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| Catching the Christmas spirit. December 2024. Photo by me. |
This has felt like the quickest Christmas season, I thought, as I walked into Rich's, or the shell of what was a Rich's department store until Macy's murdered the Atlanta institution. I will forever have a warm place in my heart for Rich's, the Christmas of 1992, working there and being a part of the team to bring the holidays alive at a local senior living home and dodging Holly under her mistletoe trap. I also would like to relive the late seventies with my grandfather purchasing me chocolate covered peanuts from the bakery at the Cumberland Mall Rich's or the eighties with my mother buying eclairs from the bakery at the Cobb Center store. Yet, those are Christmases past and the scent of expensive leather no longer wafted through the store as I looked at the marble floor.
I have written about so many Christmases from the 1970s through the 2000s which were terrible, strange, oddly funny or weird in all four of my books that you could collectively call them The Art of Bad Christmases Series. I promise, they are fun for the entire family and should be read with a cup of whiskey laced eggnog by the fireplace.
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| I hear he's nice. December 2024. Photo by me. |
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| December 2024. Photo by me. |
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| Monkey Gone To Heaven according to The Pixies. December 2024. Photo by me. |
The Christmas of 2024 was tame and could never
be used as inspiration for a story in a book and there are no
complaints about that. I went to see Christmas light displays, made
notes for my next novel and had some satisfying conversations.
I
also got sick on the weekend before Christmas. While catching the Christmas spirit
among the last minute crowds on Sunday at a mall, I caught a
cold. Perhaps I caught it from the foolish man wearing gym shorts in forty degree weather as he trudged by hopefully seeking out a bargain on some pants and underwear.
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| Tube Socks The Stray Kitty performs. December 2024. Photo by me. |
My nose ran marathons and I had used so much Kleenex
that I was Rudolph or an 80s rock star coke fiend without the fun. That was the big mishap this year. There were no family secrets revealed and nothing smelling of reindeer shit came down the chimney; there was no Claxton fruitcake this year either. I napped on
Christmas and worked my way through a box of chocolates, not the old and discolored kind my grandmother gave me each Christmas as a kid that resembled something from a litterbox. The
neighborhood stray cat visited briefly and performed Stop, Drop and Roll in the rose beds too.
Between naps,
cat entertainment, cups of coffee and squirts of nasal spray my
thoughts went through Shadow's Gravity, my last novel. I was
replaying scenes and I kept getting stuck on how I had described a
three-way sex scene as going skiing. I had no embarrassment over it
and laughed several times that I had the guts to write honestly about my early twenties. It was
the Christmas of the three of us singing RENT's Seasons of Love on repeat so...
Rarely do I ever think of a reader's reaction to something I write,
but about that particular scene I have. I hope they laughed and that
image is permanently burned into their brain.
My mind also pondered The Dead Internet Theory, which is not entirely true, but with AI and bots it seems to be becoming more true by the passing day. If it can take down social media or help create a new and better one then maybe it is not such a bad thing. I miss the 90s internet of Geocities websites and AOL chatrooms on every imaginable topic. The internet had hope and Encarta! I still have a working AOL email address from the 90s which I check daily, radioxguy@aol.com, and I am never surrendering it.
The day after Christmas, I am glad the whole “shebang”, a
fine word my mother often used and I never hear anymore, is over. Also, I swear I
watched the music video for WHAM's Last Christmas in 4K only twice
this year.
The amount of hairspray that was used in the making of that video would be enough to fill an oil tanker.
Onward to 2025.
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