The Holidays always leave me a little freaked out and out of it; stuffed to the gills with jamon. This one has been no different; I don't know whether to blame it on the full moon, the eclipse, pms, or maybe more of sensitive awareness to things/people (yes, let's blame it on all of the above and call it a day). It hasn't been a bad Christmas; it was just a little odd, unsettling in some way I can't clearly define. The traffic was particularly horrid, matched in awfulness by a populace driven into consumerist mania.
I wonder what it would be like to spend Christmas in a part of the world where it is just another day. No thoughts on Santa, gifts, naughty or nice, reindeer, carolers, malls, church, mistletoe and all of the other 'Tis The Season memorabilia. There is this weighing obligation of spending it with "loved" ones and trading pleasantries and updates on your Current Life Situation (job?boyfriend?etc?). Cheeriness! Because it's a Must! And all I can muster is gloom and doom and traffic jams.
But, the New Year (capitalized and rightly so, as it brings a brand new springboard of opportunities, a tabula rasa with new chalk in hand) is something that I look forward to with hidden (or not so hidden) glee.
Fireworks and bombitas that you throw into gutters which reverberate with a BAM! Miniature, fiery volcanoes that shower sparks in a grand, dying show. Firecrackers without wicks which are lit much like matches and a whole lotta fun. Blue and red and green fireworks that seem to create whole universes that disintegrate before your very eyes . Tuna bombs and Chinese firecrackers, the dangerous kind, wrapped in red tissue or the even more dangerous ones which are made in the Interior and are wrapped in newspaper, lined up in rows like soldiers and that can easily blow off a finger or three. The box of crayons look alike which shoots up 36 rockets into the sky in quick spurts. Endless fun with a high risk factor, perfect for your 11 year old. Who needs fingers when you can have fun?!
As a kid we'd buy tons of fireworks, firecrackers; whatever hissed, popped, sparkled and banged. We'd ration it so that we'd still have firecrackers leftover way into April and beginning of May (kind of like the Halloween candy I'd keep in the freezer that lasted year 'round and which inevitably would be thrown out at some point; all the 'good' candy eaten or rifled through). We'd terrorize the neighborhood with unexpected bangs and pows, the neighborhood pets grew to fear us and the parents threatened or prayed for an end of the bombita phase.
I want to greet the New Year as I did as a kid; oblivious as to what is to come but excited as hell about it, clutching a handful of explosives, ready to ignite.
Happy 2011!