At times such as the present, when there's just a little over a week until Christmas, I choose to saturate myself in festive holiday tunes. With so many Christmas songs to listen to in so little time, I rarely listen to the same song twice. But alas, the following playlist features the select ten songs that I have actually listened to at least twice this year. Because they are good. Or maybe because I'm stuck on my "Recently Played" playlist. I don't know.
Track 1: Happy Xmas (War Is Over) - Sarah McLachlan
Track 2: 25th of December - Everything But The Girl
Track 3: Christmas Wrapping - The Waitresses
Track 4: Yule Shoot Your Eye Out - Fall Out Boy
Track 5: 12 Days Of Christmas - Relient K
Track 6: Mistletoe & Holly - Leigh Nash
Track 7: Winter Wonderland - Jason Mraz
Track 8: Silver Bells - Gavin DeGraw
Track 9: Last Christmas - Jimmy Eat World
Track 10: Everything's Gonna Be Cool This Christmas - Eels
Friday, December 15, 2006
Friday, December 01, 2006
Fake Trees & Flying Rodents
When I was just a small boy - back when my glasses were bigger than my face - my family would annually partake in the ancient tradition of setting up the Christmas tree. Dad would buy it, strap it to the top of the station wagon, and bring it back home where he would spend countless hours trying to set it straight on the tree stand whilst my mother shouted directional orders to achieve perpendicular perfection. ("A little to the left... No, the right... Little more... No no! Left! LEFT, YOU FOOL!!!") Depressingly enough, the tree would often wither and die just before Christmas. So on Christmas morning, after we children awoke from our dreams of dancing sugar plumbs, we would dash downstairs to find thousands of wrapped gifts covered in pine needles beneath a bald - yet perpendicularly perfect - Christmas tree.
This was just as well I suppose, because somewhere in the hazy, early years of my life, my mother and sister developed allergies. This meant that whenever either of them came within the general vicinity of a living fir tree, they would start to turn red and puffy while spontaneously bursting into fits of hacking, coughing, and wheezing. Although the entertainment value of this was high, my parents ultimately made the decision to purchase a *gasp* artificial tree. Being something of a traditionalist, this idea seemed unthinkable to me. How could we have a real Christmas with a fake tree? Do we buy a fake turkey for Thanksgiving? Do we buy fake fireworks for the Fourth of July? Do we buy fake chimichangas for Cinco de Mayo? Do we even BUY chimichangas for Cinco de Mayo? Well, the point is that an artificial tree was more that just an allergetic decision; it was one step closer to bringing a gigantic rat into the house.
A couple days ago, my dad ventured into the uncharted areas of our garage to retrieve the big cardboard box that holds our Christmas tree. Yes, the fake one. After lugging it into the living room, he opened the top of the box and began to remove it's contents, when what to his wondering eyes should appear but a rat the size of a terrier. That's right, there in the open box in the living room was a big, greasy rodent. To say that it was large would be an understatement. You remember Stuart Little, right? Well, this rat could have used Stuart as an earplug. My dad slowly stepped backwards away from the box so as not to disturb the mutant rat. Meanwhile, the rest of us who were in the room at the time frantically scrambled to the highest surfaces we could reach, such as the couch, the bookshelf, and my dad. Rodents are extremely unpredictable, you see, and we all knew that if this particular one were to leap out of the box, he would either hide himself somewhere in the house (in which case we could never sleep peacefully again) or worse, he would attack. Like a greasy, squealing banshee of terror.
After a few moments of fear-induced silence, Dad cautiously sprang into action by sliding open the screen door leading out onto our back porch. The plan became apparent: Somebody had to push this potentially lethal jack-in-the-box out of the living room and onto the deck, safely distant from the women and children and I. As Dad began pushing the box toward the door, trying to be both delicate and speedy at once, we all held our breath and stared intently at the box expecting the worst. (The worst being that the rodent would jump out and latch onto Dad's throat draining him of blood and then turning to the rest of us.) Even before the box had entirely cleared the doorframe, the mutant rat sprang out, scampered to the edge of the porch, and leapt off while we all stared in disbelief. If you've never seen or leapt from my back porch, you wouldn't know that it's about twenty-five feet off of the ground. Hence, a rat leaping from my porch is roughly the equivalent of me leaping from, say, Yao Ming. Or maybe something even taller, like the Chrysler Building. Mind you, a fall of this great magnitude may cause you or me to splatter all over the sidewalk like a Hefty bag full of vegetable soup, yet the giant rat miraculously survived his plunge and scurried off. He would live to terrorize Tokyo another day.
This opus of holiday terror ended with the climactic crescendo of the rodent's Peter Pan-like flight from the porch to the earth. As the rest of us descended from our various heights, we unanimously agreed that a new artificial tree would have to be purchased. Quite understandably, nobody wanted to go near the one on the porch.
"Never bring a box into the house unless you know what's inside" seems like an applicable moral to this story, but I'm sure there are others if you look deep enough. One thing's for sure: You never know what you might find 'neath the Christmas tree. Like a mutant rat.
This was just as well I suppose, because somewhere in the hazy, early years of my life, my mother and sister developed allergies. This meant that whenever either of them came within the general vicinity of a living fir tree, they would start to turn red and puffy while spontaneously bursting into fits of hacking, coughing, and wheezing. Although the entertainment value of this was high, my parents ultimately made the decision to purchase a *gasp* artificial tree. Being something of a traditionalist, this idea seemed unthinkable to me. How could we have a real Christmas with a fake tree? Do we buy a fake turkey for Thanksgiving? Do we buy fake fireworks for the Fourth of July? Do we buy fake chimichangas for Cinco de Mayo? Do we even BUY chimichangas for Cinco de Mayo? Well, the point is that an artificial tree was more that just an allergetic decision; it was one step closer to bringing a gigantic rat into the house.
A couple days ago, my dad ventured into the uncharted areas of our garage to retrieve the big cardboard box that holds our Christmas tree. Yes, the fake one. After lugging it into the living room, he opened the top of the box and began to remove it's contents, when what to his wondering eyes should appear but a rat the size of a terrier. That's right, there in the open box in the living room was a big, greasy rodent. To say that it was large would be an understatement. You remember Stuart Little, right? Well, this rat could have used Stuart as an earplug. My dad slowly stepped backwards away from the box so as not to disturb the mutant rat. Meanwhile, the rest of us who were in the room at the time frantically scrambled to the highest surfaces we could reach, such as the couch, the bookshelf, and my dad. Rodents are extremely unpredictable, you see, and we all knew that if this particular one were to leap out of the box, he would either hide himself somewhere in the house (in which case we could never sleep peacefully again) or worse, he would attack. Like a greasy, squealing banshee of terror.
After a few moments of fear-induced silence, Dad cautiously sprang into action by sliding open the screen door leading out onto our back porch. The plan became apparent: Somebody had to push this potentially lethal jack-in-the-box out of the living room and onto the deck, safely distant from the women and children and I. As Dad began pushing the box toward the door, trying to be both delicate and speedy at once, we all held our breath and stared intently at the box expecting the worst. (The worst being that the rodent would jump out and latch onto Dad's throat draining him of blood and then turning to the rest of us.) Even before the box had entirely cleared the doorframe, the mutant rat sprang out, scampered to the edge of the porch, and leapt off while we all stared in disbelief. If you've never seen or leapt from my back porch, you wouldn't know that it's about twenty-five feet off of the ground. Hence, a rat leaping from my porch is roughly the equivalent of me leaping from, say, Yao Ming. Or maybe something even taller, like the Chrysler Building. Mind you, a fall of this great magnitude may cause you or me to splatter all over the sidewalk like a Hefty bag full of vegetable soup, yet the giant rat miraculously survived his plunge and scurried off. He would live to terrorize Tokyo another day.
This opus of holiday terror ended with the climactic crescendo of the rodent's Peter Pan-like flight from the porch to the earth. As the rest of us descended from our various heights, we unanimously agreed that a new artificial tree would have to be purchased. Quite understandably, nobody wanted to go near the one on the porch.
"Never bring a box into the house unless you know what's inside" seems like an applicable moral to this story, but I'm sure there are others if you look deep enough. One thing's for sure: You never know what you might find 'neath the Christmas tree. Like a mutant rat.
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