• Music: The Killers, "When You Were Young"

Merry Christmas Eve!

So we're hugely busy over here--I got my wrapping done, but my mother got started too late (due to having to do everything else), so she's all in a panic. See, here's the thing: we're not a physically demonstrative family. We don't really hug, unless one of us is leaving to go somewhere. Like, for a relatively long time--I got more hugs going back to college every other weekend or so than I think I'd gotten in my entire life previous to that. (Well, and I hug my grandmother, and before he died, my grandfather, every time I see her both coming and going--it's one of those knowing you might not have many years left kind of things.) We're not verbally demonstrative, either--God knows we never shut up, and we psychoanalyze everything to death, but we never say "I love you." Now, we do go out of our way to try to do things for each other, and I think we know consciously that that's what we do, but above all, we really love each other with merchandise and food. This is why my mother (and, now, my sister) is always baking for people, and why she's always turning up with this or that little thing she bought for me while she was out doing something--and this is why Christmas is SO IMPORTANT to her. I mean, besides the totally awesome decorating aspect, which she also loves. So she spent today trying to get most of the food ready for tomorrow--my aunt brought over her and my grandmother's contributions early, so we'd have all our ducks in a row, so speak (although we're not eating duck, rather ham and turkey and, I believe, a chocolate roulage?). I've mostly been recovering from Saturday--again, not from drinking, of which I didn't do much at all, but of having a day that went from eight in one morning to four-thirty the next. Sister Girl had a similar day--a long shift at work, and then out to see I Am Legend, which freaked her out so bad she came home super-hyper--but she's far more accustomed to keeping outrageous hours (due to the insane shifts she's worked at Panera for about two years now, often taking classes at the same time) than I am. I'm weaksauce, is what I'm saying. But I can write 4000 words in one sitting, so--uh--there. Or something.

I tried to spend as much of the month just thinking about Christmas as I could, so I'd feel like I'd made the most of it, but somehow, it always seems to have gone by too fast. I probably won't be satisfied until I spend an entire month ODing on Christmas music and movies, although if I did that, I'd probably be sick of it after three days. (Although I do feel that it would be fantastic to work up a list of tangentially related Christmas movies--Batman Returns! The Lion in Winter! Little Women! The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe! Anything Harry Potter!--as opposed to movies that are Meaningful and Deep about the Deep Meaningfulness of Christmas.) Still, I'm currently working on a giant Cadbury Dairy Milk with whole hazelnuts ("More to share!" AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHA) that'll probably take me three days to eat, and birthday presents have been trickling in for two whole weeks. Life is good.

Also, somewhat hilariously, I keep going around humming bits from Sweeney Todd, which is almost as fantastic a juxtaposition as that time they released Hannibal on Valentine's Day weekend. I have most of the soundtrack, although, really, listening to it isn't quite as good as watching it. You have to actually see Helena Bonham Carter smacking roaches with her rolling pin throughout "The Worst Pies in London" to really appreciate the movie version, I think, and "By the Sea" is totally owned by the character who only says three words through the entire song. Which reminds me--you can see a good number of clips on the Coming Soon.net page (hunt down all three "Little Priest" snippets, if you want to know why you should go see this movie, in a nutshell), and the interviews are interesting as well. Stephen Sondheim even declares that this is (in his opinion) perhaps the first and only movie musical that is a movie rather than a filmed musical. They've cut down the songs (or cut out songs entirely) to fit the movie rather than just filmed them and set them out there--something that works so well (for me, anyway) that I didn't even notice it until I watched the interview, but it really is the first movie musical I can remember where I didn't get restless through the umpteenth chorus of whichever song. So many movies, it feels like they just perform entire songs because... well, they're there, regardless of how restless the audience might get. It seems like some of the fans of the musical--the people who would know better, in other words, as I wasn't familiar with the original--found this awkward or disappointing at times, but it worked for me. It's actually a shade under two hours, a very swift and compact thing where they use exactly as much of the song as fits and no more. I'd actually really like to see the full show--but I think it worked, cut-down, as a movie in this case.

Ooh, dinner's ready. And it smells Italian.


(P.S. Thank you, discord26!)


ETA: A Very Lolcat Christmas.