Monday, December 24, 2001

My Grown-Up Christmas Wish

All I want for Christmas is a full-length silver fox opera cape, something big and heavy from Harry Winston, a silver Jaguar S-Type, a townhouse on Presidio Heights, a weekend cottage on Maui, a fawn-and-white shih-tzu, a hot-n-pretty twenty-year-old houseboy/sex-slave, and a trust fund in the high nine figures. Is that so much to ask? It's not like I'm asking for world peace or anything frivolous like that. C'mon, Santa, throw me a bone!



Well, they say it's better to give than receive (whoever they are, and I'd be interested in knowing what, exactly, their credentials are that allow them to make such idiotic pronouncements), and I do love to give Christmas gifts. I managed most of my shopping in one day, but today I found that perfect gift for my Grandmother, and I'm really excited about it. I had planned to buy Raiders tickets for her and my uncle (they're both football fans), but I discovered to my great chagrin that the Coliseum box office was closed today. There were a lot of other people there, too, hoping to gift their loved-ones with tickets to the last game of the Season...and they were all as pissed off as I was that we couldn't have them. While standing in a parking lot and cursing Al Davis and the Raiders is a lot of fun, it isn't very productive. So my high-school chum Caroline and I went down to Piedmont Avenue to get some cheese and pâté from the Piedmont Grocery (she works near there, and stops by daily to graze the freebies, and while treating their sample table as her personal luncheon buffet, she got addicted to their inhouse pâté, Goose Mousse...which, by the way, is delicious, but not as delicious as the bag-boy whom I would like to interview for Item 7 on my Wish List); on our way there, we stopped in a few of the ateliers and boutiques that line that particular thoroughfare. In Bansuri (a cute little shop that recently relocated to Oakland from Larkspur), I found a gorgeous scarlet enamel pen for my uncle while Caroline availed herself of the free Chai tea; in my favorite consignment shop, Classy Lady, I found the perfect gift for my Grandmother, a gorgeous opal ring...it was rather more expensive than I like to spend on Xmas gifts, but for five perfect beautiful white opals in 14kt gold it was an absolute steal.



So now all I have to do is wrap everything, shove it under the tree (which I decorated Saturday, with as much taste as could be managed with the garish multihued materials I was forced to work with), and wait for the relatives to show up tomorrow. But I still don't really feel Christmassy. The stockings are hung by the chimney, but I just can't bring myself to care.



Even after last night's show (which was amazingly spectacular), I'm in a Bah-humbug frame of mind. That brimming, mushy, glowing, caroling sensation that I have always assumed to be The Christmas Spirit has yet to manifest itself in my bosom. The tree looks good, the dinner will be great, the house is clean, everything looks to go off without a hitch. The gifts that make up the high focal point of my Christmas are fine, too—I'm fairly happy with the gifts I got for others, and look forward to seeing what sorts of things my family will bestow upon me tomorrow; the gifts I've already exchanged with my friends have been universally satisfactory...a 2002 Harry Potter desk calendar, Judith Martin's latest opus Miss Manners' Guide for the Turn-of-the-Millenium (by the way, I am not related to that Miss Manners, as many people think; Miss Marlénè springs from the Dukes-of-Rutland Mannerses), a triple-strand Hattie Carnegie pearl-and-cranberry-crystal necklace with matching earrings, a beautiful makeup kit in a gorgeous faux-suede carrying case, a bamboo fortune plant, and a still-in-the-box 50's-vintage L'Amour de Paris parure...a fairly tidy haul so far. But still, no chestnuts roasting on the open fire of my heart.



Oh, well. I'm enough of an actress to go through the motions. In the meantime, if your reading along Mr. Claus, If you would care to fill in some of the blanks in my life (as indicated in the above list), it would go a long way to making a bitter old queen Believe Again.

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