monshu brought home twinkly white lights tonight so I spent a chunk of time entwining them in the branches of the Norfolk. I felt like a madman who tortures trees--a feeling not helped by the gardener's recommendation that we leave the lights off as much as possible since electrical current whacks plants out (in much the same way that I imagine it would us under similar circumstances). It's a good thing trees lack sentience. I'm not sure what they would make of our annual customs. Would my behaviour be judged more or less sick than that of some who just kills one of them and displays the ornamented corpse? No ornaments yet, incidentally. Is there anything sadder at Christmastime than decorating by yourself?
With one thing and another, I'm running a day behind in my
ongoing series of
fireplace-
related vocabulary posts. I finally gave up on trying to find the correct Irish for "damper" and used
maolaire even though this is "damper" in the sense of "something that muffles or deadens" (e.g.
maolaire turrainge "shock absorber"). My next language, Chinese, is probably going to be even more fun because I don't think open fireplaces are traditional anywhere in China. At least I have a
partially translated Wikipedia article to work from, which is more than I have for Korean.
ETA: Chinese completed! It went quicker than expected due to promiscuous Googling.
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Also, we won't be here for Christmas, so this is for appreciating during the 3 weeks of unbelievable panic just before the holidays, in which everyone, including me, my wife's company and my son's school are trying to cram in everything they failed to do in the other 11 months of the year.
...I'm feeling a certain solidarity for the tree, right now. I think I'm going to deploy your torture argument.