What Makes Me Laugh

Sleighbells Ring. Are you listening? In the Lane. Snow is glistening.

Personally, my favorite Christmas Carol is “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.” It just says so much about a child’s mental anguish, doesn’t it? No toys, just my teeth please. Plus, you get to sing with a lisp, and who doesn’t want to try that at least once in her lifetime?

It’s hard to write about Christmas without sounding like a cross between Dickens, a southern Baptist preacher and a hedonist on a binge. On the one hand, I’m supposed to write, “Eat, drink, be merry!” on the other I should write, “Eat, Drink, Go to Church, and give some money to the man holding the cardboard sign outside of Costco!”

I would give some money to the man holding the cardboard sign outside of Costco except for the fact that I saw that same man get out of a new Ford pickup truck at the local park. It makes one kind of cynical, especially since I know there are people who aren’t scamming others who need a break.

But anyway, back to the truffle recipe I’m planning to try and make tonight. At the Holden/Blaine household we have established a tradition of skiing on Christmas day, and eating like we’re planning to ski every day for the rest of our lives. We’re planning to watch Young Frankenstein, play some mean games of Scrabble, entertain Cocoa and Peaches, and possibly sing a few tunes together. We will not be exchanging presents, as every day together is a gift (that was a joke, all right?). Let me try that again. We will not exchange gifts because that’s part of our tradition. No gifts, just skiing, some rest and relaxation, a few good laughs, and as little traveling as possible. In sum, we sort of opt out of holiday-stress. If you sent me a card, thank you, I’ll be sending you a card sometime in the New Year (it’s a surprise). The closest I get to stressed this time of year is anticipating holiday parties. The introvert inside of me screams, “No more small talk!” And then when I get stressed, I just turn to chocolate.

Did I mention truffles?

On our refrigerator is a New Yorker cartoon with a woman sitting on a couch, talking to a man standing in the corner of a living room. The caption says, “After your tomato plants, you have nothing left over for me.”

We laugh about this cartoon but there is a grain of truth there. Doug spent hours this summer growing the perfect tomatoes. Obsessed with soil acidity, organic material, drip watering systems, growing seasons, planting depth, systems for tying the tomato up above the ground, he’s now completed the final harvest. Tonight he gathered the last of them because it’s supposed to snow in the mountains two to five inches, and that means a frost too deep for any plastic-covered tomatoes to bear. So, in honor of Doug’s hard work, and his beautiful harvest, I’m showcasing his photography. Wish you all could taste our luscious, home grown tomatoes too.

We’re watching television, and a commercial for the cartoon Snow White comes on.

Doug says, completely deadpan, “I had the hots for Snow White.”

“You did?” I laugh. “I never knew this! How old were you?”

“Four or five,” he says.

And I laugh some more.

Doug replaced our weathered bathroom window last week with a new, energy efficient window that won’t cause a shoulder injury when you try to open it. It looks fabulous, but as of yet we haven’t purchased a curtain. This is problematic because the view from our window is our neighbor’s backyard and kitchen windows. Therefore, while my neighbor is having his morning coffee with his visitors from Switzerland, he could casually look over his shoulder and see me stripping.

This harkens me back to when we first moved in six years ago, when the house window coverings were missing, so the first two weeks we covered the bathroom window with a towel, and then Doug decided that a better, more artistic solution would be to paint a watercolor mural on the window. Let’s just say that this was not a sober inspiration, but it did do the trick.

So anyway, I enter the bathroom this morning with the uncovered window, notice my neighbor’s kitchen lights are on and the drapes are open, realize that I really need to use the toilet and drop down on all fours to wrestle off clothing from my lower body. I’ve since learned that putting it on while trying to avoid being seen is much harder and requires a few Pilates-like moves. Hunched over on the toilet so that they couldn’t see my head, I decided that if I crawled to the tub and pulled the curtains around me I could throw off the rest of my clothing without the neighbors seeing an inch of flesh. They might see clothes flying through the air, but at least no naked booty.

I’m sudding up (which by the way, I learned recently during a Scrabble match with Doug that sud is not a word – it can only be plural, so I’m not sure if sudding is a word either, but I’m using it) when I realized that I’m out of shampoo. This is because I’ve been using the last dregs of complimentary hotel shampoo and haven’t had time to buy my own.

So, what to do. I could wash my hair without actually washing my hair. I could jump out, towel off, and try to streak through the bathroom to the bedroom, where I thought I might find another bottle. Or, there was a slight chance I could find one in the bathroom storage drawers next to the tub.

I peeked out of the curtain. Great! The window was fogged up, so I leaned over the tub while the water was running and searched my stash of hotel gifts. Damn. It was all lotion. I really never use the lotion samples they give out, but I keep them just in case. I slipped the curtains closed and considered my options yet again. I looked at the empty shampoo bottles in the shower. Well, you never know, I thought, and then proceeded to fill them with water in hopes that a dreg of soap would be left. Bingo! I sudded up the hair. I love when that happens.

Once I was dressed, the words “shampoo” and “curtain” made it onto my shopping list. Which leads me to the moral of the story, which is that Sunlight Dish Soap may be the healthiest thing you put on your head in the morning.

I was browsing Salon magazine today and immediately noticed an article entitled, “What’s really in your shampoo.” So I’m reading it, thinking at the end that the author, Bill Bunn, will advise buying a very expensive organic shampoo that you can only mail-order from Brazil and instead he advised using Sunlight Dish Soap!

And I laughed. Here’s what he had to say:

“My new shampoo, Sunlight Dish Detergent, has just four ingredients. It’s runny and slightly acidic, smells vaguely lemony, doesn’t foam excessively and looks anemic. It’s not perfect, just better. I need to apply it only once when I shampoo. With each shampoo, I use a 10th of the volume that regular shampoo requires. The bottle will last at least a year, as my last one did. And though its ingredients aren’t worth celebrity endorsement, my hair gets clean and I expose my body and the environment to less risk.”

Well, I never. I’m going to give it a try and report back.