the wind was a motherfucker today. it was so powful i couldn't open the south side door. i was already exhausted by the cold full moon night and the wind was unnerving. we talked about getting a pine tree and i recalled the years of pine trees we got with bruce my dad. he had to have balled and burlapped douglas firs i think they were, and they were huge and heavy motherfuckers and we had to dig big holes and plant them before they died inside and generally they died before long anyway and then we had to cut them down and burn them. 
a few survived. i'm trying to remember and i can't which trees of the three for us kids lived and which died. i think maybe all of them died. i don't remember cutting them down and burning them in the two-sided fireplace. we may have left them there for the next family, who wouldn't know they had names corresponding to us kids. it would have been a sad task to cut and burn those skinny little trees that never had a chance to grow past saplings. 
anyway i think it's hard to make new traditions but if we could manage it in a so called christian dominion i would prefer not, or prefer to the earlier pagan tradition christianity superseded. when r. was asking me please not to cram things into spaces in her kitchen i thought of krampus, a bavarian tradition and made light like i was krampus, not knowing anything about him other than he was a hairy horned monster associated with christmas. i guess he's kind of santa's antithesis, or partner, like the devil and god, and i think santa might mean saint but it may as well be acronym of satan. krampus was kind of funny i think but he also instead of gifting the good punished the bad. the nazi's hated him likening him to the social democrats. i also now think how years ago in berlin i was struck to learn that gift in german means poison. i think tradition gets real convoluted like language and that's why they want to make one world empire and one language no matter how brutal and hopeless and nightmarish the dream acted out will be, like a global poison gift to a weary and denatured humankind.