25/12/2002 - 11:51 p.m.

If only in my dreams.

Well, in the last ten, oops, make that nine, remaining minutes of Christmas, I thought I would make my felicitations. Happy Christmas to all those of you what celebrate it, and if you don't, well, Happy Whatever You Celebrate, but be happy at least because it's December and it's wintertime, and you are sitting in the warm glow of a computer instead of the cold outside, OK? So be happy, I mean that.

In spite of a slight sense of turning into a broken record, I've decided absolutely that I'm not coming home for Christmas next year. The happiest bit of the last two days was watching A Christmas Story with my brother in my grandparent's basement.

I liked two things about Christmas as a little kid- my grandmother made rolls from scratch, and my grandfather told stories. For the past six years the bread maker has made rolls and they are not any damn good, they taste like a machine. My grandfather's stories are now interrupted by my grandmother going 'round the bend.

She is. Today she passed the green beans 'round the table for a second go. No one in the family except her is partial to them, so nobody took any. She had only passed them because she wanted some, so now that they were back to her, she took some. It was not two mintues after she had set down the bowl but she had picked it up to be passed again- she had forgotten she had just done it. She also likes to say entirely random things in the middle of conversations, you could be talking about history or geneology (common topics with my family) and all of a sudden she would turn to you and say "I bought a coat at the Not New Shop last month. Only paid a dollar for it. What do you think of that?"

I don't know, I really don't know. That's not the half of the weird stuff she did over the holiday, but hey, maybe I'll keep my crazy granny stories to myself.

The Valencia Tornado story, told by my grandfather (and the only one he managed to finish in two days) will be the feature of another No Shame piece, later, so stay tuned for it. I've got a scene I'm working on at the moment. Christmas in England used to be the time for ghost stories (what do you think A Christmas Carol is?) and so I've been reading some others. From these I got an idea. I'll put it up here when it's finished. But I've not yet begun it and I have until the 15th to write it, so don't get too excited.