Christmas Week

Usually, the last Sunday of the year, I do a year-in-review post, so then my post about Christmas is after the New Year. I still plan on a year-in-review post, but I had some extra time to do a non-Sunday Christmas post. 

This was the view from my window as I began work on Monday morning.

On Monday evening, my family went downtown to see my aunt's family, who were in town. I sat by my cousin Krishelle's youngest, Kelson, who I met this past spring. He was playing on his cousin's phone, and when the cousin went to get food, Kelson said to me, "Do you have any games on your phone?" I told him, "I don't have any games on my phone. But I can show you what I do have." So then I showed him the picture of us from May. 

Then he started looking at other pictures on my phone. He said, "How do you delete pictures?" I said, "Are you going to delete my pictures!?" He responded, "No! Just the ones I don't like."

On Tuesday, my family once again went downtown, this time to donate at the Giving Machines and look at lights. It's amazing how much the Giving Machines have grown over the last eight years. I donated a tree.

Then Wednesday was Christmas Eve. I did some early shopping for last-minute groceries, and then I wanted to do something I have never done on December 24 before: I ran up North Canyon. This is the first time I have ever been trail running on Christmas Eve, and it's crazy that it was one of the higher-elevation trails. When I got to the parking lot, I was the only one there.

I ran up the new Mahogany Ridge Trail to Cave Peak, where I saw some friendly mountain bikers, and we discussed how weird it was to be out there on Christmas Eve. Then I kept going up Mahogany Ridge to the main North Canyon Trail. But I didn't go to Rudy's Flat, because it was covered in snow and ice that looked too slippery for my tastes.

Though I'm sad and worried about the lack of snow, it was a lovely run—basically a perfect day for it.

In the afternoon and evening, I made pomegranate guacamole and "wrapped" my presents in Christmas pillowcases.

On Christmas morning, I woke up early and made gingerbread pancakes for breakfast. My contribution for our Christmas dinner was a bûche de Noël, or Yule log cake. I got the recipe from my high school French class, and I made it a few times, long before I had much baking experience. This was the worst iteration I have made. It has always been hard; maybe I should find a better recipe?

Not even remotely close to a spiral. I was surprised it turned out as well as it did, since the cake completely fell apart.

We opened our presents. For the last few months, my mom has been going through old photographs and scanning them, so she got us external hard drives with the scans. Here are some of the old pictures. I'm working on not having unkind feelings about myself when I look at them. 

On the right, I'm holding my first cat, Dinah

Halloween in third grade. I put up the Halloween decorations.

In sixth grade, I won the school geography bee, and I got to go to the state competition. But I didn't get very far at state.

Being an uncle twenty years ago

Also, my mom has been going to a ceramics shop recently with her friend, and she made me a beehive cookie jar that I can use for Pioneer Day.

My sister got me some lights for running, and she also got me cat toys—but Reggie hasn't touched them, as far as I know.

Gen Z, though, really stole the show with creative gifts. My nephew Preston and his wife, Claire, made me a t-shirt. Back in 2017, my nephew Franklin coined the nickname Holiday John—so that was my shirt.😆

And my niece Allie gave me holiday-themed Palm Pals, which are very cute, and she hid them for a clever scavenger hunt.

roast turkey, caramel apple, four-leaf shamrock, pot of gold (my favorite), fruitcake

Between opening presents and Christmas dinner, I wanted to go up North Canyon again, my first time on a trail on Christmas Day. My dad hiked up while I ran. This time, enough snow had melted in just a day that I made it to Rudy's Flat. 

I had a gingerbread RXBAR in my mouth

I was sad we didn't have a white Christmas. But I wanted to form memories. On some future snowy Christmas, we'll be able to say, "Remember that crazy Christmas when there was no snow so we went up the canyon?"

We spent time at my sister's/grandma's house playing cards. It was a pretty low-key holiday, which isn't a bad thing.

Then Boxing Day, I only worked a partial day, and I ran up North Canyon again! It was pretty much the same as it was the day before, but there were some new trees that had been blown over. 

And in the evening I put up my New Year's decor. Here I am writing this blog on a Saturday afternoon, regretting that I didn't go running in the break between storminess, feeling that I haven't done anything with my day. Oh well. I don't have to be productive all the time.

I've checked the weather report, they say it will not snow

Well, we are fully in the Christmas season! 

The most significant thing from this week is that on Thursday, my oldest nephew, Preston, came to town with a special someone named Claire. They have been dating for a year. Preston has always been concerned about saving money, ever since he was a child, and they determined that if they got married, their tuition would be cheaper. Also, the rest of my brother's family is all in Taiwan, and Claire is not super close to her family.

So on Friday, my parents took Preston and Claire to the Davis County offices so they could get a marriage license and get married in a simple legal ceremony. Supposedly, they plan on having a more formal, official wedding when they're done with school. This is the first time we have added a family member since 2010. (By "family," here I mean my parents and their descendants.)

I had the idea that we should have dinner at Joy Luck, the same restaurant where Preston's parents had their wedding dinner twenty-two years ago. 

***

Now, it seems weird to me to talk about frivolous things in the same post that I talk about a wedding. But the groom and bride are the ones who decided to make their wedding a non-event, so I think I'm justified!

On Tuesday, we had our staff holiday party at the Utah Historical Society, which was a baking contest and sweater party. I made fruitcake blondies so I could use up the candied fruit in the cupboard.

They were giving out sweater awards for ugliest, most creative, and Utah history. I decided to wear my bison sweater and transform it into Antelope Island by putting blue felt on it with paper brine shrimp. I also wore my sunflower collared shirt and my bee socks. I was surprised that I won the Utah history award in a landslide! Like, I am legitimately baffled, because I thought the other entries were much more creative, sophisticated, and well executed. Old Navy FTW!

They also gave out little awards to every staff member. They asked people to submit descriptions / things they liked about their coworkers, and then they gave out custom awards. Mine was the "Year-Round Festive Footnote Fanatic Award," which is pretty accurate. They also had Google Gemini come up with a couple of sentences to describe each person, using the information that staff had submitted, and they definitely had that vague, somewhat lifeless AI vibe. Mine was "For his encyclopedic knowledge as the Utah History Oracle, paired with his commitment to quiet, essential thoroughness in checking every detail, as our most festive colleague, who always shows up ready for any holiday—and ready to win at Jeopardy." That was flattering, though I'm not sure about the Jeopardy! reference, and people seem to think I know more than I actually do.

Sadly, I have continued to be able to trail run every day. I am hoping that this is just a blip and next year will be more normal Christmas weather, but I'm so worried that this is the new normal. And our current dystopian leaders think claim climate change is a hoax.

I've been reading a book called Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. It describes how many of our holiday traditions have been influenced by capitalism. But before the nineteenth century, holidays were generally minor events and not largely celebrated, because that meant a day away from working—so the capitalistic mindset was also at play then.

Regardless of what you think about the commercialism of holidays, it brings me genuine joy to go to stores and see what kinds of fun holiday things are for sale. Of course I like buying various seasonal treats, and I don't buy as many permanent things these days, because it can be a hassle to figure out where to put them. But I made some fun Target purchases this week: a battery-operated menorah that lets you select how many candles to light, 

a clearance Dracula shirt (unfortunately they didn't have any mediums),

and decorative birds for different holidays. I'm so happy they have a New Year's bird, and I especially like the Valentine's bird.

I hope you all have a Merry Christmas this week! 

**Here is the obscure song lyric that's the title of my post.

Tan Christmas

Trail running is my favorite form of exercise, and I was able to do it six days this week. And I'm sad about it!

I want to save the Great Salt Lake, but it's very hard to when we got almost no snow in November, and almost no snow in December so far. At least we had a wet October. I want it to feel cozy and Christmassy, but it's hard to do that when the weather is in the fifties and sixties and there's no snow.

Actually, at the beginning of the week, we had some small piles of snow from the previous storms. And yesterday, Saturday, I ran up by the radio towers between Salt Lake and North Salt Lake, and I did see some patches of snow. 

In fact, there are already hyacinths sprouting in my mom's garden! It's still a week before the winter solstice! 

When I'm not running, I have been doing Christmassy things. The most Christmassy thing I did was to take my parents downtown to get standby tickets for the Tabernacle Choir Christmas concert. We can usually get in, and that's always a good time. This year's guests were Stephanie J. Block and Sebastian Arcelus, a married couple who are Broadway stars. I'm sure they would be great on Broadway. I thought Stephanie's singing style was a little odd for Christmas songs. The concert always features a story, and they told the story of the Apollo 8 astronauts reading verses from Genesis on Christmas Eve in 1968. I think that is an odd choice for astronauts to read to the world, and I also think that is an odd choice of a story to feature, though I always like hearing about astronauts. The organist Richard Elliott always does some epic mashup, so he played "Far, Far Away on Judea's Plains" along with "Glory to God" from Messiah, but it was arranged and accompanied so that it sounded like 2001: A Space Odyssey—it was very impressive but also kind of an odd mashup. They also had the audience sing along with a few Christmas songs. It was a good concert, just not as good as some of the others I've been to.

I have been doing other Christmas things like reading from Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, watching Christmas shows like The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, buying Christmas things like The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures, and getting Christmas treats like Sodalicious cookies with peppermint frosting right before they closed the location by my office.

And I continue to go through my Christmas playlist. I should finish the 2021 section today and make it to 2022. I use iBroadcast to upload and stream my personal collection, and the website seems to be down today, but at least the app is working. Yesterday I listened to the playlist while I used a giant zucchini from our garden to make stir-fried vegetables. They were OK.

This week I have been doing some tedious things for work (formatting footnotes), so I have been watching some things online. After watching the Christmas episodes of The Twilight Zone, I decided to watch the episode "It's a Good Life" with Billy Mumy, which is very famous, but I had never seen it. I found this episode quite startling in how relevant it felt—it could totally be retitled "GOP." The premise is there's an evil, omnipotent six-year-old named Anthony who can read minds and send people to the "cornfield." No one is allowed to say anything bad or complain, or else he will punish them. So they all have to tell him everything he does is good, because they are terrified. Many of Anthony's actions negatively affect not just others but also himself, such as when he sends potential playmates to the cornfield. When one character opens up an opportunity for someone to attack Anthony and bring him to an end, everyone is too afraid to do anything. When will Republicans wake up and stand up to the horrible monster who is destroying their lives?

Dee Sem Ber

December has started, so we're in full Christmas mode, and there have been various holiday activities. I'm paring down my expectations this year—I don't have to do all the things, because there's plenty already.

On Monday, the City of North Salt Lake hosted a winter lights festival where they were "unveiling" a new mural on a building that is apparently a historic railroad building, which I didn't know. But they weren't actually "unveiling" it, just turning the lights on. We all gathered on a corner across from the building and kitty-corner from the city offices. The corner is where Hatch Park is currently being remodeled, so it's just surrounded by a fence. They had some people speaking, but it was very hard to hear on their quiet speakers. It felt pretty sad that we had this community event on a construction lot at a busy four-way stop at rush hour. That is our "downtown." We really are a bedroom community. There are summertime events at Legacy Park, which are more enjoyable, but they have to bring food trucks and vendors for those events.

At city hall, they also gave out scones, which was a nice Utah thing, and there were people singing carols, and Santa and Mrs. Claus arrived on a firetruck. But part of the time, they were playing a Christmas playlist with a disproportionate amount of Pentatonix. Ugh, why do people love that group? I find them a tad obnoxious.

On Tuesday, my work had our holiday lunch at Loveland Living Planet Aquarium, so we got to tour it. I don't think I'd been there since 2014, so it was fun to go back. I think it's nicer than Hogle Zoo. It is pricey, so I was glad that work paid for me to be there, but it's so cool that I can see why it's expensive. One of my colleagues is married to a guy who works there, so he showed us the new Asian exhibit that's under construction. In the public part of the museum, I also got to see the employees interacting with the penguins, sloth, and leopard.

As I was standing near the penguins with some colleagues while wearing my reindeer shirt, we got on the topic of my pet peeve about Christmas penguins. Puffins are much more suitable for Christmas! So imagine my surprise when I got on Facebook this morning and saw this post (which I had to remove a swear from). I have been saying this for years (I think even decades).

But I'm not autistic, at least as far as I know

After the aquarium, I wanted to go over to Brooker's Founding Flavors, the quirky ice cream shop themed after the American Revolution, which has a location in Draper. They often have seasonal flavors, but I was dismayed they didn't really have Christmas flavors. Even though Thanksgiving is over, I wanted to try Priscilla Alden's Caramel Cornucopia, because it's aligned with my very niche interests; I got the coconut-flavored Valley Forge Shoe Leather, because it looked like a temporary flavor that aligned with a wintry theme, but apparently it's a year-round flavor; and "Candlelight Cookies and Cream" sounded Christmassy, but it was made with Halloween Oreos, because it was originally themed around the Headless Horseman. The employee didn't understand what I asked for, so I ended up with two ice cream cones. OK, I guess?

Candlelight Cookies and Cream and Caramel Cornucopia

Valley Forge Shoe Leather

On Wednesday, I made gingerbread cranberry apple crisp. I invented the topping (recipe in this blog post), and I love it, but I picked the apples from our own tree in October, and they're not the greatest apples.

Because we have had light snow showers this week, I didn't do any running, and I went swimming on Wednesday and Thursday. So I got to wear my Christmas jammers.

As I was working from home on Friday, it was lightly snowing. I was amused when the snow on our deer fence slid so that it was upside down.

In the evening, I attended my home ward's Christmas party, even though I go to a singles ward. It's an older building, and currently there's only one ward that meets there, so the Church is going to sell it. So I always wonder if it will be the last time I go there. It's sad, because I have so many memories of the building, ever since I was in nursery. It's also the only LDS meetinghouse I know of with three levels (though the top level is only a classroom and closets).

Since I spend so much time trail running during the spring/summer/fall months, I feel like I should do more biking when the trails are snowed over / muddy, so yesterday I went on a bike ride. I only went six miles, but it was very steep, to the top of the Summerwood neighborhood. I'm proud of myself that I can do something that hard, even though I'm not great at biking. But I didn't go to the top of the road that goes to the trailhead, because I didn't trust my biking skills to avoid the snowy patches on a steep, curved road.