I couldn’t believe what a challenge it was to find a photographic image of a Santa Claus hat with a transparant background to edit on to the heads of family, friends, pets, or celebrities in digital pictures, so I’d like to share the one that I created for just that purpose.
Author: emlocke
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You don’t have to go to the talkies to get your Fitzgerald fix this Christmas
I’m going to start planning for Christmas 2009 tomorrow. Instead of spending all fall thinking about getting ready for the holiday only to wake up on the 21st and wonder where all the time has gone, I’m going to flip ahead in my 2009 calendar to September of next year and write ‘to do’ items in as reminders so I can spread the preparation out over three and a half months.
Christmas is a misleading holiday because it doesn’t happen at the very end of the month, but I think a lot of people think of it coming then. You don’t have all of December to shop and bake and wrap and decorate. In fact, you don’t even have 25 days because Christmas begins on Christmas Eve, the 24th, and the world as we know it seems to stop in time around four o’clock that afternoon. I always feel cheated out of the last few daylight hours on Christmas Eve because it’s always then that I remember something that occurred to me on Halloween but has evaded my memory since then.
And speaking of Halloween! Next year, I promise not to scoff when red and green holiday decor goes up at Target and Pottery Barn before the black and orange stuff comes down. We all complain that it’s too soon, that retailers are pushing the holidays upon us to pull our dollars out from under us. We say, “Already? But Christmas is months away!” And then we go about our merry ways as though we have outsmarted the advertising industry and the Gregorian calendar (not to mention Baby Jesus). It’s not months away! It’s one month and twenty-four days away. Most people probably need all that time between Halloween and December 24th to get ready.
The one thing I wanted to do in advance that I actually did in advance was to find another Christmas-y short story to share here like I did last year.
And so, I give you A Luckless Santa Claus by F. Scott Fitzgerald, written in 1912 when the author was about sixteen.
Oh, F. Scott. I love you for hyphenating the word “pro-ceeding.”
Merry Christmas to F. Scott, Zelda, Dorothy and Harry, and merry Christmas to you.
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What kind of cereal has a “Things to Do Before You’re 25” list on the box?
I have to work on Tuesday before I go home for my actual Christmas vacation, but I used the last of my personal days to have myself a merry little staycation of a long weekend. A vacation calls for “Vacation Cereal,” you know, the kind of breakfast you’re only allowed to eat on special occasions because they aren’t considered ‘brain food.’
I sat down this morning to eat my bowl of Reese’s Puffs and ‘read’ the back of the box. Remember the days when a breakfast’s worth of word searches and mazes and riddles were provided on the back of the breakfast packaging?
When I saw the back of this particular box, I thought, Isn’t this ironic? Yeah, I really do think.
At 18, I would have checked off five or six things. I scored the school newspaper equivalent of the winning goal my senior year in high school. I’d kept more than one pointless collection and raised money for more than one charity at that age. I got away with a stellar practical joke at 19 (retaliation is the worst). At 20, I swung across a canyon, which close enough to bungee jumping to count, I think, and probably as close as I want to come.
I’ve idolized a handful of people, including authors and actors both living and dead, and I’ve met a couple of them. I’ve made discoveries, literally and metaphorically, though to my knowledge, nothing has been named after me.
A couple of these items don’t make much sense, though. For one thing, I’ve met plenty of other Emily‘s. I think there were two others in my pre-school class. I’ve never met someone who shares my full name and I’ll be just fine if I never do. That’s more like a bizarre coincidence than a life goal. Another quandry: 18-year-olds haven’t been licensed drivers for even two years. In some states, they aren’t even allowed to drive across state lines after dark before they turn 18. Just when are you supposed to take a road trip from coast to coast?
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My mother told me I sounded high. Maybe I am high!
According to the AccuWeather Widget, the current conditions in Brooklyn are: Winds from NE at 13 mph; Scattered showers of bouncing pearls.
Splendid!
I wanted to hug today; the day itself. I had the day off from work, but I was in Manhattan early enough to see the snow really start to come down in Rockefeller Center. I haven’t been anywhere near Rockefeller Center in months. I don’t think I ever laid eyes on last year’s tree. And though I’m never looking for an opportunity to rub elbows with tourists in ski jackets, there was an infectious strain of excitement in the air there.
I blinked flakes from my eye lashes. I said ‘good morning’ to the guy rolling out the snow mats at the entrance to J.Crew. I got a smile from a tiny kid trying on ginormous earmuffs.
I also got 20% off my purchase.
I like The First Snow. What’s not to like?
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Britney hasn’t done a Christmas album so I’m mixing up the tunes
Last night I sat on the train next to a guy studying the pages of what must be the “textbook” for a taxi driving school. It was a bound book of pages and pages of hotel, hospital, and museum addresses and mnemonics for figuring out where a particular street address falls between avenues.
Here I am, thinking I’m such a genius with the “traffic travels east on the even-numbered streets and west on the odd-numbered streets in Manhattan” rule (with seven exceptions, I think). And I’m all impressed with myself when I inform my father that Penn Station and Grand Central are not, in fact, directly across the island from one another. Haughty amateur!
I scored 66% on this Hack License NYC Taxi Test, and only because most of the questions concerned the geography of city parks.
This is what I’ve been listening to at my desk and not in my cab this week:
Circus by Britney Spears
Circus by Britney Spears
Circus by Britney Spears
O Little Town of Bethlehem by Sarah McLachlan
Oh, Holy Night by Tracy Chapman -
Now think of all the things you’ve done right in your life
If you liked 2 1/2-months-to-New-Year’s-Resolutions Resolutions (which has been updated again, of late), then you will love Oh.! And not just because it is a proper noun with built-in punctuation. I’m completely crazy about that stuff.
Number 15 could be me.
“I always make this mistake.
When I start a new job I hold off asking questions for just too long.
Just untill it will be really embarrassing to ask the question and it will revile that I have just been guessing untill now [sic].”It’s not me, though. That’s someone else’s mistake, set free.
When I think about a mistake that I have made from which I’d like to be set free and from which someone else could learn, I’m like, “how much time have you got? I feel like, “where, oh where to begin.” But the point is: mistakes are meant to be made. Oh. liberates the mistake makers by casting them out there on the internet “for all to see and learn.”
The first lesson: everybody screws up.
The second lesson: to err is not to fail.
I appreciate Number 1.
“Here’s my mistake:
I accidentally sent my cv to an ex-boyfriend while sending out work applications.
Just a blank email which my cv attached to it.
. . . to which he driely [sic] replied, “oh, you’ve been up to a lot.”The ex-boyfriend? Probably didn’t know that he received an email that had been mistakenly sent. I like to imagine him, nostalgic, reflecting for a moment and thinking, “man, maybe I made a mistake when I gave her up.”
Oh. is part experiment in honesty and part community blog. The spelling mistakes in each entry give it a performance art effect, too.
Thanks to Mackin Ink via Design Crush.
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Highly Notable Events in November 2008
- Traveled to the land of my birth
- Celebrated Election Night with my mom, my dad, and The New York Times
- Went to the mall on Black Friday
- Met a friend from the internet in real life
- Became an Ugg-wearer
I scheduled the last of my vacation days for 2008 today. Yes, today. On the first day of the last month of the year.
There are thirty-one days in December. Eight of those days are weekends. Five of them are company holidays. Major seasonal meetings take up most of four of them. Our department bonding activity is scheduled on another day. That left twelve days eligible for the Vacation Day stamp. Oh, and I was already in the office by the time I tried to sort this all out, so forget about December 1.
I have to take five of those eleven days off. Am I going to get any actual work done before the end of the year?
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I am thankful
Immensely so . . .
- That I’ve grown up living so close to my maternal grandmother.
- For the social life I lead during my first year in New York City, which fulfilled a wish I thought would never come true.
- For the gift of writing well.
- That it is not in my nature to harbor empty regrets.
- For the privileges afforded to me by my race and socioeconomic status, and more importantly:
- That my parents raised me with a consciousness of racial and socioeconomic divides, and taught me to take responsibility for those privileges, not to take them for granted.
- For the bigger bedroom.
- For the guy who taught me to say ‘no.’
- That I’m only deaf in one ear and not two.
- That I live in a country where we are free to make fun of politicians.
And for you. Of course, for you.
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The pumpkin pie filling will go straight to your head
My cousin couldn’t make it back to Illinois for the holiday, so she came out to Connecticut.
Marie: Thank you so much for inviting me for Thanksgiving. If it weren’t for you, I’d probably be eating Thanksgiving dinner out of a can.
Emily: Aww! Like kidney beans that you have to cut into slices? (Like in Mickey and the Beanstalk, when Mickey Mouse slices up the one last kidney bean to share with Donald Duck and Goofy.)
Marie: More like pumpkin pie filling straight from the can.I barely turned on my iPod this week. I’ve figured out that reading is a much more effecive distraction from the many irritants, discomforts, and small tortures of airline travel, and so I’ve spent more time with earplugs in my ears than earbuds. I read about four back issues of The New Yorker and Head Cases by Michael Paul Mason. Now I can recycle all those magazines and I will happily pass along the book so that it gets re-read. It’s great.
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Right there, under the rainbow
I was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1984. A few months before my parents moved to Connecticut in 1986, my pediatrician relocated to a new office. It featured a rainbow sculpture that arched across the sidewalk leading up to the front door.
The rainbow is my earliest memory; the first image imprinted permanently on my brain. For literally as long as I’ve possessed the ability to remember, I’ve had the image of this rainbow in my head, a little hazy around the edges. It’s what I’ve always contributed to conversations about San Antonio: “I remember a building with a rainbow in front of it . . . ”
But it was the one thing that we didn’t have a photograph to look at.
My coworkers, bless their hearts, brought me to the rainbow on the way to the airport after our conference in San Antonio last week.
My parents had sent me the addresses of the hospital where I was born and of my first home, the names of a park where I split my little chin open and of a few Texan landmarks that we visited as a family, but all I really wanted to see was the rainbow.
I wanted to confirm that fading mental image with my own eyes. It’s the one memory of my infancy that hasn’t been influenced by my parents’ memories, like the chin accident in the park, or reinforced throughout my childhood, like the rooms in my grandmother’s house, which is where the three of us lived when we first left Texas for Connecticut.
I felt a little homesick in San Antonio. Without many concrete memories to represent it in my mind, I think of it as a place that I’ll always share with my mom and dad. Before my brother or my dog or pre-school, it was just the three of us among the bluebells.
