Christmas Meme

Kasia at Clam Rampant has pinged me with the following Christmas Meme:

1. Egg nog or hot chocolate? Egg Nog (unspiked) – max calories, max cholesterol, add nutmeg for carcinogenicity.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree? Santa does the wrapping. 3. Colored lights on tree/house or white? Colored light on the tree; white lights on the house.

4. Do you hang mistletoe? No, but back in my lab days, I once went out and collected a bunch of mistletoe to attempt to isolate a poisonous protein from it. European mistletoe (Viscum album) contains a ricin-like protein called viscumin. Couldn’t find any in the local Texas species, however.

5. When do you put your decorations up? This year, the lights went up the weekend after Thanksgiving, and we turned them on yesterday, the First Sunday in Advent.

6. What is your favorite holiday dish (excluding dessert)? That one is easy. Roast turkey. Especially the dark meat. Roast turkey is a supernormal stimulus for me; I could sit there and eat it until I died.

7. Favorite holiday memory as a child: My parents would hang my filled stocking on the bedpost to be there when I woke up. One year the stocking held a toy .30 cal machine gun; I happened to wake up about 3 AM that night, opened the gifts in my stocking, and was rat-a-tat-tatting, slaying Germans from my quilt-and-blanket machine gun nest, until my parents came in and made me stop so they could get some sleep.

My best grown-up memory is when we got ourselves a big jingle bell, tied some frayed yarn to it so it looked like it had broken off something, and left it out by the deer feeder on Christmas morning for Beloved-But-Expensive Daughter to find.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? What do you mean, "the truth about Santa?"

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? Sometimes; not usually.

10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree? Lights and ornaments. We have stopped using the silver-colored icicles because the lovebird gets into them. She gets covered with them and winds up looking like a tacky Christmas decoration, but we're afraid she'll eat them.

11. Snow! Love it or dread it? Haven’t really seen it in years. It used to snow more often when we first moved to Austin back in ’80, but the last really big snowfall here was the Great Blizzard of ’85. It's cool, as long as it only hangs around for a day or two. Besides, a hard freeze kills off a lot of the insects.

12. Can you ice skate? Of course I can ice skate. the problem is that, like the guy whose stage act is to blow himself up with dynamite, I can only do it once.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift? In recent years, a battery-powered, roaring Godzilla from Beloved-But-Expensive Daughter

14. What's the most important thing about the holidays for you? Jesus’s birth and my family. And the turkey (see # 6).

15. What is your favorite holiday dessert? I’m not a big dessert guy. You have the pies and I’ll finish off the turkey (see #6 and #14 above).

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition? Over the past 13 years, cutting down the Christmas tree at a place east of Elgin. We always stop for lunch at the Dairy Queen in Elgin on the trip back.

17. What tops your tree? A rather elegantly-dressed angel. The only thing I have against her is that, to keep from getting too hot, she occasionally flashes, which I find distracting.

18. Which do you prefer, giving or receiving? I’m a guy, for heaven’s sake; gimme the presents and nobody gets hurt!

19. What is your favorite Christmas song? Greensleeves.

20. Candy canes: yuck or yum? You eat all you want, I’ll be making some turkey tacos (see #6, #14, and #15 above).

21. Favorite Christmas movie? Godzilla – the original with Raymond Burr. What can I say?

22. What do you leave for Santa? Cheese and crackers, or cookies. Varies a bit from year to year. Some years ago, we forgot to put away the Santa cookies before going to bed and the dog got into them. There were several mostly-eaten cookies on the floor the next morning. Beloved-But-Expensive Daughter’s comment Christmas morning was, “Gee, Santa Claus is a real slob!”.

MERRY CHRISTMAS! And pings to Mark at Newbie Anglican, Father Dan at Miserere Mei, Paul at Thoughts of a Regular Guy, and Squach at Ecce Homo. And to The Anchoress, if she can find the time.