Monday, November 28, 2011

Caramel Brulee and Christmas

I'm sitting in Barnes & Noble sipping a caramel brulee latte wearing my "journalist" glasses and a denim jacket. There's no way I cannot blog right now.

For starters, this latte is sinfully good. Like, it's so good I feel like I'm committing some kind of crime drinking it. The ladies at the counter talked me into combining a caramel brulee latte with white chocolate. I'm a sucker for good customer service, so here I sit. Very happily. This drink is also somewhat ironic because I just came from the dentist. Oh well. Maybe that's why it feels so sinful.

Barnes & Noble is such an overwhelming place, in the best possible way. I literally have no idea where to start, anytime I'm here. Five different parts of me are tugging me towards the travel section, history section, children's literature section, classic literature and movies and entertainment, all at once. Even the sports section tugs at me. The crafts, art and music areas go without saying. The photography section is a fascinating browse, and this place even has a Star Wars section. I might lose track of a good hour in the poetry aisle. Or be caught buried in a Post Secret Book for half of that.

I find it hard to write about anything other than Barnes & Noble while I'm in here. Truth be told, I came here for fast internet and the atmosphere. But I rarely leave accomplishing only my objective. If I accomplish that at all.

But, in the interest of focus, I'm going to write about how happy I am that I can be openly excited about Christmas now without being ridiculed for materialism, overshadowing Thanksgiving, or whatever other reason people come up with to be angry about early Christmas celebrators. Truth be told, I'm excited about Christmas all year round. It's my favorite holiday and it has so many happy associations for me. Decorating and Christmas baking might be two of my favorite things in the entire world.

But, I still don't do anything physical, like putting up the tree, listening to Christmas music or light until the day after Thanksgiving. But the excitement is still waiting to burst out pretty much from the first day of fall.

And now, here we are! Sure, maybe stores only get "excited" about it early because it means more sales, but some of them, in fact, maybe a lot of them, when broken down to an individual level, love Christmas just as much as me. It comes but once a year, so I intend to get every ounce of enjoyment out of it as I possibly can! It's a very happy holiday, which is of course rooted in the happiest birthday in the history of the world: baby Jesus, of course.

That's the trick, I think, to remember that all this hype is preparation for the biggest and most important birthday party ever celebrated. Aaaaand...Frank Sinatra just came on singing "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas." It doesn't get any better than this, folks.

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