Christmas Oddity

The computer is finally fixed! Yay! It was actually good to go last Thursday, but I had a hella busy weekend and have only now gotten around to posting anything.

To begin with, it's Christmas time. For me this means two things: All Things Christmas (watching our large assortment of holiday themed films, decorating the house within an inch of it's capacity and wrapping all presents myself with a variety of ribbons and paper) and Awards Season.

Strangely I am not particularly into either of these events this year.

I did help decorate the tree and spent my last two days off wrapping all the presents (that felt good), but have left most of the house decorating to my mom (I just haven't really cared, very uncharacteristic of me) and haven't watched a single holiday movie - no cartoons, no Miracle on 34th Street or Elf, and I'm not really all that sad about it. I don't know what's up with that.

Anyone ever seen the TV show "Roswell"? Kinda crap, honestly, but I was obsessed with it my first two years of college. Katherine Heigl (before she was famous) played a character (also ironically named Isabel/Izzie - crazy!) who was a teen alien that psychotically loved Christmas. Her nickname in the Christmas episodes was "The Christmas Nazi." I wouldn't go as far as to call myself that (I'm not involved with Senior Home gift drives or caroling or Christmas Pageants), but I have been known in years past to take the decoration of my home a little too seriously (I have a collection of fruit ornaments that will someday take over their very own tree - meaning I'll have two trees and one will be filled with fruit), I've made timetables for the watching of Christmas films in order to ensure everyone's tastes and schedules are satisfied, and I've maintained pretty high standards for the kinds of wrapping paper used and demanded a variety of types of ribbon be made available (for example, no one in my family has two presents wrapped in the same pattern of paper - that would be wrong). But other than a little anal retentiveness in the wrapping portion of the season, my other Christmas fetishes have been largely overlooked.

The other oddity has been my lack of interest in Awards Season buzz. Last week alone, the Broadcast Film Critics announced their nominees, as did the Golden Globes, and the National Board of Review, L.A. Film Critics and New York Critics circles all named their choices for Best Film, Actor and Actress of the Year. Normally this would mean a great deal of squeeing and speculation on my part, but other than being stoked that WALL*E was named Best Film (by the L.A. Critics), I am not particularly excited. (Wait, I lied: Kate Winslet's up for a slew of awards, as well as Best Actress and Supporting Actress honors at the Golden Globes and the fact that she doesn't yet have an Academy Award is one of the few quatifiably wrong things in the universe, so I am rooting for her, of course!) I guess my interest in the Awards Season will probably change once I've seen some of the nominated films (post-Christmas: Milk, Revolutionary Road, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Doubt, Gran Torino, Frost/Nixon and Slumdog Millionaire, here I come) so I hope the New Year brings me some renewed vigor cause an Allison that doesn't obsess over Academy Awards nominations is just not an Allison you'd recognize (plus, that would be some hard evidence that I am actually suffering from depression - we don't want that!).