Always remember: life is too short for cheap champagne, and never eat caviar with a metal spoon!

May your holiday be as fabulous as Harvey in his seasonal drag!

… and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, well, except for Jake the cat chasing a catnip mouse.

Me? I’m finishing up some last-minute baking and watching Christmas movies. There are a lot of great films based on a Christmas theme. You know, like It’s a Wonderful Life:

Treacly? Yes, yes it is. But then Capra’s genius lay not in his subtlety, but in his optimism.

And then there are the not-so-greats, like Santa Claus vs the Martians:

Unforgettably craptastic.

But some of my favorite Christmas films aren’t really recognized as being holiday-centric. And a couple of my other faves… well, the theme is undeniable but they don’t make for the most traditionally heartwarming viewing.

Want to know my top five fave Christmas movies? Read on after the cut… and remember that neither of the above films is on that list.

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I love that there are so many holidays at this time of year. Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, Solstice… and probably some more that I just don’t know about, too.

Me? I celebrate an entirely secular Christmas. I call it Christmas because that’s what I grew up calling it, and because it’s easier to just call it Christmas than entirely buck the tide, and every twice in a while it really isn’t worth it to me to buck the tide quite so hard. It’s secular because, well, my personal philosophy of the world doesn’t happen to include a godhead. That’s me. I don’t ask anyone else to stop believing what they believe, and I completely respect the religious beliefs of others. I just don’t happen to share them.

And yet the thing that makes it the holidays for me each year is the day after Thanksgiving when I pull out my Christmas music and put The Clancy Brothers’ Christmas album on. Their boisterous rendition of Jingle Bells in Gaelic gets the holiday ball rolling for me in a way that nothing else quite can. The combination of raucous celebration and almost-but-not-quite maudlin reflection on the birth of Jesus grounds me, despite my lack of religious faith.

Why? Because of the way it makes me think of Christmas when I was growing up. That album was central to my family’s Christmas from the day it came into our home, shortly after its release. When I play it, I smell the Douglas fir trees of my childhood, and I can hear my father in the kitchen baking cookies. I can see my mother patiently creating new decorations for the house to go with the theme she’d picked for the party that year. I feel the anticipation of all those lovely packages under the tree. I feel warm, cosy, and entirely protected.

Christmas is different for me now. Oh, there’s still a Douglas fir tree, and it bears many of the old family ornaments. But the cookie factory is no more, and the tree is usually pretty much what I do for decorations. Mr. Twistie is uncomfortable with being given much, so his presents usually go under the tree on Christmas Eve, and he puts off opening them as long as possible.

But I still have The Clancy Brothers and their cheery outro of:

Bottles of whiskey and bottles of beer

We wish you all a happy new year!

So I find myself wondering, what holiday do you celebrate at this time of year, and what gets you in the holiday spirit?

And whatever holiday you celebrate at this time of year, I wish you one filled with happiness, prosperity, and good health.

I’ll be honest. I’ve been slow to warm to Christmas.

When I was a kid, my brother and I made the yuletide bright mostly by waiting in an agreed-upon supermarket parking lot halfway between our parents respective evil lairs and being caught in the traditional children-of-bitter-divorce crossfire. Then later there would be cookies.

No one asked what we wanted for Christmas and as an adult, Christmas presents were firmly tucked into the For The Children nook of holiday cheer.

This year is different, and I discovered this year is different because Hot Latin Boy –who is a total curve-ruining overachiever– casually mentioned about all the millions of manhours he’s putting into my present, which I’m 99% positive is a “secret garden” full of my favorite plants and flowers from Texas and Virginia so I don’t feel homesick at Villa Plumcake.

That’s great and all, but it doesn’t exactly cast a golden luster on my gift to him, a white ceramic pineapple (a nod to an inside joke) that I’m not even going to giftwrap, lest it alert the border patrol.

It DID get me thinking what grand gift I really would like though, and for the first time in years, I’ve actually got one in mind.

Of course there’s the old standby:

(That, my friends, is the making of one FILTHY Venn Diagram)

but in the off chance Gaspar, Balthazar and Melchior DON’T manage to bring me Zizou, Xabi and Mou (I’m still going to wax, just in case) what I want more than anything in the whole wide world is a plaza-worn Traje de Luces.

Say what you will about bullfighting –despite Villa Plumcake being tantalizingly close to the Plaza Monumental, I’ve never brought myself to see a corrida the highly-embellished “suit of lights” is the pinnacle of beauty in a male couture garment.

(*snerk*)

And of course the bodies in them aren’t terrible either.

It occurs to me my burning desire for a traje marks a departure from buying clothes and accessories to collecting them. A traje is a standalone work of art and I would display it as such.

Of course I have a lot of my shoes, scarves and jewelry on display, but I also wear them. I’d never wear a traje.

Understandably, trajes are thousands of dollars new, and used ones fetch even higher prices if worn in the ring by a famous torero like Manolete, the James Dean of bullfighting.

I still don’t know if I’ll ever see a correo (I’ve heard they have no-kill ones, and I’d jump at the chance for that) or whether I’ll just stick with my Hemingway and Almodovar, but I’ve been pretty damn good this year and I sure would like to find a traje under my tree…you know, if Zizou and the boys don’t fit.

If you work in an office setting, chances are the annual holiday bash is rapidly approaching. It’s a time to let your hair down, relax a bit with the people you spend more time with than your family, and see whether the big bosses can take the legendarily lethal punch the folks in accounts receivable make.

If you don’t work in an office setting, chances are you still have at least one good friend or family member who considers the winter holiday season a darn good excuse to throw a big bash. It’s a time to catch up with those people you only see at these parties, nibble from the annual cheese ball, and see who succumbs to the lethal punch the host makes.

I well remember my parents’ annual Christmas do. The decorations, the careful choosing of which music to play in what order, the platters of fabulous food… and my fathers’ lethal eggnog which I swear could induce alcohol poisoning from six feet away.

I’ve been to a lot of parties for a lot of holidays over the years, and the one thing that seems absolutely guaranteed at each of them is seriously free-flowing liquor. Either there’s a single punch that will begin impairing your ability to pass a sobriety test before you even begin to drink it, or there’s a bewildering variety  of adult beverages and a genial host urging you to try a bit of everything.

How to get through the season with your driving record clean and your social network intact? Thinking just a bit beforehand can be just the ticket to keep you from disaster.

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Ah, the winter holiday season! There’s a crisp snap in the air, homes are filled with the aromas of peppermint and ginger, the malls are potentially lethal, a very few people recall that there are holidays other than Christmas being celebrated, and the world is awash in body shame.

I can’t turn on my computer or television without being assaulted by messages that I’m going to gain gigantic amounts of weight this winter if I don’t stop being so greedy at the same table I’m supposed to fill with homemade goodies until the legs give out. Every ladymag in the universe has a picture of the perfect pie, cake, or souffle I’m supposed to make, alongside a reminder that gaining a single ounce from eating it means I will die well before my time, alone and unmourned as Scrooge in the vision shown him of his potential future. Every year some fanatic out there starts a campaign to make Santa skinny so that he can use his role model status to shame those who carry more meat on their bones.

But you know what? We can opt out of the insanity. We can spend this special time of year failing to hate ourselves. We don’t need to create the false dichotomy of too much food  that we are not allowed to eat. You know what we can do?

We can take care of ourselves.

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