I'm still in an extremely depressed and annoyingly foul mood. And my "humbug" sentiments have not abandoned me, but I'm plodding on - seemingly more dead than alive.
Let me interrupt this infuriatingly dire post to say that you should never begin a sentence with a conjunction (I'm referring to the above sentence.
Yesterday (Wednesday, I think) I forced myself to make the dreaded trip to town. Thank God for my potent homemade wine, or I would have never made it.
It was a cold day, with a daytime "high" of 35 degrees (that's Fahrenheit, for those of you in Fiji). I had to scrape ice off the windshield before I embarked.
Ironically, it's supposed to warm up considerably on Christmas Eve. No chance of snow here.
There were very few Christmas shoppers in town. No annoying crowds in Walmart. And (there's that conjunction again) ALL of the Christmas candy and cookie shelves were completely empty. Wiped out, as if by magic.
As for groceries - the prices seem to have doubled within the past year (I won't bother to elaborate on the reason why..........).
When I was a teen in Southern California, poinsettias used to grow wild in the yard around our house.
I bought some potted poinsettias in Walmart, with the vague intention that they might help cheer me up.
As fate would have it - while I was driving home, a ten-pound bag of potatoes fell directly on them. All the stems broke, the petals fell off, and the plants were completely pulverized.
My consternation knew no bounds.
So, what's this about a long ago snow?
During my high school years in Southern California, we lived in a tiny town nestled in the hills between Orange County and Riverside.
Winters could get very chilly there, and I was always freezing because we didn't have central heat in our house (who needs heat in Southern Calif.?).
I remember literally freezing my ass off during physical education class in school. We were forced to wear our gym outfits outside no matter how cold it was - shorts and a thin T shirt. And the coach would check us to make sure we were wearing a jock strap and not a (warmer) pair of underwear.
So, it happened in my senior year. I was sixteen years old. It was a tradition at high school to have an annual Christmas assembly - which ended the school day right before our two-week Christmas break.
My muddled mind can't exactly remember the events at the assembly - but there was a choir and orchestra and an abundance of Christmas songs (Would that be illegal nowadays in Marxist America??).
When the assembly ended, everyone was inundated with the holiday spirit.
Imagine our surprise (absolute shock) when we exited the auditorium to go home and saw that it was snowing! In Southern California!
This extremely rare event only happened because we were situated in the high hills, far from the lower regions of Los Angeles.
The snowfall was light - only an inch or two, but it brought an abundance of delight and joy to everyone. And (conjunction again) it really did seem like a holiday miracle. The occurrence was so rare that it probably only happened once in a hundred years.
I remember walking the two miles home through wintry swirls of magical snowflakes.
There are a few pictures of that snowy day in my high school yearbook. I didn't feel like scanning the pages, so I just took a few photos with my camera.
