Boxing Day

Happy Boxing Day!¹ We celebrated with perfect irony. Back when we visited Pátzcuaro²--in Michoacan State, southwest México--we bought ourselves a curvy wicker jaguar-shaped bench. It's cool: shaped like a parenthesis with a tail on the left and a head with bronze eyes and teeth on the right, looking back over the cat's flat shoulder at whoever is seated there. It's actually kind of scary--or so we recalled. On top of the MSPP, we handed the Pázcuaro vendors extra pesos to ship our cat-shaped bench to Monterrey, and then traipsed merrily on down the street to the Tzintzuntzan's cemetery, the bus home to Monterrey, to Vegas, on to DC, and ultimately over here to Saigon. The cat-shaped bench was shipped to Monterrey, sure, where it arrived shortly before getting loaded onto a truck and hauled on to Seattle, where it waited in storage for ten months before joining us here. The thing is, after walking on down that street in Pátzcuaro that first day, we never saw the bench again. Mexican shippers are incredible: they completely mummified our bench in a cat-shaped cardboard-and-tape coffin,³ wrote the address on its back, built a solid wooden cage around it, and slipped it in the mail. When it arrived we saw no reason to open it up; it shipped again as-was. Therefore, when it arrived in our custody again last month, we hadn't actually laid eyes on the thing since that store front in October oh-five. While the Canadians the world over celebrated boxing day we skinned our cat-shaped coffin, rediscovering the bench beneath. It's as scary as I remember. Christmas was splendid yesterday. We opened presents, drank chocolata, and raided the DVDs for holiday movies. We certainly don't have many of those, so we watched Die Hard. Fa-la-la-la-la.... [Cavin]