I suppose this will be the weekend when I really start to get all goofy about the holidays. I already missed the motorcycle parade on Western Avenue but by God I’m going to ride that damn Santa Train this year. I’ve only been on it once, a couple years ago. It showed up out of nowhere at my el stop and I got on. Secular Christmas songs blared over the loudspeakers. Everybody in the train car sat in a sort of daze. I know I won’t be able to quite recapture the magic, or the tingly, dissociative sensations, or whatever, of my first time on the Santa Train, but that’s okay.
I guess I am going to put up lights in my apartment. It’s a studio apartment and too small for a tree. I tried a tree once: my first real tree, since due to allergies in our family we have always had a fake tree that we haul down fully assembled from the attic. We put the lights on it years ago and now we just plug it in and sort of fluff it up and decorate it. It’s a good thing. But one year I let a boyfriend talk me into getting a four-foot-tall real tree. It was all right. But I don’t recommend having a real Christmas tree in the same room where you sleep, because the sound of needles falling off late at night is unspeakably creepy. It sounds exactly like a family of bats has nestled deep in the branches and are trying to learn how to light matches.
