And I feel like some bird of paradise

Next thing you know, my closet will have caught fire or my computer turned to salt, but right now my life is good. The various far-flung bits of my family successfully negotiated Christmas, and I am now the pleased possessor of Poppy Z. Brite's Antediluvian Tales, Jill Tracy's Into the Land of Phantoms, and the Criterion DVD of G.W. Pabst's The Threepenny Opera (1931), because my family knows what I like.* We held our usual open house with eggnog in the afternoon, from which there may be photographs, and fleurdelis28 and thomasfreund stayed for dinner. In the last three days, I have watched three very good movies, Starting Out in the Evening, Lars and the Real Girl, and Alfred Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry (1955); I roasted duck tonight for dinner and I expect to see the Dresden Dolls at the Orpheum Theatre tomorrow. Yes, the Christmas cactus got frostbite and is probably going to die. I'll make it a scapegoat for my bad luck this year. If it perishes, my problems are out on the curbside with it. If it recovers, that's my fortune coming back. If it blossoms again, who knows what that means? All oracles have thorns. But right now, I'm not bleeding.

*My poem "Autopoiesis," dedicated to xterminal, was accepted for publication by Lone Star Stories shortly after midnight on Christmas Eve. I'm totally counting it as a present this year.