{"id":155,"date":"2002-12-24T01:45:00","date_gmt":"2002-12-24T00:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/custom-deluxe.com\/2002\/12\/bless_us_every_one.html"},"modified":"2002-12-24T01:45:00","modified_gmt":"2002-12-24T00:45:00","slug":"bless_us_every_one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/custom-deluxe.com\/index.php\/2002\/12\/24\/bless_us_every_one\/","title":{"rendered":"Bless Us, Every One"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, it&#8217;s Christmas.  Although I must admit it&#8217;s hard to get into the Christmas spirit &#8211; aside from the bartenders at Gulliver&#8217;s all decked out in Santa hats with chasing LED lights and the (really a little bit creepy) Christmas music in the all-Thai department store down the street, it&#8217;s not really looking or feeling a lot like Christmas here.  Hey, what do you expect from a country where (a) 90% of the population is Buddhist, (b) Hallmark has no foothold, (c) everybody&#8217;s pretty much nice all the time and (d) there are no Douglas Fir trees? <\/p>\n<p>I, however, am feeling perky and oddly like wearing a nice wool sweater, despite the fact that it&#8217;s typically hot and sticky in Bangkok today.  I suppose the biggest difficulty stems from not being around most of the people I love, which is normally the way I spend this holiday.  I miss you all, and will raise a toast (or several) to you this fine evening.  <\/p>\n<p>And what do we have planned for the holiday?  An extravagant dinner tonight at a swank new place in town, followed by present opening and much festivity.  Tomorrow, it&#8217;s the traditional Christmas Day activities: hangover recovery, TV watching, and eating.  It promises to be a fabulous few days. <\/p>\n<p>So Happy Christmas, Merry Christmas, Happy Channuka, Happy Holidays, whichever greeting you prefer &#8211; may your days be merry and bright, even if all your Christmases aren&#8217;t white.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, it&#8217;s Christmas. Although I must admit it&#8217;s hard to get into the Christmas spirit &#8211; aside from the bartenders&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","category-the-big-trip-2002-2003","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/custom-deluxe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/custom-deluxe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/custom-deluxe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/custom-deluxe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/custom-deluxe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/custom-deluxe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/custom-deluxe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/custom-deluxe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/custom-deluxe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}