Thursday, December 25, 2003

Today’s Word: Christmas Shift


Christmas came to the southeastern littoral chain, accompanied by the requisite tinsel, traffic, and general gorge of gifts and food. This year, mother saved her ribbon rations, and tied three yellow ones about the boles of our palm trees. We bought biodegradable Barbie for Jesse, with a skin cancer Ken that mother just had to get. I got nothing, of course; it wasn't my year. "Government allotments only stretch so far, Bill," says mother every other year. It doesn't bother me much anymore, but Jesse still cries on her off years.

Next year, the Christmas Shift swings Yuletide into early Autumn for our island chain, pushing the global gift demand forty degrees following the ecliptic. Of course, it's best not to plan that far out. Next month, Christmas falls along the Atlantic seaboard, and we have to use the gift allotment for my cousins in North Carolina.

Someday, if I do well on the Bureau tests, perhaps I can get a job that travels; I'll follow Christmas round the world, chasing the glut and enterprise.

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