2003-12-26 - 3:56 p.m.
It's four in the morning, the end of December... I'm writing you now just to see if you're better...Frames From the Cutting-Room Floor: Late December Life
1. Christmas trees plummet in value in twenty-four swift hours. Discarded quickly by families made nervous by a lifetime of fire-hazard warnings, they pile in alleys, a tinseled forest turned on its side. The lots which have been enjoying a steady business for weeks now cannot move a single thing, and the prices are promptly slashed. Vacuum cleaners everywhere set to work on tenacious pine needles firmly lodged in the fibres of carpets.
2. Merchandise comes home after a brief vacation. Sweaters buy tickets out of the mall, stay in paper-wrapped hotel rooms under twinkling lights for two weeks, and then ride the round-trip ticket home to hang on the retail racks once more. A temporary re-arrangement of the whereabouts of commercial goods followed by a restoration of calm -- a merchandise homecoming. Some articles mourn as they gather to trade adventure tales, since some of the voyagers (the Playstations, the DVD players) never come home. The gaudy sweaters never understand why this is.
3. Once upon a time, when grocery stores accepted personal cheques, little signs spent the month of January reminding patrons of the correct year. "Don't Forget It's 1982." Debit cards and NSF-distrust have put these signs out of work, and now they drink in embittered solitude in late December and bore all within earshot with diatribes about how automatic-change-dispensers never worked a real day in their lives.
4. Only one man on earth understands the unshakable persistence of It's a Wonderful Life -- his name is Ernest Fullsom Jr and he lives in Danbury, NH. He understands because he has heard all the encoded messages. However, sworn to secrecy by Jimmy Stewart prior to his death, and though the memories haunt his troubled sleep, he will carry the secret to his grave.
5. Santa Claus finishes up another tough shift, and spends Boxing Day filling in his pogey application and drinking malt liquor. He hates Coca-Cola, but the company sends him a crate of the stuff every year anyway. He pours the bottles out into a long trough the reindeers use. He alone knows of the power of carbonation and its curious link to the magic of Rangifer tarandus flight.
