a holiday greeting

snow and the city

According to the Weather Network, there will be light snow for Christmas Eve! That's my idea of a Christmas snowfall. It allows me to have a cup of hot gin chocolate and look pensively out into the street. It's really quite an Oscar-worthy look. Enjoy the holidays everyone!

this is gross

In addition to the graphic television ads, the WSIB has these gross internet ads as well. I understand the want to shock people into caring, but it starts a risky precedent. Why not show soldiers blown up then for war ads, or have a man beat his wife into a pulp for an abuse ad, or worse, a re-enactment of a rape? At some point, the context gets taken away and it becomes sensational. Take a look at the ad and see if you can get any meaning behind it? It seems more like a horror movie screenshot. And ew. Ew. Ew. Ew.

christmas pet-peeves

It's almost Christmas and yet it doesn't feel like it at all. As a friend of mine said, we may be at the age where Christmas won't be important until we have kids. (So does that means Christmas by proxy also becomes less important for our parents? Yikes!) What it also means is that my inner grinch/grouch (not to be compared with the hotness of Ginch Gonch) gets released a whole lot sooner. Here are my top three peeves of the season:

1. Too many holiday commercials.
What better way to contaminate the holiday than with constant reminders to buy buy buy and to equate material things with happiness. (See what baby Jesus would have got if he were born this year.) Also, the relentless onslaught of too saccharine commercials underlines the fact that the holidays can be a sad, frustrating and lonely time for many. Blech. And then, the relentless boxing day, no, week, no, month commercials. Wake me in February.

2. Trying to buy a single item and having to break through the crowds and waiting forever to get checked out.
Now that everywhere sells Christmas items, nowhere is safe for a quick purchase. I wish people would spend the time they shopped on being with their loved ones instead. As for me, I won't shop during this time unless it's early in the morning or late at night just to avoid the crowds. I feel like I'm at freaking Disney World and needing to get there first.

(I'm get very anti-gift. I can't believe I am shilling out hundreds and hundreds of dollars on items no one actually needs. Let's have dessert instead. Honestly. Or save what you would spend on gifts into a travel fund and we'll do that instead.)

3. I hate when people sing "Have Yourself a Merry Christmas" like it's their birthday. It's a bittersweet melancholic song. (As is "I'll Be Home For Christmas" - note the final line: if only in my mind.) I want to pull my hair out when the whole meaning of the song is ignored.

Ah, that's just a taste of what I have right now. What are your Christmas pet-peeves?

what to give baby jesus?

If Jesus was born this year, what would the carols record as the gifts given to him? I'd guess a Wii, an iPod and maybe a Blackberry, because pinning is a much easier way to send prayers!