Santa's Elves Are Everywhere

To give you some idea of my current mental state, when I wrote the word "everywhere" in the title of this post, the voice in my head wasn't mine--it was the voice of Ray Stevens in his song "Santa Claus Is Watching You." In the background of the chorus, Stevens says in a panicked, bordering on insane, voice, "He's everywhere! He's everywhere!" That's the true voice of this holiday season...

Anyway. Santa's Elves are everywhere, spreading joy and Christmas cheer. And, generous blogger that I am, I'm happy to share some examples with you.

---Customer calls the shop the other day says, "Hi, my name is So-and-So Massengill..." and just as I'm thinking "great, I'll bet she's gonna be a real douche bag," she says, "yes, my last name actually is Massengill." I thought it was uncommonly kind of her to immediately acknowledge the giggle power of her last name.

---In the space of five minutes on Tuesday night, I experienced not one but two true Christmas miracles. Years ago, I inherited two waffle irons from my grandmother that she used to make two varieties of waffle cookies every Christmas. The first few years I had the irons, I diligently turned out cookies to share with friends and family. Then we moved and I somehow lost track of the recipes--which were written on two stained 3x5 index cards in my grandmother's hieroglyphic handwriting. So for going on six years now--no traditional waffle cookies. No one's mentioned them, probably everyone assumed I'm just neck-deep in the details of daily life and too busy to bother with recipes that begin "1 dozen eggs." Anyway, it's been a nagging thought and several times a year, I dig through all my recipe cards and cookbooks and other likely places in search of these damned cards. Tuesday night, while looking for something else altogether (a burned CD with Christmas classics such as "Chipmunks Roasting On A Open Fire," I feel compelled to confess, in part so you can see just how undeserving I was of the miracles about to come my way), I found both of the recipes, one right after the other, in two separate places, places I'd repeatedly looked, by the way. The only thing more miraculous would've been finding them a month and a half ago when I might still have had time to make the cookies.

---I ventured into a Wal-Mart this weekend--I know, I know, THE INSANITY! Anyway, it was exactly as horrible as you'd imagine and maybe even then some. No room to manuever in the aisles crowded with all those other shoppers with their glazed eyes and haunted expressions. Most of the people were too dazed by their own misfortune to be nasty to anyone else, which I guess is a blessing. There was one guy who seemed to be having entirely too much fun. He was dancing around in circles with his cart, while waiting for his wife to paw through the clearance racks of women's clothing. Along comes a woman, clearly on an urgent mission to fill her cart with even more crap, and runs her cart right up the guy's leg, above his ankle and over his foot--and she did not even slow down. No "excuse me," no, "oh--I'm sooo sorry," not even a "please don't file a lawsuit against me." The guy looked sheepishly at his wife, who said, "That's what you get for whipping that cart around like that." And the guy kept on a-grinning. That's some Christmas spirit. Too bad it's not contagious.