Saturday

Somewhere on the street between last night's Christmas party and home, folded into a gutter of vile wet filth, the City of Ho Chi Minh picked up the King spades, which, along with the Queen, Jack, and Nine gets the House one card closer to an impressive straight (which will beat my pair). Actually, Sunshine picked it up. In other news, that package of ornaments I was expecting arrived in the mail on the last possible day before Christmas. I did not know they sold ornaments without the little hooks necessary for putting them onto the tree. This little frustration is the kind of trigger I need to begin merrily smashing brightly colored and eggshell thin glass baubles, but Sunshine rose to the occasion with aplomb, and string, and by earlier today both our trees were prettily adorned. Both? I have two answers to that: one, along with these ornaments came our new six-foot white plastic tree, this one manufactured with tasteful white string lights already in place. We aren't using those. My second answer is more fun: we actually have three trees, if you count the four-foot tin cactus which has now been striped in fancy green and red garland and dotted with ceramic Mexican suns. This holiday copse is contained within our dining room, and populates the view from the entryway along with several dramatic reflections in the walls of picture windows lining the apartment. A standalone illustration of our distance and other differences: in the last week the bush on our patio has begun to bloom exuberantly. I hasten to point out that we were not overcompensating our homesickness when we bought our first small tree, but we weren't thinking clearly. The steady, baroque growth of both halves of that ratio have exceeded my expectations. [Cavin]