Have A Merry Surreal Christmas

This week-before-Christmas your friends at The Clog Almanac found ourselves in some incongruous juxtapositions that just might fit the very definition of surreal:

While walking our two crippled rescue Corgis in an open field and counting a flock of about 400 American robins that had been previously feeding noisily in turns on drupes of the large camphor tree in the yard of Clog House Est. 1935, our eyes were drawn earthward from the skyborn tomato-soup-colored breasts of these south-wintering thrush-cousins by the more dulcet tones of a familiar melody blaring from the speakers of an ice-cream van slowly making its way through our north Florida neighborhood.

The van slowed, stopped, and the the driver's window rolled down. It was just then, as the music abruptly ceased, that we recognized the tune as the dreydl song. The red-cheeked gray-haired lady driving the van assumed a beneficent smile fit for the Pope, mustered a restrained Queen Elizabeth hand-wave at us, and shouted in a slow drawl as completely Florida-southern as smoked mullet, grits and fried okra, "It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!"

We stood motionless, trying to process the scene while the van with its good-willed occupant lumbered away and the Hanukkah music resumed.


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