Lusciousity

Oh my! It’s been two weeks since my last substantial posting and still flying by is the season of Christmas. Okay, in the interest of your valuable time, here in list form, is what I have and have not been doing to lusciously celebrate.

Have Not:

1) Put up my Christmas tree.

2) Baked a single cookie from scratch. (Though this will change soon!)

3) Listened to or sung The Messiah.

4) Lit an advent candle.

5) Put a dollar bill in a Salvation Army bellringer’s jar (where are they all? I haven’t seen one yet).

6) Sung a carol. So sad! “Wassail, wassail all over the town!” Okay, that’s better.

7) Frozen my ass off at some parade involving marching bands. Some traditions are better dead.

Have:

1) Set my Firefox theme to Tinseltown. Thought this was so much fun that I have also downloaded Firefox onto all of my work computers just so I could set them to Tinseltown.

2) Downloaded the aforementioned Sufjan holiday song and also Aimee Mann’s cover of I’ll Be Home for Christmas available on Salon’s Audiofile.

3) Baked some non-from scratch cookies.

4) Eaten several holiday cookies of from scratch and non-from scratch varieties.

5) Traveled home to Michigan to see my family, give them gifts, get gifts from them, and eat cookies at the annual holiday party.

6) Ordered the Peppermint Hot Chocolate at Starbucks several times. It’s a yummy, caffeine free alternative to the mocha.

7) DVR’d the Chrismakkah episode of The OC… although I haven’t watched it yet.

Mailed Christmas cards with a cute tropical theme that will almost assuredly not arrive in time for Christmas.

9) Wrapped several gifts.

10) Found a good recording of “Jesus Christ, The Apple Tree” on the Classical Music Library online. Haven’t found it free online, but here are the lyrics.

11) Agonized over what to get my boss.

12) Bought a bottle of Beujolais Village. Oh wait, I don’t need Christmas as an excuse to do that. But this bottle I bought with a Christmas frame of mind.

Okay, that’s the round-up. More later I hope.

I may indeed be the last person on the planet to know about this, since I am pretty lazy about the weekly free iTunes downloads, but I was just over getting my free copy of John Hodgman’s (you know, the PC from the Mac vs. PC commercials) Areas of My Expertise as an audio book when I saw that this week’s is a holiday tune by Mr. Stevens called “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!”. It’s a bit heavy on the God, but v. Suf and easygoing in a depressive Michigan winter kind of way. So get it now for free if you like.

Start your Tivo’s and make yourself some boozy hot chocolate, tonight is the Victoria Secret Fashion Show. 10pm, CBS. Gisele for the boys, Justin Timberlake for the girls, or vice versa if you swing that way, and let us not forget the stunning lighting effects for the stage designers among us. This is one hour of television that has been a tradition for us Editors, ever since Christmas 2003 found us gathered in Steven and WA’s apartment, crowding into the futon and remarking on the jaw-dropping, um, runway surfacing. Consider this a luscious alert to your chance to join in.

Yesterday, I was knocking the New York Times for their tasteless expensive gift recommendations (it has crossed my mind that the slide show was ironic, but that’s an awful lot of ironic for a typically straight faced paper), but today, I find that their cups runneth over. This post was originally supposed to be about the Hot Dominicana, the hot cocoa drink variety that is, but I can’t find the link to the video of how to make it at home. In short: 10 oz of the most expensive dark chocolate you can find, a type of rum I’ve never heard of, a coffee flavored liqueur that I think I might have heard of, two cups of whole milk and 1 cup of heavy whipping cream. But looking at that ingredient list, I think, why mess with success? How about I do the rum and the liqueur as a shot, and then linger over what must be some kick-ass hot chocolate as long as I please, undistracted from the warm thick chocolate goodness in my hands? I have never needed the excuse of alcohol to get me to drink some hot chocolate.

So then I moved deeper into the Sunday Styles section, and found this brief aside about why writers really need to drink. In short, it improves their writing. Just ask Scott and Papa H. For really improved writing, you could try mixing up what they call the Orange Blossom. It’s simple: 20 oz of gin and 4 oz of orange juice, and you better pour that into a champagne flute before something mistakes it for a Slurpee. 24 oz of artistic brilliance I would say.

Oh readers of Lusciousity, I have lushed out. It has been over two weeks since my last post. The time has not gone unlusciously by, but there has been a considerable amount of homework and fatigue to contend with, and sometime around when I realized that I had skipped a whole week, I also realized that there was no point in keeping up the backdating facade that enabled this blog to look like it was keeping up with the post-a-day challenge we’ve (more accurately I, since I have been completely inadequate at inspiring our other esteemed Editors to read on a daily basis, let alone contribute) been grooving on since September. This is sad, but I am trying to keep it in perspective. One cannot do everything. If one could do everything one would be superhuman, not human, that frustrating but luscious state of imperfection that keeps making your life a mess but also brings you into contact with experiences that you never planned.