Tuesday 11 December 2012

Christmas in LA


our christmas tree. (and hideous, yet essential air conditioning unit)

First of all, thank you all so much for the comments, emails, messages, tweets and general loveliness following my crappy week. I felt loved, supported and generally marvellous, and I appreciate it so much. I feel SO much better this week. I have been banned from many of my favourite activities (it has been 9 weeks since I was in our hot tub. The situation is critical) and been on fairly strict 'just rest for heaven's sake' instructions, which thankfully all end on Friday. I'm going to swim, hot tub, drink champagne and go for a run. Probably not in that order.

Now it's time to talk about Christmas. Or rather, how the hell do you get all Christmas-sy in the least Christmas-sy city ever? Important question. With that I present to you- 

Lorna's Top 5 Christmas Spirit-Inducing Activities (and the ways I am unable to participate in them here...)

5. The best christmas jumper I've ever seen. It cost £19 from H&M. It is the perfect amount of Christmas snowflakes whilst also nice enough to wear around and not feel like you are going to a 'bad christmas jumper' party. I wear it from November to February. Unfortunately, this jumper is totally useless when the temperature is in the 20s, like it is today. Anyone have any good ideas for Christmas t-shirts?

4. Christmas shopping. I'll be honest, I don't really like Christmas shopping that much. I find it a bit stressful. Generally I am flat broke and can't really afford presents anyways. BUT, I have developed a system whereby I can get all my presents on one trip to Princes Street, with maybe the odd Amazon purchase on top of it. I love coming home with lots of bags, knowing I have done my best to get people nice things they'll like within a super tight budget.

The shipping costs are SO crazy here that unfortunately I will be buying things on Amazon and just having them delivered to people instead. This is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, I LOVE a good boycott (looking squarely at you, Chik-fil-A.) Whilst everyone else at home is ditching tax-avoiding scurge Amazon, I don't really have a choice. Secondly, you can only really do online shopping if you know what you want to get people. I don't have a clue. This means I will have to wander round the shops for ideas and then come home and order them online. Which is, quite frankly, the worst of both worlds.

3. Writing Christmas cards with mulled wine and 'Love Actually'. I have 2 copies of Love Actually. Both are currently in my parents' attic. It's not been on TV here yet. Also, due to ridiculous cost of postage, I only sent 16 christmas cards. I wrote and sent them last week to make sure they got there on time. This means there was no good Christmas TV on, instead I wrote them whilst watching a 'Monster Inside Me' marathon, which is about people with gross parasites.

2. The German Market for Gluhwein, Bratkartofflen and unsuccessful pleas for me to get husband on fair-ground rides with me. The closest we will make it this year is to The Grove, which pumps fake snow into the ENTIRE mall at 7pm and 8pm every night. The fake snow is actually fairy liquid bubbles. It is RIDICULOUS. The 'dumb californians' love it. (True story- I went with my friend Hilary to see it, and the girl behind us said: "OMG the dumb Californians will be totally excited by this- they've probably never even seen snow. Wait, I haven't seen snow. I'm a dumb Californian...")

1. Watching 'A Muppet Christmas Carol' in my jammies with a bottle of red wine, my noisy siblings and even noisier parents on Christmas eve having just munched a curry. This will be a family-less Christmas. In some ways, this is a good thing. Husband and I are going to navigate our own Christmas traditions this year. It will certainly still involve 'A Muppet Christmas Carol' and lots of red wine at some point, but it will be quieter, with no one else singing along to the songs. There also won't be any curry, since you cannot get a decent Curry any further west than Glasgow. I'm not sad about our small-scale Christmas. In fact, I'm actually quite excited by it. Not that I won't miss being woken up at 2am to my mum singing 'Karma Chameleon' at the top of her lungs or 13 of us squeezing round the dinner table or shouty pub quiz questions where my dad beats everyone. Again. But I am excited to make our own mark. 

Next time- a list of Christmas activities you CAN undertake in 20 degree heat. Irrelevant to many, but exciting none-the-less...

1 comment:

  1. No good curry?! Oh, you poor, poor thing.
    But then, you're in LA. Sympathy is limited...

    ReplyDelete

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