wash, wash, wash, washing the christmas tree... (sing to the tune of your favorite generic christmas song)

Me and my mom, we're starting a new Christmas tradition, giving a bath to the Christmas tree, and its high time: we've had our fake plastic Christmas tree for probably 15 years now, and it is starting to look more brownish grey than green. But soon, after we take it out of the water it wont only be squeaky clean, but it will also smell like a real pine - we put half a bottle of pine-scented handsoap in the bath water.

Christmas is such a bizarre time of year. First you spend weeks trying to figure out who you should give gifts to and how big, expensive, personal, practical or not, they should be, then you run around with what seems like half the population of your city trying to find the perfect gift, and then after you're done with that you just lie around the house eating too much for three days so that you need to get on a diet as soon as its over.

As you can probably tell I'm still feeling a bit strange here, but what can you expect in a city where there's only a few hours of sunlight and one of the main cultural events of the moment is an exhibition on men's underwear through the years. Ever seen batique-dyed bright pink long thermal underwear? They looked pretty cool on the news just now.