Feeling It

I had coffee with Jill today at Espressoholic before my three o’clock haircut (the hair dude said, and I think this was a compliment: “I just love how your hair takes finger waves so easily”) and we were talking about our plans for Christmas and New Year’s. She was not that into it, she said. In June, while I was just starting to get crazy with getting ready to go, it was winter here and the kids at the Maple Lodge decided to have their own Northern-Hemisphere style Christmas. Apparently it was pretty great: they planned everything out and decorated everything and played Christmas music and put up a tree and got everyone presents and watched Christmas movies all day long and had a big roast dinner and everything. In August when I arrived everyone was still talking about it. Jill said she just wasn’t feeling it, at the moment. She said she supposed she’d go get a turkey or something and that they’d watch movies again on Monday, probably, but that it was nothing compared to the real Christmas they’d all had over the winter. “I’m just not feeling it this time,” she said, finishing off her bowl of hot chocolate.

I’m not really feeling it either. I mean, I’m feeling really excited about my trip up to the Coromandel tomorrow in a beach-yay-woo-vacation sort of way, and about my mom coming to visit next Friday (next Friday!) and that I get to take two weeks off work. I’m excited that some very nice people sent me Christmas cards and to have discovered Christmas cake and mince pies, neither of which I’d had before and seem to be present at all my work’s multiple holiday functions (along with much wine…today my work started drinking at noon). I’m excited that the other students in my bellydance class asked me to do another couple intro to tribal classes, and that I finally have a good pair of yoga pants and a nice new hip scarf that my friend Traysi gave me a couple of weeks ago. I’m excited that I have three big fat library books to read up in Whitianga, and about my new big floppy hat. Generally, now that I think about it, I’m in a very nice chill happy mood.

I don’t think that translates as a Christmas-y mood, though. There are ads on TV, of course, and once or twice I’ve even heard Christmas music in town, although since I have done basically no shopping at all I haven’t really been in too many stores; New World continues to taunt me by playing the entire Kenny Loggins discography and Jingle Bell Rock every time I go in, though. I haven’t seen too many public decorations up, and we certainly don’t have a tree in the flat or anything, although I did see one at a housewarming party I went to last week. I won’t be spending the day itself with anyone I know, which is, oddly, fine with me.

Maybe it’s not so odd. As I have documented exhaustively in these pages—I didn’t even bother writing about it last year, although I did brag about how many books I’d read because clearly I have priorities, except I just remembered that I did write about Christmas last year, it’s just that those entries were just lost in the Great Diary-X Debacle Thing)—I don’t get into The Holidays too much. Sometimes I will read in someone’s blog about their to-do list or all the presents they have to buy or how stressed they’re feeling, and I always sort of scratch my head and scrunch up my nose in puzzlement. What’s to be stressed, I always wonder. If I were in the States right now, I’d probably be getting on a plane to Miami and reveling in the warm and heat and beachiness and being with my mom and maybe my sister and possibly the Key Girls. As it is, tomorrow I’m getting on a plane and looking forward to being a little warmer (NOT THAT THAT WOULD BE DIFFICULT, WELLINGTON) and being on a beach, so that’s all pretty similar. And if you usually spend Christmas Day itself with just one person, it’s actually not that much of a stretch to spend it functionally alone. The beach, that’s the kicker, that’s the unifying theme. Several times various Kiwis of my acquaintance have asked me if I miss having a white Christmas or if it feels strange to have a warm Christmas and I always say a) “What is this “warm” of which you speak?” and b) that I haven’t had a white Christmas since about 1988 and that I always spend it at the beach, and then everyone smiles because to have a beach barbecue is a very Kiwi and a very Miami holiday tradition, and it’s nice when everyone can agree on what’s awesome.

So that’s what I’m doing for Christmas. Tonight A. and I have the horrible chore of defrosting the entire refrigerator by unplugging it and then propping it up on a chair and letting the air ducts unfreeze, and I can’t wait to come back to what the kitchen will look like after that little operation, although I do look forward to being able to put food into that buzzing white box in the corner and having it stay cold, eventually. I’m about halfway packed and have remembered to put both my bottles of sunscreen in my neccessaire, as well as my aforementioned awesome floppy hat and my new bikini. My haircut looks pretty good, I think, although you never know until you wash out all the extraneous product the next day, do you. I’m looking forward to seeing some New Zealand that doesn’t involve my office or the waterfront or Fidel’s (Fidel’s, this is no reflection on you personally). I’ve been here for almost six months and couldn’t have predicted anything about where I’d be today, when I knew I was going to spend Christmas 2006 in the Southern Hemisphere this time last year.

If you’re celebrating something this week, I hope you have exactly the holiday you’re wishing for. Think of me, if you get a chance, walking smooth and calm on a beach at the bottom of the world.