Holiday shopping

[mellicious]

wallpaper (Galleria at Christmas)
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

This is the wallpaper on my computer right now - it's an image that really says Christmas to me. It's the Galleria in Houston, all decked out for the holidays. Usually I go up there shopping once between Thanksgiving and Christmas, even if I don't really need anything. It just puts me in the holiday mood. (However, if you're a person who hates crowds, I don't recommend it. You'll just think it's a nightmare.)

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I guess this is supposed to say Christmas in somebody's mind, too, but it's just too damn weird for me:



(from here) (I got to see it in person. It's just as scary as you think.)

Who buys things like this? I seriously don't know. And it plays the Longhorn fight song???

Remember that I did go to Texas. I do consider myself a fan. But lemme tell you about the fight song. It's called "Texas Fight" - very imaginatively. It's sung, or shouted (often by less-than-sober undergraduates) with lots of waving of the Hook 'em Horns sign, and it has words like this:

Texas fight, Texas fight,
Oh, it's Texas that we love best,
Hail, hail, the gang's all here,
And it's goodbye to all the rest.

Only nobody says that "Hail, hail, the gang's all here" part -- or at least they didn't when I was in school. At the time, everybody yelled, "Give 'em hell! Give 'em hell! Make 'em eat shit!" over that part, and I mean, that was what I was taught at freshman orientation, so it was more or less official. (No, I am absolutely not kidding.) By the time I was in graduate school, though, somebody had decided that wasn't very polite, and they were trying to get people to say, "Give 'em hell! Give 'em hell! We're number one!" but I don't know how successful they were at that. (I haven't been to a UT football game since the 80s. I watch the games on TV sometimes but who can tell what they're saying?)

In any case, that's some funky Christmas carol that Santa is singing.