Angels bending near the earth

This year i love christmas. I decided to shed my grumpiness and get out there and greet some people, soak in the christmas cheer! The other day coming home late from a friend's party, i passed a couple wearing santa hats, and it was just so kitsch and lovely, it reminded me of Australia, where everyone on the beach wears christmas hats, dresses up their dogs and even tows along portable christmas trees. I love genuine festivity! Even the Orchard lights this year seem especially beautiful, despite their daytime gaudiness (Thus mellow'd to that tender light /Which heaven to gaudy day denies. Oh Byron!).

It's strange and surprisingly true (as it always is when we discover cliches we have scorned painfully prod us in the eye) that I have discovered this in a time of partial-poverty and ( i did finally get paid yesterday but the money has gone to a better place! do not mourn, my friends. ) When you're poor, every present is suddenly an incredible shock. what? people still give presents?? When i have $1.73 in my bank account? Well, i suppose the world is not going to end after all! There is hope in the world.

So although this year brought the usual crummy Christmas CD's, tv commercials hounding you for your buying power under the cover of seasons greetings and presents you don't particular need or would ever want to use, I love it. Christmas has unwittingly slipped back into my favour, hohoho's and all.

It is also very amusing watching my sister play her new Zoo Tycoon game on the computer. She had the idea that her animals are better off free, so she built a zoo without any fences, resulting in her already dwindling zoo attendance dropping to zero. We waited and waited- well, she waited, while i laughed mercilessly. Finally, we realised that she had accidentally built a fence in front of the entrance.

We also got to talk to our grandparents in england, and I realised how much I miss England. When my sister showed Nanna the new very PATTERN-PATTERN converse shoes she got (decorated with what we at first mistook for ladybugs and later realised were dice - she is less virtuous than we thought!), Nanna said "Oh! Well. They're very posh, aren't they?"

Ling, Viv and I celebrated Christmas the other day in our dorm room, just with fizzy fruit juices and gift exchange, with Calico the kitten attacking every limb left exposed. Afterward Ling wrote such a beautiful entry I cried when I read it. We are strong, we women.

I think there are always beautiful things to be found, but they are very private - like the colour of the clouds when i woke up this morning, and my father gently poking me out of bed at the unearthly hour of 9.30am saying "Wake up Claire-bear, it's Christmas, Merry Christmas darling", and Trixie's expression when we presented her with her Christmas bone. You can keep your Jamie Yeo in loud Courts commercials, and thousands of harrassed looking people hurriedly buying impersonal gifts in Orchard Road so as not to turn up empty handed, and people arguing that society dropped 'Christmas' to 'X'mas' to exclude the 'Christ'. Gosh, I don't want any of that. I love Christmas!