Me, I Want a Hula Hoop

I may have blogged about this before, so if it sounds familiar, sorry. I'm getting up in years and can't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, let alone what I was thinking this time last year or the year before.

I have a fat collection of Christmas music on CDs, thanks in part to my being saddled some years ago with keeping seasonal music on the office intercom. The intercom at that particular time in the firm's history was a piece of work. If you didn't have music playing, the folks on hold could talk to each other while they waited. That wasn't a particularly good thing, since about half the folks that call are not happy campers due to having received a notice of delinquency from us. For most of the year, we kept your basic blah, elevator music going. But at Christmas, we all wanted to hear some mood music and you could press a button on your phone and get the intercom music at your desk, so I kept it loaded up with Christmas CDs and would swap it out every couple of days when the current crop was beginning to get old.

I have never claimed to have good taste. Sometimes my taste is pretty darned tacky. So, I admit here that I actually like The Chipmunk Song. I had a Christmas collection that included that song and my boss happened to call in and be put on hold while it was playing. He nearly had a stroke, because he absolutely despises the song. I considered torturing him with keeping it on there permanently, but I relented and that CD only gets played in my personal CD player a couple of times during December. I listened to it on the way to work this morning and decided part of its charm must be that The Chipmunks sound exactly like rat terriers would if they could sing. Including the owner hollering "ALVIN!", except in my case it would be "COCO!" since she's the one that would be wandering off, distracted by something at the window or tracking a bug across the room.

My all time favorite song is Greensleeves, which I know I've mentioned several times, and I get to listen to it a lot this time of year, since the tune was used for What Child is This?. I was poking through my Christmas CDs this morning for a new batch for the road and re-discovered an album of Christmas music on banjo that I had forgotten about. I told you, I have no taste, but it's really not that bad if you like banjo music and I do. Their version of Greensleeves was bouncy and I still absolutely loved it.

I must have 20-30 different versions of Greensleeves at this point, most of them instrumentals only, and have seriously considered ripping a CD of nothing but that piece, over and over, in every arrangement and genre. A couple of years back, somebody actually released a CD of nothing but different versions of Pachebel's Canon, another song I like very much but have no desire to listen to repetitively for an hour or more. Greensleeves, on the other hand, I don't think I would tire of.

In a total departure from the topic, have I mentioned how much I despise Christmas shopping? I once was an avid mall-rat, delighted to sniff out good deals and stay on my feet from dawn to dusk. Now I get hostile in direct proportion to the amount of crowd around me. I've been doing the scant Christmas shopping I felt I had to do this year in the small open-air malls of the little towns that circle Austin and refusing to go into Austin at all. Even the small towns are full of irritable folks who look daggers at you if you happen to be ahead of them when the good parking space opens up and you, rightfully so, take advantage of it. Nobody is going to yield right of way to anybody else. I thought I was going to witness a rumble the other day when a girl was standing in the middle of a prime parking space, holding it for somebody that was two rows over and refusing to move for the guy who had also seen the spot and had no one to hop out and go stand and hold it for him.

This is just the parking lots. The stores themselves should have bright yellow caution tape draped around them.

Remember when Christmas was something to look forward to? The only thing I'm looking forward to this year is the two weeks of vacation that happen to coincide with this madness. Me and the two Chipmunks that live with me plan to be as inert as possible. Let everybody else make themselves crazy. I have two bottles of amaretto, a good supply of Sprite to mix with it, a stack of unwatched DVDs and a knitting project, not to mention a GREAT big pile of new genealogy finds to sort and file, and a new dollhouse to piddle with.

But no hula hoop. Wonder if I could still keep one going?

LSW