You'll Shoot Your Eye Out, Kid

Well, another Christmas has passed, leaving in its wake a vaguely sick feeling and a load of new, wildly variant items to be reckoned with. Did I really need a ceramic napkin holder with sunflowers on it? What am I going to do with new holiday placemats? Will I ever eat or do anything at all with the fruitcake provided by a neighbor? (At least it wasn't sausage)...On the up side, I'm on page 186 of my new copy of The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz, and I'm enjoying my new music: Let It Be...Naked, Best of the Beta Band, and a Radiohead CD Single import with a couple of songs on it I never heard before, as well as a copy of Uncut magazine which Santa left in my stocking.

The girls are walking around in socks with toes in them for some reason.

Spending so much time with my "family of origin" this holiday season brought up discussion of a world-famous recording of me when I was about 7 or 8 (thankfully, misplaced for the moment but still sharp in everyone's mind) saying, in a deep, deep, super deep Southern accent, "I got me a new gun for Christmas, and I'm gonna shoot you dead!" The debate is over whether my whiny redneck voice was an imitation of a cowboy or the actual voice I used all the time. I was pretty much the only one going for the former theory.

The winter holiday from school has cemented 14-year-old V.'s relationship with the computer and AIM. I had to hire a lawyer just to be able to make this post. M., who's 11, is immersed in Star Wars, having received two books, a model, and the Revenge of the Sith movie. Such a sad movie. We watched the second half of it last night along with an excellent Gamora (you know, the giant turtle monster) film. It's important that children be familiar with the significant icons of our culture.

V. has a Jewish friend who got stuff from Victoria's Secret for Hanukkah.

And now the New Year looms. What resolutions that I forget by February should I make this year? We'll probably do the usual: Take down the tree, watch The Wizard of Oz (though probably not in conjunction with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, as M. keeps suggesting), and try to set our trees on fire with fireworks.