Happy Holidays: Throwin' 'Bows and Crackin' Nuts

Even though the malls have been swathed in candy canes and jingle bells since the day after Halloween, everyone knows that the "holiday season" doesn't officially start until Thanksgiving...and really technically the day after Thanksgiving.

Do not ever attempt to mix Halloween and Christmas. Unless you happen to be Tim Burton. Which you're not. Unless you are...Tim, if you read my blog, be a pal and pass me Johnny Depp's contact info.

I opted to forgo the annual family Thanksgiving gathering in Alabama. You know, too far, too expensive, not enough time, yada yada yada. There is typically a pretty good spread. Some of my favorites are cheese grits and sweet potato casserole. My mother always brings the ambrosia...which is essentially just mandarin oranges and coconut. I don't really know why it's called ambrosia, since this stuff pretty much sucks, and supposedly ambrosia is Greek for food of the gods or something. Whoever claimed the name "ambrosia" for this crap was blowing it more than a little out of proportion.

Evidently there were t-shirts at Thanksgiving this year. One can only hope that's a new annual tradition. After dinner, I'm sure everyone grabbed their shotguns and went out back to kill stuff and play on the tractor. Seriously.

Last year

I enjoyed a DiGiorno pizza on Thanksgiving. Actually I didn't really enjoy it that much, because I burned the crap out of it. Good thing I had a bag of Butterfinger bells to save the meal.

I wasn't going to hit the stores on Black Friday. In fact, I was considering a day of serious soul-searching. But after stumbling upon a Target ad for a door-buster (read: 4 a.m.) deal on a $12 air mattress cha-CHING, I decided I pretty much had no choice. Soul-searching will have to wait.

I made the two-mile drive from my apartment and found the Target parking lot...packed. At 4:17 in the morning. After a few minutes of mental preparation while playing, Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," I made my way to the entrance, ready to throw some 'bows if necessary. I floated stealthily between bleary-eyed shoppers carrying TVs and made a beeline toward the camping supply area to locate my loot. Wah-waaahhhh. What a piece of shit. I couldn't believe I dragged my ass out into the 25-degree morning - coffeeless - for this. Well, I figured since I was already up, I might as well get into the fucking holiday spirit and check out the decorations, damn it.

A few minutes later, I emerged with a $20 plastic Canadian fir tree, and all four limbs.

Coffeeeee...

Let me just say that I can be a bit of a Scrooge at times. Maybe it was the lack of sleep, but I was really in the holiday spirit when I got home. If I had any eggnog, I would have been chugging it. If I owned a Santa sweater to wear over my candy cane turtleneck, I would have put it on. If I had Mariah Carey's Christmas album...all right, you got me, I own pretty much every album Mariah Carey ever released, but that's all in the past. It was a dark time in my life.

Anyway, I decked the halls.

Every time I added an ornament, I had to adjust the tree so it wouldn't fall to that side. 

I figured while I was at it, I would bust out my one and only collection. My mother started collections for all three girls when we were pretty young. 

Julia - Snowbabies

Anna - Madame Alexander dolls

And these are my Nutcrackers.

Some of these little suckers have been around for 20 years.

Yeah, they're pretty cute. But I am highly skeptical of any actual nut-cracking abilities.

Dashboard Processional

I was proud of Ramona when she sliced and diced the pigeon a couple of months ago. She’s a tough cookie, just like her mom (me, for anyone not fluent in Allison). She don’t take no sass from nobody. But evidently she heard me bragging, and she got a little too big for her britches.

Ramona tangled with a Tundra last week. 

She lost. This is what Ramona looks like, by the way:

This is what Ramona would look like were she human:

She couldn’t possibly look like anyone but Maxine from the Hallmark cards, except she would definitely be chain-smoking Virginia Slims. When I purchased Ramona, she smelled like the inside of a smoking room in a Motel 6 in Tennessee. She is now channeling Frankenstein...with all the replacement parts, not much of her is even a Subaru at this point. What seemed like a good deal in the beginning, I have paid for twice over the span of nine months. L-E-M-O-N. At least she has low miles at 150,000. Oh wait, I forgot. The odometer was rolled back. That’s actually 250,000.

Rick, my mechanic, called me at work Wednesday. We’re on a hug-hello, life-story basis at this point. After two days of trying to get the jammed hood open after Ramona’s brawl, they discovered that the pouring smoke (no big deal, right?) was just a radiator hose that needed replacing...25 bucks. Sweet.

Oh, and also another 400 for the body work so my hood would stay shut. He wouldn't go for my bungee cord idea. Hey, my undercarriage is being held up with dental floss. No lie.

See, I have a history of automotive woes.

Before Ramona was the Bunny Slayer.

Bunny Slayer was affectionately named after she chased down and ran over the biggest rabbit I have ever seen, in the middle of the Arizona desert. She steered directly for Bugs and thunkthunk. I lost all control over her. She had blood lust - what can I say?

Bunny Slayer’s rear windows only stayed up due to the fact that I had opened the door panels and shoved a year’s subscription’s worth of Lucky magazines inside. The windows still slipped down a bit, so I jammed ink pens and sticks into the rubber pieces to help hold them up.

I was towing Bunny Slayer once (I think on one of the Georgia to Texas moves) and didn’t realize I had to tow her with all four wheels off the ground. All these truck drivers kept honking and waving. I gave a few the one-finger wave. “I’m going as fast as I can, assholes!” When I got to Texas, Bunny Slayer was literally hanging off of the tow bed by one chain. Doh. I tried to drive her off, transmission gone.

Then I moved her to New Jersey. I came out of my Newark apartment one day, walked to my (always parallel) parking spot, to find her...not there. Hmmm. I called the police, who told me she had been stolen but was found the night before. Two days of back-and-forth later, turned out my dumb ass parked in front of a driveway and got towed.

Before Bunny Slayer, there was the Blueberry. 

Blueberry was involved in the world’s first and only drive-by rafting. I was driving with a friend in Portland (likely to a bar, luckily not from one) when everything suddenly went orange and BOOM. I pulled off to the right shoulder. My left side mirror was gone and my hood was dented. I looked around and saw a large orange inflatable raft on the left shoulder. A car had pulled off to the left ahead, and someone was running to pick up the raft. I yelled at him to pull to the right shoulder as my friend got his license plate. He collected his lethal weapon raft...and sped off. When I called the police and told them I had been involved in a hit-and-run incident with an inflatable watercraft, they told me to hold before they said there was nothing they could do. I wonder if they were laughing at me when I was on hold...

My first very-own car was Mervo:

Mervo was a late-80s model Ford wagon purchased for $800 from this woman:

My sweet friend Heather told me it wasn’t so bad...that it looked like a cross between a Mercedes and a Volvo. Thus, Mervo. Mervo broke down mucho.

I really think public transportation is the right option for me.