In some ways, NOLA hasn't changed much. On Saturday night, I followed Lei Lani's recommendation and went out to the French Quarter for our second annual Santarchy celebration. This year's gathering was bigger than last year's, and most of our crowd upped the ante on costumes too. I find as I get older that I have increasingly more recyclable materials for costumes. In fact, all I had to buy this time around was a Santa hat, some crazy Christmas knee-socks, and a pair of red maryjane crocs that I plan to recycle for Mardi Gras. For that holiday, I'm considering dressing as Little Red Riding Hood, and I'm digging through various versions of the tale to determine how best to refine my costume. At this point, I'm leaning toward making a cape that approximates wolfskin, but that may be too ambitious a project. We'll see.
In any case, Santarchy was as much fun as any other NOLA-specific holiday. (It fits particularly well in NOLA despite the fact that Santas gather in anarchy in many US urban settings.) Much drinking, carousing and warming up to total strangers. Drunken bathroom confessions. The usual pleasures of debauchery and sloth. The pic is of me dancing on the bar at Coyote Ugly. I hope that doesn't ruin my reputation for any of you. Hell, if you know me, you're more likely surprised that this is my first time officially dancing on a bar.
Beyond that spectacle, the holidays are warming up nicely.
We finally got our tree this weekend. I've been hemming and hawing about the idea for weeks now. Putting up a Christmas tree is lovely but far from pragmatic. 
And much as I want to snub the system and forego the tree altogether, an echo of my perhaps-fifteen year old self remains restless, reminding me of my adolescent insistence that I would always get a real tree, EVERY CHRISTMAS, once I left home. Since I've been a homeowner, I've mostly fulfilled that ambition. I buy my beautiful spruce or fir, decorate it with meaningful ornaments that come from special places (Montana) or people (Jesse's fam), love it immensely and then throw it out to be recycled as wetlands-building materials. And that whole process seems green enough. But also tiresome, like most rituals.
The difference this year seems to be rooted in the overwhelmingness of this past semester. With delay of cold temperatures and mounds of papers to grade, my scrooge self kept kicking back at my rose-colored holiday ideals. I wanted to get beyond the need for a tree, but I still wanted my ornaments up, and I wanted to feel the nostalgic, pretty drift of a feeling that swims alongside a few glasses of wine and a blue-lit tree. There's a seductive romance about that light on a tree on a cold evening, a tinny song of sorts, a swell of romance that accompanies those little blue lights.
Well, to make a long story short, we bought a hibiscus tree this year. It's a real tree, primed to be planted in a huge hole (which Jesse will dig, not me, of course) in a few weeks. There's not enough room to hang all my ornaments, but I defend the scarcity with an appeal to preciousness. What hangs is unique, carefully chosen. The pink flowers burst out and fall, a rash cycle of beauty perhaps more than appropriate to NOLA. In the two days we've had this tree, it's cycled through a number of blooms. I think it's in tune with us. Explosive, charming, effusive... and then in time, it will quiet and be planted, set low in the earth to provide its loveliness -- now sustaining, not simply passing -- another show of recovery in our city.
FYI: To see more pics of Santarchy (or our contribution to the merriment at least), please join me on Facebook. My pics are in my profile; look me up. I know, I'm old for Facebook, but many of my other 30+ friends are there too!
