the death of the party.

i've been married for ten years now (!), and the missus and i have a groovy Christmas Eve tradition which was initially intended to be a close-family-only gathering. After a few phone calls by a confused grandmother, however, it expanded, and has now evolved into a spirited free-for-all welcoming, well, anyone and everyone we've ever met.

and we serve chili.

don't ask -- there's no cultural/spiritual/pedagogical reason. we just like the hell out of some chili. and after ten years, we have a reputation to uphold. literally tens of people look to us to provide spirit (and spirits) each and every Christmas Eve. in short, we bring the party.

but not this year.

in an embarrassing addition to my already robust physical malady portfolio of 2007, i had what basically amounts to an angry ball of tissue removed from one of my vocal cords the week before Christmas. (i'd throw a link to the post where i talked about this, but it's literally two posts down from this one. more blogging in '08! ya heard??) following the surgery, i was on complete voice rest for six days. this will be something, i thought. i will retreat inside myself, and i will ponder faith and sex and God and the life of the mind. instead, i got a massive sinus infection and laid about moaning for a week. except that i couldn't moan. i just felt silently sorry for myself. after some "conversation" about it, the wife and i decided it was just too much work to pull off the party. my father-in-law came over (it was always part of the tradition that we open gifts with my wife's family after the last stragglers had gone home), and we had a bottle of wine and a bomb lasagna. except i didn't have any of that, because i had been told by my doctor that very morning that i was to be alcohol, caffeine and tomato-based-food-free for the next month. my leftover turkey was delightful.

Christmas came and went and was glorious, save for the rookie mistake we made in not pre-assembling the "big gift," a twisty crash-'em-up car track for our four-year-old. this set us back about an hour, during which we were exactly as occupied with putting the thing together as we were with keeping our one-year-old's Godzilla tendencies in check. (we're thinking of having his name legally changed to Jack the Destroyer. just has a ring to it.) young kids at Christmastime are exhausting and a pain in the ass and just about the best thing ever.

for New Year's, i carried around a beer bottle full of water all night long. come on.


the picture above was nicked from hecatedemetersdatter.blogspot.com, whose proprietor, hecate, describes herself as "a woman, a witch, a mother, a grandmother, an eco-feminist, a lawyer, a gardener, a reader, a writer, and a priestess of the Great Mother Earth." outstanding.