Merry Christmas 2010

Thank you.

Nativity

Baby Jesus will be here soon.

Christmas, Lost and Remembered

Christmas is about sending friends and families Christmas cards.  Or at least receive them.  Thank you very much.

Christmas, Lost and Remembered

It's a thrill to receive Christmas card in the mail.  I have grown a bit phobic to mail nowadays, because there can only be bad news in the mail--all the bad things that I can think of, I just don't have any courage to open the mailbox.  Christmas is the only time of the year that mail is actually welcome.  Thank you.

Christmas, Lost and Remembered

Christmas to us kids was about giving the prettiest Christmas card to the girl you secretly adored but would never admit or even let her know.  Well I don't think if I ever had one--I still can't admit it, I am just that shy.  You also exchanged cards with all your friends but that's just to cover up and divert others from the only card you ever truly wanted to give.  That was a time when nobody had yet discovered a make-up festival called Valentine's Day which was so designed by merchants to make money and to make all the singletons weep.  So Christmas was the only big day for us kids, to have some fun exchanging tacky cards with even tackier handwritten messages like "Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!" no matter the card had that same exact message already printed in the front and the fact that we saw each other every day.  Of course all these crazy card exchanges within a classroom of some forty pupils began in early December and ran on till the climactic festive finale that was our grand Christmas party production in our make-shift auditorium inside our seedy school.  I don't remember back then if I knew of, let alone sent or received any Hallmark or any import fancy cards that actually broadcast class and taste.  All I remember were glitters, lots of them.  Looking back, they were kind of cool in their own silly tacky way.  You know whenever you look back in time you kind of look through things with a nostalgic filter which invariably aestheticizes and makes everything oddly beautiful.  Me and my sisters gathered our stacks of Christmas cards from friends and relatives and hopefully secret admirers, and hung them up on some strings we so artfully arranged on our window so they garlanded like a Christmas tree, only there wasn't any real Christmas tree except strings of Christmas cards with glitters and childish blessings.  We lived in a crammed apartment in a neighborhood where people had very modest means.  But Christmas was the time of the year every window from every household wanted to look its best or richest: that would be a small plastic fantastic Christmas tree with lightings! The decoration was so good nobody wanted to ever take it down until some months later,  when an even greater festival, so mega and so important that deserved and demanded the Japanese NHK Red and White Song Contest broadcast, Chinese New Year came along.  I still love and yearn for Christmas cards, with or without glitters.

Christmas, Lost and Remembered

As a child growing up in poor rural Hong Kong, Christmas was the big festival I looked forward to all year long and enjoyed through all my primary school years.  The apparently interminable mundane and boring school life all of a sudden got interrupted.  A nice pretty school girl got to pretend to be Mary looking radiant and serene while cradling a plastic baby doll wrapped in a blanket, a well behaved school boy got to play Joseph, the bland carpenter; and lesser boys and girls got to be a scholar or a sheep or even a tree.  The actual performance was fun but so were the endless rehearsals before the big day.  I wasn't much of a performer myself as I don't recall playing any characters in Nativity, I might have a bit part in singing reserved for the less lessor kids. But I guess I just enjoyed the spectacle and the chaos that was our Christmas party.  I remember there would always be that magic show from the Chus Magic Troupe and the magician and his assistant always seriously made sure there were nobody, us kids included, looking from the side or in the back, because nobody should know their ultra secretive and stupid rope trick or card trick except themselves.  And the obligatory Christmas boring speech from somebody high up in the church who had the good grace to come to see us perform in our make-shift stage and auditorium.  One (or every) year the church dude in funny robe and outlandish attire got particular annoyed by kids backstage.  Oh well, loosen up it was Christmas time.  The whole assembly hall was done by removing the partitions between classrooms and the stage was desks pushed together to one end.  Hey you had an auditorium right there.  I remember the teacher in charge, Fatty Som, always favored one kid and put him in charge of the project--he's a pilot now, I being one of the lesser kids would labor to push the desks together and received the underserved scorn should anything go mildly awry--Fatty was not always jolly.  No performers fell off the desks-pushed-together stage ever.  So we actually had a solid safety record, it was actually a minor miracle compared to how often mega stars fall off the stage injured or died prematurely.  The stage would have been a much safer place only if I were a stage manager.

After the big party all the pupils got their Christmas in a bag: a purple cellophane goody bag full of candies and carefully tied with a little tiny curly colored ribbon.  Please I want my purple cellophane Christmas goody bag (i.e. in addition to all the iStuff from Apple).

Merry Christmas, to all the Gentiles, out there.

Merry Christmas

This is the handsomest, kindest, nicest Santa I've ever seen in my entire life.

Merry Christmas

Because of the subprime induced economic downturn, we downsized our Christmas tree this year, from a whopping 5~6 feet to a mere 4 feet one. It's a balsam if I am not mistaken, not that it means a lot or anything anyway.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas.

Alex and Harry were pretty excited so they really got up early today. They usually get up early anyway.

Santa gave them a pearl white Nintendo DS, and for Harry, a Mario vs Dong Kong 2 march of the minis and for Alex he got the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Blue Rescue Team. Other than these carpel tunnel and seizure inducing games from Santa, we gave them more traditionally dangerous toys like ice skates and tennis racket. Also they got plenty of presents from my sister and from our friends.

They are happy and I am happy.

We got the Brain Age and my brain age is a solid 72 years old, I think that's pretty correct, mentally I am 72 years old.

Week in Review

It's just like the last week or the week before except:-

Christmas is ten days away, have you got all your presents ready? I don't think Wii can be found anywhere unless you consider the ripoffs at eBay. Even the handheld DS Lite is out of stock now. So as much as I would like to poison my kids with electronic toys, I think I will fail miserably this Christmas. No, I won't buy a PS3.

The Dow is edging up as it "should be" in year end. I think it's reasonable and customary for the Dow to run up in year end.

After 3 years and some $7 millions, in a 832-page report, the British police concluded the death of Princess Diana was indeed accident. I am not sure if that's time or money well spent.

Latest job data: Yoko Ono's driver is paid a salary of $150,000 to $200,000. Ms. Ono's driver of ten years demanded $2 million or he would kill Ms. Ono and her son and himself. And he had the balls to tell that to Ono's lawyer. The 50 year old was arrested.

UPDATE:
Again, thanks to global warming, this week's weather has been balmy.

Eric and Sid: read and download whatever you want, knock yourself out...
Operation Paget (this link talks about the operation, 9 page pdf, not the findings of the operation) produced a 832-page inquisition on Diana's death (ok, her lover and her driver, a total of three). The Iraq Study Group Report, on the contrary, is only 84 pages. I think there were almost 3,000 American servicemen deaths in the war against terror in Iraq. The Iraq Study Group Report headed by James Baker can be downloaded here, free.

Rockefeller Center Christmas

We had a hard time finding free parking on the street so after circling the area for like 30 minutes, I broke down and had our van parked into a garage.

The Christmas Tree

Bought from Garden World near Francis Lewis Blvd. and 46th Avenue, man, their website is pretty messed up. They can use some help. This is a 5-6 ft Fraser Fir, smells good. The decoration is done by Jin, Alex and Harry.
This is taken by a tripod given by me from Fung, thanks dude. This is on self-timer.
I am listening to some iTunes, most of the songs I don't even know I have, I used Autofill, all together 93 songs, and they turn out not bad, mainly olllllllllld songs like from the 80s or even earlier.