Christmas time

What does Christmas on Catalina mean? I think the word that best describes it is 'mud'.

Yes, we're into the rainy season, and with every couple inches of rain, a new mud texture is discovered. First, as the dust of summer is first moistened, it turns into an unbelievably sticky clay-like mud that cakes on to shoes until they are the size of dinner platters and weigh a (figurative) ton. Tires pick up the top inch of the road surface and fling it all about, tearing up the roads. Then as more rain falls, everything seems to liquify. Any slightly dirty surface (ie all surfaces) become covered with a slime-like mud that is very slippery. The roads (in unpredictable places) turn into 4-6 inches of muck making driving quite treacherous (since we're driving on the edge of a cliff). The kids who go to school in Avalon get the day off because the interior roads become impassable. You can see the muddy streams flowing down every crevice of every hill. They don't have gutters on the houses. Rain streams down windows and drenches you as soon as you open the door. Finally the rain stops, and the parched ground has a chance to drink in all remaining moisture. After about a day, there are no puddles to be found. The dirt is gelatinous with its retained water making walking treacherous. Soon it returns to the sticky clay consistency, and then a sunny day will bake it back into the hard soil from which next year's dust will be made. Ah, the circle of life...

"But what of the decorations?", I hear you ask. (I have good ears.) The Island Company (which runs the town of Two Harbors) organized a shipment of very nice trees to the island, however, most of our decorations (and all our tree ornaments) remain in storage on the mainland. We scrounged some decorations from friends and managed to make a pretty festive tree. The Things were so excited that they had to take some ornaments ('elements' as Thing 2 calls them) and re-decorate the tree. Not much in the way of exterior lights for us. Some houses have quite a few, but what with it being the rainy season and all, I'm worried about that whole mixing water and electricity thing. Sweetie made sugar cookies the other day, and we decorated them. Again, the Things had a blast. Some cookies you can just barely see beneath the avalanche of sprinkles atop them.

So it's looking like it will be a Merry Christmas. We will be on the island for the Big Day, then travel to the east coast for New Year's (and to complete the sale of our house) (knock wood).

So Merry Christmas to all of you out there (unless you're a Happy Hannukkah or Sensational Solstice type of person) and Happy New Year, too.