This year’s December calendar lends itself to celebrating. With Christmas Eve on Thursday, followed by Christmas and Boxing Day, and then Sunday, it amounts to four days of holidays. It’s like half a Hanukkah. I’ll be spending an intimate Christmas Eve with some friends. Our host subscribes to the too-much-is-never-enough school of Christmas decorating. It’s not straight and freakish, like the cult of Candy Cane Lane (although that’s for a great cause), but it is extravagantly gay. He has multiple trees, five in all.
Each is themed, of course. There’s the blonde bombshell tree, covered with dozens of Marilyn Monroe ornaments including John and Bobby Kennedy, Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller figurines. There’s the red-and-white tree with crimson explosions of reveling devils, bunches of glass cherries, full-faced men in the moon and snowmen. One tree is dedicated to cats (he’s a cat person). And there’s a New Year’s Tree. Then there are miniature trees, beribboned wreaths, doorway boxwood boughs, and other sundry décor laid out like a Christmas minefield throughout his apartment. He’s an artist so he switches out his walls of paintings with winter landscapes as well as Mistletoe Vodka, one of his fantasy liquor advertising posters in the Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec manner. It features a naked Nordic hunk holding a spring of Mistletoe. He’s adorned only with a holly wreath crown and rides astride a bull moose. In the background, snowcapped fir trees stand against a scintillating starry night. It’s one of my favorites—there’s nothing like verticality, I always say. Well, now that I describe it, the whole array may be a little cultish and freakish, but tastefully so.
Anyway, I’m bringing my chicken paprikash and a homemade fruitcake. I’d love to bring the stuffed pork loin I do. It entails a smoked Hungarian sausage. But, unfortunately, my friend is averse to eating “pig meat,” as he calls it. No, he’s not Jewish but Babe is his favorite movie.
Christmas Day I’ll be celebrating a culinary Kwanzaa with a friend. He has a duck-with-cornbread-stuffing recipe I’ll be making, along with greens and fried corn, of course.
The obligatory church visit was checked off last weekend. To be honest, I had an ulterior motive. I heard Anonymous 4 perform at The Basilica of St. Josaphat. It was sublime.
But ’twouldn’t be Christmas in Cream City without the jingling of jewelry, the click-click of high heels, the glitter of sequins and ruffle of chenille. Joy to the world, it’s time for drags in their shows where jolly Saint Nick in his sleigh will call out his hos: Now Ruthie, now Trixie, now Dora and Dixie! On Shannon, on Shawna, on Karen and Kiki! Now Amber, now A. Love, now Wendy and Windy! On Harmony, on Nadia, (it’s a big sleigh), on BJ and Cee-Cee! Now Scarlet, now Maple, now Karizma and Jaymes! To the top of the stage, to the top of the ball! Lip-sync away, lip-sync away all!
And a Very Merry to the rest of you!
