the rix mix

The holiday emphasis changed when I was living alone again & working at Pearl Arts & Crafts in Woodbridge. I liked what I was selling, got all my presents there, enjoyed the decorations & crowds. The retail holiday season at Pearl began in October as merchandise arrived more often at the loading dock out back, & I had more to do out in the store. The decorations went up dept by dept. After Thanksgiving the holiday music came out of the ceiling speakers, the aisle displays were all wrapping paper & stacks of tree ornaments & whatever the store was pushing that year as gift items, traffic was horrendous. I punched out of work at six on Christmas Eve. Christmas Day was an anticlimax. The folks at the customer service desk handled the returns on the 26th.

But Christmas 1993 stands out as one of the loveliest. I was in good relationhip, our first of three Christmases together.* I had a box of Christmas decorations & a cheap plastic tree in the closet, but it was a special year. I made up some excuse for us to go to K Mart, but instead of turning left into the mall parking lot, I turned right into Val's Christmas Tree Lot. She was crying when we got out of the car.** She'd never had a "real" Christmas tree - always an artificial, & had never decorated one the way she wanted to. As an artist, her way turned out to be pretty interesting. That was the most romantic Christmas Eve I'd had since I was 18 & parked with my girlfriend in front of her house after midnight Mass & we fogged up the windows & she did stuff a 16 year old Catholic girl isn't supposed to do.

*Remembered by others variously as:
A. That Young Waitress.
B. What's-her-name who was always hanging out with the cute blonde woman.
C. Your Child Bride.
**A special category of surprise in which a desire of someone's heart is both a simple thing & a poetic metaphor, & it can be sprung only once.

Labels: holidays, love, Mahalo