Sometimes too much is just right.

Ghost has been staying at the Lair all week while S&L are visiting family for Christmas week. This makes morning walkies all the more inescapable because he doesn’t accept excuses the way LB does. I woke to an at least slightly white Christmas and really cold temperatures. Not sure exactly how cold because I think the exterior sensor on my cool digital indoor/outdoor thermometer is taking a dump: It’s got to be colder than 24^o.

So anyway I bundled up, hitched up LB and off we went, stopping at Ian’s powershed to see how the Great Battery Reclamation Project is going (so far not conclusive either way.) And I was bopping along the frozen dirt feeling pretty good about things, and it occurred to me that one of the reasons for that was itself a Christmas present from several years ago…

That’s a genuine good quality snowmobile glove, one of a pair of which I take most careful care. Like the rest of my cold weather gear it doesn’t get used every day but unlike, say, my Absurd Parka it spends the winter in the Lair with me because I do get cold hands. And these gloves aren’t dollar store lookalikes, no sir. You’ve got to send off to someplace where they have big snowy winters to acquire the real thing. I love these gloves, though I may only wear them four or five times this season. I hate cold hands.

And like I said, as I reflected on my luck in having them I remembered that they were actually a Christmas present from my old now-gone neighbor Geiger Counter Guy.

I often feel like quite a hypocrite concerning Christmas. I don’t entertain for the obvious reason that the Lair contains two chairs and not one table: Landlady dropping in for coffee before heading back to the city is the full extent of my entertaining. And I don’t give gifts, both because I can’t afford to and there’s nowhere to shop in the desert, and because it never occurs to me to do so*. But people give me stuff sometimes, and invite me into their homes, and I never refuse. In every other way I try to be a good neighbor, but in the matter of Christmas I do fear I might come across as an ingrate.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate it, though – both from neighbors and from the occasional generous reader. I’ve got warm hands from a neighbor and a warm head from a generous reader, and though I may not reciprocate in any direct way I do remember with thanks.

Hope you guys are enjoying your holiday very much. I’m certainly enjoying mine. 🙂

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*Okay, upon morning-after reflection let me say that I do sometimes give gifts. S&L came by yesterday afternoon, back from the city, and while packing up his leftover Special Snowflake food I added a wrapped loaf of bread an hour out of the oven. But that was just to say “welcome back,” at the moment I’d completely forgotten it was Christmas and I’d have done it no matter the date.