“Two thousand miles is very far through the snow”

I used to listen to this song while still in bed on winter vacation mornings, on my blue flannel sheets with the snowflakes and snowmen.

I used to listen to this song in the car, usually idling, waiting for someone in someone’s driveway, usually with a cup of coffee making splotches on my jeans because I always insisted on waving it around to this song.

I used to dance to this song (the video is hard to watch – but it’s a good one, trust me).

And this one is my new favourite. Although for everyone else, it’s their old favourite. But I’m a slow-learner, babe.

Merry Christmas to the wind in the haunted, frightened trees, to the light in my old bedroom window at night, to the wannabe existentialists and the people who swear horribly while trying to wrap things in cheery reindeer paper without bothering to take the cigarettes out from their mouths, to snow that’s always falling in enormous, Hollywood-size snowflakes somewhere else, to yellow grass, to eggnog-swillers with giant angel brooches, to the man who sold me a pair of shoes yesterday and didn’t laugh (much) when he caught be singing “Santa Baby” under my nose (I am my own Santa, baby), to my kid brother Vladimir and all other children, and those who were once children, and all the people who annoy me, and all of the Orthodox Christians who won’t even celebrate until the Seventh of January, and to wolves in the woods and hitchhikers on the roads, to the people I ever-so-clumsily love, to everyone I’ve ever met and to everyone I’ll never meet, to everyone reading this.