Is It Wrong to Love a Blanket?

No, Virginia, it is not necessarily completely wrong to love a blanket, as long as one is careful not to do so in public in an obvious way. And one must always ask the blanket's permission, in any case. But when it's THIS blanket, one can be forgiven for a small lapse in control and respect for wooly boundaries:

I know, you guys are probably sick of looking at this thing and are all smiling and nodding politely while racking your brains to think of a polite weay to say "Yep, it's still a big, green blanket." And I can't disagree with you, but I love it completely and absolutely and so I have to keep running to the camera and to the blog with such mindbendingly interesting posts as "Look, I've knitted another two inches--aren't they spectacular?"

Forgive me, if you can. I figure in another month or so it will be on the back of the couch infused with cat hair and I might possibly be somewhat more sane about the thing. Either that, or I'll have made all the cats tremblingly nervous by shouting at them whenever they're within breathing distance of the blanket, and will also have dipped them (the cats) in varnish, just to be doubly sure that the hairs stay put.

On the bright side, my passionate and forbidden love affair with a blanket has kept me from knitting a festive, Christmasy house cozy, hand dipping holiday candles using broken crayons and some old shoelaces, handpainting 1000 pieces of origami paper so as to have cranes in "just the right colors", and perhaps writing a brand new Christmas opera because, after all, it's nearly December and the stores are piping in holiday music wherever I go and I'm pretty convinced that there are subliminal messages working to convince me that I'm more craft inclined than I actually am and that sleeping one hour out of every 40 in order to make still more use of the glue gun is actually quite a good idea.

In the 80's or so, there was a big hue and cry over the notion of "backward masking"--the practice of recording a second track backwards on a record, so that when you played it correctly you heard a rock song but if you played it backwards, you got some sort of evil message. If it was a rock song, the rumor/hysteria went, there would be satanic messages when played backwards. (If it was a country song played backwards, you probably got your woman, your dog, and your pick-up truck back, but Satan was probably still drunk off his ass on Budweiser, sobbing about the woman that did him wrong). It took awhile for the panic artists to realize that almost no one had the ability to play records backwards anyway except for radio DJ's and, since they were playing rock and roll all day they were probably already evil so it didn't much matter.

All of which leads me to my new theory that the holiday music played incessantly from dawn til dusk in all the local stores is actually a cover for some clever masking wherein innocent shoppers like me are advised that they can construct an entire nativity scene out of pipe cleaners, use a straw and a disposable lighter to hand blow molten hard candy into intricate shapes, knit gifts for 700 people during a few lunch hours, and fashion a convincing Star of Bethlehem out of old gum wrappers. This could explain quite a bit. Like why I have a small but growing pile of paper cranes and my freezer contains enough fat and sugar to explode a cow.

Come to think of it, it's possible that the same phenomenon is also responsible for the acquiring of holiday sweaters by otherwise sane women who, the rest of the year, cannot imagine that they would spend $50 on a red cardigan with green felt tree shapes on the fronts, decorated lovingly with a whole bunch of beads and jingling bells and ribbons and really anything that would otherwise reside in perfect dignity at the bottom of the sewing basket instead of across the breasts of these same poor women. Really, if your breasts jingle, you are likely a victim of the retail holiday music plot and should consider wearing ear muffs (and maybe boob muffs) the next time you shop.

I believe this plot to be the brainchild of merchants everywhere--after all, it's a win-win for them. Look at it this way: first, you will buy the glue sticks/glitter/styrofoam balls/beads/tragic holiday sweater which, of course, puts money directly in the hands of the merchants. Then, you'll come back for burn ointment for the glue gun incident, some sort of solvent to try to unglue the fake pine boughs from your cat's butt, a flashlight to help you locate the shiny bead your toddler just stuffed up his nose, a book on family health to determine whether eating half a styrofoam ball can be harmful, and a new vacuum cleaner that promises to be strong enough to suck 10 pounds of multi-colored glitter out of a white carpet (but is more likely to suck the fibers out in odd, random patches while leaving the glitter scattered shinily about). Then, if that weren't enough, your friends will take pity on you wandering around with bandaged fingers, a pissed off cat, a toddler with sparkly snot, a collection of chewed up styrofoam, a carpet with premature balding, and a pair of jingling boobs and come to buy you ornaments so you don't have to make them, a new sweater that does not bear such a close resemblance to a disco ball, a gross of kleenex for your toddler, and a bottle of something that will hopefully make you forget where the instructions are for making that lifelike reindeer out of pretzels and some canned frosting.

Loving the blanket may be weird, but it keeps me out of Fred Meyer and Macy's. Which is why I haven't purchased various sorts of candy and glued them together in little train shapes to attach to presents (don't laugh--I really did that one year). This is a very good thing, indeed.