Daywander: On the Feast of Stephen

“Good king winter Brussels sprouts are always crisp and even.” This was the sense my little sister made of a certain well-known Christmas carol, when she was maybe three, or four on the outside. We laugh about it to this day. It’s a song that’s just begging for a good firm filking, and I gave it a whack back toward the end of the 1990s. I published what I had here in 2004. The opener was strong:

Bit-king William Gates looked down, with his gopher Steven,
Westward out to Puget Sound, South to Portland, even.
Everyone with Windows played, up from Earth to Heaven;
All but one whose screen displayed Apple’s System Seven.

My filk engine ground to a halt after a couple more fragments. I wanted a comic dialog between Gates and the world’s last Mac user; maybe my right brain considered that a reach too far. However, this part is good enough to share:

“Bring me Windows! Bring me RAM! Bring me hard disks spinning!
We’ll show him the Mac’s a sham, and he’ll know who’s winning!”
Burdened thus they roared away, in the monarch’s Porsche…

I hit a wall when I tried to find a rhyme for “Porsche.” The names of expensive sports cars are peculiarly resistant to rhyming. What rhymes with “Bugatti”? “castrati?” I tried rhyming “Boxter,” “DeLorean,” and “Jaguar”. Nada. My 90’s rhyming dictionary app wouldn’t install under Win 7, even, so I scrapped it. And that’s where the filk stopped. Hey, being funny isn’t easy, and some jokes just don’t work, as much as we’d like them to.

Anyway. Carol and I had a wonderful, low-key Christmas together. We went to 10:00 Mass Christmas morning (at our house, midnight is for sleeping) which was our first in-person Mass in a long time. Bit by bit, normalcy is returning. Just don’t expect the panic peddlers to admit it. Tune the fools out.

Carol, remembering the hassles I’ve had trying to keep air in the tires of our hand cart, bought me a dual-power inflator. It’ll chug out air on either wall power or cigarette-lighter power. Before throwing the box away, I wanted to test it on something. So I took it out to the tack shed to harden up the hand cart’s presumably empty tires.

The cart’s tires were not empty. They were not even soft. They were still hard as a rock from the last time I filled them up at the gas station at 64th & Greenway. Figgers. I found a limp beachball in the back of the guest closet that inflated very nicely and had manners enough not to pop in my face. Carol’s sister’s family sent me a very nice Black & Decker cordless screwdriver. I had a similar Ryobi for a long time. Its battery died, and was not replaceable. That’s borderline criminal, since the tool is otherwise superb. (Though now that I have a working cordless driver, I’m going to pull the dead one apart and see if I can jigger in a new battery. I’ve done harder things. The hardest part may just be getting a replacement battery.)

We had a quiet dinner together, drank maybe a little too much egg nog, and cuddled while we watched A Christmas Story. We didn’t pull the trains out this year for a jumble of reasons. Next year, fersure. We’ve already cleaned up the canonical post-Christmas debris. St. Stephen is by legend the first martyr of Christianity. He may also be the patron saint of wrapping paper.

Carol and I wish all of you a blessed (and merry!) Christmas season–and remind you that it doesn’t have to be over yet. We’ll keep playing our Christmas CDs and keeping our decorations up and lit for another week or ten days. Christmas is important enough not to be here and gone in a day or two. That said, celebration must end eventually, lest celebration become ordinary and lose its luster.