What I Did On My Christmas Vacation

I spent my Christmas full of goodwill towards men and snot. I got a cold over the holiday, and provided a handy memento mori to my family, as a kind of short Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. "Ye too shall wither and die," I implied, while sitting in my room going through tissue after tissue. And also reading through that olde Yuletide favourite, Joan Didion's Political Fictions. Maybe a series of icy essays about the American political climate from 1988-2000 will never replace A Christmas Carol, in spite of their flawless diction. But with Newt Gingrich threatening to bring the worst parts of 1994 into the still-innocent 2012, it was timely. My cold is nearly gone, but a strange nostalgia for Bill Clinton's presidency remains.