Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Remember how at the end of A Christmas Story, the family has to go out for Chinese -- because the neighbor's dogs stole the turkey, a hilarious slapstick montage -- and the waiters all sing around the table: fa wa wra wra wra, wra wra wra wra?

My daughter sounds like that at Christmas. She's so merry and bright, it's hard not to giggle everytime she opened a present and cried "WOOK, daddy!"

She got some neat and WOOKworthy stuff, to be sure. As the sole member of her generation, Willow was pampered in style for (knock wood) her final Christmas: dolls with full wardrobes and a trunk to keep 'em in; books galore; a fluffy flamingo marionette which, once used, becomes impossible to untangle; the dolly crib Papa Neil gave Aunt Ginny when she was little.

Also cool, right off my own amazon.com wishlist, Songs From The Street, a 3-disk set of great musical moments throughout Sesame Street History which really is "the ultimate Sesame Street music collection" -- one surely appearing on an iPod near me sometime soon.

Other good gots this year:

The new Onion collection (vol. 15).

A DVD/CD/mp3 player that actually works (finally!).

The world's heaviest book, also known as "The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker." Which also comes with a two-CD set of every cartoon ever printed in the New Yorker. Tres cool.

Sea Monkeys Ocean of Light (yes, this was on my amazon list).

An entire album of hillbilly covers of AC/DC songs by some anonymous but solid musicians (this, too).

A book of Jonathan Lethem short stories.

Many family-type-gifts, such as warm winterweight flannel sheets.

Matt (the wife's sister's husband, for those keeping track) got an mp3 player from Patty and Neil (wife's parents) -- nominally for law school lecture-taping, but the prevalence of iPods was too tempting, so we ended up in a mad music-pirating three-way with Darcie's brother, Josh for most of the afternoon.

Except I'm an idiot and forgot to bump the 2 gigs of stored data from iPod to home hard drive before adding them to the library and updating the iPod, so I just spent the last hour deleting, adding, retagging, and updating to avoid having 2 gigs worth of redundancy on this just-half-full audiopill.

I was going to write more -- breakfast this morning with Alicia, Matt, in-laws and co. at the good diner in Brattleboro, backblogs (and photos!) from Florida, progress on the impending Not All Who Wander Are Lost design overhaul coming this New Years to a blog near you. But it's snowing perfect packed powder out there, and I want to be able to get the car through it; better to leave the warm deserted library lab now, and avoid having to crash in the stacks for the night.

In honor of the snow, here's a link to Womenfolk, where today you can download a free mp3 of Fiona Apple singing Frosty the Snowman. Really. Enjoy, folks. Happy Howidays.