Ding dong merrily on high

A long time ago, in galaxy far, far away (alright, it was only Saskatchewan), I had some roommates that were more different from me than most of the other roommates I've had in my life. Not just that they were Canadian, but that in general, they weren't my type of people. We found that we were still able to live together quite well, and we really liked being roommates; we all brought something special to our arrangement, and we did have certain things in common. Things like deciding that we would have dinner together at the table most nights, and we liked to play Pretty Pretty Princess together, and on several occasions found ourselves playing Mario Party till five in the morning and talking about whatever it is that people talk about at five in the morning.

But there were some things that we could never get over about our differences. We had more than one fight regarding whether the correct term was "colored pencil" or "pencil crayon," and I never accompanied them on pub crawls (or the more frequent "dorm crawls" where they would fill up a commuter mug with their alcoholic drink of choice and then stroll up and down the dorm hallways to the various parties that were going on every weekend, stopping back home every time their drinks got low). Probably the biggest difference, though, and the one that caused the most grief, was that of holiday music. I tried to play Alice's Restaurant for them on my American Thanksgiving, and after about five minutes they made me turn it off. We also had our differences of opinion on what constituted Christmas. I go for the more traditional stuff, like old English carol-type music, while their idea of "traditional" consisted of the Chipmunks' song "Oh Christmas Don't be Late." I would play some song for them and they would say "that's a Christmas song? It doesn't sound Christmassy to me," when to me, everything about it screamed Christmas. Now I kind of wonder- is there something special about "my" Christmas music that makes it sound Yule-ish, or do I just think so because that's what I grew up with?

I guess this is all just to say that, although I am usually a "Christmastime starts the day after Thanksgiving" person, I've started early this year. I don't know, it just seemed right tonight to put on the Chieftans' The Bells of Dublin.