it's christmas eve day & it's chilly but clear and nice outside; i however have chosen to stay home with young boys who are overboiling with enthusiasm and trying their best to be good in the last few remaining hours. there are a number of good traditions that we run through in the season which i'll recount here, but there's also the inevitable bad traffic, too much exposure to the general public, and exasperation from finding that if you're a late shopper, as we are, things are mighty picked over & desolate by the time you get to them sometimes. i don't want to be negative but you can understand maybe why i'd choose to stay home.

one of the traditions i like the most is lighting the way; this involves little brown paper sacks, buckets of sand, and votive candles; the candles, inside sacks about half full with sand, give a soft brown light to the sacks and make a picture you can see from afar. neighbors actually have electric iluminaria which are also common where they came from, which is new mexico and spain i believe, but actually filling up the sand and lighting them is the part i like. i like it no matter what the weather; tonight looks like bright and clear. i've only seen a couple of white christmases the whole time i've been here.

so i'm at the wal-mart and it seems like a lot of families are standing around figuring out how to get a decent christmas out of no money, given the vastness and cheapness of the place. serious discussions are taking place in the aisles. and then in the register line, one guy is right near me getting into a stemwinder of a speech to two young boys, the essence of which is, yes of course there's a santa, you can bank on it; he would stake his entire reputation on it, and would he steer them wrong? he cajoled them and then proceeded to give his best evidence for why things that happened couldn't be explained any other way.

i myself, and this is another of my traditions, decided to never lie about it, but to maintain the fantasy as long as humanly possible. for example, when my son asked my wife point blank if there was a santa, she said, a lot of people believe it, and that's nice, because we like to keep that good feeling around (this may not be an exact quote, but it's pretty similar to the kind of stuff i say). one always brings it back to the positive aspect of believing, without worrying about the answering of the question precisely. i'm not saying my style is better than that of the gentleman in the wal-mart aisle, but it's more suited to me, so i stick with it.

we decorate cookies and also occasionally receive decorated cookies from others; this causes a certain sugar mania throughout the season part of which i am dealing with at this moment. but my point is, every decorating style is different, every household is different, all these cookies have a lot of character. they have a lot of sugar too. king of the season is the cube-of-butter cookie, as my wife calls it, though i call it the mexican wedding cake and it has several other names. it fills your mouth with butter and powdered sugar and lasts all day.

the deer are all over the roads this time of year and you can't help seeing them, wherever you go, it's almost like they come into town november and december, as an instinct that has been developed over the years to counter whatever hunting season is left. they eat what's left of your garden; they stand out on lawns brazenly, crossing the roads whenever they please. they are the first to notice that it's been warmer than usual, things are still green. though i must say, the geese noticed it too. i thought i heard them flying northwest early this morning, around seven; i know the dogs noticed them. they were making a lot of noise, as usual, as if arguing about whether it was too early to go back north, or what. they come around our house, i think, because there are lots of lakes in the area. none are frozen. if they want to stick around, who are we to dissuade them?

i like to read the old crumpled up newspapers that boxes of presents come wrapped in; these newspapers are often from the cities of my relatives, and are somewhat random; i doubt they stick in a sports section deliberately for me. nevertheless this year i'm reading about the pittsburgh penguins and some years i get a bit of trivia from new mexico or the new york times, or even england. i have tons of unread and very worthy magazines around, i'm not sure what's the attraction of some back page of the pittsburgh papper, crumpled up, for example, except that in the case of the pittsburgh papers, i used to deliver them, maybe forty years ago, so there's a certain nostalgia there as well as the trivia that one picks up from finding out what roster changes the penguins are making, or, what the minor leagues or high schools of western pennsylvania are up to.

i take the main four-lane highway out to wal-mart one night, late, at about midnight, fiddle in the little car, the low-to-the-ground car (i'd been playing music), and at the left turn, to go into the walmart road, i'm in the left-turn lane at the red light, and i look over to see the big carcass of a deer in the median, with its head cut off directly in front of me. it's a fairly fresh deer, no blood on it, no sign of a mess, just a big round red place where the head should have been. there was no evidence of car accident, violence, blood, nothing. just this huge deer carcass in the median, facing me. i have no idea why it was there, what it means, why i'd put it in a blog post like this, no idea except that it kind of loomed over the holiday for me for a few days, as i went about my shopping and wrapping and that kind of stuff. a lot of times people do this stuff for pure practical utilitarian reasons; some guy from the county is going to pick it up; they could drag it over into the ditch but that would make more work for him, and they know him, so they save him the trouble. now why they'd want the head and nothing else, that's beyond me, or why they would make a clean cut the way they did, not messy in any way, i have no idea, on second thought, maybe they were trying to gross me out, or scare the heck out of me. i take the back way home; it's more comfortable anyway, goes by this ancient cemetery, and some overgrown railroad crossings where i suspect there used to be a fairly lively train coming through.

we use old christmas cards, cut up, as the cards on presents that tell who it's for and who it's from. cutting up these old cards recycles them but the thing is, they sometimes stay in this bag for years, waiting to be cut up, and some don't cut so well so they just stay in the bag, period. in general you use about a season's worth of cards cut up to identify all the presents. i've come to admire hallmark, not because i like all the different cards or colors of wrapping paper, but because, wanting to go into the wrapping paper business myself, and go into the card business (definitely), and yet still, fifty seven years into it, not getting it quite together to actually produce all this stuff on my own, i have to at least admire someone who, for as much as we disdain them, still dictates what the culture looks like, based on what they produce. if we wanted different or better wrapping paper, different or better cards, there's nothing stopping us, nothing whatsoever. yet we don't.

santa brings bizarre stuff from all over the world, it's like he has to prove he's been around, so he brings fine honey from france, squid from asia, eel, octopi, jamaican hot sauce, swiss chocolate, japanese whistle candy, etcetera. not everybody appreciates the wide diversity of foods in their stocking but they know that santa finds it necessary to spread the worldly kinds of things and that there's nothing for it but to share what one can't eat, what the heck, there's plenty of food around anyway. my mother tells the story of how i came home from school one day and said to my brother, my classmates are telling me there's no such thing as santa. my brother says, shhh, shhh, they're right, but don't tell mom, she'll get upset.

in the natural world, life goes on as usual; it's cold, but the days are finally getting longer, and that reminds the animals to get out there, get themselves some food before january comes and it gets real cold, that's really the only time it could get cold, though sometimes it snows in february. in the natural world, it's life as usual, just stay off the roads, but in the human world, it's solstice, yule, winter festival, a feast of all kinds, a materialistic orgy, celebration of all things human, and the fulfilling of all one's material desires, which includes gatherings of families far and wide and a lot of activity in the airports and train stations. at our house, the soft glow of paper sacks ih a row leads you up the driveway to the house, the path is lit up to show the way for the baby jesus, whom i would guess has to find his way into your heart. if anyone asks, that's what i tell them. you don't have to believe it. you light the candles, because the mere act of doing it is good for your soul.