Christmas Day 2011

This year's Christmas wasn't half-bad. It was kind of nice actually. I cooked breakfast for my parents and we watched The Nutcracker ballet on television. After church, my mother went to help with the Christmas party down in the church's gym so I spent the hour practicing piano in the now empty church. I had Coldplay's "The Scientist" stuck in my head so I played that one first.

A long while later, my former choir director came in to return the music sheet stand and she heard me playing. We had a short chat in which she asked when I was graduating college.
"Um," was all I said.
"Oh, so you've already graduated college?" she asked.
More "Um". I love non-committal responses.
"Well, Merry Christmas, and if I don't see you at New Year..."

We shared an awkward hug before she left; I went back to piano practice. My father came in shortly thereafter. Apparently, my parents had been looking for me for a while. My mother kept trying to call me (I took that moment as the perfect opportunity to tell them that I had left my phone at the house), and sure enough, when I arrived home, there were seven missed calls from my mother. I do have a habit of disappearing and not telling people where I am. I'll work on that as one of my new year's resolutions.

Anyway, my mother and I took a long drive that Christmas evening. She mostly wanted an excuse to talk and vent about her life. (My dad does this, too. Actually, most people do this to me.) So I was a bit sleepy and emotionally worn out by the time we drove back home. I went to bed at 8:30 and drifted in and out of sleep for hours. My brother, who is spending Christmas thousands of miles away with other relatives, sent me a text message four minutes before midnight. He was talking about some bells ringing or something. I hadn't completely fallen asleep the last three and a half hours I'd been in bed so I decided to get up and try out something I've been wanting to do for years.

Every holiday season, a few radio stations will start playing Christmas music starting in November and lasting all the way until Christmas Day. My question was, did the Christmas music stop at exactly midnight? Or did it stop a little earlier or a little later? Well, since my brother's text message woke up four minutes before Christmas ended, I snuck out to my car (my house does not have a radio, you see) to answer this question. I plugged in the car keys and turned them a notch, then I pressed the radio button. The station was just in the beginning bars of "Winter Wonderland." It wasn't really my favorite Christmas song or even my favorite version of this song, but I listened to the entire thing anyway. The song ended at 12:01 am, and I listened closely to what came next. Sure enough, after that song ended, the automatic radio host came on and he no longer said, "YOUR Christmas station" after his spiel. The next song to come on was Leona Lewis's "Better in time", most definitively NOT a Christmas song. I switched to another Christmas radio station to double-check. They were playing one of Pink's hard-rock-I'm bitter-and-resentful-because-of-my-crappy-life-and-my-unfortunate-childhood-so-I-wrote-a-song-to-whine-about-it-on-the-radio kind of songs. (As you can probably infer, I don't particularly like Pink. I like some bitter and resentful songs, but not so much the way Pink does them).

And that was it for me. That was how I knew Christmas was over (for another year, anyway)--the radio had stopped playing Christmas songs.