"But there was no room at the inn..."

In all seriousness, I just spent a very pleasant evening with my family. Maybe I don't say it often enough, but when no-one's pissed off or giving anyone else the silent treatment, I do have an almost-perfect family. We were watching My Best Friend's Wedding - good but unremarkable, best part is where some girl licks an ice statue, and gets her tongue stuck, and to make things worse it's a statue of David - and my family watched it with me in a state approaching musical harmony. We even managed to have happy, animated conversations with each other. My mother started talking about the nativity play, for some reason. "When you were in kindergarten, you were in it, weren't you?" she said to me.
"Yes..." I said. "I wanted to be an angel, but did they let me?"

[This has always been a sore point with my mother. About six months ago I happened to tell her I wanted to be an angel in my kindergarten play, and she actually got quite upset, asking me why I never told her at the time. I said that at the time, it never occurred to me she could do anything about it. I think she thinks I wasn't made an angel because of a certain racial prejudice - which is a discordant chord in my memories, but I don't want to rake it up twelve years later. And she may be just be being paranoid. Anyway]

"You were a rabbit, weren't you?" she said thoughtfully.
"No, I wasn't!" I said. "I was a donkey!"
"That was Emily Green!" she said. "I was sure you were a rabbit..."
"Mummy," I said. "Emily Green was a sheep. Why, oh, why would there be a rabbit in a nativity play? Unless they wanted to give the Virgin Mary a pregnancy test or something..."

Pedar was passing and got the full benefit of this. He started laughing and couldn't stop, and set my mother off. "Iona," he said. "Every time we send you to America, in the country of the Republicans and right-wing WASPs, I always if you'll come back alive."
"Why?"
"Oh, nothing much, though being hung from a tree has something to do with it..."

In these sorts of circumstances, I adore my family. I really do. Just now, Pedar informed me he's going to London by air tomorrow morning at five am, and will I come with him to the airport?
I said I would. I am mad. But at the time, he was reading in bed, and I was standing in the doorway. I could see through the window, and suddenly said, "Isn't that pretty?"
"What is?" He came to see, and then said, "I could take a good photograph of that."
He's been doing that a lot lately. Seeing things, and then seeing the creative opportunities contained within. Pedar does have a touch of the creative about him - he's a photographer. Under different circumstances, he wouldn't be a gynaecologist.

So when he gets back from London, he is going to take a photograph from just the spot where I was standing. It will be a photograph of an evergreen tree covered in white Christmas lights, framed by a window. I said if he takes the picture, I will give it a title.

My mother told me to go to bed and set my alarm and try not to sleep through it.
I love my family.

Christmas

So... got up at four thirty. We got back at about a quarter past seven, so I went back to bed and slept until half twelve.
And then got up, tried revising history, am cold, feel awful.
It seems I've felt consistently awful since about Monday. I'm so bored of everything.
Consider. I've been spending much less time online. All my journal entries are written offline at present (not this one, as it happens, so nearly all of them). Colleen thinks I've disappeared, and so I have. I'm bored. Not of her! No... I'm not bored of people. I'm bored of things.
I spend much less time online, I've left Stargate fandom, I haven't been reading, and avoiding revision gets more and more difficult as all I want to do is sleep. It happened again, yesterday - I gave up on the whole loneliness thing, and just went back to bed. Sleeping doesn't bore me.
Being bored and being tired are closely interconnected. And those defences... I don't know. I'm sick of being screwed over by people I call friends, I'm sick of constantly reminding myself to be understanding and calm and forgiving and all those other fucking civilised attributes I should supposedly possess, and I don't know what I want.
I don't know where this is going, either.
I guess part of the problem is the feeling everyone seems to be having a better time than me. It may sound so shallow, but it's how I really feel. I hate Christmas because of it - I know, I know, I don't celebrate Christmas because I'm not Christian, but then I see all the people who never do anything remotely religious during the year, but because they're nominally Christian and can say so on their birth certificate, or whatever, they get to make a song and dance about it in the last week of December. So everyone here gets to celebrate peace and goodwill to all men, while I sit and try to ignore the whole holiday. People tell me that I have my own religion, I must have something that resembles Christmas, but I don't. We have Diwali, which is nice when we do celebrate it, but we haven't, not for the last two years, and even when we do it's nothing like Christmas. No religion has a holiday remotely resembling the hype of this one festival...
And I hate how childish I sound. I'm actually feeling sorry for myself for such a ridiculous reason, so, so, stupid - it's a fucking little kids' candy-cane-golden-syrup-Jesus-loves-you(everyone-else-thinks-you're-a-cunt) holiday, and I don't need it, it won't enrich my life any. I don't need it.
And then they put up Christmas decorations in Liverpool's city centre, and erect a huge, beautiful, leaning-to-one-side Christmas tree, and Coca-Cola start playing their Christmas adverts, and people are constantly bombarded by the voice of Noddy Holder singing "So here it is, Merry Christmas..." and I want it. To be a part of it.
I don't need it.