Pickles & Dimes

Jason and I put up our Christmas lights yesterday. I KNOW. (It was Jason’s idea, so blame him.)

Our reasons are valid, though. They consisted mostly of: Hey, we’re putting away all of our patio furniture and plant barrels and wooden benches, and the yard now looks all lonely and dead and sad (and oddly, much larger), and we’re both pretty busy with our jobs and whatnot, and there’s only a few more weekends until December anyway, and I have to work the day after Thanksgiving (our normal Decorate for Christmas Day) and it’s nice out, so let’s put up the Christmas lights.

Because we are not totally crazy, we only put up the outside lights in our backyard. Also, they are not on. Let me repeat: they are NOT on. That would be WRONG. Despite all of this, we both felt appropriately weird about the whole endeavor: There’s no snow, it’s 62 degrees out (20 degrees warmer than average) and we’re wearing flip flops.

On the plus side, I know we’ll both be so glad we did it now. Come November 26, chances are good that it’ll be two degrees out with a foot of snow, and I’d be much less inclined to put up with Jason’s Christmas-light-column-wrapping perfectionist tendencies. I’m also hoping it helps me with my Holiday Freakout, which occurs when there is a perfect storm of things happening at once, like having a massive work project due in the next month, multiple family get-togethers, two-hour snowy commutes, and all of the Christmas shopping. I want to reclaim my festive holiday mood where I feel happy and peaceful and excited about the holiday, rather than the mood that makes me want to spear Santa Claus at the mall. So I’m really glad we did this.

When do you typically put up your Christmas lights?

I was playing around on the Internet one day and came across this article that talks about ways to trick your brain into seeing and hearing things that aren’t real.

One of the tests was called the Rubber Hand Illusion. And the intro to this test said, “If you happen to have a realistic-looking rubber arm in the closet, then this hallucination is for you.”

Well, duh? Who DOESN’T have a fake rubber arm lying around their home? Not me, that’s for sure! In fact, guess where I had it? IN THE CLOSET. It’s like it was meant to be!

Anyway. The gist of the test is to hide your real arm so you can’t see it, place the fake arm where it looks like it could be attached to your body, have someone touch both the real and fake arm at the same time, and when they smash the fake arm, your brain will think it’s really happening to your real arm.

I was beyond excited about this, I have to admit. Nearly every day when I got home from work I asked Jason, “When are we going to do this experiment?” And every day he’d answer something that sounded vaguely committal, like, “Uhhhhhrrrrrrrmmdunnonever.”

Finally, last weekend, we were taking our camper to Jason’s parents’ to store it for the winter. And I thought, “I bet Becky [Jason’s mom] will do the test with me.”

And she did, after pulling out her own fake rubber arm (“Yours looks better than ours. The skin on ours turned gray, like it died…”) AND a fake rubber foot. Out-fake-limbed by the in-laws!

OK, using the illustrations from the article linked above, here’s how the test was supposed to go.

Becky placed her real arm under a table, while I placed the fake arm on top of the table to approximate the position her real arm would have. Jason immediately called our scientific validity into question by pointing out that the fake was for the left arm, but I had placed it on Becky’s right. Because space was an issue and no one would be auditing these results, we ignored his protests and moved forward with the experiment. (There’s always those who want to stop scientific progress, right?)

I then rubbed both Becky’s hand and the fake hand at the same time with my index fingers. After awhile, Becky said it did feel weird feeling me touch her hand but seeing me touch the fake hand at the same time.

I then unexpectedly pounded the fake hand with my fist, which was supposed to make Becky scream in pain thinking I slammed her real hand, but all that happened was that she shrugged and we laughed and I sheepishly said, “This sounded so much better on paper.”

She then repeated the test on me, and besides a vaguely disconcerting feeling of watching the fake hand being rubbed while feeling my real hand get rubbed at the same time, there was no jolt of surprise when Becky hit the fake hand.

Scientific conclusion: bitter and real (not fake) disappointment in science

By far, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. There’s no stress, no traveling to multiple destinations, and the weather’s usually still warm(ish). Plus, there’s football.

Also, there’s plenty of stuffing, which is my favorite Thanksgiving food. I grew up on Stove Top (which I still love), but I can pretty much eat any kind of stuffing unless someone strays from tradition and weirds it up somehow. But the best stuffing I ever ate was at my college cafeteria, which was named Kise (rhymes with Easy), and which my friends and I (and our literal collective sophomoric humor) quickly renamed Queasy. Besides the breaded chicken sandwich that I had nearly every day for lunch (Friend who worked in cafeteria: Guess which item has the most calories! Me: I dunno. Friend: Your chicken sandwich! Me: Whatever), the only other meal I looked forward to was when we had turkey and stuffing.

The stuffing was actually horrible-looking, a damp, round lump that gave a literal SPLOT! when the lunch lady slapped it onto my plate, but I couldn’t get enough of it. It was gooey and flavorful and absolutely divine. In fact, after awhile, I just went through the line and asked them for two helpings of stuffing, hold the turkey. It’s a wonder I didn’t put on the Freshman 15. Or 50.

What’s your favorite Thanksgiving food?