MORE SIGNS THAT LET YOU KNOW CHRISTMAS IS COMING

The neighbours start baking cookies. Last night, the air in the corridor of our apartment building was thick with the smell of gingerbread. Hot damn! Yet another reminder of YT’s hopeless inadequacy in the Christmas-cookie baking department, prompting the devious thought process that perhaps, just this once, I should bake the damn cookies. Not be a wuss. Take part. Be a trouper.

I used to do it for AAH’s benefit, because she’d nag. All the other mommies made cookies – why not YT? “We have to make cookies!” she’d say, incredulous and slightly indignant. And YT, being a sucker, would fall for the word “we” every time, picturing a blissful Hallmark scenario of mother-daughter Quality Time, me standing poised at the oven door with baking sheet in hand, casting a loving look and smile over my shoulder at my sweet young daughter who would be clumsily yet endearingly shaping dough into round balls with the help of two teaspoons.

The reality, however, was more like this: AAH would enter into the collective effort with gusto, which would fade steadily over the subsequent fifteen minutes or so. When the dough was ready, she’d eat a whole bunch of it, then retire to the living room sofa to watch cartoons. And YT would spend the next hour or more shaping dough into round balls with the help of two teaspoons, gritting her teeth and vowing to never, never do this again!

And to add insult to injury, everybody would somehow forget about the cookies after a couple of days’ gorging and the remainder would land in the garbage somewhere around February! (Or occasionally later. There was the one year when I went to use the Christmas-cookie box and found it still occupied by cookies from the previous year).

APPLAUSE AND THREE CHEERS

Go to the grass-roots movement Þjóðarhreyfingin* (which grassroots or not includes some puritty-prominent people) for calling a press conference yesterday to announce that they plan to take out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times. The purpose? To let the world know that the invasion of Iraq, which the Icelandic government supported, was against the will of the majority of the Icelandic nation. The advert, which is to be published in January, demands that Iceland be removed from the “steadfast and willing” list and includes a public apology to the Iraqi nation. A collection has been launched to pay for it, as one such advert will set you back some USD 45,000. Power to the people, y’all!

WEATHER

Showers, turning to wet snow in the south and southwest. Highs of 4 degrees. The weatherman promises unstable weather conditions ahead. Sunrise was at 10.50, while bizarrely sunset is scheduled for the same time as yesterday: 15.45. (They probably think nobody ever reads them sunrise/sunset times, hehe! How wrong they be!)

* How to translate? The National Movement I guess comes closest…