"Christmas"

Be warned, more notes on kids ahead. The other day Lilly and Ann both were given the same “coloring and activity” book by a junior-level employee of a multinational financial services firm I sometimes do business with. Let’s Color is the fitting title, with the name and logo of the multinational financial services firm on a large banner at the bottom of the cover.

(I lapsed into magazine jargon. A banner on a cover doesn't have anything to do with an illustration of a flag, but is merely a stripe, narrow or broad, usually left-to-right but sometimes diagonal, typically a color to make it stand out, with words directing the reader somewhere inside the magazine. That wasn’t the odd part of the cover, however.)

The cover illustration was two cartoon dinosaurs, kid dinosaurs I guess, playing baseball. Behind them was an erupting volcano. The dinosaurs were taking no note of it. Perhaps this is why they died out—no aptitude for running from natural disasters. Then again, current educated opinion (as dimly I understand it) says that dinosaurs endure as birds. Probably none of this train of thought occurred to the illustrator.

Our neighbors have a trellis-like structure on their back patio, though vines don’t grow there in the warmer months. But they do hang things there sometimes. The other day, before the snow, they hung dangling clusters of white lights. Nice display.

As I went with Ann to the car in our driveway yesterday, she saw these lights and said, “Christmas.” She’s heard the word a lot lately, for certain, but it was the first time I’d heard her use it.