Mistletoe is a parasite...

Strange but true. The etymology may be related to the German words for "dung" and "branch," since bird poop can transfer mistletoe seeds. Who knew? Merry Christmas.


My mother bought me a small potted Christmas tree that has five ornaments and some tinsel haphazardly thrown on it...it does the job, though :-)


We attended two wonderful Christmas Eve parties last night and two more Christmas parties today. All filled with wonderful, warm people...at one of the parties, I even got to tell stories about my best friend growing up, Julia.


Julia Hanaway is one year and eleven days older than me. She is African-American and adopted from the state of Georgia at an early age. We met when I was five and she was six. We were backyard neighbors and she quickly gained the upper hand in our friendship by declaring that my house was built on what used to be a graveyard and the ghosts would come and kill me in my sleep if I didn't do everything she said.

We didn't play well with Barbies. In fact, we shaved their heads and melted their noses. We had more important matters to deal with than playing with dolls. We had to fight aliens or pirates or help our friends the Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers or the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (who lived, of course, in the drain that lead to the sewers beneath the Lutheran church we passed on our walk home from school.

One day, we were playing with swords (aka sticks) in the front yard. A man in a truck pulled over and reprimanded me for "beating up the little black girl."

"But we're just playing Power Rangers!"

As we got older, we would play different games. One summer afternoon, we were digging for gold in the backyard. A squirrel fell, dead, from a tree, and immediately, we became paramedics and the hole we were digging for gold became the squirrel's shallow grave. (The squirrel, which we joklingly named Chucky, would some back in a blood and dirt-cacked incarnation to attack Julia in her dreams. I took this as retribution for saying that my house was built on a graveyard.)

We would play tag, just the two of us, and whenever we would tag the other person, we would scream "HATE CRIME!!!!" at the top of our lungs, then fall over laughing.

My mom would take us to plays all around Madison. I always wanted to get the actors' autographs after the show. Julia knew this, and one night, she ruined my plans by feigning a stomachache. As my mother walked ahead of us, Julia stuck her tongue out at me, which prompted me to kick her in the shin. The old ladies behind us gasped audibly, as I was again, obviously, beating up this poor little black girl.

Our senior year of high school, in social studies class, the new student teacher was introducing the civil rights movement. Our friend, Chris, started glaring jokingly at Julia as the student teacher started a schpeel about the "struggle of the BLACK PEople..." Julia started laughing maniacally and asked the student teacher if he could hear how ridiculous he sounded. Then he made it worse by saying "Ok, class, don't look at Julia. I mean, don't NOT look at her, I mean..."

Then another girl in the class, who was 1/16th African-American piped up with, "Don't not look at me, too. I'm black!!!"


I now live thousands of miles away from Julia, but to this day she remains a friend that I can call up anytime, day or night, and we'll inevitably pick up exactly where we left off. Her mother still sends me rice krispie treats and a calendar at Christmas, which I am currently looking forward to getting.

So, Tofu (one of Julia's many nicknames), if you're out there, Merry Christmas and I love you.

xoxo

Kiki



Sigh...



As I munch on cheese and crackers and sip on hot spiced wine that are the spoils of one of my many holiday parties, I'll leave you with this song I performed on Christmas Eve. And with the reminder that mistletoe is a parasite.



The Galaxy Song (by Eric Idle)

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.