They say Christmas only comes once a year.
But I say, 'No it doesn't. Twice — at least!'
And I wasn't the only one having a very merry Christmas today.
Stefan from The Desert Sun's sports desk found himself listening to Christmas music today, well before I waltzed into the newsroom wearing my epic Christmas vest.
Kari, an SSPer, found herself wearing holiday attire earlier this week... because she was running low on non-Christmas clothes right before laundry day, but that's beside the point.
Phil, a State Presser who is probably better known as Denny from "The Room," had a little Christmas in July party / photo shoot with his girlfriend earlier this month.
And Chris held a Christmas in July barbeque and pool party tonight for the Tempe First young-adult group, which he had planned without even knowing that July 31 is the official date when all the cool kids celebrate Christmas in the summer.
By cool kids, I mean myself as well as all the actual (i.e., not old enough to drink/vote/drive/etc.) kids who tune in to the Cartoon Network and saw a marathon of Christmas specials airing today.
Speaking of the magical date, some of you have asked me why I celebrate Christmas on July 31 as opposed to, say, the 25th. Well, it all started last summer...
Sometime in early June, SSP training week was just getting under way up in Sacramento. One evening, while we were waiting to be seated at a restaurant, I was talking with Camille, one of my coworkers who I'd be spending the summer with in LA.
Between the two of us, we somehow hatched a plan to confuse our campers on one day during the summer by acting as if it were Christmas all day long, from the 7 a.m. wake-up call all the way to lights out at 10 p.m. We quickly told the rest of the LA staff about it, and as I recall, everybody was on board with the idea.
It took us most of the summer to get around to actually planning Christmas, though, since we had more important priorities like making sure the whole summery SSP experience ran smoothly for our campers, counselors, homeowners and Hotel Vermont Square guests.
But as the end of the summer drew near, we keyed in on Week 5 as our target week, and Thursday was the day that made the most sense in the context of our program to have a Christmas celebration. That turned out to be July 31, which got us in right under the deadline to have our celebration count as a Christmas in July. Plus, SSP's executive director was going to be in town visiting our site that day, which made our selected date all the more perfect.
On the night before SSP Christmas, two staffers in particular — Camille and Brandon — stayed up until I don't even want to know when decking out the entire program room in true Christmas style. I know that when I went downstairs in the morning and saw all the decorations for the first time, I was pretty much speechless.
Anyway, that day, we roused our campers with "Feliz Navidad" as a wake-up song...
...and we woke up Rick, the executive director, with a very special selection from "Happy Clucking Holidays," an album of Christmas carols sung by a guy pretending to be a chicken:
We played Christmas songs in the kitchen all day, served up Christmas cookies at lunch and sang Christmas carols in addition to the normal SSP songs at evening song time. Plus, we all got our best holiday outfits on for a staff Christmas picture:
Oh, and of course, we didn't give any forewarning that this holiday hoopla was coming up. It was a surprise for the teenage campers, their adult counselors and for Rick as well. And if anyone tried to tell us that it wasn't really Christmas, we would have none of it. We just insisted that no, it really was Christmas despite the fact that it was the middle of summer.
After that awesome experience, I fell in love with off-season holidays and decided that July 31 would always and forever be a day when I celebrate Christmas. I mean, July 25 makes sense and all, but the 31st will always hold a special place in my Christmas heart of hearts.
And as this Christmas draws to a close, let me leave you all with this ancient yuletide saying, which was so poignantly illustrated by Sam a few years ago:
