An almost 100% merry Christmas

I am a Christmasy person. But its just another holiday, why are you making such a big deal out of one day? you ask. Here's what I love

1. Christmas shopping (go on, call me a girl),

2. putting up the Christmas star (minimum effort required) and decorating the tree (not really, its too effort intensive),

3. munching on sumptuous lunch (duck, chicken, pork, prawns) followed by the most amazing dessert ever made (Pandhal in Cochin is where you need to buy it from, if anyone from Pandhal is reading this do I get a free dessert for openly recommending your stuff?),

4. sweets to savour (chocolate balls, marzipans and a whole lot of others),

5. rich plum cake and a dash of good old fashioned family made wine (sinfully heavenly),

6. visiting relatives (who doesn’t love them)

7. Santa Claus

8. and much much more.

The only thing I worry about on Christmas is my phone. The thing is every year I end up getting sms's from a lot of unknown numbers wishing me a very merry Christmas. Since most of these messages have my name in them, the sender obviously knows me well enough to have sent me a sms on this wonderful day. I on the other hand don’t know the same person well enough to have his / her number stored on my phone. Which sort of leaves me in a fix as I ponder on how exactly to reply to these sms's. I usually send a unisex reply that does the trick in most cases that doesn’t encourage further sms contact. Sometimes people, God bless them, in the spirit of the holidays respond with further questions - so what’s happening / what big plans etc. Now since I don’t know who I am messaging I am conscious about the amount of information I divulge so I usually respond with eating n sleeping and say I’m just about to doze off (good conversation ender) even if it is 9 AM.

The only thing worse than this is the kind hearted souls who decide to do away with sms-ing and call me on Christmas instead not knowing that I do not have any clue who they are. I am terrible at identifying voices & the conversations I have are deliberately bland and lack in detail (don’t want to give out too much information, what if the sweet sounding unknown woman is a stalker?) & I usually end the short calls with "Hey someone from the U.S is calling me, might be from the office, Ill have to call you back". And proceed to store the numbers as Unknown Christmas 1, Unknown Christmas 2 etc: So every year I have Unknown Christmas n calling up & talking to me about life while I am blissfully unaware of who I am talking to. And since the same people have been calling me year after year I think its too late to ask them their names.

Next year I think Ill leave my phone switched off. That way the same people will have to resort to emailing me or pinging me on Facebook. At least then I'll know who they are. Which means I can call them the following Christmas and spread the holiday cheer. Which would add another point to my Why I love Christmas list. Which would make me even more Christmasy & make the day a perfect Christmas.