the tiny things that look light and not massively filling. So the tiniest things get eaten the most, and the person who made the tiny things doesn't wind up worrying that the thing they made might be horrible. Also, tiny food is cute, fact.

Wear Something Strange

Instant talking point. Odd socks, wacky jumper, dinosaur t-shirt. It's all a way of saying, "Hey I'm chilled and approachable, and here is an instantly easy thing you can talk to me about". Even better, go for the in-joke t-shirt. Where anyone who will get it will a) want to talk to you about it, and b) be someone you will want to talk to. I have a t-shirt with these dinosaurs on which serves this exact purpose.

Anyone?

Be all the "E" variants of your "personality-type"

I know outgoing-gregarious-me can exist. I know she is finite and a bit unpredictable, but if there's ever a time to get her out of her box, then this is it. So I take a deep breath and enjoy being letting "E" me be a little stronger than "I" me, just for a while.

Know exactly how much is a good amount to drink.

Controversial one here. Here is a graph that might help me explain myself. I'm not a big drinker, but alcohol does away with inhibitions, so...
A secondary point here being that deciding to do away with your inhibitions has a similar result, but is much much harder.

Draw your own, they'd all be different. 

Just Talk Nonsense

If they're your friends, they already know that you talk crap, and still like you. If they're the old ladies at Church they're probably deaf and just nodding for the sake of politeness. Even if they can hear you, they're pleased to have you because you're not yet of a pensionable age. If they're Scottish Country Dancers you have an awesome thing in common which you can talk about 'til kingdom come. If they're your Girlfriend's colleagues (ahem, Big Boss) then you'll rarely meet them again, and they'll just think that your Other Half has dubious taste. Everybody wins. If in doubt, have a terrible joke up your sleeve.

Here's one to leave you with:

What do you call a Baguette when it's stuck up your bottom? A Pain in the Arse!

Happy Christmas Partying one and all. And remember, have fun, cos no-one cares! 

*Cold Heartless Bitch. I keep thinking that I might use this blog to explain all of the ways that I am a CHB, but then you'd all stop being my friends, and I am a calculating cold heartless Bitch, so that's not happening.

** because EVERYTHING IS AWESOME!

When is a Christmas Tree not a Christmas Tree?

So Here I am. 

Writing a post about Christmas Decorations. 

Writing a post about all the things I don't write posts about. 

Tonight I'm sitting at home eating my tea, and soon we'll go out and go to Church to put up the Church Christmas tree. Which is likely to be the most Christmas Tree-ish Christmas Tree in our lives this year.

Yup, we still have this thing. Our very own slice of ecological terrorism. It will get more lights once I track down a soldering iron and fix the second set of lights that I just broke.

But I'm also sitting here thinking about how Christmas Trees, although festive and pretty and generally all cheery, are not the most interesting thing to write about or read about. Then I get to thinking about all of the things I avoid mentioning in the medium of this lil' ol' blog. Because it would be inappropriate, because I'm not just talking to one close buddy here, I'm potentially talking to the whole Goddam internet. I'm not, I'm talking to the corner of the internet who know me, which works out at around 50 pageviews a post (a thing which makes me SO SO excited). And I don't like rocking the boat. So I'm bound to talking about things of relatively little consequence.

Like this cactus. His name is Colin. 

There's some topics which don't make it up here. Work, Money, Relationships, Family, Health. Y'know the important stuff. This is not a place in which I can be particularly critical of anything close to me, on account of wanting everyone to be nice and hold hands and skip and stuff. Of late, I have learned to let myself mention L in passing, but I find I check myself when I type the word "Girlfriend", and then CTRL+backspace, think about it for a while, type it again, and eventually ask L if I'm allowed. And yes, I just did all that.

But hey, we bejazzled the Cheeseplant, so all is well.

My colleagues read this (Hey Guys!), and I'm over the moon that they do, but there's some stuff I'm just not going to tell you. At least not all of you at once, unsolicited. I like you and all, but that'd be weird. You're never going to see a post entitled, "All The Things I Daydream About At Work", likewise unless I'm having a very particular crisis you're not going to see, "10 Big Important Jobs That I Totally Fail At".

Like if the Wise Men had a blog, just imagine the posts - "Think Your Christmas Shopping is Hard?", "How I Found The Messiah Before You", etc. with no mention whatsoever of how they hadn't washed their socks in a fortnight and couldn't remember their own phone number.


So what's left is the light-hearted stuff. It's my weekend adventures, whimsical little musings and pictures of my house plants. And, and this is what's getting me here, it's all a bit spun towards the positive stuff. I'm not going to come home and write about how crappy my day was when I could write about the Tiny Squirrel. I'm not going to write about all the things I may or may not think I'm crap at when I could give you a picture of me on a stage doing a cool thing.

My point, if indeed I have one at all, is this: I love it that you read this thing. It will usually feature happy things, and skipping. Please don't for a moment go away thinking that I have it all together, cos there is a reason why this post does not contain a picture of my room. I'm trying to notice how selective I'm being, but I'm human and proud, so selective I shall be. Sometimes I'm going to try to use it to tell you guys exciting stuff, but most of the time, it's going to be the Tiny Squirrel and the Cheese Plant. And I hope that's ok.

In other news, still very behind on the advent calendar. 

So we went out, and the Church is now decorated. It's not quite the whole 20ft pine I'm used to back home, but hey, it's a tree.

Happy Christmas and All That Sort of Thing!

Make Your Own Christmas Jumper

Roll on another two or three weeks of shamelessly Christmas themed ramblings.

Trigger warning. Dismembered Snowman. 

This is my Christmas Jumper.

And this is a post all about it, which I promised to do some time ago.

And that is half of my face. This is very closely related to the camera-dropping incident that we had on our last camping trip, which knackered the zoom lens. We are living a simple life these days, where to zoom out, one must take a step backwards. And well, we were in a restaurant and that would have been weird. I cheerfully sacrificed half my facial features for the sake of the snowman. 

And this is how I made it.
Now before we go any further, I must warn you - there is crochet-ing involved. Very very simple crochet, which I managed well enough to make a Thing. A good chance to practise, in fact, where accuracy is not at all necessary. Crochet is like knitting for the coordinationally-challenged. If you ask me nicely, I would be pleased to share my "hang-the-bunny, stab-the-bunny, pull-the-bunny's-brains-out-through-its-nose" methodology. Unconventional perhaps, but surprisingly effective as a learning technique.

You could let Attic 24 tell you how to do it, and have a much greater chance of success. This is how she thinks you should do circles. Or you could ask around, discover that you have a friend or family member who already has The Knowledge, and have a beautiful bonding experience where they teach you how to Use The Force. They should probably also teach you that it's bad to mix your metaphors.

The instructions go something like this: 

1. Gather shiny things
2. Make shapes
3. Stick it all together
4. Wear it in public

At this point I am going to shut up and pick up the story via the medium of what might, in this online world, be called an "infographic" were it to contain a) information or b) graphics. As claiming either might be pushing my luck, lets just call them doodles. 

Here are some doodles. 

Very much Not To Scale.

Those are ARMS. 

A gentle reminder to get some new hobbies, is what you've got.

The tiny pom-pom is made from the cardboard doughnuts and the 3D nose is made from the sock, but you knew that, right?

Perhaps not what my late Granny would have wanted me to do with her button collection. This picture does not do justice to the 3D-ness of that nose. You'll have to invite me to a Christmas party.

Ta-Daa!!

When L hands over a jumper that she wants to not wear as much ever again, I will attempt to make another creation. I reckon I could manage a couple of green triangles, stuck together in such a way as to pass for a Christmas tree. I've also offered my Dad one. Maybe this is the year?