Fellow indie kids, what sweet swag didja pick up for Hanukkah/Christmas/God damn, I was born really close to a major Holiday in Decemeber???

Merry Christmas! メリークリスマス! ¡Feliz Navidad! Joyeux Noël! Frohe Weihnachten! Nollaig Shona! 圣诞节快乐!

I have this friend I call my surprising conservative because in many ways he seems to untraditional but in many others, mainly politics and religion, he's very.. well.. conservative. Which I love! I think that kind of blatant contradiction is really the face of our reality. Can't judge a book by its cover and all. :) But he recently brought up an the very volatile topic of seasonal greetings on Twitter. He says...

"Happy Holidays" is a textbook example of what's wrong with this country right now, what a bunch of pandering, coddling fruits we've become." ... "It's the language policing under the FALSE assumption that people may be "offended" that disgusts me."

Now, personally, I'm all about using "happy holidays". I only get cards that say "happy holidays". I only end my work phone conversations with "happy holidays". But I think for me it stems from the fact that I was very much affected by how Christmas was basically fashioned to overthrow pagan holidays such as Saturnalia and the Dies Natalis Solis Invicti ("birthday of the unconquered sun" - get it? SON? walked right into that one, didn't we?). I knew before Daisy on Bones or Angels & Demons that we should actually be having summer BBQs in celebration of baby Jesus. Though I did find out more recently that celebrating birthdays wasn't even kosher back in the day - that's also pagan - so it's really all quite funny to me.

It's not like I take offense to hearing "merry christmas" at all, but I do think it's ridiculous for Christians to claim the entire month of December and be upset about PC terms being used. I grew up in a Christian household and celebrated Christmas in the traditional sense, but it's also a very commercial holiday and we really should not kid ourselves. For example, Japan actually uses the phrase "Merry Christmas" - even though they do not believe in Christ as a majority. And the holiday itself is spent with friends and exchanging gifts. New Years is their more sacred holiday spent with family. So I personally feel that the term isn't really all that connected in the grand scheme of things but can be very important to those who do celebrate it with religious fervor, therefore I'm fine with it - I just prefer "happy holidays" because I do want to wish everyone a happy holiday regardless of their beliefs or practices.

What about you guys?

And on a less politically/religiously charged note - what's your favorite Christmas/Winter song/carol?

I love "Baby, It's Cold Outside" and "Sleigh Ride". 8D We're actually gonna have "Baby, It's Cold Outside" play at our wedding. :) ZOMG WEDDING IN 44 DAYS.

So.. my week.

Sunday : Up until 6:30 AM finishing school work; done for the semester.
Monday: Up until 4:30 AM designing invitations.
Tuesday: Up until 2:30 AM after game night with work friends and printing invitations.
Wednesday: Up until 2:30 AM stuffing invitations.
Thursday: Spend day off finishing invitations - get out at 5 PM. Party at Joe's. Bed around 1 AM.
Friday: Dinner and games with Mike, Joe, Ryan, Jonathan, and Rebecca. Bed around 2 AM.
Saturday: Dinner and games with Deb, Gary, David, Annisa & Co. before running holiday errands and up until 2:30 AM doing housework.
Sunday: Dinner and games with Mike, Joe, Ryan, and Kris. Then put up Charlie Brown Christmas tree and did last minute Christmas shopping online until 2:30 AM.

Lack of sleep is an understatement.

Also had mini-fiasco when I discovered we'd printed out RSVP cards saying "We've reserved ___ seats in your honor." Yeah, '1 seats' doesn't sound or look very nice. But I could only fix 18 of the 20+ and made the random decision to send to the corrected ones to friends and close family instead of the folks I don't know from Mike's family.. ugh. I tried so hard to make it perfect and then to fail so hard at GRAMMAR.. blech. Also sent 3 known invites to the wrong addresses. But. It's done.



Then today Ryan unwittingly spilled the beans on my honeymoon locale. I thought the other day Joe had, but it turns out he was just playing around. So at first I thought Ryan was doing the same thing or was going to stop himself - but apparently Michael never told him the honeymoon destination was a secret. That alone was kind of a bummer but then what he'd spilled was that we're flying into Cancun, which really concerned me at first.. I mean, I have little to no interest in ever going to Mexico. And especially not some spring break tourist trap like Cancun. So I was a little shocked because I thought we'd been pretty clear about that when we were planning together before I released the reigns to him - but I had promised to be happy with whatever he decided. However, upon actually talking to Mike it appears that while we're flying into Cancun, that is not our final destination. So I'm thinking we're headed towards one of the small, outlying islands.. which would be fun. So I'll be okay, it just took awhile for the shock of knowing and suddenly dealing with it to settle in. See, I wanted to not know until right before so I couldn't think (ie agonize) about it too long because we'd already be on our way. ;P But, best laid plans of mice and men..

The road goes on and on.

Statistics are here!

You can now see the number of people who have visited your journal, your individual entries, a chart of comments, readers of the RSS feed of your journal, and the last 100 logged-in users who have visited your journal directly (if you've enabled My Guests).

Things you should know:
-Stats are completely anonymous (only My Guests is tied to username); only numbers are recorded, not any other information
-The times and dates in the graph are based on server time, which is UTC/GMT
-The light grey number at the top left corner of the graph is the statistical outlier
-While the graph may go back in time to this summer, the stats-gathering server was not on constantly, so previous stats may be missing. Today, and going forward, full stats are collected and displayed.
-If you opt out of My Guests (meaning that your username will not show up on other people's reports and you will not be able to view your My Guests tab), it does not affect your use of the rest of the Stats - if you're a Paid or Permanent user, you'll still be able to see all the rest of the information on this feature

( Page-by-page walkthrough )

If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can now send 10 of your non-Paid friends a $10 coupon. Your friend will be able to purchase a Paid Account for $9.95 (instead of $19.95) for one year by enrolling in our automatic payment plan or make a manual payment of $15 (instead of $25).

• All Paid and Permanent accounts can send out the coupons by clicking here (it's also under Friends -> Holiday promotion in the site header)
• You can also send to people not on your Friends list by manually entering the username in the field provided
• If your friend declines the invitation, it will be returned to your available invitation pool and you'll be able to send to someone else
• You can send the invitations until January 15th