Good. Christmas is here. Now we can get on with our lives.

Yay. Christmas.

I think I liked Christmas a lot better growing up, when the malls were festooned with fir and holly, and gold and cranberry-colored ribbons. When they still had the trees outside the Columbia Mall covered with thousands of white lights, when there was a three-story tree made out of Pointsettias, and when at school, we would squeeze into our velvet and damask Elizabethan clothing and sing Madrigals at the Governor's mansion in Annapolis, and then drink hot cider.

Oh, sure, we always spent Christmas day in Florida, but I felt like I had worked up to Christmas, and the day itself wasn't as magically cocoa-y as it should have been (typically spent on the Beach at Commercial Boulevard with my dearly departed grandmother) but the lead-up to it was, so I had had my Christmas fill.

Then I moved to Florida, where attempts at Christmas magic just... fail. The climate doesn't lend itself to corduroy blazers and hot buttered rum in a Queen Anne Victorian house, festooned with red and green, with everyone gathered over hot-pepper jelly smothered appetizers in the kitchen, and 'round a roaring fire in the parlor. There are only three kinds of eggnog for sale here - Publix, MacArthur, and Farm Stores.

And here, Christmas just seems... half-assed in this history-free land. There aren't as many organ recitals. There aren't hand-bell concerts. We don't have any grand cathedrals, echoy stone awash in poinsettias, and I'm thousands of miles from Winterthur or Evergreen House. When's the last time you saw a model railroad around these parts?

So, as Publix puts on their commercials with golden turkeys and anthropomorphic salt shakers, I'm like "eh."

I love Christmas. I just don't love Christmas down here. There's never the chance of a white Christmas. Ever. And no one knows who Burl Ives is...

I'm glad after tomorrow, it's over for another year.

Who knows? Maybe next year I'll be spending Christmas in D.C. or Chicago...and the streets will smell like roast chestnuts and pine - but I'm lazy... and stuck with this effing overmortgaged place... so maybe the year after that.

Although I went to a lovely open house this evening, where there was whiskey and peppermint bark... Christmas never feels like Christmas down here. It feels like its less-awesome impostor twin-brother... X-mas.

I miss Christmas in a place where it's cold, there are brass bands on the street, playing "We Three Kings" and going to the Beach on Christmas is not an option.

Thank goodness after tomorrow, Christmas won't be an issue for another 364 years.