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Thursday, December 21, 2006

Christmukah, West Coast style, part 1

Last Thursday night, Vancouver suffered a terrible storm that knocked out some 3,000 trees in Stanley Park, downed power lines all over the city, and created all sorts of other urban havoc.

Needless to say, Friday morning’s carefully choreographed trip to Vancouver Island was not destined to go smoothly. It was supposed to go something like this: Finish printing corporate holiday cards by 6:45 AM. Granddaughter and grandson #1 (designation by age) gets dropped off at 7 AM. Son arrives at 7 AM. Load up car with luggage. Drop cards in mailbox. Pick up potato latkes and sufganiyot order at Solly’s bakery. D rive to home of granddaughter #2. Transfer everything and everyone into their family van. Son takes my car away. Drop off other car at the airport Park ‘n Fly (for the wife, when she arrives from Europe the next day, as she has no car keys). Continue to ferry terminal and get onto 10:15 ferry, crossing to Vancouver Island, crossing over to terminal where we drive north to Nanoose Bay, home of grandson #2.

Well, grandchildren get dropped off - 10 minutes early, even! - but the schedule goes downhill from there. The power lines are down between their house and mine, so my son’s alarm hasn’t gone off and his car is locked in his underground parking garage. So we have to drive over and pick him up, which is in the opposite direction of where we’re going, and the traffic lights are out everywhere, and the city crews are out everywhere, clearing fallen trees from the road, and it takes a very long time to get onto the highway. So we load the kids and luggage into the car and send them off the to ferry while my son and I head to the bakery. But between the traffic and the lights out ... well, we never do get to the bakery - thank goodness they were gracious enough to understand - because we’d miss the ferry otherwise, so we turn down a side street and head to the airport. Except we keep hitting traffic jams, so we alternately speed and crawl to the Park ‘n Fly, and then boot it to the ferry terminal. I jump out of the car with 10 minutes to spare (they’re supposed to cut off ticket sales 15 minutes before sailing) and plead for them to sell me a ticket because my grandkids and my luggage, even my reading material, is on board, not to mention that I’d have to wait for hours for the next ferry. The kind fellow lets me through, and I hoof it to the ferry, where the staff are waiting for me to board so they can close up the boat and pull up anchor (or whatever they do). I should know by now not to choreograph things so tightly.

More about the weekend later ...

Saturday, December 09, 2006

It’s not just the break-ins you’ve got to worry about

I had a bad technology day the other day. The kind where everything mechanical or electrical goes slightly wrong. Kind of like the planetary alignment that makes communication go wrong when Mercury goes retrograde. Anyhow, I drive into a parkade in a part of town where touristy meets dodgy, put down my window, take the little ticket, drive up the ramp, push the button to put up my window, and ... my window jams. Goes crooked, then goes right off the track entirely. I can’t very well leave the car in the lot like that - it’s like an invitation to vandalize - so I take the car out of the lot (their credit card machine is broken so I have to dig around for cash) and call my mechanic (but get voice mail) so take the car to the house of family, where we call BCAA (but the line is busy), so I leave my car there and take our other car, which had been stuck in front of their house for a week in a snowbank, and head downtown again. Time lost? Three billable hours.

The next day, I was ill - maybe from driving around with an open window? - and went to see my mechanic, who took the door apart and started running his thumb along the door frame. He told me that it was likely that someone tried to pry open the car door to steal the car, and in the process, bent the frame just enough that the window slipped when I put it down. Why? I asked. It’s an old car - why do you think I drive an old car? I don’t want to drive anything that’s desirable to car thieves. Doesn’t matter; it’s still a BMW, Henry says. Look, he says, the frame is bent here, and here. I wouldn’t have known if it hadn’t been for the window. There were no parts to be replaced, but I did pay for labour. So this was an expensive lesson for me. I have a security device called a Club, and I tend to use it when I’m parking in a dodgy or unfamiliar area of town. But I get lazy when I’m going home or to a friend’s house, and I don’t always put it on. Chances are that if I’d used the Club, I wouldn’t have had this happen because the car would not have been driveable even if entry had been successful. Boy, did I learn my lesson the hard way on this one.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Doug and Bob: Look what you started

Doug and Bob McKenzie did a Hoser rendition of the 12 Days of Christmas that started out with: On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me ... Beer. How can you top that? Well, I saw a sign on my way to work the other day:

What says Christmas
Like booze and strippers?
Book your Christmas party here
And let our strippers
Show you their Ho Hos.

Nuff said.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

More on avoiding Christmas [music]

Actually, I realize that I’m not avoiding Christmas, per se. What I’m avoiding is “holiday music”. It’s the endless repetition of songs I was never crazy about in the first place. It would be like loving classical music, and then being ambushed by disco music for two months of the year, or loving country music and having the radio suddenly burst into the same two dozen opera songs, repeatedly, two months of the year. I suppose that for those who have grown up with “holiday” music and have fond memories associated with it, there’s a certain reverie that comes with that time of year. But for me, it’s just an annoyance.

This morning, in a Nyquil-induced stupor, I wandered over to the sofa and turned on MuchMusic (a youth-targeted music station like MTV) just in time to see a commercial where a star topping an Xmas tree starts to sing a generic holiday song, wherein an ornament goes postal and demands that it stop. After a frantic sequence involving earmuffs and a chainsaw, bedlam ensues and the ad closes with a “holiday wrap” theme. So it seems that my sentiment is echoed quite widely.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Avoiding Christmas, Part 2

Alright, I admit defeat. I’ve been ambushed once too often to be able to say that I successfully avoided Christmas. What did it was Boston. Yep, good old Boston. The first booby trap was the ladies’ room at the airport. At first, I wasn’t going to count it, because I wasn’t going to count hearing one bar of a song (the length of time it takes to hit the mute button on the remote), and what was playing in the ladies’ room was a medley of the first bars of many Christmas tunes, all crammed together and played at a frenetic pace, an octave too high.

But then, I got into the shared van, and whatever radio station the [probably Middle Eastern] taxi driver had on had a Christmas portion. And then the hotel lobby ... and in Walgreen’s ... and then, no escaping it, the restaurant I wandered into (Vox Populi, the one with the sweet ex-Torontonian gay guy who took such good care to seat me where I could read my book) which unfortunately had lots of loud Christmas music playing.

Monday, November 20, 2006

Avoiding Christmas

This year, I have one simple goal: to not hear any Christmas music. As of last week, I realized how Hurculean a task this is going to be.

First, I have to stay out of stores. I realized this when I stepped into the elevator at IKEA last Friday and got ambushed by some jazz version of a Christmas tune. I don’t remember which one, just that I recognized the first bar, at which point I stuck my fingers in my ears and started to hum, loudly. I didn’t care that I made the other woman in the elevator so uncomfortable stood WAY on the other side and scooted out the door before it even opened all the way. But I figure that I can do any holiday shopping online, either through Amazon or eBay. Even my groceries can be ordered online through Stongs. I just have to make sure that I turn off the sound on my computer - some sites ambush you with cheesy Christmas music when you least expect it.

Second, I have to keep my hand firmly on the remote control. The second the commercials come on, hit the mute button. Watching actors contort their faces and offer up merchandise that I would never, ever want to buy, while wearing decidedly Christmas-themed clothing, can be quite amusing, actually. But the sound track that goes with it drives me round the bend. So watching television is no longer a relaxing activity, it’s one filled with great vigilence. And once December proper rolls around, I may have to stop watching altogether, as the insidious strains of those same recycled Xmas tunes will make their way into the plot lines themselves, and the most caustic of shows will go mushy “for the holidays.”

Third, stay out of the public domain. Shops blare music out of stores, and some office buildings pipe special Chrismas muzack into their lobbies and elevators. You notice that despite being the public domain, which suggests Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and other religious and cultural traditions would be honoured, it’s only the same old, same old Christmas music that gets played over and over and over and over again. I have yet to hear any Kwanzaa muzack, or Chanukah muzack. Just those same tired carols, over and over again each year.

Fourth, beware the radio. This one is the hardest because it’s hard to start changing stations while driving down the highway, and there is no guarantee that the change will be to a station not playing Christmas music at that moment. This year I have satellite radio, so I’m hoping it will be easier. Maybe I can find a nice Xmas-free station and just keep my radio tuned to that station until Dec 25th. What are the chances?

Fifth, avoid recitals. This one I’m not sure I can get away with. I’ve already been told I need to attend the recital of the granddaughter who sings with a juried choir. I can’t imagine they’ll be singing anything but Christmas carols. I won’t tempt fate by faking an illness (though it is tempting), but I am wondering if I can wear earplugs and just smile sweetly through a cotton batting fog.

Someone asked me the other evening why I hated Christmas music so much, and I must say that his premise is all wrong. I’m not Christian and don’t celebrate Christmas, so I can be benevolent and appreciate someone else’s tradition. But Christmas is one single day long, and I don’t want to listen to Christmas music for 16% of the year. That’s almost 60 days of the year, which is about 58 days too many days of Christmas music. (Can you imagine the outcry if the 8-day long holiday of Chunukah got its music billed for 4 months of the year? We’d all go mad listening to I Had A Little Dreidel five thousand times!)

I think what bugs me the most is the collective cultural blind spot to the invasiveness of Christian doctrine as part of Christmas. When my granddaughter went to a Montessori daycare that prided itself on it ecumenical-neutral stand, they would go into a Christmas frenzy at the beginning of November and continue on through the end of December. I heard more about Santa, reindeer, wise men and stars, and so on - it got nauseating for me, and I wasn’t even there all day! But talk about Chaunkah, and the response ws that “we don’t do anything religious.” So until things change, to adapt the words of the Seinfeld soup guy, No Music for Me!