There’s something about Christmas songs. Well, the traditional ones.
By “traditional,” I guess I mean the ones you’d expect to hear in church. Songs like “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “What Child is This,” “Angels We Have Heard On High,” and, most of all, “Silent Night” knock something loose inside me. If they’re sung right, these songs can illicit the most striking, unbidden, emotional response from me. Especially “Silent Night.” A well-done version of that song and I’ll have trouble holding back tears. I don’t know why this is, or how the association got made in my subconscious, but it’s for-sure there. This Sunday at church they did a run of mostly these holiday tracks and my chest swelled as I sang along. There’s just something about Christmas songs.
Ahem… do I get to keep my man-card? OK, moving on then.
We’re supposed to get our car back Wednesday, but if things aren’t looking good I’m going to rent a vehicle to get us through Christmastime while my folks are here. Something of comparable size to the out-of-commission Acadia, on the off chance we want to do something as a family while my folks are in town (in my head I see us doing a whole lot of nothing, but you never know). The bill came to $6,000 or so of damage… although it was all superficial and the body shop says there’s nothing wrong with the underlying chassis of the vehicle. All the same, I’d rather it never had been in an accident, let alone just a few months after we’d gotten it. But, such is life. We can roll with it.
As predicted, work has slowed considerably this week. As the holidays approach there are less and less cars in the parking lot each morning. By Thursday the place will be a ghost town. All this makes for and environment that’s 1) very quiet, uninterrupted, and work-conducive as well as 2) hard to stick around long in, even being super productive. The desolation and thoughts of everyone else being at home enjoying family or a good book just makes a man want to cut-out early and call a few hours work “good enough.” Maybe, since things come so easy in the silent solitude, I can justify a few hours work as equal to a busy interrupt-drive day’s full eight hours? Yeah… that’s the ticket.
Goodnight.