This is the time of the year when they start playing Christmas carols...for anybody who still listens to the radio anymore...some stations play them 24 hours a day and that’s ok with me...it’s the only time I listen to these stations...they play the old standards and a few new ones that I don’t think will ever be standards...man, some of these songs were old when I was young but now we’re both old and they sound better than I do...Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole...a lot of these people are dead now...and some of them have been for a long time already...remember sitting around the tree when I was little listening to songs and watching the lights twinkle and reflect on the large picture window we had in the living room...usually, nobody sat in there because there wasn’t no TV in there, but at Christmas time, sometimes we’d sit in there...I’d look at the presents for me and wonder what they were...I remember when I thought Santa brought them, but then one time I got up at night and saw my parents putting boxes under the tree...I wasn’t too disappointed...I kinda thought the whole Santa thing was fake once I got to be, oh...five years old...on Christmas Eve, my mother and sister would go to the midnight mass which was like the only time they ever went to church...and they’d join all the other people who only went once a year...I never went, but I remember the Pope came on from the Vatican or somewhere and talked...that came on after the news...by that time my mother and sister had left and my old man was asleep in his chair...we weren’t Catholic but felt like I was supposed to watch--I’d watch a little bit out of curiosity but after getting bored, I’d go back in the living room--I had a little electric tree I used to leave on all night on Christmas Eve...I don’t know why, it just seemed like the thing to do...now the presents I get usually are in bottles and that’s fine with me...my mother is gone, so is my father and my sister...they’re all dead—so it’s just me who remembers that stuff and I’ll be gone one day and there won’t be anyone around to remember what we did...how we celebrated...all the little rituals...it’ll all be gone...sorry, didn’t mean to get so melancholy, but it’s my favorite fruit it seems...think I’ll go listen to some Christmas carols and look at the little tree I put up and the presents I give to myself...I don’t bother wrapping them...they’re just sitting there in brown paper bags and yeah I know what they are, but I pretend that I don’t...with any luck I’ll wake up on Christmas morning and they’ll be some snow on the ground to make it official...I used to get up early to open my presents, but I’m not much for getting up early anymore...I used to stay up late listening to Christmas songs on Christmas Eve...I still do sometimes, and sometimes I’m in a mood when I don’t feel like it...all these commercials to get you to spend hundreds of dollars for Christmas sap all the joy out of it for me...a Lexus for Christmas?...sure why not, I’ll buy one in every color...expensive decorations like somehow that’s gonna make things more fun...I’ll let somebody else do it and I’ll just drive by their house or walk by and stop and look at it for awhile...these stupid inflatable things that dare me to take a knife to them...sure why not?...the real meaning of Christmas was lost to most people a long time ago...Jesus wasn’t even born in December they say...what difference does it make anyway?...the weather outside is frightful, the fire is dying, but let it snow, snow, snow, let it blow, blow, blow, blow snow, just let it go…
