on christmas day, i woke up at 3pm, ate lunch with my family, played some basketball with nigi and wally, came back home and watched korean dramas while eating ramen, and went to wally’s to play some poker. i lost really quick in poker and waited for the others to finish the game. i fell asleep on wally’s couch and by the time the game was over, we all left and went back home. what struck me was how today (yesterday) felt less christmas-y than the days leading up to it. well, this could be just another one of my entries where i get all nostalgic about how holidays used to mean a great deal and now just pass by without a trace, but i’m going to type up a passage from v.s. naipaul’s a house for mr biswas that really captured, for me, the essence of a day like today:

‘After breakfast – tea and biscuits from the drum – the children waited for lunch. More whistles were silenced; more balloons burst. The girls seized the scraps of the boys’ burst balloons and blew them up into many-coloured bunches of grapes which they rubbed against their cheeks to make a noise like heavy furniture dragging on an unpolished floor. Lunch was good. And after lunch they waited for tea: Sumati’s cakes, a local and fraudulent cherry brandy doled out by Chinta, and icecream, made by Chinta again, who, against annual evidence, was supposed to have an especial gift for making icecream. And that was that. Dinner was as bad as usual. Christmas was over. And, like all other Christmases at Hanuman House, it had turned out to be only a series of anticipations.’