Merry Christmas to everyone who will be celebrating it tomorrow! I hope it’s a joyful time for you and your loved ones.
As someone who doesn’t observe this holiday anymore, it’s always interesting to talk about what I do when everything is shut down and see what other people have come up to pass the time on the biggest holiday of the year in western society, too.
Obviously, the answer to this question is going to be different for everyone. People who live in tropical or Mediterranian climates are going to have a far different range of possibilities than those of us who live in chillier, snowier places. If your weather is nice enough for a hike or other outdoor activity, I envy you just a little bit today. That wouldn’t be a very pleasant thing to do here….although obviously not every Canadian is as averse to the cold as we are!
My hope is that this post will give you a few ideas of things to do when just about everything is closed. For readers who celebrate Christmas, I also hope it will give you a glimpse into what your friends and neighbours might be up while you’re celebrating today and tomorrow. There’s something to be said for learning about how other people live, in my opinion.
A typical “Christmas” is quiet for me and my spouse. Businesses and non-essential governmental buildings are closed here in Canada, just like they are in most other western countries. Many stores remain open on Christmas Eve, but they generally have reduced hours on that day and are packed uncomfortably full of people doing last-minute shopping. I avoid that scene as much as humanly possible.
Instead, I make non-traditional foods like chocolate chip cookies and tacos or fajitas, depending on what ingredients we have on hand. This tradition of sorts started when I first moved to Canada, realized my spouse and I would be alone on Christmas, and didn’t really feel like going all out for a holiday I was quickly losing interest in anyway.
We already had the ingredients for Mexican food and cookies on hand that first year, so that’s what we ate. Since then, we’ve done something similar to this when we could. There’s something nice about having a hot, simple meal that doesn’t take a lot of time to make and requires far fewer dishes than the average Christmas dinner. (Did I mention that I wash all of our dishes by hand? I don’t normally mind this chore, but it can be a little tricky to keep on top of them when we’re eating a multi-course meal).
If you love making fancy dinners, by all means make one. This is simply what works best for us.
The dress code is casual and generally involves wearing pants. Well, okay, sometimes it involves wearing pants. So much depends on what stage of the cooking process I’m in and how warm our apartment is. We have such efficient insulation in our building that sometimes it gets a little too warm to wear all of those layers when the oven is on and the sun is shining brightly through our windows.
At some point during the day, we’ll often turn on the latest science fiction or fantasy film that we’ve been meaning to rent or rewatch. There’s something relaxing about seeing Frodo once again attempt to return the One Ring to Mordor while delicious scents waft out of the kitchen. I also enjoy getting to know brand new characters instead if we’re in the mood for something we haven’t already watched.
The rest of the day is spent napping, relaxing, playing games (generally of the computer variety, although occasionally I’ve amused myself with board games and puzzles), or doing other quiet things that don’t require outdoor time. It’s nothing at all like the Christmases of my childhood, but I’ve come to look forward to this time quite a bit all the same.
I have heard of people going out for Chinese food on Christmas, as those restaurants tend to stay open. It’s not something I’ve tried yet myself, but maybe one year I will.
Do you celebrate Christmas? If not, what do you generally do on that day? Regardless of whether you personally observe it, what is this holiday like in your country in general? I know that not everyone who reads this blog comes from a culture where Christmas is well-known or even practiced at all.
Like many other places, Toronto’s malls, subway system, and other public places are bustling with activity at this time of the year. No matter when someone might use or visit them in the month of December, there will be far more folks there than will be the case in January when the new year has finally arrived and everyone has settled back into their usual routines.
Instead, it’s about seeing how real people behave on a perfectly ordinary day that stands a very good chance of being neither the worst nor the best one they’re ever going to experience. In fact, they might not remember anything about it at all six months from now. They’re simply a regular person (or, in some cases, animal) going through the routines of their lives.
Lately, I’ve been taking a break from my normal interests like reading science fiction and exercising outdoors in order to try other stuff. One of the consequences of this has been that I haven’t come up with as many blog post ideas related to those topics as I’d normally be playing around with.
That is the only story I know from that portion of his life. He took everything else with him to the grave. While his body survived the war without any catastrophic injuries, his mental health was severely affected by the things he experienced during those years. He became physically and emotionally abusive and remained that way for the rest of his life.
Can you believe it’s November already? It feels like January ended last month, and yet here we are moving quickly into the 2018 holiday season.
My various allergies can sometimes make attending certain functions tricky or even impossible. I’ll often eat before going to certain gatherings to make sure I’m not sitting there with a growling stomach and the inability to eat anything there due to North America’s tendency to toss milk products into so many festive foods.
I’d be especially interested in reading posts about gifts that are inexpensive and not a knick-knack.
Nuit Blanche is a free annual art festival that occurs overnight or at night. The first one happened in 1990 in Barcelona. As the tradition spread to other cities and countries, they used their own language’s words for White Night as the name for this event.
One of the things I love the most about Nuit Blanche is how accessible it makes art. While some of the attendees are obviously experts on the creation and interpretation of this sort of thing, many more are people who are casually interested in the topic but who have no specific training or background on it. Some of them are even small children! This isn’t something that is specifically geared towards this age group, but there are exhibits every year that are child-friendly.
I’ve wandered into the middle of a zombie uprising, danced with spotlights, explored an abandoned subway tunnel while listening to music the creator thought would increase the chances of us spotting a ghost, and heard the stories of people who work or worked in the sex industry at this festival in past years.
This year there was a dumpling exhibit that caught me a little off guard at first. You could go into it, buy real dumplings (all of which smelled amazing), and eat them while you walked around looking at other artistic displays.
There’s something about the autumn season that makes me want to write out lists and accomplish things. Maybe it’s because of how much I generally looked forward to school beginning again when I was a student.
There have been references to the argumentative nature of the Internet for as long as I’ve been aware of such a thing, much less an active participant in it.
At any rate, this pattern of behaviour carried over to social media as soon as such a thing existed. It’s shown no sign of of stopping since then.
There’s something liberating about choosing not respond to everyone who wants to debate. The Bernards of the world obviously have the freedom to rant about cats and dogs as much as they wish, but they’ll soon learn that I’m not someone who will jump into fruitless arguments with them.
This post was written as a response to Candy Korman’s 
Confession: I’m a little hesitant to take book recommendations from folks who don’t know me well. My tastes are so specific that I’ve found it’s more effective to get to know someone well first before I start asking them what I should be reading next. They’re welcome to give recommendations, but I’ll be more interested in checking out their ideas once they know more about what I really love in a story.
Once or twice a year I like to check in with my readers.