You'll be doing all right with your Christmas of white

December 8

Here's a friendly game we know. Making angels in the snow!

Jewel: Blue Christmas. Guilty pleasure alert (which may be a common occurrence with these Christmas posts): I love Jewel. Sure, her lyrics are cliched, but I think her voice is beautiful. Also beautiful: her soul and her breasts. "Blue Christmas" is one of my favorites in a long tradition of sad Christmas tunes.

The Christmas Countdown

When I was younger, my brother and I shared a room. Every night after Thanksgiving, we would do a "Christmas Countdown"--usually, this consisted of playing with bendable, rubber Santa toys and making them go on crazy adventures from night to night, lit only by the electric candles in our window.

Also, Christmas was a good time to pull out our mom's eight-track machine. Almost every night, we'd listen to one of the Alvin and the Chipmunks Christmas tapes. Some MP3s are forthcoming as the month goes on, but this fit in with my Christmas Coundown memories and I can't imagine a better place to stick this memory.

Eventually, we moved to a new house and got separate rooms--and really, my brother was getting too old for such tomfoolery anyway. I continued the tradition by myself for several more years, incorporating LEGO characters and vehicles of my own design. This is one of the reasons I love X-Entertainment's Advent Calendar every year. It utilizes LEGO. Matt's got recurring characters and seemingly random tangents. It reminds me of my old Christmas Countdowns. Except, you know, X-E's is actually good.