Drink, people!

This is how I look into the world, still adorned for the holidays.

My little corner of Tuscany.

I’ve been reading how meticulously and richly many of your have adorned your homes, and now the time has come to remove the decorations. Over here I’m keeping my sole light garland that my sister brought from Thailand, at least for a while. Our town also keeps its stars and Buone feste banner up. Yes, a few days more won’t hurt anybody.

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  Notice the oranges.

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  I have just returned from the station and they turned off the lights.

Which reminds me of my first home, the one with my parents and sister, and how we once left the tree standing until May, just for the hack of it. Ain’t nobody telling us when to celebrate and when to stop. It was plastic, do I need to mention it? But sometimes it was real and I loved the scent but hated the needles dropping off.

We didn’t celebrate Christmas but New Year, our tree was not Christmas tree but novoletna jelka (New Year’s Fir Tree), and the man bringing us presents was not Santa Clause (ADD-IT: neither Santa Claus :D) but Dedek Mraz, “Grandfather Cold”, who we must have borrowed from the Soviet Union.

I think that now both exist and kids get the double dose of parades, events, presents, unless their parents resent one or the other, just like we had both American and Russian propaganda films on the TV when I was growing up in socialistic and non-aligned Yugoslavia, between East and West, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, capitalism and communism. Not a bad way to grow up: you get more choices, cultures, horizons. I’m sorry for the kids who only get to live in the now of capitalism.

However, now there is the Internet and that means everything. We are able to be our own content providers and selectors.

One of the loveliest pieces of truth that I spied from my little corner of Tuscany in this online way comes via wonderful Charlotte and one of her blogs:

“The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty so they may drink — and in drinking understand themselves.”

Federico García Lorca

Which sounds like blogging in the nutshell. Drink, rejoice, celebrate!