Sunday, December 18, 2005

decorations a go-go

Normally I prefer to read when I'm on the streetcar. The current book I'm reading is particularly enjoyable and therefore the past few mornings I've been entirely oblivious to my surroundings. But the other day the old eyes were feeling tired so instead of reading, I was staring out the window and enjoying some tunes, just chillin' and watching my neighbourhood slide by.

A couple of stops past where I get on, there's a "community centre" of questionable repute, where they usually put up some half-hearted decorations for whatever hallmark holiday happens to be approaching. This year they have some scraggly tinsel framing the three big windows, as well as some 8.5 x 11 hand-made snowflakes, which is pretty standard. However, the thing that caught my attention, and that makes this year so very special is the addition of fake spray-on snow - the kind I always wanted to get when I was a kid, but my mom wouldn't let me because scraping it off the windows is a total bitch.

Anyway, some enterprising young spray-snow artist with a more lenient mother than mine thought the windows needed a little extra holiday spirit and decided to include a giant sky-writing-esque message: the time-honoured Santa-Clausean chuckle. Which would have been completely unexceptional, except for the fact that this particular artiste forgot the whole backwards-writing thing necessary for the decoration of street-level windows. As a result, as the streetcar drove past the three big windows, they read, in sequence: "OH, OH, OH!"

Happy Holidays everyone!