Kissing Baby Jesus

Red Shoes are Better than Bacon

I will never be cool. I’ve never kissed a woman, other than in the most forced greeting, and even then I make great efforts to avoid doing so. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you, but it’s just not my style. But an effort to be polite, I bowed and kissed Baby Jesus. It was agonizing.

Not all Christmases are festive and joyous or even as picturesque as something Noman Rockwell could’ve dreamed up. Some are spent in lonely bars. Some are spent with odd lots of relatives and a police presence. Others are spent looking for Chinese restaurants. And some are simply awful.

There was Christmas Day in Iowa City, dining at Denny’s. The bar exam review course would start the next day, and for the next ten days I would be the sole occupant of the FIJI house with Mother Guy’s blessing. For at least a…

View original post 649 more words

The Gift

Red Shoes are Better than Bacon

My grandmother had the worst taste in the world, which meant that she was always fun and easy to shop for. Consequently, she always got the lion’s share of my gift-giving budget. She was the kind, in a certain age, who would’ve fit very well in Miami. She always decked herself out with too much makeup and jewelry, bright and gaudy colors, favoring the brightest blue eye shadow, so much that my mother would tell her that she looked like a streetwalker. She wore the loudest clothing she could get her hands on, and if it was lamé, all the better. Her over-the-top purses, always big enough to carry an entire carton of cigarettes, would be considered tacky in some circles, but that didn’t stop me from coveting one which bore multi-colored dead, stuffed birds nestled under clear plastic. I was thrilled when she gave that to me.

I thought she…

View original post 563 more words

Bad Santas

In the spirit of Bad Santa, we’re going to add a few more unwanted gifts:

Vocational merchandise. The recipient’s admission to practice in the highest court of some land doesn’t mean that gifts of scales of justice, gavels, bobble-headed lawyer dolls, or a commemorative DVD of Amazing Supreme Court Oral Arguments are welcome or even desired. And the same goes for medicine-related gifts to physicians, educational gifts for teachers, and well, you get the drift.

Self-help books.

Religious items. God’s Not Dead 2, whether in Blu-ray, DVD or digital, isn’t any more welcome this year than that DVD of God’s Not Dead you sent in 2014. I don’t think Jesus Christ himself would’ve approved of using Christmas as an evangelical opportunity any more than he would’ve served ham sandwiches and shrimp toast at a seder.

 

Red Shoes are Better than Bacon

Bad Santas seldom start off with evil intentions. At least, that’s how I’d like to think. But there are times when you really wonder whether the givers’ brains were on hiatus. Why not just settle for giving your loved ones a stick or a lump of coal and get it all over with? Or just nothing? It would have to be cheaper and kinder in the long run.

It’s so easy to fall into that trap of giving someone what we would want to receive. Or what would make the recipient what we’d like them to become.

Maybe I’m being too kind. We can write off gifting fails as acts of the clueless and the cheap bastards, and then there’s unadulterated malice.

There are funny gifts. There are gifts that can be genuinely appreciated only by the recipients. And then there are gifts that are just plain cruel.

The initiation…

View original post 808 more words

Dreaming of Sugar Plum Fairies from Spain

Grocery store shelves harbor even fewer candies from Spain, edged out by German and Polish imports. I ask a small group of Mexicans comparable to my station why there is so little turron. One says “It’s the economy,” to which his wife remarked “But people buy German chocolates, and they’re even more expensive.” The rest said “It’s because no one likes turron anymore.”

Moving on to bacalao, I recalled how huge tables of sides of bacalao announced that the Buen Fin-Reyes marathon was underway. It always smelled like someone died. Then there were no more tables of those giant sides of bacalao, just a couple to decorate the few boxes of bacalao, neatly filleted. What’s with that? One man says “It’s the economy,” to which his wife replies “Bacalao is too much trouble to prepare.” And the rest chime in “It’s because no one likes bacalao anymore.”

What’s this world coming to?

Red Shoes are Better than Bacon

The Guadalupe Reyes Marathon is just not the same without an abundant assortment of turrón imported from Spain.  Let me ‘splain. The Christmas season in Mexico officially begins with  Día de la Virgen de Guadalupe, the 12^th of December, and finishes with Día de los Reyes Magos on January 6. Nothing will get accomplished during this time frame. Actually, the holiday starts even earlier, Costco revealing its Christmas treasures in August, followed by El Buen Fin, which is Mexico’s version of Black Friday and CyberMonday, preceding the country’s non-celebration of Estadounidense Thanksgiving. [Note to self: install a footnote plug-in.]

There are fewer fresh Christmas trees in Morelia this year than in years past. Costco only had a few, and Superama a grand total of five.  Walmart at Altozano was live tree-free. My Christmas tree comes in a box, an original silver Evergleam, grown in the forests of Manitowoc…

View original post 832 more words